Evening drizzle hits Naruto's face when he steps outside, more a caress than a slap. Moisture beads on his scarf, a sudden glitter like fairy crystal.
Sasuke has turned his back on the abandoned building they've set up camp in, standing with his arms crossed and staring at nothing, in a way that looks more like glaring nothing into submission.
"Hey." Naruto says it softly, or tries to say it softly.
Raidou and Temari were antsy about Sasuke going outside, about Sasuke being alone, but Shikamaru talked them down: where would he go? There's no one who wouldn't hand him over, either to us or to Orochimaru.
Naruto, to the insultingly obvious surprise of everyone present, hadn't needed to be talked down, because of the utter lack of hesitation with which Sasuke had declined leaving with Ino.
"We're," Naruto starts, and then lets silence settle around them for a bit as he settles down on the decrepit lawn chair next to Sasuke. "We'll be entering demon territory again soon."
"I've been telling you since yesterday, you idiot, learn to shield." Sasuke calls him an idiot all the time: this time he means it.
Naruto draws in a breath, and then lets it out. "Yeah. I do need to learn to shield better. And I will. But that's not all there is to it."
Sasuke finally looks at him. "You're the one who can't shield, and you're the one who burns."
"But you were angry with me," Naruto points out, softly the way that comes from being sure. "You wanted me to burn."
Sasuke looks blank. "You think I wanted to burn you more than the demons?"
Naruto shrugs. "The demons didn't betray you. Anyway it's not like they were a threat yet. Not to you, and you don't care about the others, if they're killed." Silence for a bit, because words are difficult now. "It doesn't – Kyuubi's magic isn't affected when it heals you. Because you don't want it to be. So it needn't – I need to shield better but you have to not want me to burn." He fiddles with his sleeve, pulls at a loose thread. "You're angry with me."
"I'm furious." It's said with fury. Standing painfully still, Sasuke is animated and vibrating with rage.
"Why?" Naruto stands up on that challenge. "I didn't choose this."
"You were supposed to be better than that."
He was braced for that blow, which is crushing but can't be allowed to crush him. "You mean because I – went with instinct."
Sasuke's face whitens with fury, lonely life-long fury. "Your instincts are your problem," he spits, and snaps around on his heel, his back thrust at Naruto like a sudden shield. "You fucking animal."
Naruto grabs his shoulder and snaps him back around. "That's the problem, isn't it."
Snapping Sasuke around turns into pushing Sasuke hard against the wall, until Sasuke kicks him off, breaking his thigh bone in the process.
Naruto curses and has to realign it, push the broken bone pipe back into his flesh so it won't heal wrong.
"That's what this is about," he says, even surer now, a dark certainty that eats through him. "I let you down."
"Yes," Sasuke sneers at him, pared down to raw truth, truth that is dangerous and wild because it can't be taken back afterwards. "If you did it, you were supposed to have chosen it!" He breathes in shallow and hissing, like the air hurts him. "You hate this too."
"I'm supposed to love belonging to you?" Naruto yells back, pushing Sasuke back into the wall. "You hate me!"
But the terrible thing is that he does. He does want to belong to Sasuke, does want Sasuke to claim him and keep him, so that he can feel Sasuke's possession in the marrow of his bones.
It's horrifying and demeaning and he hates himself for wanting it, but yes, if only Sasuke would want to keep him, if only Sasuke would belong to him in return, there's nothing Naruto would love more than to be utterly Sasuke's property.
They're disintegrating.
Something breaks, and at first he thinks it's him but then he realises it's Sasuke.
"Yes!" Sasuke roars at last, and in the rain and the sudden skinlessness Sasuke's a child again, emotionally orphaned. There's no moving on, ever, from October 27, seven years ago, displaced from Itachi's arms into Orochimaru's. "You were supposed to choose me."
"I did," Naruto gasps out, so much desperation, he's grabbing at Sasuke and drowning on dry land, breathing in rain and gagging on it. "I do, I did, I do. I do."
"But it's not real," Sasuke rages. "You never wanted –"
"I always wanted…! This is real. It's," and the truth is bleak and the truth is stark, "the only thing that's real now." He speaks then into Sasuke's skin, his forehead pressed to Sasuke's jaw. "It could've never been anyone but you."
Sasuke's exhalations hit the back of his neck. His fingers dig painfully into Naruto's face, nails catching in the whisker scars.
"This is it now," Naruto says. "We're it."
It leaves him wretched and painfully gratified, that Sasuke must be able to feel it through the bond, feel how he owns Naruto, how Naruto resents it and also thrills to it, and resents the thrill, and chases his own tail in darkening spirals of loathing and obsession.
Worse, feel how Naruto's hunger and insane possessiveness grow and grow. It's unacceptable, it's obviously wrong and sick and hateful, nothing at all like proper love, good love, how he feels he would do anything to keep Sasuke. By force if need be, that he'd drag him back from anywhere, never let him go, break every bone in his body if he had to: that he'd kill Sasuke himself before he let him disappear – Naruto understands easily that these are monstrous feelings to have, much less to expose Sasuke to.
"Naruto," Sasuke says, and the name is certain and thrilled. He says it like speaking a holy word, a word of power for him to take hold of.
Naruto makes a helpless sound of longing and need and oh god, how good it is. Take me, keep me, own me…
"Sasuke," he breathes, clinging, submissive, but Sasuke's name too is a word of power, a staked claim. Stay with me, I will kill us both before I let you go…
For the first time Sasuke's… not excited, not interested in closeness, but susceptible to Naruto's excitement, to Naruto's desire to be always closer. Though he's stiff as a board in Naruto's arms, he's not trying to leave them. More than that, his arm bends sharply over Naruto's shoulder, his fingers hard and possessive against the nape of Naruto's neck. The tails coming out and sweeping up Sasuke's legs, over his back, are intensely sexual to Naruto but make Sasuke relax. If he – if Naruto opened his mouth now, against the pulse point in Sasuke's throat, Sasuke might not push him away.
But that's not – that's not what he wants, that's not good enough. It wouldn't be right.
Sasuke has issues about sex, and Naruto breathes out, rests his head against Sasuke's shoulder, arms locked firmly around Sasuke's hips.
Sasuke has, to be frank and pragmatic and not crazily emotional about it, been sexually assaulted somewhere in the region of two and a half thousand times, and Naruto isn't going to do anything that could in any conceivable way be interpreted as adding to that number. They talked about it once, in strange factual tones when they were so young that it might've been the first time Naruto ever actually said the word rape. Well, not every day, but when he does he usually does it a few times, so I guess over a week it averages out to once a day. And it's been two years, so two times 365 – he wrenches away from the memory of Sasuke's childish voice, already strangely deep for someone so little.
"Sasuke," he breathes again, gathering Sasuke more tightly to him, and yes. To have and to hold, so full of sensation, of bond craving and thorny human need, that he's going to burst open with it, his skin bloated and trembling on the edge of eruption.
Sasuke stays with him, if not enthusiastic then at least marginally willing. Contact panic doesn't hit until they're intruded upon.
xxxxx
"Fuck," Shikamaru says. He doesn't usually swear. It's pointless, words lose their value if they're overused, if they're used to obscure instead of express intelligent meaning.
But he followed Kiba out because someone had to, and now Sasuke steps sharply out of Naruto's arms.
The black look Naruto sends their way makes Shikamaru actually, instinctively, take a step back himself.
He's really never wanted to place himself as the obstacle between a hunger-crazed predator and its meal.
And usually it's easy to overlook, with Naruto in particular, that shifters aren't human, but in this moment it's ruthlessly obvious, is screamed by every caveman instinct still lodged in Shikamaru. Naruto is not his kind.
And you can live with shifters, you can even love shifters, but only as long as you don't forget that they are shifters.
"Let's go back inside," he says, and Naruto's face is still such that Kiba doesn't question him.
Sasuke stalks past them all and in through the door, and so Naruto breathes out long and slow, and the crazed beast bleeds out of his expression as he follows them in. Talking again, approachable again.
Sasuke sits down in a corner, sharply away from everyone else despite the smallness of the room. Shikamaru notes with interest that he procures a rosary from somewhere and sinks into what appears to be some sort of meditative prayer, which is an entirely odd activity to associate with Sasuke Uchiha. White-golden light flickers across him until he sits there glowing with grace, so perhaps he's just soaking in magic.
Or perhaps not, because when Kiba steps too close he catches fire.
It's nothing too bad, they beat it out quickly and Kiba can heal the burns within an hour, but Shikamaru elects to keep a healthy distance from Sasuke all the same. The smell of burning flesh lingers long after Kiba's skin is whole again, and Shikamaru looks at Sasuke and thinks of the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the crusades.
Naruto, this time, isn't visibly affected by Sasuke's magic. He's pulled himself together, stuffed Kyuubi back inside his human skin, and is laughing and teasing and stuffing his face with cold greasy takeout. Ino's always been envious of shifter metabolism.
Shikamaru sinks down on his mattress, using Temari's arm as a pillow. She says, quietly, with more disappointment than he'd have expected, "Kiba doesn't understand."
"No," Shikamaru agrees.
Kiba isn't bonded yet, and Kiba isn't a subtle man. Kiba grumbles something, in a tone that pretends to be joking, something about Sasuke being difficult, and clearly misinterprets how Naruto doesn't protest.
To Shikamaru, and evidently to Temari, it's plain that Naruto doesn't speak up because Sasuke doesn't need defending.
Perhaps because Sasuke can defend himself, or perhaps because Kiba could just never be a threat, but the end result is the same: is Kiba blathering ahead and blithely ignorant of how his talking is simply making it clear that he's not worth listening to.
It was a different matter when Sasuke wasn't actually present. When Shikamaru first met Naruto, at the boarding school Naruto kept trying to run away from, Shikamaru was very careful never to mention Sasuke. Naruto had been wild then, intensity and impulsiveness raging unchecked and violent. He'd been brutally miserable and brutally energetic, a whirlpool Shikamaru had instantly decided to keep well away from.
This plan had failed within the first four days of Naruto's tenure at the school, because someone had apparently mentioned to Naruto where Shikamaru was from, whom he knew. Just when dusk was settling outside, Naruto thundered into his room, and everyone else left. People did that, in those days. Naruto could pull them in, Naruto has always been difficult to ignore, but the set of his shoulders, how his face was blazing and his fingers twitching into fists – well, it was hardly the first time these signs had sent people running.
He bent over Shikamaru, who was slouching in his desk chair, and Naruto wasn't actually pushing him up against the wall, wasn't touching him at all, but it felt like he was.
"How is he?" Naruto demanded, so many contradictory emotions in his voice that it came out almost unintelligible. "Oh my god how is he? You have to…!"
"I just know Ino," Shikamaru said. "I don't – I just see him around sometimes, we don't talk."
This wasn't good enough, but Shikamaru had nothing of substance. Fortunately Naruto could be distracted by talk of Sasuke in general.
Little details that hadn't meant anything to Shikamaru, that certainly hadn't endeared Sasuke to him, left Naruto with this wobbly, over-invested smile.
Sometimes – just a few times, much fewer than he would've expected – he'd catch Naruto on the phone and immediately understand that he was speaking to Sasuke. The words didn't matter. Naruto's whole body was curled around the phone, plastic cracking under his white fingers, and his voice came stuttering and raw and breathless, erupting like a geyser.
Of course, to say that Sasuke wasn't popular at the school was putting it mildly. There was Mist Town Massacre, and beyond that the fact that exorcists in general weren't well liked. The fact that Sasuke had this way of looking at people so they understood that they weren't worth being looked at.
Back then, when Sasuke wasn't there and so couldn't make the choice to ignore the people talking about him or to shut them up, Naruto didn't tolerate it. Shikamaru had understood that Naruto had been talked about a good deal himself, half-breed bastard that he was, but if he'd defended himself with half the implacable belligerence that he defended Sasuke, Shikamaru couldn't imagine that it would have lasted.
The only time he snapped at Shikamaru was when he snapped, "Could you have done better?"
"Well," Shikamaru said. "No."
Partly because strategically, in order to minimise the total number of dead, Mist Town Massacre had been the right call.
Partly because he had no delusions of martyrdom, nor of being particularly resilient to torture. Placed in a situation where he was subjected to daily agony and had little meaningful prospect of escaping, he'd have killed himself. It would've been the sensible decision.
So if he'd been Sasuke, he wouldn't have been involved in Mist Town Massacre, but only because he would've already been dead.
"Then shut the hell up," Naruto said, Naruto who always wanted to talk about possible better ways.
Shikamaru felt his own teeth snap shut, and he'd meant to agree because he always picked the path of least resistance and what did he care about Sasuke, anyway? But he hadn't meant to snap his mouth shut instantly. He understood then about being alpha, about being someone who can say do not and make it stick at bone level.
Other people needed more persuasion. "Yeah," he heard Naruto say at one point. "Human trafficking is hilarious."
Whom he'd been talking to, Shikamaru couldn't tell, because Naruto jumped them and beat the shit out of them, to the point that when he was pulled off Shikamaru couldn't identify them.
"What?" Naruto demanded, still kicking. "Torture porn is hilarious, why the hell aren't you laughing?"
A grumble, not really intelligible, and Naruto laughed a cold sharp laugh completely unlike him. "Sasuke never needed me to hold back, you pathetic fucking coward, and don't you ever speak of him again."
xxxxx
Naruto isn't the only one who looks wan in the morning. To be fair, Kiba spent the better part of the night with Naruto on the floor outside Sasuke's door, and Sasuke – well, sleep wears away on Sasuke's mental walls, which means he kept waking up in the small hours of the night, when Naruto had gone sleep-deprived and desperate, to intense erotic dreams about…well, about himself, which was an altogether strange thing for Naruto to experience second-hand. Or third-hand, since they were really his dreams, regurgitated through Sasuke's mind and made strange by it.
Nobody's in the mood for a leisurely morning: it's a matter of minutes before they're back in the car, scarfing down breakfast rations that taste of dust and preservatives.
Sasuke has done that thing where he makes himself apart, untouchable. But Naruto's never been one to hold himself back from touching what was forbidden to him, was always the child who touched the altar candle. And he wanted to look at it and for it to last, but he wanted to touch it more and it was worth the burn.
Mum was exasperated, not really angry. You're the one who wanted to come to the service, Cubbie. Of course we can't come back if you break their things.
He'd only wanted to come because church was such a big part of Sasuke's life, and he was tired of being called stupid because he didn't get all the dumb references to it. But it was astonishingly tedious, like one interminable class in a language he couldn't understand, where he was supposed to stand and sit and read along with words that meant nothing to him.
Pushing the memory aside, he sits down next to Sasuke, almost touching but not quite. "So, um. Can I sleep on you for a bit?"
"Are you brain damaged?"
"Are you? We don't – even you aren't quite this much of a bitch when you've got some sleep, and I'm all… I want to sleep, too. Before we hit demon territory." One sleepless night shouldn't matter so much, but the bond has drained them both.
"If you could keep your mental pornos to yourself, this wouldn't be a problem."
Naruto stops himself saying, if you'd just sleep with me there wouldn't be a problem. "You didn't mind," he says instead, hopeful beyond the grinding, sleepless frustration. "Before we left, when I got into bed too, when you were asleep."
"I would've minded if I'd been awake."
"You were awake yesterday." It's more a question than a challenge, his voice softening at the memory of Sasuke standing unmoving in his arms.
Sasuke looks away. "Those were your emotions."
"If you'd wanted not to on anything like the same level…" Then it wouldn't have mattered what Naruto felt. Naruto's emotions can only overwhelm Sasuke when Sasuke's own feelings on the matter are much weaker. He's dry-mouthed, oddly short of breath, his voice all levity around maybe the heaviest words he's spoken, "I thought you liked having power over me."
He hadn't really expected Sasuke to deny this, so hadn't expected Sasuke to hiss at him, white-lipped and venomous. "How is you forcing yourself into my life giving me any power?"
"I was already in your life!" He splutters, incoherent maybe but Sasuke understands: how Naruto's in unrequited need, slavering and desperate for scraps Sasuke has no real incentive to throw him.
Sasuke sneers back at him, an equally incoherent barrage of how Naruto demands and invades and drags him down into this needy aching co-dependency, how Naruto took something from him and made it dirty, made them dirty.
The bond is a live wire between them, crackling and cutting, his mind a sudden chiaroscuro painting of annihilating light and black hatred.
He hates himself, too, which is new and familiar all at once. He hated himself for the first time after his failed attempt to assassinate Orochimaru: when he was locked in that cage, beaten and impotent, a screaming bystander while Orochimaru asserted his possession of Sasuke. And he never – it was years ago, he's obviously out, but he never did free himself. It was Sasuke who unlocked the door which had remained stubbornly closed under Naruto's screaming, crying, begging, kicking, hitting desperation.
There's no point in saying, this isn't what I wanted.
"It's the only way it could have been," says Sasuke, implacable and inexplicably calmer, his constant fury brought down from boiling to a quiet simmer.
If there was no bond – if it was just that I love you…
Then I wouldn't have trusted it.
Whatever his other resentments, Sasuke does like having power over him. Sasuke's incapable of trusting, of believing himself safely or reliably loved. But soul-deep addiction, the reassuring ownership of being needed, that's something he can believe and understand.
And Naruto has taken things from Sasuke, he has, but he's also – given himself over in this compulsive way. To give Sasuke this immense power over him, the power to make him happy and so to make him miserable, to place Sasuke as the centre of his life…he's trembling with it, scared of it and high on it, and he didn't choose it but he can't regret it.
Sasuke puts his hand on Naruto's face, scratches scorching, heaven-lit fingertips along the whisker scars.
He's always liked the middle one on the right best: the first one he made.
The whisker scars are Naruto's now, he's made them his to the point that they move and deepen with Kyuubi's upset. But he got them when Orochimaru had locked him in that cage, a cage he couldn't quite fit in. Some of his bones broke against the confines, and healed wrong: had to be re-broken, once Naruto was finally out, so they could be realigned and heal right.
Just after he'd been caught and locked up, Orochimaru grabbed his face and started marking him as the beast he was. He did one line on the right and two on the left, traced Naruto's uncleanness across his face with the fire of Heaven. Traced it into skin and soul, far beyond the reach of Kyuubi's healing.
When he was done, he turned to Sasuke. "What do you say, Shinigami? Would you like to balance him up?"
Sasuke looked at Naruto, stared into eyes like drowning, and he did want to and Naruto wanted him to.
He burnt his mark into Naruto, where it can never be erased. Naruto's carried it on his face ever since.
In the present he takes Sasuke's hand, pressing it even closer, into his flesh, until Sasuke's nails scratch against the bones of Naruto's face.
"Not to interrupt the lovefest," comes Temari's dry, agitated tones, "but I just spoke to Hayate. Things have moved. We'll be in pretty thick demon territory within the next eight or so miles. It's better we stop now, wait for escort here."
"That's such a waste," Naruto says.
For once, Sasuke doesn't contradict him. "Don't be a coward. We can take them."
"Yeah?" Naruto says, on a grin breaking so it feels like dawn all over his face.
"Naruto," Temari says, strained. "Be realistic. You almost died yesterday."
"I was fine," Naruto dismisses. Looks at Sasuke. "We've got this."
"We've got this."
"Naruto –"
"I said we've got this. Okay? Trust me."
Sasuke's smirk/sneer, his version of a grin, is savage and anticipatory. He's tense but it's the good kind of tension, twisting up the sinews of his arms. Naruto grins back at him and follows him out when the car stops five miles ahead.
They're on a deserted stretch of dirt road, and he can already see the demons as a dark mist towards the edge of his vision. Real mist could never move like that, hurtling towards them like a gathering tornado. "Plan?" he says.
"Pray." It's a clipped order, and startling. "I don't care if you believe it, say the words."
Sasuke's already chanting, in that exorcist voice echoed by angels, but it's not an invocation Naruto's ever heard from him before. It takes him a long moment to recognise it, to translate Ave Maria gracia plena dominus tecum and start babbling along, Hail Mary full of grace…
They get traction. The words taste of light and sooth on his tongue, buzzing with the resonance of Sasuke's chanting, but they do not burn him.
"…et in hora mortis nostrae." And the light comes.
Naruto has seen archangel light, the light of Uriel, and this isn't that. On the words fruit of thy womb, Jesus his tongue curls around the possibility of scorching, but the light is warm, and he is safe and he is – loved. Light like an embrace, like grace, like mercy.
Sasuke keeps chanting, brow furrowed and freckled with sweat, as he walks towards the demons.
And it's heart-stop astonishing, a miracle: Sasuke, champion of the Archangel of Vengeance, glowing golden with the holy power of forgiveness, of motherly love for mankind. It's the Corinthians kind of love, the love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
It's blinding but only in the way summer sunlight is, the kind of blinding that leaves you squinting but ultimately pleased about it. The rest of the group hangs back, clustered around the protective bulk of the car. Naruto tags along as Sasuke hunts down the demons, and as the light spreads around him like rings on water, melting the demons out of existence, Naruto feels himself embraced, protected by the light rather than eradicated by it. Sasuke, he understands, is shielding him, Sasuke and the words Naruto keeps repeating. "Hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners, hail Mary, full of grace, pray for us sinners…"
They're a twelve minute walk from the car when the last of the darkness fades, and Sasuke stops, chanting halted abruptly as a cut rosary. He breathes out deep, chest visibly contracting, and the light fades from him, much more quickly than his usual archangel radiance. That, the cessation of Uriel's light, tends to leave Sasuke wistful, resentful, with none of this sudden relief. Sweat glitters on his neck, gilding the line of his throat.
"Virgin Mary," Naruto says. "I didn't know you could."
"She's easy," Sasuke says dismissively, rather sharply. "Open to anyone who asks." It's a tone of voice Naruto recognises from every other time Sasuke's made derogatory remarks about people being easy, the tone that makes Sakura bite her lip on any admonition because obviously she's not in a position to tell Sasuke not to slut shame or make rape jokes.
Naruto nudges his shoulder, rather roughly. Self-hatred is as ugly and miserable as any other kind of hatred.
"We are awesome," he says, letting the relief turn to exuberance, coursing effervescent through his veins along with delayed adrenaline shock. "This can work."
"It's an – adequate first step."
Naruto snorts, hitting his arm. "Bitch, bitch, bitch. Look, demons exorcised, me on my feet!"
"I want my wings," Sasuke tells him.
"I know. I'll – look, I'm working on the shielding. I'm not trying to blackmail you or anything, but it will work better if I can get some sleep."
Sasuke's post-exorcism relaxed face ices over. The idea of Naruto touching him is disgusting. This time there's no question of Naruto's feelings being stronger: there's the memory of bed sheets stained with Sasuke's vomit and Sasuke's blood, and disgust so strong Naruto physically shudders away from him. He's – god, he's hard from the memory, fucking hard from the fucking memory of fucking assaulting Sasuke, and that makes him more disgusted, it spirals and spirals, a physical sensation of his stomach twisted, innards wrenched out of place and torn as though by Kyuubi's claws. He has to lock his jaw so hard his teeth grind and crack against each other, and still a trickle of vomit stains his lips, the corner of his mouth.
I did this, he knows, and staggers one step, two, and then he's jack knifing towards the ground, spasming with the force of his projectile vomiting like he hasn't for years.
"Sasuke," he says, when he's managed to straighten up, says it around wiping his mouth with his hand and then having to wipe his hand on his trousers, and bloody hell, he's never going to be clean again. "If you need me to die. I mean. I don't think you do. I hope you don't. But if you do. Tell me."
"Stop lying to me!" Sasuke snaps, remorseless. "Either you martyr yourself or I embrace this horrible farce – that's dishonest, that's fucking cheap. Don't you dare!"
"I," Naruto says, hands still on his knees, no longer wiping, just gripping, his stomach a violent churn that makes it impossible for a long moment to straighten up. "There's no other way I can let you go."
Absolute honesty, stripped down to the bare brutal bones of it, and Sasuke's called shifters inhuman for much less than this instinctive insanity, but he doesn't yell about Naruto being an animal.
"You mean that," he says, and how could this possibly be a surprise, but his voice is blank with the realisation.
Slowly, slowly it comes to Naruto that this is what Sasuke could never have hoped to have: to be claimed, in the finally and forever sense. To own someone, and to be irreversibly owned in turn, to be irreplaceably and unconditionally Naruto's, first choice always.
"I mean that," Naruto says.
"Let's get going."