His own clothes are cut differently than Naruto's, tighter and more fitted, with less colour and no ridiculous prints. They hide his weapons by show off his assets, as Kakashi put it. Naruto's slightly broader shoulders would hardly fit in his shirt.

It's time he got on top of things.

He walks briskly though the building, and the shifters have learnt by now not to stand in his way.

In the lift he discovers Jiraiya, who still looks like an injured beast.

Naruto's grandfather is younger than Orochimaru but appears far older, his shaggy hair already white. He also shares Naruto's rather eccentric taste in clothes, and doesn't wear them well: shoulders perpetually sagging, the left one more than the right, although he can't help that.

Sasuke did that to him, six years ago, and hasn't actually spoken to him since.

Today too they ride the lift down in silence. Jiraiya doesn't speak until they're on the ground floor and Sasuke makes for the door.

"Uchiha," he finally snaps. He says the name like he thinks it's an insult, which is ludicrous. "You don't think you're leaving?"

Sasuke turns slowly to face him, savouring the moment. "Try to stop me."

Jiraiya snorts. "If I decided to stop you, you'd have to kill me to get out."

"So?"

Jiraiya snorts again, a rather animal sound. "Naruto would never get over that. And then –"

"Yes, he would."

There's nothing Jiraiya can say to that, apparently even Jiraiya realises that: there's the kind of love that goes away – enough distance, enough time, enough hurt, and it can fade – and there's the kind of love that doesn't. Sasuke turns his back on him and walks out the door. Jiraiya growls, but he's been useless for a long time and must be used to being left behind.

One of the guards outside reaches for Sasuke – "are you really supposed to…" – and Sasuke immolates him without thought. The rest of them have the sense to leave him alone.

He waves down a taxi, forgetting that he hasn't got any money until they're stopping outside Orochimaru's compound. It's similar to the Sabaku building, and evidence of the city's age: one of those incongruous houses, a private mansion in between highraises, built in the days when this street was situated just outside the city rather than in its centre.

"He'll pay you," Sasuke decides, pointing at Jirobou standing guard. Jirobou will either pay the driver or kill him, Sasuke doesn't much care which.

The gate still opens under his hand. There's no door here that won't open for him.

The corner of his mouth twitches up sharply. "Tadaima."

He walks through the familiar building, through rooms he's spent years walking, running, crawling through: walks straight to Kabuto's lab. Nobody interferes, until he's standing there in the antiseptic smell he associates with impersonalised torture. Whatever Orochimaru did to him, it was always very specifically about Sasuke. To Kabuto, in contrast, he was just a piece of meat, a means to an end whose reactions were irrelevant.

Sasuke occasionally provoked him into going too far, so he could show Orochimaru a cut that might scar, an injury that might impede his ability to carry out missions. That always ended up hurting Kabuto far more than it hurt Sasuke.

Kabuto seemed surprised each time, as though he'd really believed that he could ever compare to a crusader. Kabuto, like Temari's human, has a mistaken idea of what determines a person's value, and keeps suffering for it.

"Hello, Sasuke." Kabuto blinks. He usually only does that when talking to people he perceives as dangerous, to win time before having to speak. "I'm afraid Orochimaru's not home."

"I know. I'm here for you."

"I see." Kabuto blinks again, his eyes cutting to the container with Sasuke's foot. "I'd really like to…"

"I didn't really come here to talk."

He steps forward quickly and cuts off Kabuto's tongue. It's a moist, dead thing in his hand.

Kabuto makes a sound like a cow screaming. Tries to clench his jaws together, to trigger the suicide substances hidden in his gums.

But Kabuto's not even a crusader. It's child's play to do to him what Kakashi did to Sasuke, in the car driving to Minato: force more power into him than he can handle, short-circuiting him with it.

Kabuto collapses into his desk chair. Sasuke smiles.

There are running footsteps outside, and then a security unit entering, presumably called by Kabuto's agonised noises.

"Leave," Sasuke says.

They obey. They're used to obeying Sasuke, and nobody likes Kabuto, nobody here hasn't dreamt of killing him.

Kabuto's eyes have been pained but only now become scared.

"They don't take orders from dead men," Sasuke says.

He's fantasised about doing a lot of things to Kabuto over the years. Today he does them.

Kabuto's been experimenting with shifter healing, not without results, and so won't die easily: Sasuke can cut off his arms and legs in increments. Pull out his nails. Slice off the tips of his fingers, the first knuckles, second knuckles, half the palm. The entire hand, and then bit after bit of the wrist and then the arm, working his way up to Kabuto's shoulder, until Kabuto doesn't have any limbs.

It takes a long time.

Sasuke pauses halfway through the second leg, cauterising the wound with Uriel's fire and starting instead to flay Kabuto's torso.

He tears the skin off in porous stripes, exposing the bleeding meat underneath and rubbing it with salt. Pulverizes Kabuto's ribs, using Kyuubi's strength to crush them between his fingers. Flakes of bone fall like snow inside the hollow of Kabuto's chest.

All the time, Kabuto's screaming never stops.

It's gratifying for a while, but in the end Sasuke cuts off his dick and gags him with it, forcing it deep into his mouth.

He leaves Kabuto for a little while, retrieving some of the lab rats. Placing shields inside Kabuto to protect his vital organs, he reaches inside the cages for the rats, putting them in the holes where Kabuto's arms and right leg used to be, letting them feast as he finishes the flaying and the last amputation. The sound of their chewing intermingles with the sound of Kabuto trying to scream.

Only when Kabuto's last limb is gone does he burn Kabuto's face off, watching his eyeballs boil and melt down the black, crackling mess of his cheeks.

xxxxx

"I'd like to be able to send you as our liaison to Rock," Kushina says. "Your sister's there now, as you might have heard, but there's little doubt you'd be a better fit."

Gaara, still restrained from the neck down, gives her a dry smirk. "Temari's rather more moderate than I am."

Dad shrugs. "Doesn't she have to be? Given Shikamaru."

They all fall silent as Sasuke's steps become audible outside the room. Naruto's felt him approaching for some time, has left Gaara's bedside to strain towards the door.

Dad was freaking out about Sasuke burning some guards to leave, but Naruto knew Sasuke never meant to leave. It's new, that Dad takes his word over Jiraiya's.

"Maybe he's good for you," Gaara says into the silence. "He shares my views on humans. You'd have never said shifters are obviously superior before you were bonded to him."

Sasuke steps into the room carrying a large plastic sack.

Naruto lets himself be distracted from that, catching the hem of his shirt. "These aren't my clothes."

"They're mine," Sasuke tells him, surprisingly patient. "Sakura got them for me."

"She went to Orochimaru's?"

"To Kakashi."

Naruto's fingers tighten around the fabric. "You kept clothes at his place."

"It's not like I could borrow his."

It's hard to argue with that. Kakashi's tall, even for a white man: Sasuke would look like a child playing dress-up, Kakashi's clothes pooling around him.

"Sasuke," Kushina interrupts. "Good to have you back. I understood from Naruto that you went to see Kabuto Yakushi?"

"Ah," Sasuke agrees. "I brought you a gift." With the sunniest smile Naruto's seen on him since they were little children, he drops the sack.

It opens to reveal what Naruto understands intellectually to be Kabuto, but what doesn't – it doesn't look like anything that's ever been a person.

"I've sealed him off," Sasuke says, gesturing to what seems to be a glowing rosary twisted around the thing. "Once that's taken off, he'll go nova. You could consider him an anti-demon bomb."

Naruto touches his hand. "How're you…" He saw things like this up north, and was so sick he collapsed on his hands and knees in his own vomit. But anchored by Sasuke's satisfaction, he's so calm now.

Sasuke smirks, steady and sure. "I'm good." It's not a lie. Clearly those advocating forgiveness as the key to rehabilitation haven't properly appreciated the healing properties of a good vengeful torture.

Gaara laughs. "Do you remember what your stupid little human used to tell Uchiha? Evil is almost always human. You can live with evil, laugh with evil, undiluted evil is very hard to find, but irredeemable evil is not. Look around you, Naruto – maybe she should've been telling you."

"Not now, Gaara," Kushina says. She slants a look at what used to be Kabuto. "Can I keep this?"

Sasuke shrugs. "It'd be a waste not to use him."

Kushina says, "I quite agree."

"All right." Sasuke speaks then into Naruto's ear, "I'm going to fuck you until the only word left in your head is my name."

Naruto gives him a kiss, a quick deep kiss that Sasuke surprisingly accepts. "Let's."

Rather later, he nudges his face against Sasuke's. "You really gave Dad and Kushina an exorcist bomb. That's gotta be the weirdest dowry ever."

"You're so stupid."

Naruto might have taken more offense if they hadn't still been naked. He leans up and kisses under Sasuke's jaw, licks along his veins.

Sasuke smirks, then scoots down and bites his nipple quite hard.

"Ouch," Naruto grumbles, swatting at Sasuke head even as he's arching up for more. He tightens his legs around Sasuke's hips, and feels something warm seep down his buttock. "I get it more about the condoms now."

"You didn't seem like you minded."

"I don't. I like it." He reaches behind himself, dragging his fingers through the sperm on the upper backs of his thighs and licking them clean. Sasuke gives him a rather odd look. "What?"

Sasuke unfortunately rolls off him. "It's not like it tastes good."

"It's okay," Naruto argues, and then hears himself say, before he can stop himself, "I sort of want to drink mine out of you."

But Sasuke just stretches, fucked-out and gorgeous in Naruto's bed. "I don't mind."

"Really?"

"Sure. Orochimaru did it all the time."

"Eww."

Sasuke gives him an impatient look. "He kissed me all the time too, are you going to stop doing that as well?"

"No," Naruto grumbles, rolling onto his side and kissing Sasuke rather thoroughly, hand curled around the back of Sasuke's neck. "You could," he mumbles. "I mean, obviously. If you wanted to, you could…"

"If I'd wanted to, I'd have done it. It's disgusting."

"Excuse me? You love it when I –"

But the idea of putting his mouth on someone's arse is disgusting to Sasuke, even more so with the heightened smell and taste of bleedover shifter senses. "I'm not doing it," Sasuke tells him, scratching up his ribs. "I'm never drinking it again either."

"Again? We never…"

Sasuke shrugs, pressed close and relaxed. His toes flex, tickling Naruto's shin. Naruto thinks how his strongest memory of Kabuto involves Sasuke's foot, the one that's lost now: the white arc of Kabuto's arm bringing the bone saw down. He knows for a fact that Kabuto kept the foot afterwards, as a trophy maybe. He'd have said Kabuto's paid for that now, only there's no paying off a dept like that.

"Sometimes when he was enjoying himself with both of us, he'd come in Kimimarou's mouth and then have him spit it up in a glass. I was supposed to drink it." Sasuke shrugs again, his shoulder dragging against Naruto's chest. "Kimimarou always got it down when it was his turn, but I threw it up. Then he made me drink that too."

Naruto goes cold. Kyuubi growls, jealous and possessive. "But you're mine now."

Sasuke kisses him, slow and hard, before edging Naruto's mouth down towards the seal.

xxxxx

"Am I to understand," Mikoto asks, "that you had Sasuke assassinate Kabuto Yakushi?"

"No," Kushina says, blowing steam off a spoonful of borscht. "I don't have the authority to make Sasuke assassinate anyone. If I did, I wouldn't sic him on Kabuto."

Mikoto hums tunelessly. "It would be senseless. Despite his shifter experimentation."

Kushina lifts her eyebrows. "You're acknowledging that now?"

"Off the record I've never denied it." Mikoto brings a piece of meat to her mouth and chews slowly. "It was a beastly practice."

Kushina snorts. "Agreed." She has some more borscht, wipes her mouth meticulously on the thick cloth napkin. "I understood Orochimaru's out of town."

"Yes," Mikoto says, putting her cutlery decisively to the side. "He's consulting with his following."

"Your extremists."

"In a manner of speaking, yes."

"Are we in a war?"

"Jesus, Kushina. We never ceased being in one."

"We've had seven years of peace."

"Temporary measures. A war doesn't end until there's a winner." Mikoto draws in a breath. "Our extremists, as you call them, they can't be negotiated with. They're fanatics. True believers. You must understand this."

"Orochimaru's managed to keep them in check."

"They respond to power – and to the promise of a final purging."

"And the rest of you – what? Sit by? These people are not a majority. We've got fanatics too, we've got the beastmad – well, we deal with them. We have them put down or handed over."

Mikoto ignores this. "I couldn't help seeing this," she says, taking her phone from her handbag. "Would you like to explain?" She angles it towards Kushina, who presses play.

It's a short clip, less than thirty seconds. It shows Sasuke on the pavement, carrying the sack with Kabuto's remains. Some reporter, visible only in the form of a microphone, asking a question drowned out by static. Sasuke smiles the cold smile that was Orochimaru's long before it was his. He says, "I've been asked to tell you that I'm not being held against my will. This time it's even true."

Kushina sits back in her chair. "I don't know what you want me to explain. I don't control what Sasuke says, or whom he speaks to."

"Is that so? That seems rather inconvenient for you."

"Mmh, well. He's wiped quite a few of ours," Kushina admits.

"There was quite some surprise that he didn't exorcise Rock. It was considered that the only logical conclusion must be that he was still too sealed to manage it."

Kushina chooses to shrug. "Naruto can be fairly convincing when he wants to be."

Mikoto again hums tunelessly, looking blankly past her.

"You know," Kushina says. "I remember speaking to Kakashi, years ago now. He said how there was so little to gain, for the rest of you, in aggressively opposing your fanatics. Exorcist fighting exorcist means diminishing the world's protection from demons, it's contrary to your calling. And what would you be doing it for? A subhuman race of filthy beasts."

"If he understood that," Mikoto says, "I'm surprised he serviced your husband for as long as he did."

"If you wanted to keep him on your side once you'd finally got him, you shouldn't have given away Sasuke."

"Sasuke's a child," Mikoto says. "Kakashi had no right." A pause, before she adds, rather more belligerently, "And before you judge me, you remember that it's not my people, not my family, who would have been slaughtered if Orochimaru hadn't been pacified."

"I'm aware."

What do you do, Shikamaru Nara keeps asking, when the bigots are right? Some people really are worth more than others.

One day, she has to believe, one day they will have created anti-demon weaponry that anyone can use. One day, everyone will be able to exorcise.

That day is not today.

Mikoto asks, "Are you considering returning him?"

"That's not an option."

"You're not expecting me to believe that you value your husband's bastard over the rest of your race."

Kushina smiles thinly. "What Itachi and Orochimaru could do to a little boy and what Minato and I can do to a grown crusader are two very different things."

"I suppose Sasuke's never been martyr material. He wouldn't…"

"Go back to Orochimaru on his own? No. Not for us, not for you."

"Still, the alternative might well be to let the world burn."

"I'll be frank, I'm having difficulty understanding why you think he'd be opposed to that."

"I'd hoped I'd raised him better."

"Mikoto, you didn't raise him at all."

"No, you didn't," an all too familiar voice says.

Kushina closes her eyes for a second, allows herself that one moment of respite. "Naruto."

"Yeah. Tsunade asked me to find you. About the – situation from the infirmary. I guess she didn't know who you were seeing."

Mikoto smiles her devastating smile, the smile like a polite slash across her mouth. "Hello."

"Naruto," Kushina interrupts. "Where's Sasuke?"

"At home," Naruto says. "He's hanging out with Sakura."

"Good. That's good." Relatively speaking, it's for the best, though Sasuke with Sakura has always reminded Kushina of that parable, something Sakura herself must have quoted: a lynx trying terribly hard to pass itself off as a housecat. If that pretence breaking down means Sasuke failing her, then of course he was always going to fail her. In fact, Kushina had assumed that the end of that charade – well, that it would end with Sasuke eating her alive, and is relived that it hasn't happened. As yet, it hasn't happened.

"Maybe," Naruto says. Ever since he came, he's not stopped staring at Mikoto.

"Well," Mikoto says, standing. "However I raised him, I clearly didn't do it well enough. I'm disappointed."

"You're a disappointment," Naruto says. His voice comes searching and young, trying to find words for a situation they were never meant to cover, for the sort of betrayal and horror that language can't contain.

"That wasn't my point," Mikoto says mildly, collecting her handbag.

Kushina puts a restraining hand on Naruto's shoulder, but of course there's no stopping him now.

"How can you say that?" It's not a rhetorical question. It's wretched and real, an echo of that famous cry: why have you abandoned me? Sasuke, Kushina remains absolutely convinced, could not have said these things to Mikoto. "You were a monster to him. You've – missed the whole point. Anything he is, he is in spite of you."

Mikoto gives him nothing. "Yes, well, whatever you believe you know about him, I am still his mother, and unfortunately –"

"But you're not! Don't you see that? You should've been but you – you never loved him. You never made him happy."

Mikoto cocks her head in a way that makes Kushina think perhaps Sasuke doing it isn't only due to Orochimaru's influence. "Shouldn't you be grateful?"

"What?" It's a helpless question. Furious too but mostly helpless.

"If I had loved him," Mikoto says, so steady, so sure, "you would be dead. Happiness… I'll bury him in the sky, where he belongs. Then he'll be at rest."

Naruto's quiet for a bit after she's gone, biting his lip. Then he smiles, a hurt little smile, at Kushina. "You weren't awful to me. I'm glad you weren't awful to me."

His hands are shaking badly, violence trembling and erupting in bursts of vermillion energy.

"Let's go," she says quickly, steering him out of the restaurant with a steady grip on his shoulder and into a taxi.

In the car, he sits with his claws closed tight inside his own body, searing through muscle and bone, shaking and shaking on the verge of eruption.

It's been too much, too bloody much. Mikoto, staring him down: if I had loved him, you would be dead. Because she would never have allowed Naruto to lay a finger on a child she loved.

I'll bury him where he belongs, in a grave in the sky. Which is, horrifyingly, where Sasuke thinks he belongs too.

And Mikoto hasn't really been relevant for a long time, but the whole world is going to pieces, Naruto is going to pieces. He's been fighting Sasuke so hard, and now with the impossible return of him – don't stop. I'll kill you if you stop – everything else comes crashing down on him.

Sasuke doesn't love him. Sasuke didn't choose him, and Sasuke doesn't trust him.

And Naruto has become someone who isn't stopped by that, someone that he never meant to be. He promised he'd save them, that he'd save them both, and now instead he's with Sasuke even though he's – Orochimaru too said he loved Sasuke, and that Sasuke belonged to him, Orochimaru too took him in violence and in tenderness, and – Orochimaru at least doesn't prioritise having Sasuke with him over having Sasuke alive.

The way Sasuke looked at him, before they went to Rock: toppling off the roof, and then on the ground as Naruto hit him.

Sasuke on the airplane, after Naruto stepped into his dream: how are you any different from Orochimaru? and Naruto just spluttering in response.

Sasuke that first night, just after – after Naruto had forced the bond on him, white-faced and dead-eyed, trying to claw Naruto out of him, claw himself free from this latest manacle, and –

And this shouldn't even be about Sasuke, because Naruto's letting so many people down, not just himself and Sasuke, but Sasuke's all there is.

He swallows and swallows. Sasuke doesn't need to feel this: Naruto pulls on the holy writ inside him, makes it uncurl from where it nests inside his skeleton and cage in his black hysteria, the wild grief wracking him, wrecking him.

"Here we are," Kushina says, manhandling him out of the car.

They're in what seems to be the corpse of the Hokage building.

"We need this demolished so we can rebuild," Kushina tells him. "Go crazy."

Naruto does. He goes absolutely batshit insane, comes to his senses what must be hours later, when it's dark outside and his throat is raw from screaming. Cement has been pulverized, steel bent and ripped.

Naruto stares for a moment, feeling purged and fine, and then he starts to cry. It's fugly crying, tears cascading and snot all over his face, great hulking hyperventilating sobs. He cries until he pukes, until there's nothing left, and still the tears come.

He feels himself reaching out, into thin air, in this absurd way. Sometimes at school he woke up rolling off the bed, reaching for Sasuke. Which was insane, because he'd barely ever shared a bed with Sasuke. A few sleepovers, usually involving Sakura too, and then of course every night snuggled up tight for warmth when they ran away together after Mum died.

Sasuke had been oddly calm about that, oddly calm in fact about everything at that point. Isolating himself from the world. Naruto had understood afterwards that this was around the time Sasuke found out that Kakashi was aware of the full extent of Orochimaru's abuse.

In any case Naruto had said, There's something I have to do, you know.

Sasuke had looked at him with those steady eyes Naruto's never been able to look away from. I know.

His impotently reaching fingers find a drain pipe, and crush it into nothing. It's a sensitive topic, something Gaara only reminds him of when they're really going at each other, but destruction has always come easily to Naruto.

He was always a physical kid, always open to violence. Sasuke for a long time was far more sedate, or at least controlled. It was after he'd been given to Orochimaru that suddenly he could be provoked into deadly force, went crazy at unexpected touches.

Naruto got hospitalised twice, after Sasuke pushed him in front of a car. And Naruto, who was used to fighting with Gaara and Kiba, with people who had shifter healing, broke Sasuke's bones more than once. Usually he only found out afterwards, because Sasuke in the moment never gave any indication.

"Naruto? You here?"

"Narutoooo!"

Naruto hurries to rub the worst of the snot off his face, but he can't doubt that his eyes are still wet and red when Konohamaru bounds in, Kiba following.

"There you are!"

"Yeah," Naruto says. "Yeah, here I am."

"You about ready to go home?" Kiba asks, holding Konohamaru back from pouncing.

"Yeah," Naruto says again, and gets to his feet on the knowledge that he's beyond ready to go home. Where he will run with his heart beating fit to break through his ribcage and leave him behind, run to Sasuke.

It's pathetic, it's horrible – all the time in the car, when he talks to Kiba and Konohamaru, who are his friends, his family, his people – there's this horror, this distance. He's speaking to them like he's speaking to everyone else, as a stopgap measure until Sasuke pays attention to him again. Doing things to distract himself, let time pass, until he can have more of Sasuke, always needing more.

Every time Sasuke's out of his sight, there's this feeling that dawn will never come again.

It's only when he has Sasuke with him that he can feel normal, feel good: calm and happy, a functional person. It's only then that other things, other people, can matter. All the rest of the time there's only the lack of Sasuke, which hollows out everything else.

He remembers back in school, all these imaginary conversations with Sasuke that never quite stopped, a constant murmur in the back of his head. Everything that happened, everything he did, relevant as background to speculation of what would Sasuke have done, what would Sasuke have said. Sometimes for hours he could feel sort of normal, sort of okay, only then suddenly there was that airless emptiness again, this crippling need for Sasuke's presence.

When he called and called, and how when Sasuke finally picked up this relief. The world a place to be lived in again, instead of this terrible prison.

"Naruto," Konohamaru insists, kicking at his knees. "You're not paying attention."

"Sorry," Naruto says. "I had a run-in with Sasuke's mum. She's – not a very nice person."

"No," Kiba says, when Konohamaru falls uncertainly silent. "No, I imagine she's not."

Eventually, still subdued, Konohamaru says, "But aren't we – like, allied with her?"

"Well," Kiba says. "Sasuke's not a very nice person either, but we get along all right with him, don't we?"

Konohamaru looks deeply unconvinced.

Naruto manages to laugh, ruffling his hair.