Follow Me into the Dark

"Come with me," Neji says. He wouldn't normally let himself say this – wouldn't normally be able to say this – but he just exorcised a devil, after Sasuke turned to him, asked him to.

"I can't." Sasuke kicks off his muddy shoes, rubbing his feet dry on the ugly carpet. They've taken shelter in one of the houses on the outskirts of New Suna. Until an hour ago, it was occupied, seemingly by a family. Children's jackets hang in the hallway, half-empty plates clutter the kitchen table. "But I'm coming back soon."

Neji nods, shedding his coat and sinking onto the coach. It's a wide, luxurious thing, almost a bed. Light still trembles in his fingers, molten and heavy.

He's never faced a devil alone before, and isn't – this is humiliating, but Neji's never been stupid enough to let embarrassment stop him drawing the relevant conclusions – he isn't sure he would've managed if Sasuke hadn't taken care of the surrounding demons. If he'd been rested, he'd have been fine, but he's been through some heavy exorcisms earlier this week, and today he needed Sasuke.

Sasuke too sits down, his hip resting lightly against Neji's calf. Neji sits up properly, which brings him very close to Sasuke. "I'm supposed to bring you back."

"You're supposed to do a lot of things."

"Ah," Neji says. Sasuke smells of angelfire and sweaty skin, an impossible combination like ash and dew. Neji knows he tastes the same. "Was this a setup, then?"

Sasuke shrugs. "I doubt it. The Council can hardly have counted on me purging New Suna, and if I hadn't, a single devil wouldn't have mattered."

"I was referring to my instructions to bring you back with me. They can't have expected me to succeed, unless they're underestimating you greatly." He recalls Hanabi saying, off-hand, that Sasuke's far stronger than he. At the time, he hadn't believed her.

"I'm not sure," Sasuke says. "But it'd mean taking on me and all the shifters, so it's unlikely anyone would count on you succeeding."

"The shifters," Neji repeats with distaste. "I'm surprised they aren't here."

"Naruto's trying. The other don't want to let him, until they're sure the demons are gone. They're much deeper in the city."

"He doesn't force his way free?" Neji wouldn't have imagined Naruto capable of that, but then there was Stonehall, which proved that Naruto's far stronger than a shifter should be allowed to be.

"He doesn't want to hurt them when he knows I'm fine."

"I see."

But that's a lie. He doesn't see at all, because his eyes fall shut as he tilts his head, sharing Sasuke's breath, taking it greedily into his own mouth. Their lips brush lightly as angel wings, until he angles his head more, pressing harder.

"Ah," Sasuke says. "I see."

"Ah?"

"If you thought of it as doing something for me or as making a bargain with me."

"I –" He was going to say, I don't know, but Sasuke takes control of the kiss, taking Neji's jaw in his hand and tilting his face until they're kissing properly, a deep filthy kiss, and Neji's arms come up around Sasuke's neck, they're pressed chest to chest suddenly. Neji never feels like a teenager except in moments like this, undone by contact, with not just another boy but with Sasuke.

Sasuke tips him backwards until he's sprawled on his back on the coach. Sasuke kneels over him, undoing his buttons and stroking circles over his chest.

Neji draws in a deep breath, smelling sooth and copper and mud, and Sasuke. "We should shower."

"We'd better get this done before Kyuubi gets here," Sasuke tells him, licking a hot stripe up his ribs.

Neji's back arches involuntarily. This is what he hates about sex, what terrifies him: his body is unmastered, like a hoarse you thought you'd broken in that suddenly runs free and wild.

He sits up again, kissing Sasuke, wet greedy kisses that leave saliva running down his chin, urging Sasuke to unstraddle him and spreading his own legs.

"Hmm?" Sasuke says, eyebrow raised and a headache frown intermittently twisting his face.

"It's Kyuubi, right? He doesn't like what we're doing?"

"No," Sasuke says, not without amusement but not without bitterness either.

"And if I fuck you, he'll go insane. It matters to him, right, he thinks it matters who's penetrated?"

"He does," Sasuke agrees, undoing Neji's trousers without looking. "But I'm not gonna be able to get it up, so."

And Neji was going to speak, but Sasuke pushes him back down, sinking his hand into Neji's underwear. He drags his thumb in circles around the wet tip, sucking on the fingers of his free hand.

There's no time to speak before Sasuke has his mouth around Neji's erection and his fingers teasing up Neji's arse, and speaking becomes entirely impossible.

They're just about done, Sasuke wiping his mouth and tucking Neji back in, when Neji senses the approach of Kyuubi – not a demon, but unclean energy much stronger than it should be.

"Stay here," Sasuke tells him.

Neji's ashamed to obey him, to let Sasuke once more walk away from him.

xxxxx

Kyuubi's pushing Sasuke so hard into the wall, the bricks are being displaced, the wall starting to cave.

Sasuke curses at him, and Sasuke's mouth smells of Neji's sperm.

Kyuubi claws that out, forcing his fingers into Sasuke's mouth to scrape away the traces of Neji, flaying Sasuke's tongue, the insides of his cheeks.

Sasuke spits blood and bites him, crunching finger bones between his teeth, but Kyuubi's hand regrows too quickly for that to matter.

He nuzzles Sasuke's throat, wanting to replace the purged smell with his own. He pushes his tongue into Sasuke's mouth, licking up all the traces of blood. Sasuke's belt snaps open in his hands.

"No," Sasuke says. There's a brief, terrible struggle. Sasuke's elbow – Uriel's elbow – comes down, breaking through Naruto's face, exposing his brain. "I fucking said no!"

It takes everything Kyuubi has to heal that, to keep Naruto alive despite the angelfire sparkling across the surface of his brain.

"I know," Naruto says, his grip shifting until he's just holding Sasuke, face buried in Sasuke's shoulder, arms so tight around him his ribs creak. "I'm sorry."

Sasuke too changes, fists relaxing on Naruto's shoulders.

"I really freaked out," Naruto whispers. "He really – Kyuubi really – we both really fucked up. I didn't think you'd – how could you – why would you do that!"

"If this situation should occur again, Neji needs an incentive to save you. This way, he knows there's something in it for him."

"I didn't think – you didn't want – "

"I didn't want to do this either," Sasuke snaps.

"But he…"

"He couldn't force me if he tried," Sasuke tells him impatiently, resting his chin against the crown of Naruto's head.

Naruto's voice comes little and lost. "How could he not know that you didn't want…?"

"You've done it when I haven't particularly wanted to."

"You were all right with that."

"I was all right with this too."

Naruto looks up at last, catching Sasuke's eyes. "So now…with me?"

"If you're too hurt to heal yourself, if we need the bond reinforced, I'll fuck you."

"But otherwise –"

"If that's how you want it," Sasuke starts furiously.

"No! I'm happy you wouldn't just – that you only want this if you want it – augh, I'm not making sense – I just want – "

"You make sense," Sasuke tells him, his fingers catching proprietary and familiar in Naruto's hair. "I won't have you taken from me."

Kyuubi erupts inside him, inflamed and crazed. Every particle of his body strains for more, his cock aching and twitching between them. He rubs his cheek against Sasuke's. "Lock him up, okay?"

Sasuke looks at him in question, in maybe surprise, but trusts him in this. Uriel grabs Kyuubi by the scruff of his neck and locks him tight inside his cage.

Naruto can breathe out. He still wants Sasuke, he always wants Sasuke, but it's a want he can control. He presses a brief kiss to the side of Sasuke's jaw before stepping back. "What the hell did Itachi say to you?"

"That I made him unclean."

"What?"

Sasuke smiles humourlessly. "Apparently I'm his gateway to sin."

"That's crazy."

Sasuke shrugs. "According to human criteria, Itachi's insane."

"I – really? Does he know that?"

Sasuke rubs at his mouth, which is whole again, healed. "He hears voices. One voice at least, telling him what to do."

"Lucifael."

"Yeah."

"Uriel doesn't talk to you."

"No. They're not supposed to talk. If you start hearing them – you've taken in too much, you should've already gone nova."

"He's not really human anymore."

"No," Sasuke says again. "He's shedding his humanity the way you're only supposed to be able to when you go nova. But he's too strong, so he survives."

Naruto takes his hand and starts walking. Sasuke looks at him in confusion but comes along. "You're not unclean," Naruto tells him. "If Itachi sins, that's on Itachi. That's got nothing to do with you."

"I want it to have something to do with me."

Naruto squeezes his hand. "Hmm. Yeah. 'One wants to be loved, failing that' – um…"

"One wants to be loved, failing that admired, failing that feared, failing that detested and despised. One wants to evoke in people some sort of sentiment. The soul shudders in the face of emptiness and seeks connection at any cost."

"Hah, Sakura will have us graduating after all."

"Sakura?" Sasuke says blankly.

"Oh. Yeah, I guess Kakashi always liked … what's his name again? That author bloke."

"Hn."

"We're just – leaving Neji?"

Sasuke shrugs. "He's a big boy, he can find his own way home."

This is probably for the best, because Kyuubi's already straining so hard, the bars of his cage are bending.

xxxxx

"You said he was doing better," Temari hisses.

Shikamaru makes a placating gesture. "He was."

"We're fine," Naruto cuts in. "Also we can hear you."

Temari sighs, pushing her empty plate away. "Fucking ghost town. Fucking exorcists."

"This was kind of my fault," Naruto admits. "I killed Ito."

"Why?"

Naruto reaches for his own plate, filling it was spaghetti and chicken raided from some dead family's pantry. They've taken shelter in a random house that must have been the home of a big, wealthy family just hours earlier. "He needed killing."

"Right," Temari says. "Jesus, I just back here – I just convinced Shino bloody Aburame to stop being so against non-shifters, now I'm thinking he's got a point."

"You got messy with Ito?" Shikamaru cuts in. "Here, watch this."

Temari and Naruto both lean over, watching the news footage on Shikamaru's phone. It shows Sasuke and Neji in a room, and then Ito's men rushing in and opening fire on them. A bullet must've graced Sasuke's face – Sasuke must've let it – because there's a wound, blood splattering on Sasuke's collar. Then there's the terrible light, which envelops the shooters and grows, swallowing the city, extinguishing all its life. The reporters are talking about Sodom and Gomorra, and quoting God's commandment to smite Amalek: to utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

"Jesus," Temari mutters again. "He was right though. It does make Stonehall not look so bad." She snorts, spearing a piece of carrot with her fork. "But of course there'll be no condemnation of this."

Shikamaru shrugs unhappily. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's shifter condemnation. If Naruto hadn't killed Ito, his men wouldn't have had this unfortunate misunderstanding that necessitated the purging. Whichever way the wind blows, it's shifters getting rained on."

"Did you at least kill Neji?"

"Neji," Sasuke interrupts, returning from his shower, "saved your lives."

Temari snorts. "Not of his own volition, not from what I saw."

Sasuke pulls out a chair, stealing some of Naruto's food. "Do you imagine I hypnotised him?"

"Would you have helped us?" Temari asks. "If Naruto hadn't been there, would you have stepped in for us?"

"Generally?" Sasuke asks, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of chicken. "I guess. Why not?"

"How heartening," Temari snaps, reaching for the wine bottle.

"Keep talking, maybe you'll change my mind," Sasuke tells her dryly, on the very edge between teasing and threatening.

"Could we not," Naruto says. Kyuubi's beating against the insides of his head like a migraine, desperate to break out of his cage.

It's shit timing, all of it. Temari had finally got Shino onboard, not that he probably needed much convincing after Stonehall, and then this. Shikamaru was actually something like friendly with Sasuke, but Shikamaru minds so much about humans and won't make that effort anymore, not genuinely, and then Sasuke will close off again.

Sasuke was all right, they were all right, only then Itachi fucked everything up, and now Sasuke would rather barter blowjobs with Neji than let Naruto touch him.

He wants him mum, desperately and desolately, as he hasn't in years. He understands, understood even when he was little and she was still alive, that she wouldn't have been able to deal with this, but he wants her all the same, with the aching ardency of a child.

Failing that, he wants Dad, Tsunade, Jiraiya, Kakashi, but he can't have them anymore either.

Sasuke puts his hand on the side of Naruto's face, cold bony fingers and Kyuubi suddenly soothed. Naruto takes a selfish chance and pulls him closer, half into Naruto lap. Sasuke yawns around a mouthful of pasta and rests his head on Naruto's shoulder. "You should rest up," Naruto mumbles. "We won't have Neji around if there's another devil tomorrow."

"There have been too many of them lately," Shikamaru says.

"Orochimaru's faction is slacking," Sasuke says. He's finished most of Naruto's serving and drops his fork in the empty bowl. "They're making a statement."

"How much worse will it get?"

Sasuke shrugs. "A lot, probably. They won't be bothered about a few millions humans."

"A few million – "

"The planet's overpopulated anyway. They'd see it as a good thing if the human population was halved."

"The humans would turn on them," Shikamaru says.

"Really? Because their alternative is the human population being cut down to zero. Everyone in this world lives at the mercy of exorcists."

Temari empties her glass. "We should team up with the humans and keep the fucking exorcists enslaved."

Sasuke actually laughs. "Good luck with that." He stretches a little. "I'm going to bed."

Naruto understands from the way Sasuke looks at him that he's invited along, and slams to his feet. "Night, guys."

Sasuke's chosen what appears to have been the bedroom of a teenaged daughter, and is in fact, now that Naruto's looking for it, wearing what must be her pyjamas. Naruto can see why, because he too notices the obvious resemblance to Sakura's room: stuffed animals next to thick books, cheap makeup and expensive bags. It should be upsetting to be in what might just as well have been Sakura's mausoleum, but it's oddly comforting. Sasuke toys with a perfume bottle that, indeed, smells the same way Sakura did in seventh grade.

"You killed her," Naruto says. "The girl who lived here."

"I killed several million people."

"You really don't feel bad about it."

"No," Sasuke says, lightly but firmly. He puts the perfume away but his fingers already stink of it. "I enjoyed the purging. I'm not going to lie to you about that."

"I don't want you to lie to me."

"But you want me to regret it."

The world tilts under Naruto's feet, until it feels like he's going to fall off it. "I told you before, I don't want you to feel like shit. But I'm not – I don't want you to feel bad, but I also don't want to you massacre millions of people and think it's fine!" He makes a frustrated gesture, like he's trying to throw his emotions away from him. "It's all fucked up. You feel like shit about all these things you shouldn't, when you haven't done anything wrong – and then you feel fine when you've done all this fucked up shit and you should feel bad!"

"Hypocrite."

Naruto stares at him in bewildered challenge.

"If I hadn't brained you, would you have stopped?"

Naruto freezes.

Sasuke snorts, settling on the bed. "You don't exactly seem crushed about it."

"Nothing happened."

"No," Sasuke agrees. "And if New Suna had been able to defend itself, nothing would've happened here either."

Naruto swallows, swallows the urge to vomit or scream.

"Another wave of demons, or before the seal was gone, so I couldn't have held you off – you'd have done it."

"No," Naruto says desperately.

"Last time I tried to kick you off of me, you just broke my leg."

Just after Stonehall, when Naruto/Kyuubi triggered Sasuke's brainbleed: when Sasuke couldn't stop him. He did do it.

His voice catches and shakes. "I'm sorry."

Sasuke shrugs. "It's not that big a deal."

"But it is."

"After you burnt your hand, in the infirmary – you told me to stop. I didn't. Which by the way, I stand by that."

"This is fucked up."

"This is who I am. I purged New Suna, I'd do it again. I fucked you when you told me not to, I'd do that again too. If you don't – "

"I do," Naruto cuts him off. "I do, of course I do. I just… I want it to be less fucked up."

"Che. Good luck with that."

"I don't need luck," Naruto mutters, chucking his jeans and jumper and getting into the bed too – slowly, cautiously, checking if he's allowed. It's a rather smaller bed than they're used to, with only one duvet.

Sasuke turns towards him, nestles into his arms the way Naruto likes best, curled tight and close with his face pressed to Naruto's heart. "I mean it," he mumbles. "Don't do anything."

"I know," Naruto mumbles into his hair. "I won't. I promise."

Sasuke makes an unconvinced little noise but nevertheless presses closer, slipping his hand under Naruto's tshirt to curl against his back. "You can put out the tails if you want."

"Yeah?"

"Mmh."

So Naruto curls his tails around Sasuke's legs, and Sasuke shifts and sighs, falling asleep very quickly. Naruto remains awake, feeling like someone's fisting his heart, squeezing it to pieces inside his chest. He does what Sasuke allowed when he was awake: strokes Sasuke's back, outside the borrowed shirt, kisses his hair.

The most horrifying thought of all is that Sasuke would probably be neither surprised nor particularly upset if Naruto fucked him in his sleep, as long as he didn't wake him up doing it.

When he finally falls asleep, Naruto dreams of the girl, who stands at the foot end of the bed looking improbably like Sakura. I know, Naruto tells her. We killed you. I'm sorry, I am, I'll try to do better. But I did the best I could. I choose this – I chose him, I'll always choose him. No regrets.

He wakes up from Sasuke waking up, clutching at Naruto's chest like a great big owl, a panic bird: weight and claws and heavy, helpless breathing.

"Hey," Naruto mumbles. "I'm here, you're okay. Just a dream."

But it wasn't, of course. All Sasuke's worst nightmares are memories.

Sasuke makes this wet, strangled sound and pulls Naruto roughly on top of him, breathing hard and clinging harder.

"Let him out," he hisses into Naruto's ear. "I don't want to think."

"Sasuke, no. Just let me…"

But what Naruto wants doesn't matter. He can fight all he likes, like Sasuke could fight all he liked when his brain was bleeding, but it makes no difference. He goes in the cage and Kyuubi gets out, and what happens after that, Naruto can only imagine.

Still, when he wakes up in the morning, Kyuubi subdued to a purring warmth in his stomach, everything seems curiously fine. He's naked, but the bed is relatively orderly, the room untouched.

Sasuke's nowhere around, but Naruto can feel him downstairs – a fractured, shaky presence, but no less stable than he was yesterday.

Naruto ambles into the kitchen to find him drinking tea from a gigantic striped cup. The silence of the room is oppressive, hostile: unnatural when there are so many occupants. It's a good thing, probably, that they left Gaara with Tsunade, or this would be an even more volatile mix.

"Hey," he mumbles, reaching out to touch Sasuke's arm. He only just brushes Sasuke's elbow before Sasuke steps away. "What's wrong?" Because Sasuke welcomed his touch just a few hours ago, grabbed for him greedily.

"That was just a momentary," Sasuke starts irritably, cutting himself off.

A momentary weakness.

The cup breaks in Sasuke's hand, ceramic slicing open his palm and fingers, tea sloshing into the cuts. It's not a serious injury, so Kyuubi doesn't heal it: he's uncomfortable with the monstrous light of Uriel and likes to hold back on the healing, trying to remind Sasuke of his place. Sasuke looks at the cuts with detached interest, flexing his fingers to deepen them.

He doesn't draw on Kyuubi, but there's something fundamentally inhuman about the face he eventually lifts to meet Naruto's – Kyuubi's – gaze. Red eyes stare into red, magic and challenge sizzling between them.

Naruto leans forward slowly, a movement better suited to a fox than to a human body, and catches Sasuke's bleeding hand in his mouth, licking it clean and whole.

Sasuke stares down at him, at his hand inside Naruto's mouth, which shouldn't be able to fit it. Naruto could close his jaws so easily, snap the wrist off. He thinks of Tyr and the Fenrir wolf, and drags his tongue along the closing cuts, fangs scratching against the skin of Sasuke's arm.

Finally Sasuke curls his fingers, plucking Kyuubi's canines from his jaw. He scratches up his hand badly when he pulls it out of Naruto's growling mouth, but it's filled with triumph: bloody fangs.

In fluorescent light and the smell of someone else's kitchen, they circle each other. There's a brief furious tussle, half physical, half energy.

"Enough," Temari finally snaps, and Naruto straightens up on the remembrance that they aren't alone.

"Haha, yeah, sorry. Is there any food?"

Shikamaru points towards the counter, and Naruto starts slathering jam on toast.

Sasuke looks rather miffed, but at least he's eating again, shovelling in eggs and wholegrain.

Naruto draws in a deep breath, trying to find his zen centre or whatever, and slings a tail around Sasuke's thigh. "You can't do that," he says, and his voice finally comes calm. "Like last night. I told you no. You can just let him out whenever you like."

"Unless you can stop me, yes I can."

"That's not how I want us to be."

"Tough shit."

"No. Just – fucking no. That's not how we have to be with each other! I don't – I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to force you into anything, and I don't want you to do that to me either."

"People want things," Sasuke tells him. "That doesn't mean they can have them. It doesn't change how the world is."

"But it changes who people are. Which is – which is what decides how the world is too. Sasuke. I need you to listen to me." He closes his hand around Sasuke wrist.

Sasuke spears it with the breadknife, cutting through Naruto's hand and his own arm. Hissing in frustrated pain, pulling the knife out, Naruto understands that Sasuke's doing the same thing he did when he didn't want to think anymore and let out Kyuubi: replacing emotion with sensation.

"I'm not going to be some fucking self harm mechanism," Naruto sneers at him.

People don't self-harm just to hurt themselves, Sakura told him once. They do it because they feel it helps: they do it to feel better.

It's not like Naruto's never taken a crazy daredevil risk, taken a chance that would inevitably end in him getting hurt – in atonement, in rage, in an insane adrenaline rush. But still…

Sasuke wanders away to look out the window, the morning sun gilding his outlines. "We'll be passing by some other towns on the way back. I could hurt other people instead."

"No!" Naruto erupts after a frozen moment. "What the hell, no way! We will have no more purgings!"

"I can arrange a pretext if you like."

"Bad enough you did it here."

Sasuke turns towards him with a smirk. "They started firing of their own volition."

"But you decided," Shikamaru cuts in, speaking in this quiet furious voice that Naruto's never heard from him before. "You let yourself be hit. You could've dodged, killed the shooters, and swept the whole thing under the rug."

"Of course I could." Sunlight moves over his face, bleaches out the humanity. "As Neji would say, it's the law."

"What's the law and what's the right thing to do are bloody different things," Naruto says. "We decide the laws – we, the people. We can change them."

Sasuke shrugs, playing with another knife. A real one, this time, one of his own, which blurs nimbly between his fingers. He cuts himself every now and then, just little paper cuts really, but they must be intentional because if he focussed he could certainly avoid them.

"If you have to hurt someone," Naruto says, stepping up close, "then hurt me. I can take it."

Sasuke plunges the knife into Naruto's stomach with sudden astonishing violence, gutting him like a fish. Angelfire spills over the blade, bleedover from the power trembling through his hands, spreading like poison in Naruto's innards.

Naruto falls to his knees, pressing his bowels back inside his abdomen with his hands. They remain frozen for a long moment until Kyuubi's managed to patch him up. "Feel better now?" Naruto asks.

"A bit."

"Good," Naruto decides, struggling upright. He reaches for his abandoned toast with determination.

Sasuke nods vaguely at him and walks away, back upstairs.

"Jesus Christ, Naruto," Temari erupts. "This has gone a long way too far."

"He's not doing well," Shikamaru says. "You have to see that."

"We're fine."

"No, you're fucking not, and don't you lie to me," Temari snaps. "I'm on your side, but I need you to be on our side, too. You're with Uchiha, I get that, but you got to admit he's not fucking stable right now. Something has to give."

"I'll get it sorted." He rubs at his face. "Itachi really fucked him up."

"He should be over it by now."

Naruto's never made anyone physically shrink back this fast before. "He spent the first fifteen years of his life being told he wasn't fucking wanted, and what? You think he's just going to suddenly believe he is? Fuck you."

"Fine. Just deal with it. We still need to finalise details on the itinerary. The press will be swarming, too."

"We're not talking to be press. Best case, they don't even see us. I've got the itinerary."

"You finished it?"

He shrugs, one of those acquired habits, something he didn't do before the bond. "Sasuke did."

Shikamaru at least looks politely sceptical, but it is a good route.

Naruto finishes another few slices of toast, empties the milk cartoon, and follows Sasuke upstairs. He's back in the dead girl's room, on the phone with fucking Neji.

But he finishes the call almost at once Naruto enters. "My mother called," he says blankly, before amending it to, "She told Neji to call. She'd like to see me."

"We can't go back like this," Naruto says.

"I need to do what I need to do," Sasuke tells him.

"But right now – "

"I'm going. Whether you come along or you try to stop me or whatever, that's your business. It won't change anything."

"Okay," Naruto says, sinking down on the bed to retie his shoe laces and leaning a bit against Sasuke's side. "I'm coming along. Someone needs to remind you to be your best self, you bastard."