The Naka shrine was still standing, rising from the mangled compound, though bearing scars of its own from its battle against the flames that night, so many years ago. Sasuke found himself wondering if the Uchiha district would ever be free of its shadow. Because he was quite certain it would follow him for the rest of his days.

He matched Yurei's stride as they swept through the courtyard, up the stairs and into the shrine. Yurei went to the seventh tatami mat on the far right and removed it to reveal a slab of stone marked with old inscriptions and a likeness of the sharingan. He then paused to perform a series of seals. Sasuke's own sharingan dutifully committed them to memory before the stone grated aside, revealing a passage way down. He followed Yurei down the stairs, into the darkness.

The musty air from the shrine carried stronger notes of smoke and ink as they descended. Sasuke lagged behind at the base of the stairs, unsure where to step with even his sharingan unable to penetrate the darkness. Then Yurei's silhouette took shape in the dancing light of a candle, followed by two more. The shadows receded, far enough to reveal the outlines of a wide chamber, big enough to hold a whole crowd.

In the middle of the room, surrounded by precarious stacks of books and haphazard scrolls, was a bedroll. Yurei truly was a masochist, Sasuke realized with a sinking heart. He swallowed the lump in his throat and stepped forward, closing the distance between them.

"Is this where you've been hiding all this time?" he asked.

His inner struggle, the tumult of warring emotions within him, didn't surface in his voice, but he failed to keep them from his eyes. Yurei had this unfortunate effect on his guard. And now they were all there – pity, confusion, regret, desire and a dozen other threads for Yurei to pick apart at his leisure. Sasuke had never had much patience for introspection to be able to name them all.

"For the past ten years," Yurei acquiesced. His demeanor betrayed nothing, only carried a dark undercurrent Sasuke could detect but not identify. "Well, almost ten years now."

Sasuke blinked, trying to envision ten years trapped between these walls, in this cold and humid darkness, alone. His mind could not encompass it, abhorred the very notion, recoiled at the thought. He would have lost it. Maybe Yurei had too, or he was holding on to the last vestiges of his sanity at this very moment.

Sasuke's hand reached out for contact, as if to give Yurei something to hold on to, to pull himself out of the dark. His palm ran along the length of his arm and Yurei's chakra flared in response to the stimuli, though he remained otherwise quite still. Almost like he was waiting for something.

Some madness coursed through Sasuke's veins at the thought. He leaned in, tipped Yurei's head to the side and brushed his lips against the cut made by his kunai. Then he paused, but Yurei stood just as unnervingly, maddeningly still, so Sasuke sampled his blood with the tip of his tongue, tentatively. When his actions failed to elicit the coveted response for a second time, he threw caution to the wind.

Teeth sank in the soft, wounded flesh. Yurei's hand fisted in his hair then, one half-breath, half-moan making it past his lips. Sasuke knocked over the candles, extinguishing them. Darkness swallowed them whole and still, he closed his eyes as he removed Yurei's mask to blindly claim his lips in a desperate kiss, more teeth and breathlessness.

Yurei deftly stripped him of his clothes, matching the rushed pace set by Sasuke's boldness in relieving him of his own. They stumbled around together, locked in this struggle until they tumbled onto the bedroll, one tangle of limbs and lust, primal, almost animalistic. The fabric was cold against Sasuke's back – the sensation registered, but he didn't feel it, unable to escape Yurei's warmth.

It was nothing like that first time. No experimental caresses, no hesitation, neither of them holding back anymore. Pleasure laced with pain wrung sweat out of Sasuke, almost as much as their spar had, and his throat reverberated with sounds he'd never made before. Yurei's touch, his fingers, his lips, they branded his skin and left it burning, aching for more. Sasuke chased his release, tipping his head back to expose the column of his throat, arching his body into the thrusts that promised to rock him into oblivion.

But it wasn't his to take, as Yurei made abundantly clear. He receded like the tide, changing the rhythm of his strokes, the angle, softer, shallower, sending shudders of pleasure through Sasuke's flesh but not enough to tip him over the edge.

He groaned, driven almost feral with sensation, but trapped within Yurei's cage, between his limbs and around his cock, he couldn't move and there wasn't enough air in the room and his head was spinning, mind spiraling out of control. He held back the plea until it choked him. Until he couldn't, anymore. It came out from his mouth barely intelligible, glass deformed by molten heat.

"Please…"

Yurei's breath was hotter still against the over-sensitized shell of his ear. "Say my name."

That tone, steel-wrapped, sharp-edged, it raked against the insides of his mind and clawed at his soul and Sasuke knew which name Yurei demanded, what he wanted to rip from his mouth with this languorous torment, honeyed agony. He gritted his teeth against it, held it on the tip of his tongue, unwilling to let it go, to accept the truth he had known for some time. He shook his head, tears forming at the corners of his eyes as he struggled to keep his eyes shut, his mind in the dark.

Yurei's grip shifted then, from his arms down to his hips and he slipped deeper inside him, hitting something that broke the coils altogether, unraveling him.

Sasuke didn't say his name. He screamed it.

"Shisui!"