Chapter Seven

by Ember, Lady of fl00f

-

Till you show me how it could be...

Till you show me how it could be

And when the world turns over

I'll keep my ears to the wall

And when the world turns over

I'll keep my feet straight on the ground

-

There was no doubting that it was spring.

The sun was everywhere, which, thinking about it, was a stupid thought to think but it was, giving everything a cheerfully yellow-gold tint, and pressing down a perfect, not too-hot warmth onto bare arms and a wide face as Naruto, reclining onto the sturdy presence of the tree behind him and sitting on his jacket spread out across the grass, tilted his head back, eyes closed, towards the bright blue sky. The lake was glittering in front of him, huge and blue and sparkling like a smashed sapphire, while the smells of damp grass and dogwood and cherry blossoms filled the air, like a less intense version of Sakura's perfume, or the way you imagined the princess garden in the story books smelling. It was their one day off in a long time, and it was perfect. It was the kind of day where no one was doing anything but enjoying the sun, the kind of day that was perfect for the thinking of all-too-poetic thoughts and romantic contemplation. And Naruto, who was overdue to do some thinking, was enjoying it.

He ran his fingers through the grass beside the orange folds of his jacket and sighed, not quite sure where this was going. It was two days after he had been confronted with... well, with Sasuke, and his feelings thereof, and the hour or two when the black-haired Genin had just held him. He didn't know why it felt so good to have nothing asked of him and not have anything to ask, to just sit there and be with someone. Even someone like Sasuke. Especially someone like Sasuke. He wasn't sure which anymore. But it didn't matter because it did feel good and he hadn't ever wanted it to end, but time never slows down when you don't want it to go on and soon it was dark, and they'd kissed again and gone home.

The day before, they'd had a mission, preceded by thirty minutes of picking up the phone, staring at it, putting it down, and picking it up again, until the droning 'busy' signal of the unused phone drove him insane and he gave up on trying to call his teammate. He figured they had something to talk about but he didn't know what and he couldn't figure it out and the whole thing freaked him out a little. If this were Sakura it would be easy; he'd call her and set up a date and walk around all day feeling that light little buzzing feeling he'd felt once or twice when she'd talk to him and accidentally act disposed towards him. But it wasn't Sakura, it was Sasuke, and Sasuke was very different. The wrong move would screw everything up, and Naruto didn't want everything screwed up. He wanted... he didn't know what he wanted. He didn't want everything going to hell. He didn't want...

God dammit. He didn't know.

So they'd had a mission and managed to screw it up royally, because both of them were quiet and uncomfortable and entirely out of step. Naruto knew why and wondered if Sasuke did; but Sasuke was smarter than he was so he was pretty sure the black-haired Genin knew. Now, thinking back on it, the blonde didn't even remember what the mission was. It had the last thing on his mind at the time. He had been torn between making out with Sasuke, tearing off his clothes and screwing him right then and there, and changing his name and running into the mountains to become the Hermit of the Wood. He'd tried to work up the nerve to talk to his teammate at least six times, but he couldn't. What could he say? Hey, Sasuke, I liked making out with you just didn't wrap up a week of emotional turmoil and mental breakdown, not to mention to absurd surges of hormones and the whole 'questioning of sexuality' thing.

He knew what would sum it all up, what he could say that would make everything fall into perspective. What he could say that would relieve everything on his mind. He knew what he could say, but he couldn't say it, couldn't even think it, because it was absurd and stupid and gross and a little terrifying. A lot of adjectives for three words.

Slowly, he opened his eyes, looking out over the lake, the faint stripe of land on the other side splitting the water from the sky. It seemed impossible that the water could hold anything like a sea monster, on a day like today, but Naruto had seen enough monsters coming out of pretty places, metaphorically and literally, to keep him up a hill away from the lake. It was a stupid thing to be scared of, and he wasn't a little kid anymore, he was a shinobi, and he shouldn't be scared of monsters or water or the dark, but that didn't get him any closer to the lake and it didn't get him to throw away the garlic he kept in a plastic bag in his dresser, in case he heard noises in the night and had to put it under his bed to keep monsters from getting in there. He was scared of stupid things, yeah. Sea monsters and leaving his closet door open at night so that the blackness inside looked like it could hold anything, and Iruka when he got really mad, and Sasuke, and...

I L Y .

Three words shouldn't scare him but neither should some rumor probably prompted by a floating log.

It didn't matter, because both of them scared him, so he sat alone up the hill from the water and watched the lake glittering beneath him. He thought about monsters and he thought about ninjas and he thought about Sasuke a lot more than he had intended to. He'd intended to come up here to get away from thoughts of the dark-haired Genin.

Screw him, anyway. Sasuke hadn't been able to talk to Naruto, either. It would have been gratifying, seeing his rival as much at a loss as he was for a change, except that he really wanted one of them to make some sort of move towards the end of this and he couldn't bring himself to do it. They had watched each other from the corners of their vision the whole mission the day before, not even trying to hide it from one another. They tried to catch the other's eyes but they couldn't go beyond that. They were, after all, only teenage boys.

So what now? He could just give up on it. It made his stomach feel like it was coated in lead and his throat work noiselessly but it seemed like the only current option. Then again, he could go take off his clothes and dance in the older Genin's front yard until he was acknowledged and let inside but while that seemed like a much more optimistic ideal the thought of falling in love- or worse, having fallen in love, having no control, having already started to fall aimlessly and helplessly into the depths of... well, of love- was unbearably terrifying. Maybe if it wasn't Sasuke. Maybe if it wasn't this... weird. Strong. Like he didn't have a choice anymore, like he was already in too deep to get back out, and now he was trapped and couldn't ever be normal and couldn't ever like a girl and couldn't ever think about sex and adulthood without Sasuke being part of the picture, or most of the picture, or the picture in whole. It was strange, different, ridiculous.

On the other hand, he couldn't stop from thinking, when was I ever 'normal'?

And there was one person who didn't care or maybe even liked him better for it and didn't flinch away or mutter behind his back but acted the opposite, acted like he never wanted to let the blonde go...

Weird. But enter Sasuke. Everything about him was weird. Most of all, the fact that he... he was willing to... Naruto couldn't finish the thought because it all went back to the three words, and he still couldn't get past them, still kept working himself into the same roadblock. He sighed and opened his eyes, blinking in the omnipresent sunlight, shading his eyes as he looked out over the lake, to the forest beyond it.

If he hadn't opened his eyes he wouldn't have seen it, it was there and gone in a second. But he had looked out just in time to see the water break, the faceted sapphire flaw and split in a heartbeat, something long and silver burst out of the water and dive back under, all within the time it took to open his eyes. He felt his stomach sinking, suddenly and dramatically, but the whatever-it-was was obviously going away from him, and without imminent danger curiosity won over fear. He ran down the hill, leaving his jacket spread out on the grass, and sped along the bank of the lake, down to the mud and running along so that the soles of his shoes splashed in the water.

He was out of breath from trying to keep up with the supposed path of the water monster when it broke surface again, its long and silver body glittering in the sunlight, ribbonlike tearing through the air, its narrow head slicing back into the depths. The crown of its antlers broke into the lake, a dozen ripples shooting out from it. It took a second for the length of it to get back into the water, shimmering silver-white and glittering, its long and waving tail vanishing last, lingering for a second as if to verify that it had, in fact, been there.

Holy shit. It would take an idiot to not recognize the creature, and Naruto, for all his Narutoness, wasn't really an idiot. At least, not much of one. Not so much that he didn't recognize it, sliding back into the blue, for what it was.

It didn't come back up. There was no patch of darker water moving in a telltale direction or another spectacular jump in the distance. Naruto had a definite feeling that there wouldn't be another jump, that with the one appearance the Sea Monster of Konoha had made its mark and could now rest peacefully under the surface. If monsters were like ninjas and it worried about being forgotten, about not making an impression or making history, it didn't need to worry. From the magnificent spread of its black crown to the tip of its tail, the narrow head and long, ribbon-like body between with the short, clawed legs, it couldn't be forgotten.

His sea monster, the creature he'd been scared of for the past few weeks, the lake beast that had kept him away from this exact place, was an honest-to-god dragon.

Naruto looked like an idiot, standing there ankle-deep in lake water, his sandals thoroughly saturated, staring at nothing like he'd never seen water before. He didn't care. It wasn't like sometimes Jounin weren't called in to take care of a dangerous or mad dragon, or like there weren't stories about wisdom or kindness passed down to humans, but for the most part something like that was a once-in-a-lifetime type of thing and for something the blonde had been scared of for a week the lake monster was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

...Well. Maybe second.

He blinked, and after a second could finally take his eyes off the spot where the monster had been. "Heh," he whispered, barely loud enough that he himself could hear it. "It was a dragon. It was really a dragon." He'd never seen a dragon before and in all the stories about them they only came to the people who were worthy of seeing them, which amounted to everyone but Naruto in the kyuubi vessel's mind. He smiled, a little bemused (a new emotion for him), and turned away from the lake, grabbing his jacket as he started to walk home.

By the time he got to Konoha, he had a plan. By the time he was getting close to home, it had fledged and developed, and he was grinning like a maniac to the surprise of the people around him.

It was starting to get close to dusk by the time he'd finally gotten into his house, and he was all ready to finish his plan. He decided to wait until it was completely dark, because this time he wasn't just doing it for attention; he dug around in his closet until he'd found a really long piece of bungee cord, a paintbrush, and a couple of buckets of red paint. And then he sat and waited for it to get dark.

He didn't wait for second thoughts, didn't wait to think it over, in fact shoved away all doubts with typical Naruto determination. He didn't want to doubt what he was going to do because sometimes you got scared of stupid things and sometimes they turned out to be the most beautiful in the end.

-

Kakashi was late, again.

Naruto was late for the first time in a long time, and Sakura was starting to get impatient.

Alright, so maybe she had been late a couple of days ago. And maybe Sasuke had been, after that. So maybe it was the blonde's turn already. She didn't keep track and she didn't really care; she was impatient to get this over with because she had gone through the trouble of waking up two hours early and walking all the way out here (they were on the road halfway into the forest, which was a stupid place to have to go to meet their sensei, but there had to be a reason behind it; maybe they were going to another city for their mission) and she was ready to start. But it had been a long time and neither Naruto nor Kakashi seemed to be about to show up.

"He's really late," she said quietly. Sasuke turned to look at her, his face wiped clean but a hint of worry lurking behind it. Sakura was a girl, she knew how to pick that sort of thing out.

"He always is," the dark Genin drawled.

"You know who I mean." She smiled at him, but he didn't smile back, like nothing had changed over the past week. Maybe nothing had. Sakura frowned. She didn't like the idea of going through the whole 'sacrifice my final chance at love' thing without Sasuke and Naruto even getting together. She'd have to try harder, especially if- as it was starting to look- the fate of their love was going to depend on her. "One of us should go look for him."

Sasuke grunted. "He probably got lost," he growled. "Or he's waiting back in Konoha. Or he overslept. Or he tripped and forgot how to get up. Or he-"

"Or we should look for him," Sakura broke in. Sasuke shot her a glance, surprised that she would interrupt him or correct him instead of stupidly nodding along. She flashed him a grin. "Of course, one of us should stay here and wait for Kakashi..."

"I will." There was no hesitation. He was really resisting going to look for the blonde, which was interesting.

"You're a lot faster than me, though," Sakura protested, looking pleadingly up at him. Don't fight me on this, I'm trying to help you! Sasuke shrugged.

"You can walk just as well as anyone else," he snapped.

Sakura smiled grimly to herself. It was getting increasingly obvious that something, anything, had happened between her two teammates. A week ago, Sasuke would have gone just to get the ten-minute walk to himself, without the pink-haired girl clutching his arm. Of course, a week ago Sakura would have been clutching his arm, and would have died rather than propose that one of them leave the other even just for half an hour or so. Odd how these things change. "Not as well as you," she replied, reaching out and placing her hand on his shoulder. It still hurt a little when he pulled away but less because she had meant for him to. Plan B: make him uncomfortable enough to run to Naruto.

"He'll come soon enough," Sasuke growled, moving a couple of feet away from her. She followed him. This was getting kind of fun.

She smiled like he had just confessed his undying love to her and moved close enough that she started to get uncomfortable. And, gay or not, he was still hot enough that... she was straying from the plan. "Okay," she said, grinning. "It'll give us time alone. I can't stand it when we don't get any time without Naruto around, anyway- if you think he's okay." The Ino-tactic- that is, jumping on Sasuke and clinging with every available limb with whatever part of his body happens to be unoccupied by admirers- never worked for Sakura, probably because Sasuke didn't care about Ino and couldn't care less about the tiny amount of weight she provided, but had developed a sort of friendship with Sakura and therefore didn't like having her pretending it was more. She could, however, use the Sakura-tactic- arm-clinging. She wrapped both of her arms around one of his, leaned her head against his shoulder, and worked her special Sakura charm.

It always worked. "Are you sure you don't want to go looking for him?" Sasuke pulled his arm from her grasp and tried to back away, but as always she followed him like a spaniel.

She pouted, trying on her spoiled-little-girl face. There was little or possibly nothing that Sasuke hated like the spoiled-little-girl face. "It's too long of a walk," she said. "And one of us should wait for Kakashi..."

Sasuke glared at her, trying to determine whether or not this was some trick to get him to go- and finally deciding it didn't matter. When it came down to it, it was a choice between confronting Naruto, possibly alone, and being molested by Sakura. And Naruto ranked above Sakura. Well above Sakura. "Fine," he growled, starting down the road without saying anything else.

"You're going to find Naruto? Good luck!" And she meant it in every sense of the word. Sasuke scowled to himself, walking quickly without looking back; he wasn't sure whether he was glad or upset or on the verge of panic with this new development in the day. When you deny the presence of your emotions for as long as he had it gets hard to tell exactly what you're feeling. He'd been trying to get the blonde alone for a long time, now, but had never worked up the nerve; when they finally didn't have things to do or people breathing down their necks they'd probably just start making out again and nothing would get said. And Sasuke, for the first time in perhaps a year, really had some things he had to say. They were things he couldn't get right when he just thought them, things that he didn't know if he could articulate, things that didn't make sense when Naruto wasn't around- but he still had to say them. They had floated around him for weeks, now, and he had to say them or they would drive him insane. He hated saying what he was feeling; it was awkward and stupid and opening yourself up to get hurt but at the same time, he didn't know how far he could get without the kyuubi vessel knowing what was on his mind.

Sakura watched her dark-haired teammate's retreating back and smirked to herself. She always won. Even when she lost, she won. It was... her ninja way.

-

"Are you sure it was Naruto?" Ino sounded doubtful, leaning with the palms of her hands flat against the bars of the black-painted, metal fence. "It could just be some idiot copying him."

Kiba shook his head. "Nah," he replied, staring ahead. Akamaru whimpered from his jacket and he paused to run his fingers through the dog's ruff. "Had to be Naruto. Arrogant asshole, but he's right- no one else would ever do anything that horrible. He's the only one with the balls to desecrate Mt. Hokage like that."

Hinata had a frail smile and Shikamaru, who heard her speak maybe three times a month, almost jumped to hear her quiet voice. "I- I don't know that- that I would call that dese-desecration."

Kiba looked down at her, smiled, and looked back out to the mountain. "Maybe not," he said, quietly.

Ino grinned almost cattily and elbowed Hinata. "Got yourself a boyfriend?"

"Ki- Kiba?"

Ino's eyebrow rose. "Naruto!"

Hinata chuckled. "N- no." She pressed the heel of her hand to her mouth and smiled into her knuckles. "No- not Naruto. Th- that's not for me."

"Then who's it for?" Ino looked around- Shikamaru, Chouji, Kiba, Hinata, and even Shino looked faintly, knowingly amused. She frowned, ticked off at being left out of the joke. Her eyes darkened and she shot a glare at Shikamaru, who kept his mouth shut. "And don't you dare say-"

"Sasuke!" Kiba rose onto his toes and waved, catching the dark Genin's eye. "Look what your teammate did to Mt. Hokage!" He gestured over the fence then pulled his hand back to scratch behind Akamaru's ears.

Sasuke, walking quickly past the fence, paused to glance over his shoulder to the mountain more by reflex than because he really cared. He was trying to find Naruto, not stop and talk about nothing for half an hour with the idiots that called themselves shinobi. He started to walk past them, then looked again, froze, and stepped wordlessly and almost unconsciously forward, staring in complete and utter shock at the side of the mountain. He didn't say anything, against or defending his teammate, just stared silently, breathlessly ahead like he couldn't move, or think, or anything. Like someone had walked behind him and clubbed the last of his breath from his body. And then something strange happened.

Sasuke, morbid and anti-social shinobi genius of Konoha, smiled softly and smally with something like real happiness.

The left side of the Third Hokage's face boasted three words in bright red paint.

I love you.

end chapter seven