Chapter Two

All Entrances of Opportunity in Temporary Lockdown

by Ember

A/N: ...Guys?

All: Yes, Ember?

Y'all make me feel so much better for my own natural aversion to SasuSaku with your open hostility... Group hug-group hug- Yeah, I will obliterate that pairing in time... As I mentioned in last chapter, this one mostly deals with why I had the audacity to start with it. :P

The SasuNaru WILL be the main pairing, but it might take me a little while to get to it. Why? I have plans. Some angst, some fighting, and the death of one character. Normally, I don't like killing off characters. D: But this one is my absolute, number-one LEAST favorite character. So there. Feel free to guess who it is. I won't tell you, because I don't want to ruin the surprise, but I will warn you that someone's gonna die so you at least won't be shocked if he/she is your favorite.

Long-arse chapter title. Basically framed after the quote, "When a door of opportunity closes, God opens a window."

Because two people asked specific questions, I will respond to those two reviews:

Ryushai: Yeah, the fic title did come from Dickinson's poem. It's a nice poem, and I'm not the first person, in fanfiction or published fiction if you look hard enough, to get titles from the titles and lines in songs or poems. Err... Good job, knowing what you're talking about, though? ()

Ruby Love: The first few paragraphs were really from Sakura's point of view, trying to get across that she feels a little bit used... (Which she probably should.) I'm hesitating a little bit 'cause I don't want to give the chapter away.

My plan to steal Naruto has not yet come through... It still belongs to Kishimoto.

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Tell me

That we belong together

Dress it up, in the trappings of love

I'll be captivated

I'll hang, from your lips

Instead of the gallows

Of heartache, that hang

From above

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People- Ino- had asked him, more than once, why Sakura- why Forehead- and more than once he'd been at a loss for words, floundering for an answer before just shrugging and ignoring them. Okay, he could have picked a more romantic expression than that, he could have told them that they were soulmates, or that it was because she was beautiful to him, or because he was in love with her. But wouldn't that have been at least somehow traitorous? If he was going to lie to himself, he should at least have the dignity to tell everyone else the truth, or else nothing at all.

It wouldn't all have been a lie. Sasuke did, in a way, think Sakura was beautiful. He did love her. But she wasn't the same sort of beautiful, not the right kind of love. He loved her. He wasn't in love with her. It was a weird line but it hadn't been crossed, even with him trying desperately to cross it. Maybe Uchiha couldn't be in love, maybe he was just a sort of solid, emotionless statue.

So, people would ask him if he ever, ever in his life, found the courage to confess this to anyone, why Sakura?

Sakura, because while he didn't love her like that, he most certainly, definitely, without doubt, did not, not, not, not, not not NOT love Uzumaki Naruto.

And if he didn't love anyone else and he did care about Sakura, he really did care about her, wasn't that an excuse for thinking he was in love with her? Acting like he was in love with her?

Mercilessly using her as a cover-up for affections directed at someone else?

Maybe not. But he couldn't help it, and now that he was in it this deep, he couldn't stop. He couldn't leave her now without telling her why, and he didn't think he'd be able to lie to her with the same fluidity that he lied to himself. He cared more for Sakura than he cared for himself, and he couldn't hurt her like that- he'd prefer, in hindsight, to just ignore any sort of feelings he had towards anyone else- not that he had any, of course, of course not- and just stay with her, keep her as happy as he made her. It was worth it, right?

She was asleep beside him, her rose-colored hair a spray of color across the white pillow, brilliant even with all the lights turned off. Her bare shoulder rose and fell with her breathing, and he traced the white curve with a finger. She had soft skin and it felt wrong beneath his hands.

He had thought he was in love with her. Well, no, he couldn't say that exactly, because he had never believed in love existed in real life, he had always thought there were people you cared about and people you wanted to sleep with and when those overlapped you had as close to love as possible. But he had always thought he was as close to that with Sakura as he could get- he cared when she went quiet or became withdrawn, he worried when she got hurt, he listened to her when she talked. Wasn't that close enough? He couldn't say he really enjoyed their 'dates' because they were so absurdly different from the time they spent together as friends or teammates; Sakura clung to his arm and talked unceasingly and seemed to be telling herself that she was happier than she was. He couldn't really say he disliked the sex, though he had always thought there was more to it than that, like it would be something a little more... important. He didn't dislike it, he was disappointed. And come to think of it, he didn't like dwelling on that topic for long.

So he wasn't in love with Sakura, and he wasn't in love with Ino- he told her so every time she asked him why he'd chosen his rose-haired teammate over her- and since he was so obviously, totally, completely not in love with Naruto, he didn't even really care that the blonde was off on a life-risking mission without him, and with a cute girl who dared to openly adore him. Seriously. Entirely care-free.

His stomach throbbed once in protest, a short but pointed glance of pain that traveled quickly down his spine, and Sasuke leaned back into his pillow and groaned to himself. Sakura shifted, giving a little moan in her sleep, and Sasuke, unable to take it any more, sat up and rolled out of bed, pulling on his discarded boxers and walking quietly downstairs. He wanted to be alone. No, he didn't want to be alone, but he didn't want to be with his best friend and rival so he wanted to be alone, dammit.

...Self delusion was complicated. Thoroughly frustrated with himself, Sasuke collapsed, dressed in his boxers and without even a blanket, onto the couch, curled up with his face shoved into the back of it, and went to sleep.

Unfortunately for him, dreams tended not to care for self-delusion. His sleep was only barely restful.

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It was well past dark by the time they got to the next village and nearly midnight before they found an inn willing to take in three wandering shinobi without notice or much in the way of reimbursement. It would take three days, half the time spent running full-out, to get to the border and three days back, plus however much time they had to spend in the village where the target was, so Lee, who was also in charge of the money Tsunade had funded them, had been trying to keep spending to a minimum. Naruto discovered this the hard way, suddenly limited to three meals a day, and he wasn't sure he liked this place much, even though Lee assured him, in the nice-guy way he had, that it would be fine.

A tall, thin, balding man took their money, looked over it briefly as if trying to hide the suspicion he regarded it with, then tossed the black-haired Chuunin two keys- one for Lee and Naruto's room, a slightly larger one with a bed and an unfolding couch, and one for Hinata, comparatively very small with only one narrow bed. The boys saw the Hyuuga to her room before retiring to their's.

"Ah... goodnight, Naruto. Lee."

Naruto smiled down at her and felt her cave under the expression, blushing scarlet and staring a bullet-hole into the ground. "Night, Hinata-chan." Lee only waved solemnly.

The boys' room smelled slightly of dust but, upon reflection, Naruto could think of a variety of worse things it could have smelled like. Without hesitation, Lee threw his stuff on the fold-out couch, leaving the bed to his new teammate, and proceeded to wrestle with the cushions, throwing them into a pile on the floor. Naruto dropped his own bag on his bed and went to help Lee unfold the couch, pulling it out into a slightly creaky but more-or-less comfortable mattress. The shorter shinobi threw a cushion from the couch to use as a pillow, since Naruto's bed only had one on it and the fold-out bed hadn't come with any, and collapsed, fully clothed, to splay out from corner to corner. His hair shifted slightly as one body, appearing like a slightly-tilted bowl, and his too-round eyes closed for a second then opened again, focusing solemnly on the ceiling. Naruto smirked and took off his shirt, throwing it and his pants in a pile by his bed. (He'd have to wear them again because he never packed enough clothing, but he didn't really care if they were wrinkled.) Dressed in his boxers, he clambered into bed and sat for a second on top of the blankets. When he was working with Lee, in training or the few teaching jobs they had allowed be thrusted upon them, he always felt just a little more comfortable than when he was around Sasuke; maybe that's why he liked working with him so much. After all, you couldn't really look bad around Lee, and there was no need to impress him, and little effect if you tried. And it was easier to walk around in your underwear around Lee, and not hard at all to see him undressed.

"So," he said, a little teasingly, leaning against the single pillow, "how're you getting over Sakura?"

There was a long pause, then, just when Naruto thought he might had been toeing the line, a forceful sigh. "Poorly," Lee confessed morosely. "I've proved myself again and again to her, and she still walks around arm in arm with the Uchiha." A lump, large and, by the pain, obviously spiked, grew in Naruto's throat. "What does Sasuke have that I don't?"

"You mean, aside from-" Good looks, grace, repertoire, and a lofty position well out of a certain blonde's reach? Naruto managed to curb himself just before he snapped back his answer. Okay, maybe he was bitter- that was no reason to bite Lee's head off; the kid didn't even know that his words would have an effect, given that the blonde had been demonstrating quite well, lately, how much he'd gotten over Sakura. How could Lee have known that he had a new- not new, but newly-accepted- crush? He couldn't leave the first four words hanging, though, and grabbed something random out of the air. "Sakura?"

'A stick up his ass?' he thought of a millisecond later, when it was too late to use the better repose.

Lee, however, didn't seem to notice his lapse or even how weak his response really was. He laughed, albeit lightly and obviously just being polite. "Well. And what about you, Naruto? Are you planning to take advantage of this mission?" A weird, flat wink. "I won't tell Tsunade."

What? This was a regular arrest, what did that have to do with anything? "What do you mean?"

Lee rolling his eyes was an odd phenomenon. "Hinata," he said, plainly, and Naruto was bowled over by a tsunami of 'duh.' "She likes you."

"I know." Naruto glanced skyward and kept his eyes locked on the ceiling.

"...So?"

"So, what?"

The look on Lee's face would have been 'conspirational' on anyone else's. Naruto had gotten good at translating the facial nauces of his friend. "You don't want to go visit the girl room, just for one night? I told you, I wouldn't tell-"

"No."

"No?"

Naruto writhed under his covers and collapsed backwards onto his bed. Lee got up to undress, Naruto turned over to stare at the wall. "No."

He heard the creak of bedsprings and thought, just for a second, about how good it was that Lee was on that bed while he got this one. He moved a lot in his sleep. "Night, Lee."

"Good night, Naruto."

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His face was buried in yellow hair, light and tickling and smelling sort of like oranges, and a little bit like dust, like... like you'd expect a fox to smell like, mixed with what you'd expect a Naruto to smell like. His arms were wrapped around the blonde's chest, his body molded along the contour of the kitsune's back, and it would have felt good except that it was just a dream and you couldn't feel things in dreams, didn't everyone know that? Wasn't he too old for this kind of dream, anyway? Wasn't this more the kind of dream he'd have a couple of years ago, when he was a Genin and a kid and still thinking with his crotch as much as his brain? It wasn't the kind of dream he wanted to have, but with the knowledge that it was only a dream came the knowledge that the content of it wouldn't bother him until he woke up, and so he set himself to enjoying it with vigor.

Which was when his mindset was disturbed by a distant yell, "Sasuke," in a high-pitched, familiar voice, and the warmth in front of him was gone- imagined warmth in an imagined scene, god it hurt to think that- and the imagined hand on his leg was gone and the imagined smell from imagined hair was ripped away on a sudden, frigid wind. "Sasuke!"

A woman, long black hair whipping around the moon-shaped frame of her face, brought the back of her hand into contact with Sakura's face, hard, snapping the girl away from her with a crack. The pink-haired girl hit the dust with a groan, a gray cloud rising around her in wisps, then lay still; not dead, she couldn't be dead, she wouldn't die, would she? Sasuke stepped forward, then started running forward, pulling a kunai from the inside of his shirt where a line of them were sewn in. He had to save Sakura because he cared about her; and she cared about him so the solution to his Naruto problem occurred to him, in between the ground and the missing-nin who threatened to kill his teammate. He wouldn't love the blonde if he could make himself love Sakura. Would he?

"Sasuke!" Why was she yelling? She was unconscious, wasn't she? "Wake up!"

No, because if he woke up he wouldn't remember the first part of the dream. It was already fading away... Did he even want to remember it? His dream-self flew at the missing-nin, his weapon pointed at her throat, but would he be able to kill her, even for Sakura? No, he knew he couldn't. He knew he wouldn't be able to because he remembered this very event, down to the slight wind tossing the enemy's crop of dark hair, not as a dream but as reality.

She brought up her hands and formed seals, and he faltered in his attack because this wasn't the way the fight had gone; he'd avoided impaling her and she'd gotten away, mission failed, shinobi alive. Naruto, who had stayed home recovering from some injuries he'd sustained during their Chuunin exam, had bitched about how if he had been there, they'd have gotten the target and come home with time to spare, and Sakura, by the way, wouldn't have ever been in danger at all. This wasn't how it had happened. She wasn't supposed to fight back.

And as he identified the seals, his blood ran cold, suddenly, his veins freezing over, because the jutsu happened to be the least frightening and yet most successful jutsu ever created. This woman... couldn't know that jutsu. She couldn't. It was impossible. (Of course, it was a dream. Impossible meant nothing and the entirety of the dream had gone to prove that.) And by the knowing look in her eyes and the certain quality to the grin on her face, Sasuke knew, knew that when she finished the seals and completed Naruto's special trick, the world's stupidest and simultaneously most brilliant jutsu, she wouldn't be a pale woman with long black hair but she would stand in front of him as...

"Sasuke!"

And, by a twist of his thought train, the Sexy no Jutsu screwed up and the female shinobi suddenly did become Sasuke, facing Sasuke, looking surprised. And then Sasuke, the real Sasuke, opened his eyes.

Damn, but it was bright. He squeezed them shut again and tried to remember the decaying fragments of his dream, but he couldn't quite hold on...

"Sasuke. Finally." Sakura looked slightly amused. "Morning."

"Hn." He really should have answered her but he really couldn't, right then. He sat up, feeling the couch yield beneath him and shivering slightly in the cold; he hadn't had a blanket all night and some genius- probably him, but for the moment he'd be bitter- had left a window open.

"Why did you come down here last night?" Okay, he could ignore the hurt in Sakura's voice, if he really tried. Seriously, he could. That wasn't guilt, that was... annoyance. "You look tired." And he should have. He had spent so long tossing around upstairs.

He meant to say, 'sleepwalking,' but he couldn't lie to the rose-haired girl like he could everyone else. So he said, "I wanted to be alone." And it was true. Only it wasn't true because he hadn't wanted to be alone, he just hadn't wanted to be with her.

Maybe he shouldn't have said it so waspishly. Sakura looked even more hurt, now. "I'm sorry," she said meekly, lacing her fingers together.

He held in a sigh. "It's alright," he replied, shrugging. He should have apologized for snapping. Really, he should have.

She smiled faintly though she still looked a little hurt. Shit. "Well, it's already twelve-thirty. You missed Naruto, Lee and Hinata taking off."

Twelve thirty? He hadn't slept past eight in the morning in ten years, and this wasn't the first time he'd ever spent half the night tossing around or even up and training. Hell, he'd gotten himself thoroughly saturated with alcohol, sloshed around half the night and collapsed at around three to wake up, more-or-less aware, at six AM- with a pounding headache and a tongue that felt like a scale model of the Sahara, but awake.

Sakura seemed to expect a response, so he said, "Hn."

"You wanna go get some lunch now, Sasuke? Or... you know... we could get some breakfast, if you're more in the mood for that..."

This wasn't fair, was it? Wasn't this cheating at life? He didn't love Sakura, he knew he didn't love Sakura, so didn't she deserve better, didn't she deserve something more, like happiness, or someone who would really, really care? Wasn't he taking that from her, from himself, by pretending to feel something he never had? He didn't love her. He knew he didn't love her.

So he said, "Lunch is fine," and got up to go get dressed. Sakura was smiling in the same way Sakura always smiled when they were getting ready to go out.

Besides, he was Uchiha Sasuke. Stoic ninja of Konoha. He didn't love anyone- and still she begged for it.

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A/N: Heheh... Oh, Sasuke, you angsty... guy... :P Alright, this chapter gets kind of confusing because I always thought Sasuke would have a very confusing inner mind. 3... And yes, the middle part of the chapter does take place twenty-two hours after the first part and twelve hours after the last part. Chronological order is ridiculously overrated.

Character Challenge of the chapter was definitely Rock Lee, whose never easy to pin down because he just so deviates from one's average anime character. I got some help, though, from a fic called "The Slightly Ecchi Adventures of Rock Lee", which I highly recommend. Sooo cute!

Wow, you guy's reviews were really nice, even if I do feel kind of ripped apart for the first pairing... XD I don't blame you all, though. And I am worshiping you! I have little idols sculpted in your likenesses out of Hershey Kisses wrappers... (Alright, not really. That'd be creepy. But I worship you in my own way.) Thanks so much!