Warnings: shounen-ai, light yaoi. NaruSasu. deathfic? Not your cup of tea? Leave now or forever hold your peace.
Summary: Sasuke loves exactly like he fights, deadly and vicious and dangerous. Yaoi. NaruSasu.
Vigil
By Shanghaii
Sasuke loves exactly like he fights, deadly and vicious and dangerous. His focus is extraordinary and his concentration is peerless. But he is subtle too, and knows when he is unwanted.
Sasuke loves the same way he breathes, sweet and shallow and measured. His attraction grows in increments until he no longer knows what to do with himself because he is yet unversed in the ways of amorous confessions.
Sasuke loves with no intention of requite, intense and fragile and precariously balanced. He watches quietly and goes on with his life, with no real purpose but to see each day through to the end.
Sasuke loves the way he dies. He fights it to the end, he fights for it, but he ultimately succumbs.
Naruto never knew.
Sasuke lost his heart when he was twelve, and he didn't lose it as much as it was bloodily wrenched from him. He reflects now, with a newfound sense of irony, that perhaps it was almighty Fate with a capital 'F' come to torture him all along. And he thinks, as he stares at the sky with blood trailing from his mouth and pain screaming murder through his veins, that perhaps everything turned out for the best, even the stealing and subsequent losing of such a paltry thing as his heart.
Because Naruto, for all his mutterings and stupidity and smiling affectations of happiness, is worth it. Worth everything, as it were, to Sasuke. He coughs and winces at the shuddering of his lungs and thinks 'that can't be good' even as Naruto leans over his failing body to peer at him with blue eyes that Sasuke hates and finds incongruously beautiful at the same time.
Naruto is worth Itachi and Orochimaru and 'kaa-san and 'tou-san and Sakura and all of his precious people rolled into one. Sasuke just can't admit it to himself yet. And he will never admit it to the man with sunbright hair who keeps vigil beside him. But he knows deep in the place his heart used to reside, and he knows inexplicably as his heart beats in its new home, right beside Naruto's, right in time, that Naruto is worth even his death.
"Stupid bastard," Naruto chokes out past the tears running down his cheeks. He swallows and strokes the dark hair from his best friend's face. It isn't fair that the pain lines around Sasuke's eyes ease only after death. The blond suppresses a sob.
"Stupid, arrogant, bastard," he says again, for good measure. Because he knows, and has known for a long time. And he wishes that Sasuke understood that his love was never unrequited.
A/N: Oh man, pile on the angst, why don't you? I actually started this fic with no intention of turning it into a death fic. o.o it ended up so tragic.