a/n:

This is lightly based on own my experience too. But for this chapter I was completely inspired by the book 'It's Kind Of A Funny Story'.

. . .


Right Through You


Summary of the chapter:

"…What the fuck?"

Sasuke's smirk only widens in amusement. "Starting today I feel like you'll keep saying that often."

. . .


"This is boring."

Naruto's head thumps against the wall, eyes up on the dull white ceiling, and he sighs for what feels like the umpteenth time today.

The visit to their recovering teacher should have made him feel better. It should have. But as soon as he parted ways with Sakura and Sai, his forced smile dropped instantly. The last tendrils of energy burned out with each second that passed him by, each step that he took, leaving him to what had become his customary routine: being drained.

Unfortunately for him this day has yet to end. In fact, one of the exciting activities scheduled for today just so happens to be the therapist's appointment.

And, of course, Sasuke is...

Still here.

"You pointing that out thrice might've been a glaring giveaway, but please feel free to expand on that." Naruto finally mutters through gritted teeth.

"That is a fact, this is me reiterating a fact." Sasuke whispers back as if this should be obvious to him, as if he is completely unaware of Naruto's aggravation rising with every word he utters. "Can't we just go somewhere else? I'm sure there are funnier ways to spend an afternoon than being cooped up inside four walls to talk."

Naruto wants to slam his head against one of the aforementioned four walls in sheer frustration. Seriously, as if he doesn't know that.

"I told you already. I'm–" But he stops mid-sentence when he notices a man standing in the hallway, looking at him as if he's grown three heads in the last two second.

Naruto offers a bit of a nervous grin, that probably comes off as more of a grimace, and the man practically flees away in the blink of an eye, leaving him more than a little puzzled and—oh, right. Sasuke is 'invisible' to everyone else...why does he even keep forgetting about such an insignificantdetail? Maybe because it's so ridiculous even Naruto is not sure what to believe in.

His head thumps against the wall, again, and he sighs, again. Another unfortunate fact of the day seems to be how there is no way of getting rid of him. What grates on his nerves even more is how Sasuke (well, this Sasuke...or was the old Sasuke the same way too?) has to have an opinion on everything, and, of course, he doesn't mind making his complaints known.

"Oh, c'mon, I'll croak out of boredom at this rate." Sasuke practically whines beside him.

Naruto turns sharp, glaring eyes in his direction. "You mean you can kick the bucket? Good. Maybe you'll finally leave me alone." He snaps at him, though he doesn't have the slightest clue about how...'ghosts', or hallucinations, or whatever he is, even work.

Sasuke stares at him, blinking. "You're funny, you know." He says out of the blue, chuckling in the back of his throat as if he just heard something amusing.

Naruto's expression spells for him, 'are you insane', before deciding he has better things to do than waste his time with...this, whatever 'this' entails. What remains to point out is how those better things are now...no things. Because he has nothing to do except...waiting. He grumbles to himself, turning the other way before he starts making a scene out of annoyance. And boredom.

In the room adjacent to the small waiting area he is in, Naruto can hear a kid crying. From the ajar door he can see two women inside the room with the kid, one is presumably the mother and the other should be the professional he is under the care of. Both are trying to calm him down because the child is thrashing on the ground. Naruto doesn't know what is going on, but it doesn't sound—it doesn't look simple. The little kid is wailing, voice raw and acute, and it would be more accurate to say those are screams and not cries. The kid's voice breaks. He is in pain, Naruto realizes, he is in actual pain. And he only catches a fleeting glance of his small face, red, bloodied, lost, raw.

Naruto's hands are suddenly clenching so tightly he can feel nails biting in his skin—as if fresh marks of blood will be enough to keep in check the fresh wave of pain—his stomach caves in, and he feels it, something heavy and terrible settling in the middle of his chest and weighing him down until his breath sticks like glue inside his throat with no way to escape.

These here are real kids with real problems and...and apparently he is one of them.

"Hey."

He is suddenly met with Sasuke's face close to his own and it takes him a full second to pull back, as if scorched by unseen flames.

"What's with that frown?" Sasuke asks him. His voice sounds ridiculously worried for a reason Naruto is unable to comprehend or rationally explain.

The sunlight filters through a window to their left, unforgivably enveloping everything it reaches in its burnt orange hue. Sasuke's skin looks lighter exposed to the rays, his eyes ablaze, and Naruto can almost read him in this quiet sliver of openness. It's like a slap to the face, like ice water poured over his searing hot skin, leaving the charred flesh to heal with the shock of cold painful relief.

The door closes. It puts a stop to the ear-splitting screams, as if they never existed in the first place, and Naruto blinks back in the present.

The question finally registers, and he is quick to peel his eyes away. "...Shut up. S'nothing." It's a quiet scoff, a harsh murmur. Naruto doesn't know if he is trying to distract Sasuke, or if he is trying to distract himself. He doesn't want to think about it a second longer.

Sasuke doesn't say anything else, but he can feel his eyes on him. And it bothers him, it bothers him to no end.

With nothing better to do, he busies himself with having a look around the place—not like there is much to look at to begin with, he is inside a waiting room after all. Being here still feels strange and foreign, even if this is the second time.

The first time he was here he took in the clean floors, the cream colored walls, the two waiting areas and the narrow hallways. There are at least a dozen doors that he doesn't have the slightest idea what goes on behind. If not for the few touches of life here and there to show there are still living people inside, the place would have been bare. It feels impersonal, empty. A simple working space and nothing more.

But something he has noticed right away is, this place feels crowded in a silent sort of way.

As if there is always something to do, somewhere to be, but it's quiet. The sort of quiet that gets on people's nerves and makes them fidget even if they don't want to, and even when they shouldn't, since the wait is only leading to something as simple as hearing their name getting called. And once he himself got the opportunity to be behind one of those closed doors, it was...well, he has to admit it was much less dramatic than he had initially thought it would be.

For starters, he would have expected to be lying on a comfortable dark leather sofa, like he's seen people in movies do, which did not happen. He also expected mahogany tables, dark floors and dark wood everywhere, along with bookshelves littered with books and books to no end, and just about anything and everything else that would make the room feel old, small, stuffy. Suffocating. But that had not been the case, either.

The office he's been accommodated into during his first session is medium sized at least, decorated with a few paintings. A large window opens on the side. The walls and floors are different shades of white and the sunlight streaming in gives the room a certain lightness. Along one of the walls there is a bookshelf that contains a great quantity of volumes, but it doesn't give the room the suffocating sense he had at first imagined, although some of the books are so thick he would never even think about looking their way, let alone read them in this lifetime.

To be fair, they are currently restoring the old building these meetings were supposed to take place in. So, once the new office is ready, Naruto is still expecting to lie down on a comfy couch and rant on endlessly about the woes in his life to a stranger who takes notes and pretends to care.

He is snapped out of his reminiscing when he hears his name being called, signalling for him to go in. Wordlessly, he gets up and marches to the same room he had been welcomed in only a few days ago.


"This is so boring." And Sasuke complains. Again.

Naruto has just taken a seat in one of the two chairs in front of the desk. And of course Sasuke just had to take the other one.

He can't help but keep thinking how the day is taking more of a bizarre turn as it passes him by, not only because of Sasuke being here, but the way he's acting too. He is...so frustrating right now. And in a different scenario Naruto might even take a moment to laugh himself to death, but he currently feels so unnerved even the 'click' of a pen might just set him off.

"I never asked you to be here in the first place!" He hisses under his breath, vexed.

"Did you say something?" The woman looks up from whatever she had been writing—what would Naruto do to know what therapists write about their clients, this curiosity has taken the best of him since their first meeting, maybe even before then—with a slightly puzzled expression.

The therapist he has been assigned is a woman in her late thirties, probably, and although they had not spent that much time getting to know each other, he had immediately gotten this feeling that there was something immaculate about her. She seems composed, organized and prepared. And even if he is completely distrusting, because he won't kid himself enough to think she will be able to get inside his head and find a solution for him to fix all his problems with, he can at least wait and see what comes out of this.

"Nope, nothing at all." He quickly denies with a minuscule smile in her general direction.

Sasuke snickers and Naruto throws him a discreet glare, going back to giving the room another once over.

For some reason unknown to him he can't quite bring himself to look her in the eyes. It's...difficult, almost, in a way he had never thought about before. But since he doesn't have the obligation to keep the eye contact during their 'conversations', he simply doesn't.

"You look a bit tense." Sasuke quips beside him, so good-humored it's almost inappropriate given Naruto's current predicament.

And Naruto is about to go off on him, before remembering, again, just how crazy that would make him look. And if he can help it he certainly won't go out of his way to give more reasons to get himself locked up inside some mental facility.

The wait is unnerving, but it is short, and after a couple more moments the woman is apparently done with her task, regarding him with her full attention. Which makes Naruto feel more uncomfortable than anything, wishing she would go back to write whatever she was writing about until their time is up.

"How are you doing today, Naruto?" She finally asks, voice gentle but not quite. Professional.

And here comes the question. From what he has seen and heard, they all have a standard question they ask the first time, only to repeat it over and over again every time after. Like, 'How is it going?' or 'What's going on with you today?' or simply 'How do you feel?'

The first time he was here, a bit before his own meeting, he'd caught a glimpse of another one going on, a kid around his age was in a room with an old man, who had shockingly white hair and a big smile and a round belly. He'd asked the kid, 'What's going on inside that world of yours today?', and for a moment Naruto wished the old and smiling man was assigned to him instead, because there had just been something about him that transpired safety.

Not that he has anything against this therapist. He doesn't even know her, so how could he have already formed an opinion on the woman whose job is supposed to form her own opinion of him and...well, put like that it sounds...weird. But he's at a point in his life where everything keeps sounding weird, and confusing, and unpleasant, so this is at least unsurprising.

As for his answer to the standard question, well...

'I feel like dying.'

Now, that's not something he can say, is it?

He also can't say, 'I feel like shit.'

Oh, and what else is there he can't answer with? 'Three days ago I found in my room this sort of ghost of someone who's supposed to hate my guts and I think the weirdest thing might be how his personality has just about flipped out from what I remember him being like and that's almost throwing me off more than the whole 'ghost' concept itself...surprise!'

...Yeah, that's definitely something he doesn't want to share.

"I'm fine." He goes with a standard answer too, because he thinks this is the only acceptable one anyway. It's almost funny how unfunny it actually is.

Beside him Sasuke scoffs under his breath like this is the biggest bullshit he has ever had the displeasure to hear in his lifetime, and Naruto wants to roll his eyes at the sudden way his stomach churns and the frustration that furiously climbs all over him. But he also feels a prickling and suffocating sensation, that might as well be guilt, and it makes him want to build up higher walls and strengthen his defenses.

"Anything new you want to talk about?"

He is caught a bit off guard by this next question and peels his eyes away from Sasuke to look at the real other person inside the room. He tenses slightly and clears his throat to cover up his bafflement. "Uh...what do you mean?"

The therapist doesn't falter as she repeats her question, elaborating in a kind tone. "Has anything new happened in your life since the last time we saw each other? Something you would like to talk about?"

As if on cue, Naruto finds himself searching for Sasuke, who...is not sitting beside him anymore. Trying to be as discreet as he can, he casts a glance around himself, until his eyes wander up and...there he is.

Sasuke is actually sitting on top of the bookshelf, appearing as comfortable as ever while he scans the room with what seems to be a great deal of concentration. Until his gaze lands on him and he breaks out in a grin that borders on mischievous, waggling his fingers in some sort of mocking wave and kicking his legs back and forth like little kids usually do.

Naruto thinks he will have this image of Sasuke seared behind his eyelids, forever imprinted into his memory with absurd clarity.

"No." Naruto blurts out, looking straight at Sasuke, before resolutely shaking his head and focusing back on the therapist, hoping the opposite is not written all over his face. "Not at all."

"Awh, I'm hurt." Sasuke pouts at him. Before snorting, because he apparently finds himself that funny.

"You–" Almost on autopilot Naruto is ready to raise to the bait, but refrains from doing so when he feels another pair of eyes trained on him. He falls back in his chair, wearing a smile that is supposed to show confidence, but comes out as more anxious. "...And what about you? Anything new to share?" He tries to salvage the situation, redirecting the question to her.

The woman's eyes crinkle a bit at the corners with her small smile. "It's thoughtful of you to ask, I'm fine, thank you. But we're here to talk about you."

"...Right." He settles a bit more in his chair and looks down at his lap.

"Nice save." It's unclear if it's taunting on Sasuke's part, or if it isn't. And Naruto decides, for everyone involved, it's much better if he just ignores him.

...Well. As much as he can ignore a ghost perched on top of a bookshelf who might be mocking him, that is.


"You might wanna hone those lying skills." Sasuke comments, once they're walking out of the building. "Could come in handy."

Naruto didn't remember the sun shining so brightly when he first entered and is slightly disoriented when hit by its intense rays, but also somewhat relieved. And still very much confused.

This area is mostly calm, which is something he likes, and the quiet chatter of passersby is relaxing as opposed to the now annoyingly loud buzz that fills his ears in the open streets. It's quiet enough to be white noise starring in his thoughts, leaving the real issues to take the backseat.

He takes in the few trees, the small patches of green that managed to survive and they all add up to the tranquility. Fresh, crisp air fills his lungs inside out, leaving him almost light-headed for a second. But even this is not enough, a magical mood change is still wishful thinking.

"I'm not a liar." Naruto impulsively spills out, feeling the contradiction course through his veins and settle deep in his gut, because what he said now is not what he said before. Because his exact words to the therapist were 'I'm fine', when the real answer is...much more complicated.

But if Sasuke is aware of this particular truth, he doesn't mention it. "I wasn't implying you were. What I'm saying is, it could sometimes work in your favor. Just give that a thought."

"Almost sounds like you're an expert in that field." It comes off as more of exhausted deflection rather than a real attempt at accusation.

Sasuke doesn't call him out on it, but he gets a conceited smirk in turn. "Maybe I am."

Naruto huffs quietly. He stares down, at the uneven asphalt, in front of him, at the peaceful and surprisingly bleak surroundings, up, at the cloudlessly pale sky, and takes in bits of everything. Everything except for the one who is standing right next to him.

But it's so surprisingly hard, when Sasuke now seems to be the only center of his focus.

Naruto's eyes flit to his in clear consternation and suspicion. Sasuke stares back, unfazed.

"He seems to be doing well. That's a relief."

Naruto's thoughts are unexpectedly thrown for a loop as the words resurface in his mind. Something sharp aches somewhere deep, and he casts his head down, doesn't dare raise his eyes from the ground now when the words tumble so lowly out of his mouth his voice might as well be a strangled sigh.

"...did you really mean it?"

The pause has him holding on his breath. It burns his lungs.

"Of course I did." Sasuke's casual smirk turns into a cautious line. When he does take a step towards him, it's when Naruto finally wills himself to look up at the unblinking stare directed at him, unwavering. There is no hesitation behind. "After all he was my teacher too, remember?"

Naruto sucks in a startled breath, moving back one step.

Teacher.

For a moment the word rings so loudly in his head he fears he will go deaf from it.

Sasuke seems to understand his shock, because he eases back, as if giving him a chance to breathe. Naruto doesn't know how to feel about this either.

"I want him to be okay." Sasuke adds in quiet earnestness.

"Do you?" Something raw and reproaching filters in his voice and he can't help but ask the question before his brain even has the chance to play catch-up with his mouth.

"Why wouldn't I?" But Sasuke's rhetorical question ends up being as innocuous and demure as almost everything about him seems to be these past couple of days. His lips quirk up. "You know, you shouldn't assume what people think without asking them first."

Naruto wants to bite back, but no more words come out of his mouth and the beginning of a headache is already settling in his temples. He decides to leave it be, before he says something he might come to later regret, though with everything that's happened already that sounds ridiculous too.

"Why didn't you tell Sakura that you don't like it?" But it seems it now is Sasuke's turn to ask questions anyway when he changes the subject, nodding towards the building they just left.

Naruto starts walking again. He puts his hands in his pockets for the lack of anything better to do, but also to hide the small shaking that has recently taken over his limbs. "Don't like what?" He asks dumbly, pretending not to know just what the other boy is talking about.

Sasuke has a bit of a smirk lifting his lips, like he knows. "Going to therapy, what else."

Hearing him talking about Sakura, and Kakashi, so naturally, as if it's...normal for him...is weird. And disconcerting. Naruto feels disoriented all over again.

He thinks about making up an excuse on the spot, denying it, but somehow he has the distinct impression Sasuke would see through it right away.

And as previously stated before, he is not a liar. Even if honesty comes at a price he doesn't want to give in to at times.

"...I didn't want to burden her." Naruto rushes to let out in a sincere breath.

Thinking he would get the opposite reaction, he is surprised when Sasuke smiles. It's not a mocking smile, not sneering or meant to make fun of him. It's genuine.

"That's just like you." Sasuke says.

Naruto blinks in a daze as this time he does stop in his tracks, studying the other boy as if he's seeing him for the first time. "What's...what's that supposed to mean?"

Sasuke stops too, just a couple of steps ahead of him with his hands in his pockets and balancing on the balls of his feet, still smiling. "It means you still...even when you shouldn't." It's almost a whisper under his breath, like it's his own secret and not something he wants to share with him.

Naruto blinks, once, twice, three times. "...Huh?"

"You're selfless." Sasuke simply adds in a louder voice and his smile simultaneously grows and dims, making Naruto feel dizzy. "You're way too selfless for your own good, don't you know that already?"

Strangely enough, the words make Naruto feel worse than if he had been subjected to a rasengan. Their impact has him wide-eyed and gaping. "I–...that's not true." He counters defensively, and a bit childishly.

Mischievousness flickers into Sasuke's expression. "It is."

"No, it's just–" He scoffs, averting his eyes. "Look–I...I'm not even the one paying. I should at least go." Quieter, he adds, "...that's it."

But Sasuke practically waltzes in his line of vision, smirk plastered to his face. "Do you always do what you have to?"

Naruto's eyes narrow in glaring irritation as he counters back. "Do you ever do what you have to?"

Sasuke shrugs, grinning. "Touché."

Naruto has more to add, but ends up spectacularly interrupted when a shout of 'look out!' draws his attention away. And for good reason, because a rickety wheelbarrow is quickly emptying itself of its contents and even more quickly coming their way. Or Sasuke's way, to be more specific.

Naruto would usually be quick on his feet, which is no hardship considering he's a ninja, but for some reason his legs are stuck to the ground and his vocal chords are unwilling to cooperate with him, so when he opens his mouth to warn Sasuke, to tell him to move out of the way...nothing comes out. Instinctively, his arms raise up to his face as if to prevent him from seeing the disaster waiting to happen.

But as the wheelbarrow swiftly speeds down towards them in rocky motions, it ends up going...

Right. Through. Sasuke.

...and Naruto's jaw practically falls slack, not believing what he just witnessed with his own eyes.

Sasuke opens up his arms in a grand gesture, as if to say 'see?', "I guess this actually proves your theory that I'm a ghost, doesn't it?"

Naruto keeps staring, unblinking and unmoving and shell-shocked. The only thing that comes to mind in the moment is...

"...What the fuck?"

Sasuke's smirk only widens in amusement. "Starting today I feel like you'll keep saying that often."