One Foot In The Golden Life; One Foot In The Gutter


Summary of the chapter:

The thought of a dead man hangs heavily in the back of Naruto's mind.

. . .


|Trigger Warning|:

somewhat graphic descriptions of violence

brief scene of torture


It's a bad day.

Naruto is walking ploddingly down the street with an almost stunted gait, paying too much attention in the way he puts each foot forward, feeling even the slightest of maneuvers his whole body is subjected to. In his head he is leaning too forward, then backwards far too much, even if his torso is ramrod straight, but it's all wrong. The slightest twist of his hips, the stretch of his legs, the small lurches accompanying every step, the rise and fall of his sternum that is growing less steady by the minute, the way he is trying to control every single motion; cataloguing each superfluous information up in his addled brain, only adding to the self-conscious, uncomfortable bubble enveloping him.

An eerie type of calm has set in, settled deep beneath his bones.

Naruto feels about ten seconds away from a panic attack.

Way ahead, two shinobi he has seen around catch his wavering attention, the overlapping of two missions has them engaged in an animated discussion.

"I can take it out of your hands, if you want." Naruto offers. It takes a jiff for his brain to kick in, realize he has walked the distance up to them and even opened his mouth to talk.

The two exchange a surprised look, then eye him with twin eager expressions.

"Wait, seriously?"

"Are you really sure?"

"Yeah, I'm done with my ch–" He stops himself before he jabbers out 'chores of the day', not knowing how that would make him come across, probably wouldn't paint him in that great of a light. "–load for the day anyway."

Their grins are practically blinding as they clap him on the back and show their gratitude, oblivious to how miserably Naruto is in need of any distraction he can get his hands on.

"Thank you so much!"

"Man, to think we'd get a ticket out of a tight spot by the savior himself!"

The corner of Naruto's mouth tugs up. Beneath the unnatural calm, the panic is just rising.


He leaps through the forest, momentarily numb-minded with the absorbing thought of a low-level mission, blinking up ahead with vision slightly unfocused.

A pained wail rips the air without warning.

Naruto draws to a halt straight ahead, breath hitching in his lungs. It takes at least five seconds for him to focus, suddenly hyperaware of the thick foliage and undergrowth confining him.

When he takes off in the given direction, the sturdy branch he was standing upon breaks beneath his strength.


It's a matter of whistling minutes before he finds the owner of the pained voice.

The woman is kneeling on the ground, draped over the body of her companion. A curtain of sandy hair sticks wetly to a countenance stricken in sorrow, she is matted in blood up to her elbows. But it's not her own, he realizes.

On the ground a man lies still. The sclera of his eyes is criss-crossed in liquid carmine, pupils thin and sooty. And unseeing.

"Who did this?" Naruto is asking, so low he can't even hear himself, let alone recognize his own voice through the nauseous wave of swelling rage.


He is running at breakneck speed, bordering on inhuman. His eyes flash, his vision is streaked in a violent sea of crimson.

For a split second Naruto is able to think, mind clearer than it has been in months.

His feet hit the ground so fast the wind nicks at his skin. A mesh of sweltering colors looms in his eyesight, the scenery is a muted turbulence wherever and everywhere he looks, but he is hyperfocused in on the coward running off thirty feet away.

The man is high on frightened adrenaline. His shaky form is disappearing through the low branches and dense underbrush. Every few seconds he cranes his head back in jerky motions to see if he has lost him yet.

But Naruto is only gaining ground, not letting up even an inch.

The sight of the two strangers is seared in his mind, fueling his pace. And the distance between them shortens.

He gets close enough to reach, fingers extending forward, grazing fabric.

Then he pulls.

The man topples backward, until he is landing on the ground with a grunted shout, startling a few animals nearby.

Not sparing him time to get a hold of himself, Naruto drags the man through the brittle, dry foliage like a corpse.

Blunt nails dig through his hand and wrist as the man tries to claw himself free, but it's no use.

The rage has reached a boiling point inside him and all Naruto can see is the crying woman stricken with anguish, and at her feet the man lying bloodied, dea—

The crack resounds throughout the forest. But it's nothing compared to the scream that tears out of the man's throat at the snap of bone. His elbow is now bent at an unnatural angle.

Naruto doesn't stop.

The forest seems to fill up with the anguish imprinted in his vision, fills to the brim with loss.

The thought of a dead man hangs heavily in the back of Naruto's mind.

At some point the stranger starts begging to be let go of. Promising any amount of money back, anything he can think of Naruto might want from him. But the one thing he wants can't be brought back. Naruto doesn't let his grip falter, instead it only hardens.

Until the wrist of the man is shattering in his hand.

Naruto can feel bits of bones, now unaligned, pressing against his palm.

He grits his teeth. It's not enough. It's not nearly enough for the unfathomable amount of pain he caused.

Naruto twists his grip and the bone breaks further at the elbow. It tears through muscle and ligaments and skin, puncturing open a gaping wound.

The heavy scent of iron seems to invade the forest itself, it climbs up his nostrils and the back of his mouth as it sticks like glue to the disfigured arm, dripping down Naruto's fingers still seized around the broken, swollen wrist.

Another drag and the arm pops clean out of its socket, the high-pitched cries of tortured pain increase in volume.

Naruto feels a sick kind of satisfaction coiling in the pit of his stomach, churning with the agony surging in the shrill voice of the murderer and across his distressed face.

At his elbow, the ends of the fractured bone peak through the torn skin in glimmering dots of white as the thickness of the blood pours in thin rivulets down to the ground. The expression marring the man's face is now frozen in anguished shock, almost matching the woman's Naruto found.

Just another pull and his forearm will rip off his body.

Naruto tightens his grip further, feeling the wrist almost turn to a pulp in his grasp. The hand hangs limp, fingers rigid, shaking. The man is only capable of whimpering stifled, suffering gasps now. A string of saliva trails from his gaping mouth to his rough, scratched cheekbone. Tears flow freely down the bridge of his crooked nose.

Naruto glares daggers into the terrified, half-lidded eyes, clearly battling through a fading consciousness. And yanks—

Only to have his hand pried wide open as he is suddenly slammed back against the bark of a tree.

The impact is not painful, but he is locked in place from head to toe, suspended half a foot off the ground by seemingly...nothing.

"What do you think you're doing?"

'Sasuke.'

Naruto lifts his head hastily, only to find Sasuke standing a few feet away, watching him with eyes narrowed in what almost appears to be disappointment.

He forgoes replying, if anything his silence is telling.

Naruto doesn't know how it is even possible, but Sasuke is clearly someway responsible for the reason why he is currently hovering above the earth. He tries to break out of the presumably invisible barrier, but it's no use. Not only is he immobilized, but the strength with which he's being kept in place is perceivable—a couple dozen piles of walls made of steel would be a downright joke to break through compared to this.

"...Let me go." He demands through gritted teeth, riled up after a few moments more of wasted effort.

"So you can finish the job? I don't think so." Sasuke spares an almost pitying glance at the man lying on the ground, just as his frightened, watery eyes lock with Naruto's one last time before rolling to the back of his head, and he passes out in place. "It'll take some voodoo kinda surgery for him to even be able to move that arm again from the looks of it."

"So what." Naruto is blurting out before he can stop himself, the intrusive overfamiliarity of hate infused in his voice.

Sasuke turns back to him and pauses, enough to scrutinize him. "You're going to kill him?" He asks, quietly, composed. Far too composed for the situation at hand, much to Naruto's chagrin.

"He killed someone." He breathes in tight-lipped wrath.

Sasuke tilts his head a fraction, voice dropping just as much. "And are you the one who gets to decide he doesn't deserve to live anymore?"

The rage is building back up, twice over.

"Stay out of this." Naruto adds through the fizzy static in his brain, louder now.

"Why? God has given you the green card to choose between life and death now? I wasn't aware." Sasuke continues in contemptuous sarcasm.

"He deserves it." Naruto spits out in barely restrained outrage. A vein in his temple is pulsing hotly. Heat is creeping up the back of his neck, inside his gut.

"Yeah, maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't deserve a second chance at life." Sasuke says with a steely level of detachment. "But you're not the one who gets to make that decision."

Anger slams down on Naruto like a brick wall and his voice is rising in volume. "Just stay out of this."

His mind is clouding up again.

"And let you have a free go at killing?" Sasuke's gaze is sharp and settled as he takes a step towards him, a determined resolve spreads across his features. "You're not a murderer."

The word has him drawing back to himself instinctively.

Naruto flinches. Hard.

The fog inside his mind cuts splittingly clear and the whistle of blood rushing in his eardrums is piercing. The taste in his mouth turns to acid and for the split of a second horror replaces the lifeblood streaming in his veins.

Then disappears without trace.

Naruto blinks back to himself, and at the statement echoing inside his head and with the aggression returning, he feels like laughing in his face.

"Oh 'cause you know me so well now."

Bitten out of this mouth, the words taste every little bit as accusing as three years and a half of suppressed and repressed and invalidated defeat can.

Sasuke's eyes widen slightly, almost comically, and his voice grows a little higher as he takes another step forward. "Don't tell me I need to remind you now that between the two of us I am the unhinged one? Not you? You don't kill people, Naruto. You don't. Is that even physically, mentally or emotionally possible for a goody two shows like you? I mean, you're a strait-laced do-gooder to a fucking fault, and you believe in peace and second chances and happiness and all that flashy bullshit!" Despite his heated demeanor, his tone differs from the harshness of it, there's more of a contradicting mellow-panicky quality to it, as if he can't believe his own ears.

"He deserves it." Vitriol instead takes over Naruto's words, over his voice; a bitter means to a loathsome end.

Sasuke keeps up. "But you're not a murderer."

Naruto doesn't flinch this time, but his jaw hurts with how hard he is keeping it clenched.

"Let. Go." He punctuates with a couple of stilted shoves in place.

"Not until you've calmed down."

Naruto does just about the opposite.

"Didn't you see what he did!?" He's shouting now. Specks of light and dark sway in front of his eyes with how worked up he is getting over the matter. "Didn't you see he–he took him away–took him away from her–from them!" His inhales and exhales morph to stuttering and rugged, there is not nearly enough oxygen to seize his emptying lungs. "He can't just keep–he deserves to–"

But Sasuke cuts in smoothly, with razor-sharp precision.

"Are we still talking about the same person?"

Naruto's head snaps up and he freezes as their eyes lock.

The sick satisfaction that had coiled in the pit of his stomach now turns into an ugly shade of ash gray. A lifeless gray he can touch, he can feel, he can see.

Sasuke's answering smirk is somewhat amenable, somewhat repentant.

His teeth clamp together behind his lips, pressing thin and whiting. Naruto turns his head away, avoiding his eyes.

"If God's the game that you're playing, well, we must get more acquainted, then. 'Cause I've got a bunch of real pressing matters I'd like to ask the old man. So should I do that through you now since you've appointed yourself as the apparent messenger?"

Sasuke speaks much more quietly now, yet the bitterness interlaced in his voice sounds far too deafening between the two of them.

"No, you know what, scratch that, I've been asking for years and years and years and never gotten anything back. I'd like to particularly ask why life turned into such a shit show. You've obviously got to have some kind of nerve to disappear right as it all goes to hell, don't you? Leaving in the eye of the storm, when everything is falling apart...and leaving behind a kid who doesn't know how to fix or put back together any of it."

The clipped tone Sasuke speaks in, the meaning hidden and disclosed behind it, it brings a tidal wave of pain that Naruto isn't up to face. But when the pain reaches its peak, it slowly gets swallowed up, and the next thing he knows he is hissing out a silent growl.

"...I told you...to stay out of this."

A blazing draft of air rises from the ground, so violent the embedded roots of the tree he is held against snap like twigs, and the earth quakes below the sheer force that is taking over.

His vision flashes once more—in his mind's eye he sees scorching, crimson chakra simmering to the surface, about to envelop him.

Sasuke doesn't move a muscle, eyes steady and fixed on him all the while, not even a wince betrays his composure.

"Nnh–" Naruto shudders from the quiescent power he feels stirring, twining inside and outside of himself, his shoulders draw up to his ears and his eyes slip shut. "...no..." He barely manages a suppressed groan, tilting forward with the effort to keep fighting through it, keep himself in check, keep breathing. This is not how it's meant to go. He doesn't need chakra for this, not for this.

His eyes snap open of their own accord, blearily centering on the muzzled nature bounding him in, on the murderer lying with a crumpled arm bent at unnatural angles. And then focusing on Sasuke and his aplomb, who moves another step forward, staring directly at him.

"I'm guessing this is more than just a fit of anger issues gone down the wrong pipe." His resulting chuckle is laced with more acrimony than dry humor.

Naruto opens his mouth to say something back, to utter Sasuke's name, but nothing short of a pitiful, exhaled gasp escapes out of him. The invisible barrier keeping him upright grows just a little tighter, and it takes all of his willpower to focalize and not let himself fade beneath the gravity of the force splitting open beneath his suspended feet.

He blinks through the maddening but drowsing coercion, trying to stay conscious long enough to get a grip of himself. And centres on it, on Sasuke watching him, and fights through this crimson rage with his own rage.

He doesn't know how long it takes, or how long they stay like that. But just like the snap of a bone breaking in two, he feels the abrupt shift.

Through a hazy fog he can feel the consuming power receding, letting go of him and disappearing back below the earth as if it was never there in the first place.

He lets himself heave breath after breath afterwards, as if someone was holding him by the neck until then, and blinks enough times until his vision stops swimming in the darkness.

"Better?"

It takes a bit of effort, but Naruto raises his head enough to cut an exhausted glare in Sasuke's general direction.

"I'm serious, did that make you feel any better?" Sasuke inquires with a sort of defiance that usually belongs to Naruto only. "Was the high worth the pain?"

It's an involuntary reaction the way his eyes blink closed, unable to hold the challenging stare any longer.

"...You're still holding on so tight you can't even see it's already fallen apart." Sasuke lets out in a lonesome whisper, and for a moment it sounds like he might be talking to himself.

The last tendrils of rage finally creep away.

Naruto hangs his head, his muscles lose every last bit of tension, and his whole body goes tipping forward, only still somewhat upright due to the invisible wall fixed all around him.

Sasuke finally loosens the clutch, carefully letting him touch the ground where Naruto lands on his knees, and rests fixed in place, head pitched low, mouth shut, muscles lax, his expression covered beneath the shock of messy blond hair.

"There are other ways to take the pain away." Sasuke dares to break the still and exposed disquietude that enwraps them. "And they don't involve any number of means that lead you to destroying yourself too in the process." The murmur is shaded with more unguarded self-awareness than Naruto can take at the moment.

The restraints don't fully leave him, quite literally functioning as a hold. As if Sasuke wants to hold him together, afraid Naruto will fall to pieces otherwise.

But there is a sea of emptiness in the wake. And Naruto can't tell anymore if he's trying to keep himself from drowning, or if he just wants to drown beneath it at this point.

...It gets so much worse.

Unfortunately, this was never his call to make. It sums up to only a matter of hours before his reality comes crashing down in smoke and flames right before his eyes and he finds himself in the very eye of the brewing storm.


. . .

a/n:

Playing God- Paramore I wrote this chapter before having ever listened to this song, but boy oh boy, is it accurate to both Naruto and Sasuke right here.

Just puttin this out there, there's gonna be a lot of recs from Paramore and Fall Out Boy in this story.