Time Out


Summary of the chapter:

Grief sinks its vicious claws back in.

. . .


Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

They say life is like a clock.

But if it is, then time is a thief; because it steals.

And it is a present too; because it gives.

In its contradictory nature, time is a blessed curse.

It ticks away blameworthy and unaccountable.

Time is always, always ticking. Always relentless in its passing.

And when the hands of time meet, it strikes the loudest, drowning out all the rest.

A bomb ticking away its final moments of life.

.

.

.

But the undeniable truth is...time runs out when we don't want it to stop.


Tick.

"Hey."

Naruto opens the door to Kiba, who is wearing his usual, vibrant grin.

For maybe the first time in weeks, however, today Naruto is noticing the dimness of it at the corners of his lips, the semi-circle shadow of exhaustion under his eyes.

"...Hey." He greets back with far less vigor.

Naruto feels all out of sorts. Disconnected, and all the while too fixed inside the seconds, inside the moments drawing out and away from him.

But Kiba doesn't know what had come to transpire the day before. And, if he is being completely honest with himself, Naruto doesn't know either.

Something is...amiss.

...something is wrong.

He can't seem to focus enough to find what it is.

He has been trying for weeks now.

Tick.

"–what kinda movie we're gonna watch later?"

He catches only the end of the question, but it lugs him back to the present. "Whatever you want." He answers, absent-minded.

Kiba blinks owlishly, far too many times, astounded. "Woah, what. Uzumaki Naruto leaving me free reign, that's a first."

Naruto shakes his head, dismissive. "Not true. I let you decide that one time."

"Yeah, because the choice was between two action flicks–"

His focus wavers again, mind twisting all over the place and wrapping around past events. The day before flashes in front of his eyes in crimson cuts.

He hasn't seen Sasuke since.

A shudder crawls down his spine. He's been shivering since the haze of the morning hit.

Kiba suddenly stops his rambling, eyeing him with worry. "Cold?"

Tick.

"...yeah." Naruto breathes out.

Tick.

"D'you have a fever or something?" Kiba asks, concern growing as he checks his uncovered forehead with the back of his hand.

Naruto shrugs, sluggish. "I don't think so."

After a prolonged moment, Kiba's hand settles on his back with a few light pats. "You okay man?"

Naruto barely nods, eyes half-lidded, numb. "Just fine."

"...If you say so."

Tick.

Despite the summer air, Naruto feels cold all over, chilled down to his raw bones, as if a sheet of ice is adhering to the inside of his skin, thawing him from within.

A glacial numbing seeped into his mind first has taken to spread all over his body now. And with mind and body as one, they work against him.

It's a burgeoning disconnection between fragmented pieces that were dissonant from the very start. Barely stitched together by sheer power of will to keep him from fragmenting back into pieces.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

And now the discord is welling up.

The storm is about to unravel.


It's all in a day's work, as the saying goes. But it turns out a hard day of work can be rewarding too, it's the first time in a while Naruto feels something akin to pride warming up his ribcage.

But instead of focusing on the work he put, his fickle attention is pulled away from the site he, Kiba and Shikamaru are in, and pulled in towards the landmark of Konoha.

The Hokage Mountain stands in all its imposing glory, as it always did, now completely restored, even if it was one of the few monuments capable of withstanding the gravitational force of the assault.

Naruto stares up with lidded eyes at the history carved into stone.

Unable to place why over the past few weeks his chest felt so tight he couldn't draw in air whenever his gaze lifted toward the known, sculpted faces.

Tick.

"They fixed it all up, huh." Kiba comments as he looks up too, a small smile hanging by the corners of his lips.

Shikamaru lifts his shoulders, hands deep in his pockets and looking his usual degree of disinterested. "Seems so."

But Naruto is only thinking about one person in particular to show the familiar and restored view to, already picturing the expression on his face once he tells him the news.

He always had such a kick out of teasing Tsunade, he won't pass up this opportunity either, probably drop a few callous comments about inexistent crows' feet or something of the like, and she will likely get mad at him for it and chase him out of her office with the threat of her strength, and Naruto will stare at the scene in front of him, grinning all the while.

A smile, radiant and aglow, slowly blooms across his face, and he feels better than he has in seemingly forever.

He suddenly can't recall why he has felt this inconsolable misery deep in the marrow of his bones as he now exclaims, bright and excited, and like his old self—

"I can't wait to tell Ero-Sennin!"

Tick.

A suffocated stifle settles over the triad.

Tick.

Kiba is frozen, stunned into a wide-eyed silence.

Shikamaru is frowning at him.

Tick.

"What are you talking about?"

Tick.

Blunt confusion pinched in the furrow of his brows, Shikamaru doesn't let up, voice lilted with clinical detachment as he defuses such a detrimental, poisonous verity.

It ends up imploding inside Naruto all the same.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

"You know he's dead."

Tick.

Time runs out its course.

The storm hits.


The air is punched out of his lungs, leaving him to gasp in its waking absence.

Naruto is standing, tall, upright, on his benumbed legs, and petrified on the spot.

Naruto is standing, but the ground has already cracked open below his feet.

His world as a whole, what's left of it, splits down the middle in a paralyzing, unforgiving fracture. Tearing open in two imperfect and empty halves.

And Naruto finds himself standing numb in the eye of the brewing storm as the world in its entirety is thrown back into the stark light of reality, that goes bursting into flames, goes up in a wall of smoke; the storm that has been brewing inside his mind all along hits him.

Jiraiya, his teacher, his mentor, his found family, he...he is...

...dead.

"...I...know." The distant echo of his faint voice doesn't reach his ears. His eyes are open wide, glazed over, but unseeing. He doesn't know how he can possibly utter a single sound when the truth has rendered him speechless. His head jerks in place with the small jolt of a robotic nod. "I know."

The anaesthetized, glacial lack of feeling that had taken over every inch of his skin fades from his brain like smoke against mirrors, leaving him to choke.

"I..." He withdraws. Draws back. Takes a step. Takes another step back. "...need to go."

He hits the ground running before he is even aware, setting off at a scorching pace.

"Naruto!" Kiba calls out in a much too delayed action once he unfreezes, to no avail. But before going to follow after him, he turns to glare sharp daggers at the teen beside him.

"What?" Shikamaru asks nonplussed, clueless as he stares between Kiba and the vacant space Naruto occupied only seconds prior. "What did I do?"

"...Seriously man? Don't you get it?" Kiba tries to keep a lid on his rising ire, barely keeping it at bay. "You've really got the tact of a fucking horde of elephants. And this coming from me makes it ten times worse." He shoulder-checks Shikamaru on the way to checking up on Naruto.


Naruto barely keeps himself upright inside the locked, dusky shade of his apartment. The walls never felt more imprisoning, siphoning the oxygen off of him, siphoning him of everything he could hope to reach for in the dark.

Back when time had slowed down to a trickle. Back when he still had something left to hold on to.

The haze he has been living inside lifts at once, revealing the unfolding darkness existing underneath.

How selfish.

He is nothing but a pretender.

He is nothing but a fake.

How fucking selfish of him.

Thinking nothing was wrong, that his world as he knew it had not disintegrated the appalling second he heard of his horrifying death up in the stuffy, ominous office of the Hokage.

What an evil thing to do.

It doesn't matter how many enemies he has come across, it doesn't matter what they have done, none of them comes even close, because Naruto is the worst kind of scum for doing this—for letting his own mind shelter him inside this made up, frangible dome of glass that was bound to implode in itself.

It takes far too long for his muddled conscience to realize his name is being called over and over, an urgency to Kiba's voice as he pounds at the door.

But Naruto has already fallen to the floor, as if the force of gravity had increased tenfold, landing forcefully on his knees. Needles of pain crawl up his spine, between the blades of his shoulders, behind his closed eyelids.

"...Naruto."

The voice sounds muted in the deafening space, much closer, much distant too.

The way Sasuke said his name is slow. Careful. As if treading cautiously around a wounded animal who has its claws protracted in fright.

In a trice, nibbles of their past conversations ring startlingly loud inside his eardrums.

Naruto lifts wild and unblinking eyes up at him, so quickly his vision swims, his mouth hangs open but no sound escapes at first.

Sasuke's words take on a new meaning all together.

"It might get worse before it gets better."

"Shouldn't I be the one asking you that."

"If it's a game you're playing at, then you're the only player here."

"Some things you just...can't speak about."

"But secrets kill."

"Is something wrong?"

"All these secrets, Naruto...Your ability to keep everything to yourself is admirable."

"I know you're trying to protect yourself. But you're just hurting yourself more in the process."

"Are we still talking about the same person?"

"...You're still holding on so tight you can't even see it's already fallen apart."

And above all else the piercing, thundering stillness of his unrestrained warning.

"When it hits...it's going to hurt."

It's the suspended, stilted moment before a glass goes falling, inexorably shattering to its demise; but the shards have already cut so deep inside him he can feel nothing else around their excruciating sear.

Two pieces of the intricate puzzle finally fit together as the rest falls apart.

"...You knew." The stabbing accusal burns like bile in the back of his throat. "...you knew...he..."

Sasuke averts his eyes to the side, speaking so quietly it's a strain, but his hesitation has nothing to do with disclosing the information. "Of course I knew."

"S–Since..." The tremble indwelt in him seizes his frame once more. His fingers, shaking, scratch the solid pavement below, his nails break open with blood. "Since when?!"

Always so confrontational and belligerent, Sasuke is not gutsy enough to meet his eyes this time around. "...a few weeks now."

The meaning settles in like an oppressive darkness. Sasuke had been aware of Jiraiya's death all along.

Nothing...nothing Sasuke had done up until then, nothing he had done against him, nothing had ever left Naruto feeling more betrayed than now.

"Why are you even here–" He rasps, windless, desperate, the quietude goes disrupting with the seconds ticking by. "...d–did you wait until now to rub it in my face, to laugh at me...to say that you w–won?" The inquiries he strings along go dwindling in volume and sense.

But nothing else except the loss of his teacher makes concrete sense anymore, it's all he sees in the splintering voracity caving under him, in the blind darkness carving inside him, blinding him to his own emotions, let alone having the capacity to understand anything, anything at all. Nothing else matters, nothing else but this.

Naruto feels sick.

"...what?" Sasuke staggers back a step.

The distance that had been there from the beginning, stunted into the form of an ambivalent truce of sorts, stretches so far between them now it breaks into a rift.

Sasuke's features contort with a crumpling veil of hurt. "Of course not. How can you even think–I could never–"

But Naruto is not seeing anymore, he isn't listening anymore, he can't. Even his beating heart is drowned out by the shock, a reverse avalanche that ploughs straight into him.

And the shock slowly dissolves; under the enormity of loss everything else dissolves and loses its meaning.

And everything, everything he so desperately tried to suppress, it all comes surfacing back. Merciless waves of pain he drowns under.

The shear of nothingness, a shield of numbness, all along he felt it, emptying him inside out. His insides were scooped out of him, left to bleed dry, twisted into nothing until he wasn't a thing, until he wasn't a person, until he wasn't human anymore; nothing to have, nothing to feel, nothing to need anymore.

And now there is nothing holding him whole anymore.

The dissonant, fragmented pieces rip apart the same way his world did, they tear open the same way the inside of him did. With no gospel truth to keep them attached to him any longer, the ineludible truth bleeds out, relentless in its ruthlessness. He drowns beneath it, too.


When he comes to, Naruto realizes he is shaking on the floor, struggling to get a wisp of oxygen inside his heaving lungs, unable to even draw a single breath in anymore.

He realizes Kiba and Sakura are both here, they have their arms around him. Muffled cries fill up his eardrums, and Naruto belatedly realizes they belong to him. Muted sobs wrack his body and he shivers in their unabating vehemence, choking on the saltwater chafing up his throat.

He can distantly feel his nails scratching at his scalp, fingers pull at his hair, pulling until it burns, until everything is burning in black and white across his vision—an empty sea of lifeless gray had been lying in the wake all along.

Frozen drops of tears now stream incessantly from his eyes as the calamity of what he has lost dawns on him.

Time. Relentless in its passing. He had built into it a make-believe reality and froze himself inside it. Had frozen himself in time. Buried beneath this evil sheath of denial he surrounded himself with, until the truth was dug out of him.

But time turns ice to embers.

It's coming around full circle now. And as he digs back in, past the facade of exhaustion, down the hurt burning his core, bruising the inside of his chest, where his heart should be beating he comes up with bloodied fingers. He finds all the words left unsaid, lying broken in shattered shards of glass; a heart nothing more and nothing less than a pulsing mess of cut up pieces.

This is what he finds underneath all the pretence.

A death he couldn't believe in.

A death he so desperately tried, with every fiber of his being, to not believe to be real.

But Naruto had never truly stopped counting since the day he found out. He never did. Time starts back again, ticking away unforgiving, even if it never truly stopped in its unrelenting passage, either.

One month, three weeks, six days, eleven hours, fifteen minutes and fifty-seven seconds of death pulsing still beneath his fingertips.

Grief sinks its vicious claws back in.

And this time he is powerless to stop it.

.

.

.

Stage I: Denial—Shock

'In the denial stage, you are not living in 'actual reality,' rather, you are living in a 'preferable' reality. Interestingly, it is denial and shock that help you cope and survive, aiding in pacing your feelings instead of becoming completely overwhelmed with grief; we deny it, do not accept it, and stagger its full impact on us at one time. Once the denial and shock start to fade, those feelings that you were once suppressing are coming to the surface.'

—Elizabeth-Kubler Ross and David Kessler From 'On Grief and Grieving'


. . .

a/n:

This.

This.

This was the needle held at the back of his neck, and his world as he knew it ripping apart bit by bit.

The dead man hanging in the back of Naruto's mind as he faced a murderer was not the stranger he found, it was Jiraiya. And the murderer he was seeing in front of him was Pain/Nagato.

Naruto denied it to himself so badly he started living inside his pretend-reality, and Sasuke's presence was distracting enough to let Naruto stew inside his denial a little longer than he would have otherwise.

But Sasuke wasn't the reason for his denial, Jiraiya has always been the focal point of it, and finding the scroll threatening Sasuke's life was his first 'wake-up' call because the thought that someone had already died started slowly sinking in.

Sort of comes 'full circle' from ch. 1. Naruto has been dropping hints that he didn't 'recall' Jiraiya's death up until now, as his death only gets mentioned between the (brackets), Naruto's innermost thoughts, and then his thoughts slowly start spiraling as he starts having moments of 'clarity' where he almost admits to himself he knows what happened.

Everyone probably figured this 'mystery' out already, but it was really important to me to underline the importance of denial for personal reasons and otherwise. It's also a pet peeve of mine how they didn't explore Naruto's grief more in the anime/manga, so this is me putting my own spin on it.

I know in the end this is just another chapter for everyone else, but up until now this was hands down the heaviest and most painful chapter I've written and it drained me, putting me back in a bad spot with memories I don't want to live through again, so I'm taking a bit of a break for now from writing this story.

As always thank you so much for your incredible support and kind words, it's always so shocking to me to know there are people out there who are interested in reading the messy stuff living inside my mind.

Thank you, see you soon.