a/n: I don't know how anyone can think of reading or writing or doing anything at all when drivers license dropped not even two weeks ago and it's been playing in a costant loop in my mind. one of the best bridges ever made I swear.

anyway. I've been fighting with this chapter for the last two weeks, rewrote it 10 times and I'm still not completely satisfied. probably gonna edit it over time.

. . .


Give In To The Lonely (here it comes with no warning)


Summary of the chapter:

"You look like shit." Sasuke remarks.

. . .


The sun pours itself into another ending. The moon rips open the dead of a new night.

Nothing changes. Everything already has.

Naruto lies motionless in bed, the pallor of his skin stained with the tangible weakness of dried over tears.


Loneliness gets...intense. More so than he has ever known. It blends into one of the multifarious shadows lurking in the dread, in the shape of unseen monsters he used to fear as a child, and still fears now. He is left to struggle through it, toss and turn into it. But strength is an outlying concept he can't concretize now, so he's losing again.

He doesn't want to be alone—he loathes the sole idea of it. But what he can't truly stand is being around anyone else, only to see a slice of his pain reflected in their stares like a diluted mirror when they lay their eyes on this broken version of him.


He doesn't think he can remember what he used to fight for.

And part of him doesn't want to anymore. Because, somehow, that stretch of his life tastes like the smoulder of betrayal, and he doesn't want it. He doesn't want anything, anything but going back to before he lost the one thing he has ever really known.

His memory of him is all he has left; he is slowly, slowly, coming to grasp, a realization in the makings still. And Naruto is paralyzed by it. He is too afraid to break it, to destroy it between his clasped fingers, to shatter it too.

As if it were an innocent picture standing the test of time, he tries to keep it as far away as he can. Like a suppressed, childish fear he got on his tiptoes for, locking it up on the highest shelf, somewhere too tall for him to reach. Because if he takes hold of it, if he opens it up, if he unveils it and lets himself get absorbed in it, he will only get dragged under another tidal bore.

And he cannot touch it, now, he cannot see it, or listen to it, or do anything that would lead to him inexorably ruining it. Ruining him in a way his very death hasn't already.

He cannot possibly dare to breathe around it.


"You look like shit." Sasuke remarks, blunt, showing up unannounced—again—in the thick of his grief—only Naruto is now acutely aware of the plight he is in—his voice is layered, but Naruto can barely distinguish through his own emotions, let alone try and play catch up with his. "My bad, there really was no way to sugarcoat it."

He cranes his neck just enough to settle a withering glare on his casually slouched form over the windowsill.

"I'd ask how you've been but...that's pretty much par for the course."

A flicker of something hot and known bruises against his ribcage, coming alive amid the death and despair and emptiness that's taken residence inside him.

Only to snuff out like a dying flame immediately after.

"Leave." Naruto whispers. And it's apathetic, above anything else.

He doesn't have the energy to be any more accusing, and can't muster enough to handle whichever vexing scheme or facade Sasuke plans to throw his way.

There is a stroke of silence that draws out, far too loud between them.

"I already told you. I don't think you should be alone right now."

Naruto ignores him.

How can he possibly consider this apparition of him—which might be nothing but an equation of the byproducts of his sucky mind—when his mentor is gone, when he is nothing but a lost phantasm placed somewhere he can't reach, now.

He doesn't want to listen to Sasuke anymore. He doesn't want to see him, to deal with him any longer. Because he can't take it. No more of this, he pleads and threatens himself at once. No more.

Naruto shuts his eyes tight, wishing with everything he has, which amounts to a pitiful nothingness, for him to be gone too.


Naruto doesn't fully remember what went down with Pain. It's all scrapes and morsels, bits and pieces too bleary and bleak to recognize or tell apart.

And, truthfully, it all feels like the worst game of mind fuckery he has ever been subjected to. Which is why that specific day is one big, great vacuum where the reminders of it are siphoned, frozen below the surface—so close he can almost touch them, yet never really able to breach into the light.

It's a corroded tape he keeps rewinding on an endless loop, but all it does is come to a lull on that precise moment in time where all went lost, the ruptured circle of his thoughts drains around it—the day of his passing, the sombre pain etched in her countenance, Tsunade's stoic behavior betrayed by her downcast gaze, and himself standing shocked out of words—only, this time, blaming her, blaming them, wanting them to take every word back, to take every ounce of pain back, to take every single day he gave, to subvert this whole system built on murder and lies and subterfuge and make it untrue—

Slowly, he shifts his weight to his other side, letting his pillow and sheets smother him. Naruto doesn't want to think anymore.


For the first time, Naruto stops forcing himself to smile.


He's unsure how much time he has been cooped up inside, but restlessness has seeped so deep down his bones he can't shake it out until he is forced to crawl out of his apartment.

The brisk chill hits him at once when he steps into the bold air of the night, with humidity abating and giving room to the cold that laps at his cheeks almost soothingly. It's an aimless walk, he simply wanders around town with nothing better to do to fill the dregs of time, burrowed into himself and unconsciously uneasy at the smattering of people around. He isn't exactly taking notice of them, or anything around him, really. It's all smoke on mirrors.

But he starts taking heed of his feet carrying him toward familiar paths, as if lit up by unseen threads, as if the memories are slowly clicking into place, fitting one by one. When Naruto lifts his head again, he finds himself standing right outside the newly built establishment of Ichiraku.

And he is reminded, he had been so cautiously reluctant that day. It had felt so sickeningly wrong to come back here with Iruka. Because, before then, the last time he was here he had been with his mentor. Because even if rarely, and only when he was in the village, this became one of the spots they used to go to.

Naruto used to think of this place with wondrous, endless naivete. He used to think, in a warm way, that after so much time spent here, after all the experiences, after witnessing how it brought people together, that a small, minuscule part of it all also had to belong to him. But if it ever did, he lost this too.

It feels close to a sacrilege, stepping foot here again now...now that he knows. It feels like breaking a promise in two, so much so that something breaks inside him alongside it as he pushes himself to step in, pushing past the phantom walls of his reminiscing.

The suffused light and inviting smell and remembered warmth of a place as closely familiar as his own memories erases him a little.

"We're clos–" Teuchi pauses at the counter when he notices him standing at the entrance. And even if Naruto knows this restaurant like the back of his hand, he now looks more lost than ever standing there like a stranger, with arms crossed over his frame as if holding himself up and together, and barely succeeding in doing so.


"Here." The old man places his usual in front of him, with that same kind-heartedness he has always shown him, one of the few who has always welcomed him when no one else would.

Only his smile is dimmed tonight, as if he knows the black hole Naruto is entrapped in. And maybe he does, no one else seems to, and there simultaneously is something so incredibly painful and yet validating about someone else being aware almost as much as he is.

Naruto manages a nod, thankful for a myriad of things he can't express out loud.

Before leaving him to his meal, Teuchi squeezes his shoulder once, in a comforting gesture that is, most of all, fatherly. And Naruto finds himself blinking back heavy mist as the thought of Jiraiya suddenly pierces him—as if he actually ceased for even the split of a second to think of him.

He is quick to drop his head, pushing back the burst of emotions that leaves him scalded and hurting that bit deeper. His watery stare lands in front of the same bowl of ramen he used to love so much and ordered hundreds of times over the years.

For whatever reason, in the present moment he recalls himself sitting on that lonely bench after the destabilizing news, with a twin-popsicle dripping to the ground and a world severed in half, with hopeless teardrops streaming down his blank face and trying to make sense of it all, work around an unfathomable loss all alone before Iruka came to sit beside him. He had been stuck between two lines: it can't be and I'm sorry.

He wonders if Jiraiya—

"Stop." He suddenly tells himself with a fragile firmness, as if it will refrain the plethora of hurt from surfacing back. "...stop." He whispers to himself, like waging on a war that's already been lost.

But nothing will stop it. Nothing will.

He's roughly wiping the back of his hand against his swollen eyelids and clumped lashes, finding the wet proof glistening on his paler skin when his hand comes away.

He can't do this.

"I..." Naruto slowly shakes his head to himself. His mouth is a compressed line, his eyes won't stop glazing over, lungs spent, features crumbling like rubble. "...I'm so s-sorry."

The words have been ringing inside him again and again, over and over. Since the day he lost him. An empty husk of his greatest failure lies at his feet; with everything he is, he wasn't enough to prevent it.

But his mentor is not here to hear it. His meaningless apology now goes to waste.

...what is he doing out here?

What is he even trying to accomplish by coming here?

What was he trying to prove?

Before the old man is out of the kitchen, Naruto has already taken his leave.

Teuchi comes back to see the vacant spot he occupied seconds prior, the untouched chopsticks and the bowl of ramen still steaming. A concerned frown wrinkles his expression.


The hurt that grief brings is unimaginable. Indescribable. Every single word this world is made of in the end still wouldn't be enough, or capable of truly conveying what loss is, and what loss does. How it has tainted every nook and cranny of his life, reached every hidden and exposed corner of him, muting his feelings, emotions, and whatever grows and perishes outside of them. But despite his life being a gold mine for adversity, despite always feeling himself being the butt of the joke, the last one getting picked, the deadlast, despite having very, very little choice in this cruel fucking existence, he never- never before had to survive anything this damaging. Nothing ever touched him to this degree.

This is the kind of pain that shatters people's souls.

...and it's unbearable.


"Naruto!"

The searing water sprays in a downpour over his bowed silhouette, clothes sticking uncomfortably to his sweat cold skin.

His forearms and knees are littered with decorations of half moon marks, from sinking his short nails in his breakable skin in hopes to drown out the ripples of hurt with a fresh wave of physical pain, but nothing works. The water pooling at his feet turns a faint hint of rose, as if streaked with innocuous paint.

Sakura is punching against the door, his name resounds as a desperate, repeated call. It adds to the cavernous pit in his chest, blame swallows all around it.

How selfish, how foolish, wanting to seek even a glimpse of refuge when in his core he knows how hopelessly useless it all is. A safe place to escape in doesn't exist anymore.

"...Naruto–Naruto...please..."

Naruto remains motionless, skin clammy with scalding water and sweat and the buildup of tears covering his scrunched lids. His body is one big muscle mass seizing. The weight of loss is so oppressively overwhelming he will irrevocably end up crushed underneath.


The rise of the day is just pulling across the horizon when Naruto drags himself to the Hokage monument, slowly making his way up. He used to do this quite often when he was younger, but most of that is locked away too, a frozen sequence of his life he can't open up right now.

Once upon a time this place used to be beautiful, so astonishingly freeing, and his. But now it's just a bottom line, another ending.

There is a strange, atypical calmness that has only begun to wash over him. It's skintight and uncomfortable and ugly, but it's barely beating under his skin, almost undetectable.

On his way, he watches the fragmented, blurred memories play in reverse across the stark painting of the faraway horizon, they come back in black and white, in flashes and echoes, and he watches focused, like he would watch a film reel playing across a silver screen.

Somehow, he is watching so intently he starts seeing double.

And then he sees nothing at all.

What was once so important to him, what was so essential he needed like a heart needs an incessant pulse, now has melted into an indiscernible fog. Just a string of words fit together, sentences without meaning, letters vacant of sense.

Only a faded, idealistic mirage shaded against the lightening canvas of the sky and the still inexistent sun rising inside it.

This is...not home.

It's not home, he knows. It can't be anymore.

Trying to make-believe it still was only made it worse, and there's a selfish little voice inside his mind that asks him the truth with unceremonious cruelty, that's asking, why did he do this to himself?

And he is asking it back, but what can you do when a house doesn't feel like a home anymore?

Naruto wishes, he so desperately, so wretchedly wishes, someone would give him the answer to that.

He sits cross-legged now atop the rocky surface of the landmark, hunched, as if his spine has been splintered from a fathomless burden, wearing old sweats, wearing a thin cotton t-shirt and goosebumps. The heat of the dawn greets him with an unanticipated freeze that is almost welcome. Naruto retracts his bare arms inside the sockets of his shirt and curls them cold around his stomach, his distorted form a mere dot in the distance.

His complexion is slowly washed alight as he stares at the chalky golden of the brightening sky almost obstinately, and against the first glare of the rising rays, his eyes are surprisingly dry for once as he barely squints, and watches in replay the past of two lives—Jiraiya's and the hopes he had about his own—dissolve.

In the end, his life was a world kept in balance by the bridges he built. And now he watches the first bridge burn, dissolve into the flames.

Despite the fact he never truly stopped being one...Naruto feels like an orphan all over again.


. . .

a/n:

...it killed me to write that last line.