a/n:
there's callbacks to chapter 19 and 20
also, remember fam, this is canon divergence!
. . .
you got your finger on the trigger (but your trigger finger's mine)
Summary of the chapter:
"It might be cathartic to channel what's left of your energies into something other than self-flagellation."
It's actually kind of funny, the way he's saying it. Like he knows Naruto will charge into the opposing route without reserve.
. . .
Anger is a violent copper rush, the chafing to a road rash burn. Anger is scorching fire. Anger hits its peak again, and again, and over again. And when it does, you ride it out until it expires, until the cycle repeats itself.
Rage, instead, comes in molten waves that aim to disintegrate. Rage is an unending tragedy. Rage is a building inferno. And it comes full circle.
Rage is a quiet (—suppressed, repressed, invalidated—) thing.
...at least, quietly is how it starts. It's how it always does.
Naruto is sitting on the high, flat tiled roof of an old building overlooking a shady alley where the sunlight doesn't reach.
The rear of his profile is bathed in blinding daylight, while his front is cloaked in shadows. Naruto peers down and puzzles about how fast the fall would be from all the way up here. How long it would take to be fully drenched in the darkness.
It's just a far flung thought he pushes in the deepest recess of his brain matter, preoccupied with else. He's watching uninvolved a bunch of riotous thugs kicking one of their own to the ground like a ragdoll.
The unsettling calm sits like a brash signpost inside him. It's a steady beat burning his veins, still below his skin. Just starting to infuse his lungs.
"He's unconscious already, you're just wearing yourselves out." Naruto airily comments.
The bunch of them come to a halt with a start, the top of their heads spinning wildly, until they're all gawping at him like sheep. They're soon squabbling among themselves, loudly enough for him to overhear, "W-Who the hell is that?!" and "How the fuck would I know?" and "How long's he been up there?!", bickering among those lines.
"I'll go ahead and answer not long enough to know why you're currently beating up your friend." He courteously lets them know, leg passively swinging back and forth, touching the brick with his heel, then up in the air again. Like a rhythmic beat. Like the one flowing through his blood vessels. And, after a deliberate moment, proceeds to get to his feet, standing up to his full height. "But long enough to know you've got some buzz to kick around. And I've got some time to spare."
Naruto peers down at them, numbly. Nearly in boredom.
"So?"
He raises a casual brow, lifting his chin with just a pinch of haughtiness. Hanging by the corners of his lips is a baleful little smirk.
"Who wants to play with me first?"
"Tch. Just a waste of time." Naruto mutters under his breath with a distrait sense of disappointment.
Standing in the middle of a clearing now, he walked as far out as he could in search of an isolated stretch, guaranteed to be entirely on his own.
He's been hitting the bark of a tree repeatedly, not even throwing real punches, just grazing the trunk with the bluntness of his palm again and again. Not even using an ounce of his real strength.
In the end they went down like a cheap bulk of dominoes. Not even worth the effort.
They couldn't even spill a single drop of his blood.
What a waste.
Naruto thinks to a particular night weeks back, he's not usually one for sloppy seconds, at least he doesn't think he is, but perhaps he should go seeking out that same gang again. He can still faintly remember the leader's voice warning him after he was the one to unleash the first blow, a statement to his intentions. At least they knew how to throw a proper punch.
"Boooo! What's with all this pent up aggression against nature! Leave that poor little sapling alone you punk!"
Tone pinched high in an exaggerated fashion, the exclamation suddenly carries over to him. Naruto speedily turns around.
Only to find Sasuke sitting on a drab, dilapidated brick wall that stands low and in ruin, at least twenty feet away from him.
"Hey, handsome." Sasuke greets, mouth tugging up in one of his infuriating smirks. "Either you come 'round here often or my lucky strike has yet to run out."
...God, why does this guy seemingly show up out of nowhere right when he doesn't need him to? He can't bring himself to deal with this, with him now. Maybe if he ignores him long enough he'll just pop out of existence?
...He could really, really do without this right now.
Naruto exhales through clenched teeth, swivelling back again and resuming his failing diversion. This time the hits grow slightly in intensity.
Evidently uncaring of a possible response, Sasuke continues with enthusiasm. "I saw the little sideshow you put on earlier."
Naruto catches the bark with the side of his tightened fist, eyes narrowing in sheer frustration. He didn't notice him—again. Why can't he feel his presence at all. It's the slightest bit ironic, considering Naruto concealed himself from the bunch of thugs before offering himself as their next kickbuzz. Which didn't last long at all, and he ended up being the buzz kicker after all, but, oh well.
"Nobody ever taught you to pick on someone your size?" At first he thinks this might possibly turn into a lecture. But Sasuke is walking along another trajectory, of course he is. "They'll definitely last longer than the smaller fish in the pond ever could. If you want to make it entertaining for yourself, you gotta know how to pick first, mate."
Naruto gives a quiet scoff, still trying to bruise and break open the skin of his hands with the restrained hits building in strength. Sasuke's appearance is unneeded, and frankly unwanted. One more time, one more time he's idly wondering if this is a nasty joke-like illusion. Or if he truly is, somehow, someway... real.
'Ghost' is perhaps the closest thing to the truth... too bad Naruto can't even find a shred in himself to care.
"...Maybe if you'd held on to this anger back then things would have taken another turn." Sasuke is uttering, quieter. Only to to brush aside his own statement, as if irksome to him. "Hah. Who the hell knows."
What Naruto knows is Sasuke can refer to their shared past so damn easily, but he is most certainly not on the lookout for a dive into those hopeless waters...but then again, he's not looking for anything, anything at all—
Naruto unconsciously strikes his target with a dull hook.
The impact breaks the trunk in half.
'...Ah, damn it.'
He breathes out, once.
Tiny splinters scratch between the gaps of his knuckles like fine needles. He can feel the way his heart is hammering inside his skull. He might be sick.
"You're fun."
Naruto shakily opens up his fist, fingers quavering with the effort, and with Sasuke's words washing over him. He steals a glance of the other boy out of the corner of his eye. "Am I supposed to take that like a compliment now?"
"Yeesh–did someone mess with the temperature out here?" There's a spark glinting in Sasuke's eyes, he looks diverted more than anything. "You're freezing me."
Freezing? All Naruto can feel is the low simmer of a searing heat. Stifling, and oppressive, and arid. A dry flatline of vast desert anger.
"You know, just thinking out loud." Sasuke starts. "It might be cathartic to channel what's left of your energies into something other than self-flagellation."
It's actually kind of funny, the way he's saying it. Like he knows Naruto will charge into the opposing route without reserve.
But Naruto chooses to just brush it off as yet another one of his facetious remarks. "Are you sure you should be here wasting your time with me?" He comes up with, for lack of anything better to say, simply depriving his lungs of air.
"There's no other place I'd rather be." Sasuke replies with the corny one-liner. But then, his tone changes inflection—he's digging in. "...Unless there is somewhere else you would rather be?"
Naruto is able to remain unmoving simply due to sheer willpower alone, but the tight grip Sasuke has on his attention is a losing game he is gambling on.
"Say, have you already scheduled a tour of the newly built tower?"
Eyes widening a fraction, Naruto swallows down a strangled gasp.
(—they are fixed in this... strangely friendly, strangely tender patch right now. It's somewhat of a gamble, like it will hurt as soon as they both dig in and press down on it, but neither of them is bent on trying.)
Sasuke is digging in now.
Naruto falters to a hasty standstill, hand scratched and scraped, hovering unsteadily mid-air between his body and the rent bark. He holds motionless for a few seconds, the low hum of panic faintly creeping in.
A clash of visions like memories fills his mind's eye with vengeance.
Until he is breaking down that particular wall—but not necessarily through it—quickly spinning on his heels to lock his stern stare with Sasuke's fairly mischievous one. "What's the catch?" He inquires, slowly.
"Define 'catch.'" Sasuke returns in kind with a wry smirk. Although it's reticent, as if his walls have started building back up.
(But how can Naruto notice, buried as he is inside his own.)
He finds the nerve to hold his gaze steady, almost alleging what should be writ large between the lines. "I mean, what's in it for you."
"Your well being? Your mental and overall health? Your peace of mind?" Sasuke raises the rhetorical questions, as if this should be painstakingly obvious.
In an instant he's thrown back to five years prior, even far back into their childhoods, back to being under his thumb...
Naruto scowls in contempt. "As if you'd give a single shit about any of that."
...somehow, even in this bind that gets worse with every passing second, even now, it's as if Sasuke still has the upper hand. And Naruto thoroughly despises him for it.
At his caustic retort, Sasuke draws imperceptibly back in surprise. For a second he appears to be on the verge of a rebuttal...but then he locks his jaw, quickly averting his stare.
"Give me half an hour." Sasuke is offering, turning back to face him after a lull. "Then meet me outside the Hokage's office." He has a grin plastered on that stretches a little too wide at the edges, like a mask slipped back on.
Naruto frowns at that. But before he can make the effort to think about getting a word in, Sasuke has disappeared already.
He stays rooted to the spot, feeling somewhat uncertain, feeling a little bit at a loss and a tad strung out by Sasuke's strange shifts in attitude.
He doesn't have to go.
He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. Not any longer, he tells himself.
He doesn't and shouldn't have to do anything he isn't comfortable with—which, and this should be pretty damn self-evident, includes following Sasuke to, right about now, the only cursed place he wishes earth would rip open under and swallow whole.
It might be the slightest modicum of curiosity, it might be outright apathy, it might be he isn't concerned about any whichever consequence anymore, that after fifteen minutes has him taking a first step, and then escalating into a full out run in the specific direction of the familiar location.
The Red Tower is...deserted.
If the outside looks fairly suspicious devoid of people bustling in and out, the inside appears ten times worse devoid of any form of life whatsoever. The whole place is thoroughly vacant, as if it's been evacuated, the structure equivalent to a ghost town.
For a second Naruto harbors the absurd thought that Sasuke might have killed off everyone and stashed a pile of bodies somewhere underground in a hole-and-corner dungeon. Then he's shaking his head to himself, the thought's a little too ridiculous, and somehow he has the strangest hunch that if trying any attack at Konoha, Sasuke would go with the more 'flashy' route rather than playing it subtle.
Naruto dispels the mental picture as he walks deeper, feeling something akin to being lost in a maze he knows the secret passages of; which doesn't make sense, but neither what he is feeling now does. Neither Jiraiya's loss does.
He treads scrupulously slow, watching the walls and doors succeeding each other.
He has the strangest urge to reach out and touch the smooth surfaces, jog his muscle memory and substantiate the meaning this space holds, make it real—but then that would make everything else too, and he is not sure how he can deal with that fact right about now.
So, step by leaden step, he traiks forward, not dithering enough to trace the footprints of a past life.
He is halfway through, when he catches sight of something in his peripheral vision. In the dim reflection of the nearest glass window, for a moment he glimpses Jiraiya's silhouette beside him.
Naruto stops dead in his tracks.
Heart pounding across his temples and the inside of his mouth, he sharply, fully turns into the direction of it.
But all he sees is his disheveled reflection staring back hollow and a little caved in, a little more fraught around the edges, a little less human framed in the transparent glass pane.
He's standing all alone.
Sometimes when he passes out from overexertion he sees flashes of Jiraiya in his unconscious state. Just flashbacks of him, or a standstill of his figure, or split seconds of him drawn out through a cloak of unstructured darkness, or the amorphous mirror image of him nebulous against a gloom body of water.
It's the same story with his voice. He never hears fully formed words, or the exact cadence of his tone. But he hears it all the same, an indistinguishable carbon copy of it, its fading echo reverberating through his mind's infinite miles.
He wonders if he might be hallucinating, he's aware hallucinations can be caused by lack of sleep, among other things, and it wouldn't be an astonishing development considering his progressively deteriorating health. Not to mention the last time he blacked out was a hundred hours ago.
He has been awake for a hundred hours, Naruto realizes with a start.
It's a strange thought to think. And it is so abysmally low put in perspective on the grand scheme of things, so low in ranking on his list of What's Left To Care About it shouldn't even have its own spot.
Nothing except his mentor's passing deserves his attention and care. Nothing else.
Naruto peels himself away from the ghostly scene, the daze trapping him in, at last. Trudging on without looking back.
Unable to tell if he is looking forward at all.
.
.
.
Once he has ambled to the exact floor, he descries Sasuke's lone form down the harrowing hallway.
It's as if the misgivings he had now mute into a physicality that shackles his feet to the floor and restrains his wrists behind his back, rooting him in place from the thin tinnitus of terror of what awaits him.
Through the flim, low static panic that binds every inch of his body, he walks forward. This is not strength, nor will power, or any courageous or heartfelt stand at all. No, he knows strength, and this is not.
What this is, it's cinders he can still graze, the soot of it sullying his fingertips. It's wanting to shake his hands clean of the remains. And it's an impersonal detachment from it altogether, of wanting to get this over with already.
Or he might just be on the wrong side of dissociating. Who the hell knows.
It feels like a tedious age has gone past when he comes to stand beside him. Side to side. Sasuke doesn't speak a word, but looks at him in a way that means he knew he would come.
Naruto faces the brand new door of this accursed space, dreading what awaits on the other side of it.
Because the last time he was here...
"Do you need a minute?" Sasuke inquires, slicing through the beginning of his overwrought reminiscing.
If Naruto had to describe the interruption, he would say it's strangely compassionate.
He doesn't understand why.
He takes his time to shake his head. Then breaches into the place he once upon a time fantasized to be a sanctuary. Now adding to another sacrilege he feels he is stomping all over.
Memories streak his consciousness like feathery cobwebs, sticking to the walls of his mind and refusing to dissolve.
He used to come here so often he began thinking of it as something more than what it was, as a second home—
"–no." He chops off the reminder in half, clenching his eyes shut against the tangibility of it, of another life.
Sasuke undoubtedly hears him, being only steps within distance, but he doesn't say anything to it. No teasing remark this time. Nothing.
(His silence is the silence of someone who shares an analogous experience, but Naruto's walls are crowding him in, extending up too far for him to see beyond.)
When he opens his eyes again, he is forced to take stock of his surroundings, doing so with difficulty. Normally, his mind is wired on taking apart the scenes presented before him in detail, it's just the way it works. But he's emphatically forcing himself to glaze over the particulars, refusing to linger on them, because that would feel like treachery. Because what he lost would sink him into even more of a reality.
So he sweeps the scene in a desultory manner: On the left side of the renovated office stands a sitting area, made up of a padded, coal cushioned sofa and a bare coffee table. On the opposite wall rests a bookcase, its shelves stuffed full of stored contracts, sealed documents, loose papers and voluminous tomes. Taking the center stage is the lofty desk, ever imposing, although lacking a presence behind it.
Naruto feels virtually ill. He forcibly sucks in the next lungfuls of air.
"When agreeing to a mission you usually have to sign an official paper, right?" He questions. Unsure if trying to reason with himself out loud, or if directly asking Sasuke.
"That's right." Sasuke answers all the same, also scouring the limited space. "And they're usually catalogued depending on their importance, right?" He asks back, eyeing him.
"Right." Naruto whispers, taking a couple steps in and trying to breathe still.
He remembers her, sitting there, right there, with her hands folded beneath her chin and the storm unraveling inside her eyes—
—no. No. Stop. He can't do this to himself.
Naruto trudges in further, stilling before the mahogany, glasslike surface of the imposing desk—at least, it used to be, back then. Now it's just splintery wood and the denouement of an oath come to grief. He cautiously lifts a hand, fingers almost grazing the veneer...then thinks better of it.
For a disconcerting second he feels on the verge of breaking whatever his fingers can reach, can touch.
Sasuke casually leans against the wood of the bookcase, even more casually lifting him out of his stupor with a calculated question. "Say, are you familiar with the concept of 'false floor' and the like?"
Naruto's eyes promptly widen in understanding. He makes a beeline for the front of the desk, throwing wide the drawer and emptying it of its contents, too agitated to be meticulously searching for an opening or even a hidden mechanism that will trigger the reveal, but trying his best nonetheless. It takes a few seconds too long, but the pads of his fingers come in contact with a weaker section of it. He prods it on all sides, works on it until the thin board is edging off, and he fully removes the compartment, finding a secret stash of documents waiting underneath.
In hindsight it's a bit too simple, he wonders if Sasuke had anything to do with this too.
Pushing back the nugatory thought, he thumbs through the stacks of files he has no interest in, until he finds what he had been looking for. Naruto repudiates with every fiber of his being the very thought of sitting down and reading its contents, but he is gravely focused on the signed name at the bottom section of the paper. His mentor's calligraphy shapes his name stark black against the whiteness of the sheet.
Feeling as though his knees, the whole weight of him, will deliquesce underneath him, Naruto drags himself slogging to the small couch, depressing the sickness sweltering in his esophagus.
This is a paper thin cut ending he can touch the margins to, the outlines of; and in the metaphorical ripping of it he deliberates about the reason why he isn't alone inside it, why he was lend a hand to it. And he wants to ask, but...
"...Why?" He breathes out.
It's all he is capable of mustering at the moment.
Sasuke lifts the tension of his shoulders in a deliberate gesture, as if in politeness. And maybe, that's it. "Oh, you know, I just wanted to add 'breaking and entering' to my flourishing criminal record and maybe impress the higher ups, score an extra point or two, just in case."
Naruto doesn't explicitly ask him to drop the act and say what he is hiding in thought, but he does fix his stare on him, unconsciously doing so long enough it possibly becomes unnerving.
Sasuke properly averts his gaze, then. Naruto watches, almost as if studying a pattern, the way a thin muscle jumps in his jaw, how the stretch of skin around it tenses, the way he cautiously shifts his weight, one foot to the other.
"Believe it or not...I do have a soft spot for you." Sasuke whispers with too little air around the syllables, like the concession is weighty enough to leave him breathless after all.
He whispers it as if Naruto has a little more than the ridge of his fragmented worldview and a razed soul left to believe in.
He doesn't.
With a burdensome exhale he probably doesn't deserve aimed his way at this point, Naruto dismisses Sasuke. Dismisses the notion altogether. "...right. Of course."
He can feel Sasuke's stare as it sits back on him, as if burning through the diaphanous barricade of the skin and hurt he is wearing. But by then Naruto is intrinsically fixed on the formality of a suicide mission clutched in his grasp, wrapped up in a ribbon of deferentially printed words and the familiar calligraphy by his mentor's hand, watching it in the same vein he would stare down the sharpest tip of a poisonous kunai held at his throat; one wrong breath and the blade sinks in.
He clenches his eyes shut, steering himself away with his center. He breathes harshly through his nose.
These are the bare corners of an ending he can touch. So he...
...crumples it in his hold.
Just like that.
And hears an entertained half chuckle lined his way.
His gaze flits up to steal a glimpse of the other boy's face. "What?"
"Nothing, just..." Sasuke, still not looking his way, shakes his head to himself. "You can be so frustratingly unpredictable sometimes."
"...Don't know about that." Naruto exhales noisily, and his next words come out almost lighthearted. "Have you met yourself?"
This time Sasuke replies by tipping his head back as his lungs give out to the hush of a genuine laugh.
It's the first time in weeks Naruto gets to hear the mellifluous sound of his laughter. It feels like yet another strange thing to notice in the given moment. Like he missed the presence of it saturating the volume of a room, somehow.
"It's not the same." Sasuke says with tinges of merriment inside his voice, across his face, meeting him with one of his—new—habitual grins. "You keep me on my toes."
Actually, Naruto thinks this particular sentiment is very much mutual.
"Naruto Uzumaki." Sasuke adds softer, then, slower, enunciating his name as if he wants it to get stuck between his tongue and teeth, as if he wants to keep it to himself. His eyes darken a smidge, tone dropping lower still, but the curve of his lips only goes widening. "You're so much fun to me."
...if only he knew what Naruto would have done at the time to own the pull of his attention, just like this. How he would have put in every conscientious effort to keep it in between the lines of his palms like a guarded secret, hidden, belonging to him solely.
Naruto breaks eye contact first, now, feeling he can hardly breathe under the scrutiny Sasuke is leveling him with, like he's chafing beneath it.
That was years ago. He can't let himself think this way—not anymore.
"Say, do you happen to conveniently have a lighter on you?" He deflects, however badly needing the answer, so he's not sure how much this counts as proper deflection.
Sasuke uncrosses his arms, fingers splaying up in grandeur. "Why use a simple lighter when you can conjure a flame?"
Oh. That's right. Naruto blinks rapidly, as if coming back to his senses. He has been so hellbent upon avoiding the usage of even an ounce of his chakra, he utterly forgot what he can do with it.
Well, this is an exception he can make, he tells himself.
It takes more than he wants to admit for his limbs to cooperate with him, apprehension clogging his throat now, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.
He rakes his brain for a sealless technique he learnt years ago that will produce a plain flame in the center of his palm.
Naruto is desperately wrenched back into the chiselled clifftop of the Hokage Monument rising to the chalky sunrise, in the frozen heat of dawn laid out before him and enveloping his frame, into the sequence of his life collapsing in debris all around him.
The bridge burned already. This is merely collateral damage.
With his fingers tightly gripping the creased end of the document, the touch of a seemingly innocuous flame slowly spreads through the flimsy sheet, the unmistakable smell of burning paper faintly tickling his nostrils, the burn throwing light into his features.
The curved ink of his mentor's signed name lights up with specks of crimson and golden, before fading back to an incinerated charcoal. Through the lick of fire he glances at Sasuke, who is staring right back.
Inside this stuffy and impersonal office, locked in the unbearable heat of his emotions, in this deafening and suffocating quiet where he wonders if he should also be mourning the collateral damage of it, this, of all things, is what keeps him anchored. It's what grounds him. So Naruto keeps their eyes locked throughout the entire process, throughout the debris of a collapsed bridge lit to yet another premature death, he watches the way the fire refracts off Sasuke's eyes, feels the heat of it inside his own, before it eventually dies, too.
He tries to breathe in the absence of it. It's harder than he thought it would be.
"Better?" Sasuke dares to break the stifle that settled over them like a concealing cloak, not for the first time doing so.
This juncture is so reminiscent of that doomed day in the forest. But without an intrusive intervention from Sasuke this time around. But without his gravitational pull to hold him upright this time around. Despite that, Naruto feels boneless, like grime scattered over a room deluged with detritus, pieces of him have been laid in uneasy unrest all over here.
And he, honest to God, has no idea what to answer to that.
He feels a cling film hybrid of revulsion and epiphany sticking to the outside of him, unsure of it being an ideal combination, especially when wrapped up in gauzelike emptiness.
What once had life as whole is now a fist of fuming ashes by his feet; this conceit keeps plaguing him.
Naruto shakes his head with a heavy, drawn out breath, mouth lifting in a humorless, hollowed out simper. A vicious flicker lights up the knuckles of his spine and he's getting to his feet at once.
The orderliness of this room, the harmonious peace reigning within it—as if nothing, nothing is missing—is daunting in the worst of ways.
Sasuke's words skim off the surface of his mind as his eyes bore into his own. 'Well, then, how's this for unpredictable', Naruto thinks, sarcastic.
And then he's bringing the heel of his foot down the dainty coffee table. It smashes in two imperfect halves (another analogy that haunts him).
Sasuke's face is quick to light up at the impetuous action. The flicker flame licks up and up his spine, reaching the stem of his brain, a violent little rush that he plans on riding out. So Naruto pushes himself toward the library, stacked with folders, documents, the muted colors of multitudinous book spines. And then he is the one doing the pushing, until the assembly comes toppling over, scattering all over the floor like blood that comes oozing out of a wound. The muffled sound of it still fills up the room with a deafening thud.
He doesn't stop there, doesn't restrain himself to weak, pointless strikes. The punches he throws, the kicks he rains, it's blow after blow, until it feels the very space gives out beneath his feet.
And the imposing desk he had so badly fantasized sitting behind of one day—he's bringing both hands down on it before he can even blink, or let his breath hitch. It cracks beneath his strength with an ear-splitting sound.
...Yes, that's all it is. Splintery wood, a failed oath, an abrupt and rushed ending.
He feels astonishingly disengaged from it all. Still unable and unwilling to get a clear grasp of the details. Chunks of wood, torn papers, strewn documents covering the floorboards. In another light, with a different point of view, from another perspective, this ending he is standing atop could be seen as a corpse whose life bled out from.
His inhales-exhales disturb the dust particles as they visibly float in the light spilling into the room. Standing whole only on the surface, Naruto is caught in the middle of it, of this jagged, surcharged turmoil.
"...This counts as self-flagellation too?" There's a morbid hint of curiosity that's leading him to ask, and he asks so with voice on the verge of asphyxiating laughter, with eyes on the brink of stinging tears.
"This has a shit ton of names." Sasuke concedes, mirth stretching around his syllables.
Naruto swallows down the thin buildup of nauseous dread, and while his head spins around the last minute, he spins around himself to take in the layout of the office, of the dealt damage. With nothing else to the room except the walls left intact, the peace of it tainted by the hand of chaos, Naruto doesn't find any use of extending his time here any further.
Quickly and teetering, he climbs up the sill, pushing himself out of the window. And runs with the wind.
.
.
.
"Now that's how it's done. Nice job, team! Take five!" Sasuke exclaims, plopping down on the nearest chair in the kitchen, boisterous and somewhat childish.
Naruto comes to standing still a few feet away against the wall, hands twitching and tense, the adrenaline has yet to disperse.
He feels vaguely gutted, as if there is more left of him to break open and split apart. As if he hasn't already been obliterated.
"...What are you doing?" He finds himself asking with voice stretched taut, now. His fringe falls disheveled into his eyes, keeping his expression concealed.
"Taking a break?" Sasuke asks back, pointedly so. He is clearly clued up but choosing to diverge.
Naruto raises his head, eyes slowly fixing on him. "You know what I mean."
Sasuke settles back in his seat, looking at ease, far too assured. "Do I, now?"
A slight furrow of his brows betrays Naruto's thinning composure.
"You're different." It comes pushing unrestrained out of him before he has the chance to take a hold of himself.
But Sasuke does look...different. As with Sakura and Kiba, it's almost the same tale recounting itself. There's this heaviness to his features, to the way he carries himself. Naruto wonders if it was always there and he never noticed over the glaze of denial. His behaviour has undoubtedly changed, too. There is something adding to it, like a new tick. Like a new shade he is unearthing only now.
Sasuke observes him, stare fixed right back. Until he is leaning forward, unreadable poker face slipping on. "You switched stages. It's only fair I get to change my approach in turn, isn't it?"
Naruto frowns in bewilderment, and the slight apprehension of buried fear. "...what are you even talking about?"
Sasuke's mien seems to be telling two stories altogether:
His eyes remain glued to him, solemn, far too composed.
"Well, instead of letting everyone else waste your time..."
Whilst the corner of his mouth slowly quirks up into a smirk; so sharp Naruto thinks if he were touching it he would have cut himself.
"How about you play with me instead?"
Naruto's breath jerks into his lungs and he is instantly immobilized, as if made of stone, stuck inside his limbs.
Sasuke leans away satisfactorily, this apparently being the reaction he was looking for. "Don't fret, it's not like you have to answer right now." He tilts his head back nonchalantly, chin tipping towards the ceiling. "Contrary to popular belief, I'm a pretty patient guy. So don't lose your precious sleep over it."
Naruto swallows around the hot saliva in his mouth with difficulty, it tastes bloody. A transparent pearl of cold perspiration trails down his nape, caught on the rim of his shirt.
"But shall I go ahead and already assume," Sasuke's eyes fall back on him, lingering, irises gleaming with the unmistakable glow of challenge. "It's game on?"
In the next breath he's vanished.
Naruto struggles to inhale through the ill-defined flame red crowding his vision, obfuscating his view as he fights for breath, standing unsteady against the hard wall.
Wetness starts streaming down his face in thick, damp drops that make his skin itch. For a few wayward seconds he thinks he might be crying. But then he shifts his gaze to the floor.
A drop of his blood has spilled down below, staining small and scarlet against the clean tiles, tarnishing.
Naruto inhales sharply, suddenly hyper aware of his nose bleeding, of his nerve endings sizzling, of the muscles in his neck straining, of the vein in his forehead throbbing with each pulse, of the flush of anger as it spreads over his pasty complexion, the pale line of his neck. Blood keeps flowing down his chin, dripping almost soundless, tainting skin and clothes alike.
He can taste it, the copper tang of it inside his mouth.
Slowly, he brings up a wavering hand, wiping away the wetness with the back of it. Smearing his own blood all over the lower side of his face, he leaves himself to look ferocious and deranged, as if he has lost all reason.
Stare falling to the place Sasuke was in only seconds prior, he ends up adding to the blood with his nails indenting into his palms, cutting open marks. The veiled threat is an endless echo looping inside his mind.
Suddenly, it feels like they're eleven all over again, resuming their so called 'game' despite never having put a proper end to it.
...and, just as much as he did back then, Naruto wants to destroy him.
