(...how harsh and sudden all of this is gonna be, 'cause all in all I'm looking out for a bit of honesty...)


Summary of the chapter:

Naruto wants to reach for him in tandem to the tendrils of an innocence that refuse to dissolve even before the very cut of death, like everything else did, like everything else is, now. He's blinking twice, three times into a fading focus he wants to touch the loose grasps of yet again; and maybe this is a modicum of self-preservation after all.

. . .


|Trigger Warning|:

unhealthy coping mechanisms

first glimpse of suicidal thoughts


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5 years back

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Sasuke is trudging with his head bent low, his lidded eyes heavy and trained on the earthy clouds of fine dust he raises by monotonously putting one foot forward after the other.

...it's just a bad day. Just another bad day. Tomorrow it will be yet another echo faded by the hand of time, he has to swallow down the acrid dregs of it until then. He can't let it affect him. The lack of mission todaythus, distraction—with Team Seven doesn't exactly help matters.

The sunset is stretching far and wide, the coral golden hue of it a color of fire hearths and tangerines that dapple the reflection of the dusk, a backdrop to the familiar walkway down the docks he's wending his way towards, aiming to sit for hours upon hours and mull in the encompassing semblance of serenity the place is submerged in.

But he is so lost to the density of his leaden thoughts, he fails to take notice of a new presence until he is about to make his descent down the dune-backed mound, only to stop short when finding the unannounced guest who has apparently made a home of his habitual spot.

Naruto is giving him his back, a drooping line tilted forward. The silence he is sitting in is smothering, it's palpable from all the way up here. Sasuke can glimpse the side of his cheek flecked in blood, even from where he stands, smeared, as if unsuccessfully wiped at. And Naruto looks...devastated.

It's not a showy or overt display. It's a quiet, quiet kind of hurt that billows unconcealed, the sort of voiceless hurt you simply don't have tears to shed about.

Sasuke knows it all too well.

Sasuke knows loss all too well. And from where he is standing, Naruto reflects it agonizingly clear, like the glare of the blazing sun bleeding inside the ruffled, glasslike surface of the limpid water.

Perhaps sapped by his own exhausting thought carousel today, Sasuke reflexively moves a step forward, because there is just something insistent and nearly unbearable about the abnormal sight making him move, and maybe reach out and—

Sasuke shocks himself into halting abruptly, outstretched hand frozen in the air.

...What is he doing?

He suddenly backs away, as if scalded. That's when Naruto is, in turn, taking notice of him.

Something unfamiliar flickers inside his ocean eyes, once he recognizes him. Then Naruto's whole demeanor shifts so imperceptibly and effortlessly, Sasuke is all but convinced what he glimpsed mere seconds prior must have been some sort of illusion.

Something about his change being so drastically swift is—freezing.

It catches him off guard.

"What?" Naruto's voice is too low to be discernible from where he stands, but Sasuke can read his moving lips, can imagine the lilt of his voice taking on a smidge of his childish chagrin as he glances away, slouching further as if untroubled, rather than the exact opposite. "Mph. So annoying."

"That's my line, idiot." Sasuke replies naturally, tone level and fractious, although saying so to himself since he can't be heard without raising his voice. But he's slipping his hands into his pockets to hide the twitch of surprise his fingers betray.

As if to spite himself, he moves back a step.

Naruto doesn't need any more attention than what he's already being given. He's just a clumsy, pestiferous kid, too bothersome for his own good. Yet another annoying kid who gets on his nerves.

Sasuke takes another step back.

Then another.

Then he's turning around, refusing to linger on Naruto's sombre, stony-faced expression contradicting his carefree nature.

Trudging back to an empty house to cope with his ghosts. Refusing to believe Naruto has any of his own to deal with.

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present day

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Naruto has been walking the streets all night, roaming all day. Without a wisp of cognition about which direction he is headed in, and, all at once, maybe too much.

Anger chose to recede a step, simmering down enough for him to be able to think, so he chose to step up the way he is weathering the storm and drown the thoughts sinking him deeper.

But can't keep up the single shred of a facade today. Hah, how annoying.

Naruto coughs, something wet and thick and quiet that's lodged inside his sternum. Bloodshot eyes sting when he lays them on the sight above, sky a graying line between towering buildings, lingering shadows.

Naruto wants to choke on the ocean of tears that just won't flow when he wants nothing more than for it to burst out of him and drown inside it. He wants to howl, wants to cry out until it consumes him from the inside, let the scorch of tears and depleting oxygen bruise his lungs, char them to nothingness, until there is no proof of him left but melting dust and rain. He's wondering if this is another facet of anger, or something else altogether.

Above the physicality of pain, all he feels is a deeply rooted incandescence, iced surface level, numbing down to his fingertips. Below the tangibility of pain rests the unending tragedy of an iceberg frozen in blame, only the apex of it is visible, but the invisible weight of it he feels into his core.

Sometimes willpower, determination, resolution, it's nothing other than the smolder of a liquid fire burning inside your core, and it's pure energy. The feel of it is intoxicating, it builds you high, higher still. Then, eventually, inevitably, the fire dies out, and you're bound to come back down, with shortness of breath, with your heart pounding to an aching rhythm, with your curled hands shaking- only to realize no one is there. Only to realize no one is waiting for you on the other side.

Naruto forces himself to sway in place, use strength he doesn't have, then he's rolling into his side. Forces himself to bear his own weight, balancing on scratched knees and scraped palms and nothing beside his battered physique to hold him up. A streak of pain flares up the crumpling line of his body, and he gasps into it, into the realization that he is still alive. Paints the asphalt a deep scarlet with the air forcibly climbing out of his lungs.

(If only he had been there.)

This desperately sought upon, raw power the Kyuubi is made of, which saved his life far more times than he could count, could admit to—it could have sheltered him. It could have saved him. If only he was there when it happened. If only he had been there. If only he had known

This guilt is cloying. (And it's killing him.)

(Naruto wants to reach inside himself. He wants to reach inside, below the flimsy layers of clothing and tissue, and break open his ribcage, crush his bones, mash his organs to a pulp. Tear his own heart out and watch it lose a lifetime worth of beating, squeeze it until it bursts in a searing explosion of crimson. Mangled meat. Ripped skin. Splattered, wasted blood. Wasted.)

His eyes well with the solitude of a desperation over two months old, but rooted sixteen years deep.

(...it's killing him.)

Because the Kyuubi would have saved his mentor's life.

It saved his own when Naruto didn't even ask for help in the first place. When Naruto didn't even agree to be used as a vessel to store the world's ills inside of and constrained into a stigmatized life due to it.

But all this raw, tremendous amount of power thundering pure in his fingertips, living inside his core, corrupting whatever he has come to know of life- it could not save his teacher.

(Naruto wants to end himself.)

What's the meaning of it, when he's being sung praises back and forth as a hero but couldn't even save the one person who meant the most above anything else. The only one who cared enough to welcome him into a life of normalcy, who in the end gave him a shot at a real family.

(Wants to destroy everything he has come to be. Wants to gasp his last breath.)

Pushing down the acid of devastation that swells back up, he spits the pungent taste of blood out of his mouth, and with the cracked dryness of his lips parted for air, and his swollen and dilated eyes, watches it drip down the bare rough ground made of granules of gravel gray, tarnishing it.

(Wants his heart to stop pumping inside his chest. Wants to mark a permanent end to the fighting he grew up alongside of and was raised into.)

...all this raw, outstanding power forced inside of him. And Jiraiya still lost his life. While Naruto gets to keep his. While everyone else gets to live theirs.

This twist of fate is plain cruel.

(Wants to watch the last seconds of his life split apart, slowly trickle out and away from himself, until finally draining out of him.)

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Naruto doesn't know what kind of energy, higher power, make-believe or barefaced lie is holding him upright right now. Not when even the act of breathing stings, when it feels every inhale and exhale is cutting into his bones. Pain beats down his struggling steps but he stumbles along the murkiness, the clouds gathered above him want to pour their own fires out, the sky is bound to cry down on him any minute now.

The stairs are another pain, every time he puts his foot down to climb one the pressure his muscles exercise makes it feel like his torso is being sawed in half, but he doesn't think of himself as deserving any kind of respite, so he swallows down the scorch and keeps going.

When darkness clouds the edges of his vision, he catches the wall, hard, with the curve of his shoulder. Blinking into the waning and candor daylight of the dusk slanting through the window pane, he finds himself in the dimness of his room, in the dimness of him.

Inside the suffocating silence, disrupted by Naruto's stuttered breathing pattern and the penumbra of his grief sticking to him, Sasuke slowly lifts his head from the edge of his bed, settles lidded eyes on him.

"You have four broken ribs." He's saying.

Naruto stops short. Recoils a little in place. As if, at a minute's notice, having blotted out that this is not a lifeless mannequin or a static shadow or a life-sized statue. As if, at a minute's notice, having consigned to oblivion the crux of the matter, that being the snippets of the possibly more unfeigned and sincere and candid conversations he has had in his lifetime were all with another human being.

For a very, very palpable and cavernous moment, the way he misses Jiraiya is extensively large, tangible. It's real, real enough it could uproot him from the endless hole he has dug himself into, break him thought for thought and bone for bone, dismember and bring to light what lies frozen below his writhing guts, dig up the entirety of him too. Bleed his heart out, dry every last drop from him.

And Naruto is splittingly and suddenly and very, very vulnerably aware of what a close death, fresh a couple of months only, does to whoever gets left on the other side of it.

The lightest frown mars Sasuke's features. And Naruto is sucking in a grating breath, eyes widening in delayed reaction when finding himself still curled at the corner of his bedroom. Still buried inside his walls.

"...What?" The sound of his voice is distant, skipping a few seconds, sounding like the replica of a stranger who is wearing his skin, as if he didn't just trip back from inside his own head.

"You have four broken ribs." Sasuke reiterates, lowly and plainly. "That's why you're having trouble breathing properly and standing upright."

Naruto forgets to actually breathe in the stupor, hands lifting listlessly from his sides and gingerly hovering over the apparent brokenness of his body, but never touching.

"Oh." He lets out.

Soundless. Without air. Feels the way it jostles his bones inside his skin.

"You hadn't even realized, did you." Sasuke ascertains with the lilting of a supposed question, framing it with a bit of an incredulous, resounding chuckle, averting his gaze as he drags his palm down the sharp curve of his jawline with a whisper, faint, bitter. "...Christ."

Naruto weirdly feels like standing in the direct line of fire that burns down to a scolding, as if he has managed to disappoint his interlocutor with a bad deed that now deserves regret from him, somehow. As if he has done something wrong.

Once again misinterpreting Sasuke's actions, his words.

Despite his miscontructions, however, Naruto realizes with an abrasive start, as if shoved down a radically differing path, he doesn't want to be his enemy, not right now. Not in this split second of motion where time seemingly lays frozen between them, where the view he has of him deviates, even if only a little, from the conception of Sasuke he manufactured up in his mind.

And then kicks in the slower realization, he wants to extend a hand, wants to reach out. Thumb the translucent skin across his cheekbone, trace the worn out darkness beneath the fragile tissue of his eyes. Draw it with his touch, this softness he sees.

Naruto wants to reach for him in tandem to the tendrils of an innocence that refuse to dissolve even before the very cut of death, like everything else did, like everything else is, now. He's blinking twice, three times into a fading focus he wants to touch the loose grasps of yet again; and maybe this is a modicum of self-preservation after all.

Naruto abruptly jerks away, like stepping out of the candlelit warmth belonging to a tender hold, beyond the grasp of the warmest hands, sinking barefoot down the frost laced crackle in the harshest winter snows, lost to the biting windstorm.

A subdued gasp coming from his left scoops him out of his torpor. And Naruto finds Sakura on the threshold, clearly reading the shock spreading across her face. Knowing it's not really about the gravity of his injuries, but that Naruto is sporting them in the first place.

"Naruto...you..." She begins faintly, for a couple of seconds unsure of what to even say.

"At least let her take a look at your wounds." Sasuke whispers, with his stare locked down on the floor, his back a drooping line tilted forward.

As if having just heard him, Sakura clicks back into action, her training spilling out, hands automatically lifting towards him. "Please, just let me–"

Sakura says something Naruto doesn't catch, his focus having irremediably fallen on Sasuke.

"...they're still open." The other boy's adding, quiet and hushed and despondent, as if he's the one in pain, as if the wounds are in serious danger of festering and getting infected and turning for the worse, as if the way he's phrasing it makes the injury become something other than the physicality of brokenness.

But he knows Naruto won't. Naruto won't let anyone in. Sasuke already knows that. And Naruto wonders if three years can truly change what you once knew of someone, the perception you had moulded of them up inside your head.

He steps back.

"Don't touch me." Naruto tells her quietly, in a gentler tone he wouldn't use with just anyone, giving the semblance of a warning he wouldn't grant almost anyone else. Distantly, he wonders how he must be coming across right now. He must look like a freak, the byproduct of a sideshow, as Sasuke had put his 'muddling along' only hours prior, and doesn't even know how anyone could stand being in his vicinity at the moment—how can they stand to be even looking at him and the wretchedness sewn into him like a second skin. "...please." He adds, maybe to soften the warning, maybe to get her off his back, he doesn't know, he doesn't know anymore.

On her end, Sakura cannot tell what happens when the hold someone has on him turns searing, could not say to which degree touch can affect him on the wrong kind of day, how downright poisonous it can feel, nor how badly or impulsively he might react to it. But at this point, she can probably imagine it.

"I–" Sakura falters back a step too, concern and fear swirling in the vibration of her wobbling voice like impending tears. "...okay. Okay. I won't. I promise I won't." She breathes out to steady herself, relying on her grounding rationality, as if trying to reason with an individual who can't see past reason any longer. And Naruto supposes it might not be too far off a future truth.

He can hear the lump in her throat she's forcing words through, can feel his own lodged like a knife buried inside his flesh, staring at her around the halo of a haze while her eyes are glistening even in the approaching darkness, thinking she can see through the barricade he's chained to.

She can't. No one really can, because Naruto does not allow them in and is simultaneously unable to. The only one who has ever come as close as grazing his walls, however, isn't even looking his way.

But what adds to this distant sense of astonishment is Sasuke doesn't just disappear today. He is still here, still taking up a space Naruto is unwilling to occupy, like the stain of sweet wine that refuses to wash away, echoes of a flashback that won't fade.

Sasuke doesn't look his way. Not even when Naruto is. Staring, instead, into a vague, vacant emptiness, as if numb and a little bit emptied himself.

It messes him up a little, Naruto thinks. This is a slice of openness Sasuke is not supposed to be showing, and Naruto is not supposed to be witnessing. Not when Sasuke never did before, not when Sasuke never wanted to before. Naruto is uncertain as to why he's choosing to do so now of all times.

Something about Sasuke wearing loneliness the way Naruto is clothed in hurt, is what's perhaps affecting him.

Maybe it's something about his loneliness not being so intrinsically different from hurt, that impacts him more than he wants to let on, after all.

...and just how harsh and sudden will this actually turn out to be, in the end? When all the sugar is eventually bound to go to waste. When the piled years of honesty will undoubtedly spoil. When any leftover sweetness between them will inevitably sour...