a/n: heeey pretty people of the world. it's been a hot minute hasn't it? so… surprise-update?
so, this is very lowkey because i'm not "officially back on my bullshit" just yet. i'll be soon (hopefully soon), just not today.
to tell you the truth i had planned a whole other thing but it did not work out on paper-so i'll leave that whole thing for a future chapter-but this one, the fourth version of this chapter, this easily did. and it surprised me too?
well, i knew chapter 29 was supposed to take A Turn, i just didn't expect for it to be this one. though i'm not complaining? hope you guys will enjoy this one, i feel like it's got a bit of a different feel from the rest of the chapters so far (and i have no idea if that's a good thing lol?) i don't know what this is guys, i don't know, it just is.
. . .
you could give that aspirin the headache of its life; it won't get better than this
Summary of the chapter:
Naruto is looking straight at him, but isn't sure if he can even see him right now, isn't sure he can see anything at all right now, and for a singular, linear moment he wonders who the ghost really is between them.
Sasuke exhales soberingly into the dark, dark stretch of night they're encased in, and Naruto swears he feels it into the bed of his bones. "I do this thing where I goad to garner reactions."
Naruto holds his stare for a moment and wishes for a moment longer he could be anywhere else, with anyone else, because the slivers of openness, the harshness of this, it suddenly hurts, especially when it almost sounds like he himself is the one trying his hand at reassurance this time. And he shudders at how caustic it all feels. "...yeah, I know."
. . .
It's unfounded.
Naruto can't recall their parting conversation.
It's insane. Something so final, so fundamental, something that should have replaced a last goodbye, a stopgap closure, proxy for it at least—and it doesn't even exist anymore.
He thought he did, he thought he could—he recalls heaps of granted innocence, the phantasmagorical idealization of him, his strong back silhouetted against the setting sun of a perfect weather day—but he doesn't even remember his mentor walking away from him.
It's happening all over again. He's losing... pieces.
And the more he tries to, the more those precious, stolen fragments of memory get bitten through, eaten away.
Perhaps it's better. Or maybe it's so much worse like this.
His memory is what's left of him, all he has, but it's a picture tucked safely away on the highest of shelves now, inaccessible—he's doing this himself, he's doing this to himself.
Because if he isn't alive in his head anymore...then where will he live?
It's ruthless.
"I can smell the blood on you."
Naruto doesn't jerk, or twitch, or flinch, or recoil. It means he's acclimatizing to his presence, or well on his way to getting there. He doesn't know if the thought is more assuaging or upsetting.
Nightfall inches over the earth like the roll of curtains sweeping off the dying light. A spectral moonlight casts abysmal shadows along the gravel, the same way it reached inside his room after he crawled out of the first nightmare, when he made him the target of his anguish, when he failed to do so. It's the first time he's seen him since.
"Terrific opening line." Naruto gruffs into the distance, sarcasm pinching his features as he shrugs, once. He's oozing disengaged disdain. "Didn't sound ominous at all."
"And I'm not even trying." Sasuke crows with papery presumptuousness. "Imagine if I was."
He'd rather not.
Sasuke considers him with a curious dip of his chin, the lackadaisical cross of his arms. "Thought you'd be more inclined to sidestep the niceties tonight."
He lets out an exhale meant to pose as a hollow chuckle instead, wonders when did the shallowness bleed out of their conversations, when every thoughtlessly voiced syllable feels purposive and poignant, now.
"Thought you'd appreciate it." Naruto says so low he might as well be whispering.
"Whoever said I don't?" Sasuke doesn't hide a diverted smirk, and Naruto feels no inclination to hide from his roaming gaze either. He keeps up his head-to-head, needing no preamble, waiting for none either way. "I'm the only one who's noticed, isn't that so."
It comes off, perhaps unintentionally so, covertly, like maybe this is their secret to share...it is their secret, isn't it? After all only Sasuke knows what he does in the dark.
He used to be a nimble-witted eleven year old, far too stubborn and intelligent for his own good, tasting the repercussions of Naruto's actual, real anger onto his skin for the very first time. Now a seventeen year old, Sasuke stands before him fearless, on the constant verge of a cunning grin like an anthropomorphized Cheshire Cat, pulling at invisible strings behind the scenes leading to tangible repercussions.
Still here, as Naruto falls prey to another crimson spiral of his own rage.
And he remembers the flickering darkness of his lamplit room months, and years, ago, he remembers being pinned down by Sasuke's gaze, remembers the different intonations, inflections, parallels, of the unvarying words, remembers, "I'm not going anywhere. Not this time."
But Naruto doesn't know what that's even supposed to mean right now.
He gives another indifferent shrug, feels Sasuke's stare bore through him from his right. "...they probably will, too. Soon enough."
"Not if you have a say in it."
Naruto blinks, only mildly taken aback. Thinks about Sakura, shell-shocked and distraught as she took in the sight of him covered in his own blood, in his own grief, and how she couldn't see past the blood and bruise (not the way Sasuke did). He fixes his frown where the line of flat, towering roof meets darkened skies. "She saw me."
Sasuke needs no further explanation as he replies with an easy scoff, practically insouciant. "She won't figure it out if you don't let her. No one will."
Naruto's frown deepens. And again, he's wrenched back to the unravelling thread, 'But you did. You're the one who figured it out–the only one.'
The thought has an actual pang of fear spiking in his gut, and he refuses to utter it aloud. (The fear, perhaps, at what he would hear in response.)
"S'not a secret." He tucks his head in, along with every writhing piece he's keeping tucked into himself, mutters far too quietly into the cold ground he's sat atop. It's not—because this isn't—it just—it never was a secret per se, just something kept under wraps, something standing concealed until someone pulled out the truth from underneath.
"Oh?" Sasuke feigns surprise to ask, his stare proves to be just as demanding. "So what would you call it then?"
And this is what swamps him for some reason, hits too close. Pulling at the seams of a wound over three years old and dredging salt all over it, watching it dissolve inside the fresh blood swell he began drowning under.
Naruto shifts, view twisting as he corners him with a withering glare. "What are you doing here." He states, instead, a dash too quickly. He deflects.
Sasuke knows. He does it right back. "Me? This is your show, I'm just along for the ride."
Below, a creaking sound grates against the thick stifle of resulting silence, shapes shift in the pitch blackness uninterrupted.
(He wonders who will call the other's bluff first, wonders if it is even an option at this point.)
Sasuke suddenly cocks his head to the side, assessess him, quizzical. "What's on your mind, neighbor?"
Naruto has to make a conscious effort to clamp down on the quail seeping into skin, sizzling below, at the continuous, unconventionally laid-back approach after...well, everything.
Moreover, everyone's been treating him like he encapsulates a world either built in glass or stone. But Sasuke's modus operandi runs on an exhaustively different racetrack (then again, Sasuke's approach toward him has always been different when compared to everyone else's) and Naruto can't quite choose if he likes it more or detests it worse.
"My shrink's gonna drop me." Naruto blurts out of nowhere. Might as well try for any scrap of normalcy while the last ringlet of sanity lasts, right?
Sasuke quirks a brow, forehead creased with a splash of bona fide surprise. "As in quitting on a 'hopeless' case? Isn't it too soon for the lay off just yet?"
Something hot and acidic slices him across, has stitched scars springing open wide.
Naruto shakes his head at that, which should actually be a given considering the pile up of missed appointments, but this isn't the case. "As in relocating to her hometown. Was just a temporary gig, this one."
Below him, the fire escape criss crossing above dirty alleyways groans underneath someone's weight. Above him, the fold of night is lit up in the weak hue of fluorescent luminescence adorning the adjoining buildings. Naruto is growing restless by the minute.
"Got any suggestions on affordable shrinks catering to traumatized shinobi kids?" He palms at his raw knees below his soak stained sweats and rubs throbbing friction against the healing skin there and feels the itch bite into his blood dappled dry knuckles and asks noncommittally and doesn't mean any of it.
Because they're already thinking of assigning him to another 'professional', someone else to evaluate him as an issue that needs fixing, another stranger picking apart his living, bleeding innards during his darkest time. And, fuck that. Honestly, fuck that and all of this.
Sasuke's grin grows piercing, more sharpness than anything to it. "Should I ring my brother up for a brainstorming sesh? Get him hooked on some good cbt too? Hell knows the rotten scum needs a new mental makeup, above all else."
Naruto is an awful, awful person for the way a cackle clambers out of him at that.
Short, hysterical, shocking, suffocating like the ascent of bile up his esophagus. It's a choking sort of noise, because the nick of humor is too dry and too dark and too sharp, and too soon, and too much, for it to feel any good.
Because he doesn't remember when even was the last time he laughed. Doesn't remember when even was the last time he genuinely smiled without feeling like dying, and that's so hopelessly pathetic. But everything is awful, awful these days.
(Sasuke's own grief—a grief he was coerced into by his own shared blood—for a missing beat, wafts over him in distant, isolated ripples; but it doesn't belong to him, so it gets discarded in a matter of breaths, along with the rest.)
"Jesus fucking Christ, Sasuke." Naruto hisses, tinges of terribleness echo still in his timbre, while he drags a rough palm down his face, at a loss—because who in the hell would joke about their genocidal brother needing to cash in on a few therapy sessions?
Sasuke would, apparently.
Sasuke pairs the retort with an actual laugh, bitter but delighted, with a nonchalant lift of the shoulders, as if there's nothing wrong at all about any of this. "Can't seem to keep a lid on perspective lately."
Naruto almost chokes on the wheeze of his breath again. There's certainly been a clear lack of that, lately.
He tries to breathe. He cranes his neck towards him, looking, slowly, taking him in more fully, an outline against the wan moonshine backdropping him.
Sasuke is looking right back, watching him out of dark, analytical eyes as the seconds slip by them.
"I know." Naruto tells him quietly, sweltering, numb desperation clouding him in like the overcast sky.
Then Sasuke moves against this immobilizing hush they're stuck under.
He breaks the stillness—but not the tension—by taking a step toward him.
And another one.
And another.
A dizzying lurch steels him with every step he's stealing off the empty space between them.
Until he's ceremoniously dropping down into a crouch right before him, arms bent at the elbows and resting easily above his jutting knees, face pulled carefully blank.
Naruto is looking straight at him, but isn't sure if he can even see him right now, isn't sure he can see anything at all right now, and for a singular, linear moment he wonders who the ghost really is between them.
Sasuke exhales soberingly into the dark, dark stretch of night they're encased in, and Naruto swears he feels it into the bed of his bones. "I do this thing where I goad to garner reactions."
Naruto holds his stare for a moment and wishes for a moment longer he could be anywhere else, with anyone else, because the slivers of openness, the harshness of this, it suddenly hurts, especially when it almost sounds like he himself is the one trying his hand at reassurance this time. And he shudders at how caustic it all feels. "...yeah, I know."
And he does know. This, he remembers.
It's not like he can say they knew each other; but it's not like he can say they didn't either.
Naruto has known him since they were seven, they spent the next six years together, in a way or another, then got slapped together into the same team, for better or for worse, began begrudgingly bonding despite mutual misgivings of one another, whether they liked it or not. In the end they started chipping off the tall, looming walls both were buried behind, brick by heavy brick.
Letting themselves get to know each other in the moment.
Sasuke's mouth tips with a bit of a witty, softer smile, for just a moment.
"It's a character flaw, I'm told."
Buzzing nerves have him rub the middle of his cold palm against the skin of his chin, an ill-humored simper stretching loud into the night between them. Naruto looks away, then. "There are worse flaws to have."
Sasuke sighs sort of noisily, sort of satisfied, stretches his neck up toward the starless night sky, answers in kind with his own, more humorous one. "You think God's looking down on us, laughing at our plans from high up his throne?"
It catches Naruto off guard that the first thing that comes to mind, the first thing he thinks to blurt out, is. "You don't believe in God."
Gaze dropping again, the corner of Sasuke's mouth crawls up in smiling indulgence. "But you do."
It draws his chest tight, for a skipping, lingering heartbeat. But Naruto disregards it, the way he does this too, how strange is it that they can remember such futile trivia about each other?
"It's so strange remembering such pointless details about each other, isn't it?" Sasuke echoes his thoughts. His words sound heavy, as if they've been sitting to gather dust and weight, now only ink poured down the drain.
Naruto blinks himself out of the stupor. "My bar for belief has been significantly lowered lately." He ends up adding, this unfiltered too. But seriously, scraps of his thoughts are already laid open, so what's one more?
A cold draft of air rushes past, raises the barest coating of goosebumps along the exposed skin of his loosely folded arms. He burrows a bit in on himself, as if in defense.
"Well." Sasuke exhales deeply, with some kind of difficulty. "If anything, I'm a strong believer in that."
For a transient minute Naruto thinks he might like to know just what Sasuke believes in, if there's anything left he can latch onto—then without warning, the barely smothered quail creeps back in, so full-throated it's choking.
And suddenly all he can think of is: You knew.
He knew about Jiraiya and didn't come clean. How could he? How could he do this to him? He knew, and every other day looked him straight in the eye and never said anything. When Naruto was down to his knees in the darkness, Sasuke only absorbed the sight of it. He never—he watched and never—
He knew he knew he knewheknewheknewheknewknewknewknewknew—
Sasuke swiftly averts his eyes, as if he can sense the shifting tide of his grim thoughts.
There's nothing subtle about this suffocating silence.
"Aren't you a little too camouflaged for a casual midnight stroll?" He asks after a pause, rhetorical.
It's pretty clear he's aware of Naruto's intentions already.
The sticky quiet builds, boils, swaying in the air sweltering between them like exhaustion, like one of the many phantoms hanging above their heads. Naruto wonders what omen will happen first, the attacklike imminence of a panic attack or breakable bones breaking in half.
Sasuke regards him with the slightest tilt of the head, perusing. "Gonna put on a show?"
"Gonna watch it?" Naruto hits back with, snaps with abruptness that surprises even himself.
A terse chuckle flies his way, so characteristic of the boy he used to know it sets his teeth on edge. "You're not an exhibitionist."
Naruto is so far past caring he could make a point out of it. "I couldn't care less about flies on the wall."
"Couldn't you, now?" Sasuke deliberately utters, vision falling onto a specific sight past his shoulder. "There's eyes I wouldn't want on me in...well, ever."
It has Naruto instantaneously sitting stiff, back ramrod straight and hair standing on ends, the razor of an edge.
"Too many sharks and not enough blood sullying the waters." Sasuke comes back to him, grin all keenness and teeth.
Something's amusing him.
Naruto deliberates, thinks he could throw a dart anywhere in Konoha, and wherever it landed Sasuke would still have found someone to pick a bone with.
The thought is hysterical in a horrifying type of way.
There are words gathering hot behind his ears, at his nape, burning there.
It won't get better than this.
For a winding breath it's so startlingly loud Naruto wants to tell it to shut up. He bites down instead, until the taste of iron washes all over his mouth.
"You're getting lost in your head again." Sasuke tells him, once more unexpectedly.
"Yeah." Naruto replies with numb downrightness, refusing to overanalyze these streaks of perceptiveness the other boy seems to possess. "What do you expect me to do about it?"
Sasuke inquires back, rivaling a hawk in directness of aim. "What do you expect me to do about it?"
Naruto can't hide the thunderbolt of shock as it strikes exactly where it had targeted, because he doesn't–
(–does he?)
Sasuke's whole demeanor pivots toward piercing, somehow, like veneer starting to get scratched off. "Do I get additional points for catching you off guard?"
But he exudes hubris in waves, and Naruto exudes animosity for days, and he thinks they're stuck, too, in this narrow limbo, sick but full of pride, twisted but rationalized.
Something that's just a little less than realization beats in the weight of his ribs. "You like this, don't you."
Sasuke appraises him in the same degree he would the entrance of a particularly intricate maze, irises glinting in the waking, over-bright lights of the adjoining building signs, undercut with streaks of menace. "What's there not to like?"
Naruto has to suppress the frisson of a premonitory chill tracing its icy way down his backbone under the scrupulous scrutiny.
Sasuke seems pleased, like he knows by the lack of reaction, and only makes it worse, the huskiness to his tone, the roughness to his words. "I like the way you try to run with the wolves even when your legs can't carry you anymore. I like the way your brain works, down to every bait and switch, down to every trick." His low voice rings out over the nighttime lull, he's watching him with gleaming pools of ash obsidian beneath the waxen moonlight. "I like the way you turn."
A shudder shoots down his spine, leaving violent sparks in its wake, leaving him breathless, and he can't do anything to hide it the second time, nor does he think he wants to in this frame of narrow-mindedness in which only the two of them exist.
Not when Sasuke is gazing at him like he's trying to bruise him with his eyes alone and Naruto wants to curl around the searing sensation of it.
(He wants Sasuke to peel him apart by the layers, peel away the pseudo hero from the shinobi persona from the struggling human and tell him what he sees underneath, tell him just who he is when seen through his eyes. If the way Sasuke has him painted corresponds to the version of himself Naruto knows, if it is the real, the true version he's been trying to dig up for years, if there's even something salvageable left of it.)
Naruto bites blood onto his tongue behind the locked screen of his teeth, digs blunt nails into his outer thighs, hoping to break skin and a faltering resolve (not that he has much left of that either) and ground himself, for a handful of minutes more, at least.
"I love this feeling." Sasuke voices finally, tone so faint, completely devoid of emotion and in contradiction with his expression. "But I hate this part."
It hits Naruto, seams of the old wound bursting open with blood, because he thinks he knows exactly what Sasuke is referring to. For once.
The distance dividing them sharpens like a knife when Naruto only wants him to cut the edge and draw closer.
'One minute I know you.' He thinks, winded. 'Then I don't.' It shouldn't matter—shouldn't matter anyway.
"...Gonna make another enemy." But Sasuke isn't talking in reference now, and he isn't asking either.
Naruto meets him halfway through with not quite a glare, but nothing benevolent either. "I wasn't aware we fit in any other category."
And Naruto wants to cut the distance. But he's the one sharpening the knife. It's maddening.
"Even white little lies have dark consequences, didn't you know already?" Sasuke warns, threats. Like blood spurting through stitches his amusement is showing again.
Naruto is running on seventy hours sleepless and he's about to throw himself into another free-for-all struggle, he thinks there's something hysterical about this too, but can't seem to find when the punchline is gonna hit.
Naruto is running on seventy hours sleepless and he's about to throw himself into another free-for-all struggle and Sasuke is somehow only gaining ground and upper hand, slowly twisting the knife, digging into a raw nerve, stabbing through the sizzling hot pulse of it.
Naruto is running on seventy hours sleepless and he's about to throw himself into another free-for-all struggle and he lets himself sink under the unmitigated ugliness for an instant, wonders how much more satisfying it would be to paint his knuckles sore with the crimson stain of Sasuke's blood instead.
And still, under strokes of moonlight, Sasuke draws closer, and Naruto just follows the inescapable magnetic pull of it, and in some of the ways that matter he thinks they keep gravitating each other's orbit in the worst of ways.
"Go ahead, Little Fox." The rough murmur sets buried emotion and nerves alight, and Naruto momentarily plummets into it, swears he can feel the ghost of his breath against his cheek, wants to close his eyes against the feel of its icy warmth—a beacon of sunlight-like-clarity inside his overcast mind, venom all the same.
Something thick curls at the base of his spine as tangled warmth uncurls from his chest, getting swallowed up in the dead of night, spreading into the hollow of his chest, crawling over the spreading emptiness, rolling with a spark of fear, excitement.
Sasuke throws a careless nod over his shoulder, an invitation he's supposed to follow through like a puppet on a string dancing at the curtain call, and Naruto has barely enough presence of mind to spare a thought, fleeting, to how can someone make a fucking nickname sound threatening.
"Put on a show for me to watch." Sasuke adds in barely a murmur, watching him out of dark, fathomless eyes as the seconds build up into a flare singeing under his skin, the dimness slicing through the moonlit hush, softly cutting into the bare edge of his treacherous smirk. "Go ahead and do your worst."
Anger lurks like murk polluting see-through waters, a poison reaching within, and Naruto, like it or not, is only rows away from freefalling into it.
He's starting to see red...again.
(and begins giving in; one more time he will give in)
. . .
a/n:
Turn, The Wombats (some of the lyrics were in the chapter, this song's so good, very recommended)
but umm...this Tension between them wasn't actually supposed to happen (...at least not yet)? though it just sort of did anyway?
but hey, we're rolling with the punches here
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
also? the /it won't get better than this/ in the title and chapter feels like a serious threat, yes i am 100% aware of that.
also? Sasuke felt more like a cunning demon than a friendly ghost this chapter i feel like?
apparently there's no way we're getting any comfort in here without getting through the chunk of sideshow this Angst Fest™ actually is, first. but hey we're all here for the Angst Stage at this point am i right?
(also: Sasuke is in the mood to use pet names—threateningly? teasingly? affectionately? all three at once? you decide—and my god, am i in the mood to give him anything he wants, so expect more of those in the future lol)
