a/n:

don't know if i should keep putting in 'unhealthy coping mechanism' as a note warning in this stage… since literally this whole stage is basically it. like every single chapter. let me know if you want a warning of it i guess. though i promise i'll definitely keep giving warnings about the more delicate subjects!

that said… do you have any idea HOW LONG i've waited to post this one? (and the next chapter! especially the next one!)

. . .


see your clouds taking shape; i feel the rush of static on my face


Summary of the chapter:

Clenched shut jaw, palms consumed raw from hanging on too tight, too long.

But there's nothing left to keep hold of.

So...

...he...

...starts letting go.

. . .


.

.

5 years back

.

Sasuke makes the mistake of looking down.

He's distracted. Unheedingly absorbed by the breeze playing between the dry leaves, the smattering buzz of unseen insects, sounds of wildlife all around, Naruto's distinct voice whilst he's animatedly talking to Kakashi about something or other during their lunch break, Sakura listening in and giving her input when asked. It all sets the pastel white to a dimming background noise.

So it's just the slipping matter of a second, of his view aligning with Naruto's lowering arm, the gaping sleeve sliding down tan skin.

And catches the purplish blue splashed across the thin circle of Naruto's forearm, the inside of the fabric stained coppery with dried over blood.

His breath catches.

Caught unaware, the moderate widening of his eyes betrays his surprise. His grip slackens unintentionally, chopsticks cutting through the soft texture of his half-touched eggroll, falling from his fingers.

Twice can't be a simple coincidence...can it?

Sasuke almost flinches back from the unbidden thoughts taking root in him, the unwelcome attention exclusively focused on his teammate.

Suddenly frustrated with himself, he tears his gaze away.

Sasuke forces himself to swallow down another mouthful, as if nothing's happened, and so forth with the rest of his meal.

But his appetite is abruptly gone.

.

.

present day

.

He can still taste the blood across the roof of his mouth. A new molar fills the cavity in his inflamed gum, tongue sticking to his palate in desensitized anxiety.

He's at the table, flanked by Sakura and Kiba. Legs crossed at the ankles, the bone of his elbow jabbed into the smooth top, holding the weight of his head in one palm and slumped over from the weight of the world curving his spine.

He's only half-listening to the faint, pastel white noise filling a background of quiet and unsureness, chopsticks sinking into his food, glass sitting half-full next to his mostly untouched lunch.

The meals have been few and far in between.

(He used to be so hungry for the world, Naruto thinks a bit too numbly, life, the unearthed parts of it, puzzle pieces waiting to be stuck into place. He used to starve for the magnetic pull of it, the utter fascination of it all.)

He's just not hungry anymore.

Memories have been bubbling to the surface all day, frothing up like the fizz out of cold cans they used to crack open on hot summer days.

"Lady Tsunade asked about you again."

Naruto not actively mincing his true thoughts for once, which results in him saying something really mean out loud. Instead of being admonished for it, like Iruka, like any other adult would undoubtedly do, it instead has Jiraiya cracking up. Shocking Naruto into a tentative grin of his own. Instead of considering him just another wedge out of the hostile cluster he has to guard himself from, for the first time being around an adult has him feeling genuinely at ease.

"Maybe you should–"

His mentor shamelessly laughing at his twenty-ninth failed attempt, while Naruto is flopped belly down on the ground, pouting in exasperation. He flips Jiraiya off for good measure, and only succeeds in making him chortle harder.

He murmurs, absently. Numb...for the most part.

"I can't."

Loose-tongued from alcohol but with palpable effort still, slumped over the counter on the squeaking stool of a dimly lit inn, Jiraiya had vouchsafed about how he reminds him in more ways than one of two students he separately taught to, long ago. He has no idea who the unknown mentees could be, or why an inexplicable sadness washed over him at the mention. The topic is never brought up again and Naruto isn't plucky enough to ask why.

"But facing her could–"

Naruto shakes his head with effort.

His jaw tenses. His chopsticks bend from the rising pressure in his fingertips.

Jiraiya buying twin popsicles for them both for no definite reason, no particular inclination to give a single moment specific meaning. They've sat on the sidewalk to eat them, watching people walk by, watching human beings encompassed in their own fretful lives, thoroughly lost to their own world centers, zealously holding onto their own issues. The two of them quietly watch life as it slowly slips by before their eyes, perfectly content with letting it.

"I can't."

Someone mistaking them for father and son. But instead of a rectification, Jiraiya grins, ruffles his hair and talks all about how he's such an unruly son that drives him crazy, and how he wouldn't have him any other way. Naruto is so surprised, he can't do much but burst into a shocked laugh. Chest so tight with ailing and yearning, he almost starts crying.

"You haven't seen her in months, Naruto."

"Why won't you at least give it a try–"

His teacher waiting beneath a sheltering canopy out in the pouring rain, waiting him out, until he finally mastered the new technique, having done so all on his own. And underneath the pour Naruto is drained and bone-tired and hurting all over, and he's throwing his head back and giving him his toothiest grin and raising his thumb up, feeling so proud of himself, feeling strong enough to stand on his own bones and skin and bloodstream, feeling he could move mountains with sheer willpower alone if only he wished to. And for that single, peculiar moment packed with hard work and reward and life, being alive is so, so worth it and beautiful.

"Because she killed him!"

A thunderous crash pierces the very air, forces Naruto into blinking down. And he's up to his feet. Has a fist through the table.

The splintering crack sends sickening shockwaves through his system, he attempts an aborted step back. Splinters cover his newly healed knuckles, the wood latched together through wispy filaments a witness to his faltering control. The cutlery follows suit with gentle thuds upon the floor as the last of their amicable guise falls by the thread, the delicate balance they've all been deluding themselves into, warping into something more vicious now.

A stifling silence blankets the room. Shards layering the pavement, glass shattered on the white cloth. Nobody's moving on.

His it's a lousy attempt, a scramble to salvage something that isn't even there anymore. "I–I didn't mean–"

Liar.

Oh, he meant it, alright.

He means it.

Do they think he's forgotten? That she is the one who granted permission. Who ultimately allowed the suicide mission to be carried out.

If it hadn't been for her Jiraiya would still be alive now.

And he's livid.

Naruto is so angry it's choking him.

His mentor shaking him, fingers biting into his shoulders, angry eyes boring into his own, frustration and concern and fright coloring the air. Because he was so reckless. Because, before he could even have the sense to grasp at straws, his body reacted on its own. Resulting in new heights of excruciating pain to last for days and nightmares to come. Because he disregarded his own safety entirely, exchanging it for someone else's.

He sags back into the chair, the scratch of it grates against the floor underneath his weight, the breath is sucked out of his lungs. Irresolute hands eventually reach for him, on his shoulders burn their imprints below his skin, breakage inside his chest, at his feet.

Any trace of appetite he might have built up to suddenly disappears.

He hides beneath his hands in distrait fear losing any more of his temper, control, the heels of his palms digging into his eyes until the darkness goes patchy, shapeless and gray and sharp.

The pointless little I'm sorry he was meant to utter ends up selfishly dying on his lips.

Jiraiya laying a unexpected, kind hand on his head. Telling him that he's the stupidest, most reckless and bravest kid he's ever met. All due to the plain, impulsive, astoundingly simple act of weighing someone else's life over his own.


Naruto tastes gravel, dirt and his own blood. Face hot from the blows.

Jiraiya is watching over him, wearing his laidback grin, the easy ring of his voice, it'll be fin

His skull cracks against the solid asphalt. The fading memory of his mentor punched away from his wavering consciousness.

It's heaving breaths disrupting the thick sound of silence, and nothing else.

Nothingness swallows him down.


He shoves everything off his desk.

Ends up losing his footing, elbows catching onto the hard surface and he heaves, and watches his belongings fly in a heap, scrolls and other paraphernalia scatter across the floor.

He ripped the doors off first, the closet hitting the ground a suspended breath later. The cacophonous crash of it dissolving into the bare walls.

Throws the desk across the room, too. Watches it break upon impact. Drawers flung open and away, clothes strewn. The mattress is upturned and askew, the fuzz coming loose.

Pictures lie without frames. Faces past and known, and torn to shreds now.

More wreckage to bear upon.

With nothing left to hold him upright, Naruto sinks down to his hands and knees, fingers splayed open across the pavement, bracing gravity's pull.

Yet another headache splits his ideals adrift.

Sparks sizzle out from the searing flesh of his palms, scarcely constrained. Scalding the floor beneath, blowing a fog of static across his face.

Eyes bloodshot, and they burn from all the unshed tears gathering in a noose around his throat, inching by the breath.

He's been going crazy, hasn't slept in days.

The glare of a sun set ablaze precedes the blurring crackle of a pounding storm, and he struggles with his heart in his chest for clouds of breath inside this sunlit drenched room. Heaviness plunges the air, things left unsaid, innocuous dust motes like flecks of rust fluctuating between them.

"I meant what I said." Naruto utters thickly through an insulating bubble wrap of fury beating dull into his fingertips. Unhesitating. "When I told you there was nothing left."

Russet irises glaring into his own crimson ones from below, and his bruised feet dangling, aloft, the crash of the waterfall rush and the sound of thousands of crows thinning inside his eardrums. Past and present entwine, corrosive—and he's tried to wash him away already but—he just won't leave.

The corner of his mouth crawls up a notch, conceitedly, bleeding hollow into him. "Sounds like a point you're trying to prove to yourself." Sasuke says, careless. Proving another point himself.

Red hot spikes blister behind the pasty skin of his eyelids. For a split second, above the punch-drunk pumping of his blood, he feels his heart beating everywhere.

Clenched shut jaw, palms consumed raw from hanging on too tight, too long.

But there's nothing left to keep hold of.

So...

...he...

...starts letting go.

.

.

.

...just when it couldn't get any worse.

.

.

.

A thicket of trees hugs the horizon in a defined archway, the two-dimensionality clash of a dark picture sky blueness and a spread of verdant lush forest, both stretching for miles out of reach, nothing else beyond reach. The snapshot world of it thins from East to West, trimmed at the edges.

At its feet, haloed by a fulgent hue, rests the silhouette of a lonesome man with a shock of white hair cascading over his shoulders. Sat atop a smooth silver stone, casually slouched in his posture with his back facing him. He's abstractedly whistling an old tune he once had told him about.

Before Naruto even reaches him, his eyes are already welling with tears.


. . .

a/n:

song recommendation of the day: Let It Rain by Grayscale {discovered this one by accident and oh. my. god. was this the best accidental click of my whole life. they've stolen my heart.}

had a lump in my throat writing this whole thing. but my eyes literally filled with tears when i added in the last sentence. what is this witchcraft?

i honestly, personally, consider the third stage to be the worst, but… ah, crap. this stage is gonna hurt too, isn't it?

***to clarify (in case it wasn't obvious enough): the two students Jiraiya mentions to Naruto are of course Minato and Nagato.