A/N: Spotted-a wild update appears! As always, apologies for the wait. My level of fail knows no bounds. Good news is, I've finally found some pockets of free time that I can dedicate to writing. So expect much more frequent updates!

THIS CHAPTER. When I first started planning this fic, it had three distinct arcs in my mind:

Arc 1: Fucking dream ninjas

Arc 2: Ninja feels in the fucking forest

Arc 3: Fallout every-fucking-where and not a drop to drink

I THOUGHT that this chapter would finally move us into the third arc. But then this boatload of unresolved feels cropped out of nowhere (not nowhere, the fault is Sai's, like so many things). So the next chapter should take move us forward.

Much love, again and again and again, for sticking with this story. It means more to me than you'll ever know.

I do not own Naruto, and am making zero profit from the writing of this story.

Chapter Nine:

Target

Naruto

He'd never been good at this balancing bullshit.

Just ask Iruka-Sensei, who'd spent the majority of Naruto's poise and precision lessons shouting so hard his ponytail came loose or making helplessly bewildered hand movements at the air, depending on the exact size and height of the object Naruto had managed to fall off of this time. Or Jiraya-Sensei, who'd made really great lemon-sour faces as he attempted to explain things like 'gravity doesn't work that way, Naruto' and 'you are a ninja how are you this bad at standing on one foot'.

The point was, Naruto was a champion battering ram-perfect for obliterating obstacles and throwing himself at shit until it exploded into tiny, tiny pieces. But toss him three differently shaped balls and tell him to hop on one foot (upside down, because this was a Kakashi-Sensei exercise, and Kakashi-Sensei didn't believe in doing normal things when he could do dickish things instead) and Sakura would laugh herself sick watching him execute what she called his 'floppy, flaily dance of failure'.

And so being stuck between two ninjas with stupid hair, a serious skin-flashing fetish, and enough emotional baggage to paint the entire Leaf Village emo-black was starting to make Naruto itch.

Sasuke wasn't talking. He'd never been the chatty kind of angsty ninja (Neji) but he'd never been the completely silent type either (Gaara, who'd gotten better in recent years, but still preferred to update Naruto on the depth of his emotional pain via uncomfortably wide-eyed staring). But for every mile they'd inched towards home, Sasuke had gotten quieter and quieter. And now, so close to the Village gates that this was the last campfire they would need to build, Sasuke had managed to shut off even the tiny tics that Naruto had learned to read like a language.

Which Naruto really fucking resented, because he'd spent years learning how to speak Sasuke and the bastard shouldn't be able to just shut off Naruto's one academic achievement like that.

But the more he pestered Sasuke, shouting and shaking and poking with his toes because it brought out Sasuke's happy-murder face, the more Sai's smiles emptied into those fake and fragile things that made Naruto want to fill them with his fist.

So he bitched at Sai until his smile softened. But then Sasuke's face went blank again, and so Naruto described in loving detail what a twat Sasuke was until the ice cracked a little. Only to turn around and find Sai fading back into his pictures, Sasuke's words about pegs and where they belonged lingering like ghosts in the air.

"JUST-LOVE YOURSELVES!" Naruto finally bellowed, startling several birds from the trees. "Stop with the quiet-sad, or I will make you two hug your shit out, see if I don't."

Sasuke didn't bother with a response. Sai's head tipped gracefully to one side. "Loving myself in public is frowned upon. The book said so."

Naruto made a sound like one of his frogs being squished and buried his head in the foliage.

"You're doing fine," Sakura assured him later, as the darkness around them deepened into night.

"Mah," Naruto grumped, and stared across the fire at Sai and Sasuke. Kakashi-Sensei was sitting between them, reading his porn with a happy eye-smile like the sheer amount of angst in the air wasn't enough to crush lesser ninjas into flattened Fire Nation pancakes. "Kakashi-Sensei should maybe move away from all of the manpain happening over there right now. He's like five seconds away from punching the nearest person and telling them it was in the name of vengeance. Or some shit."

"Sensei is immune to the manpain of others," Sakura reminded him. "Sensei has manpain of his very own."

Naruto puffed out his cheeks to properly display his outrage. "Hey-I'm immune to manpain too, Sakura!"

Sakura offered him a deeply pitying look and said, "Monologues. I have listened to so many of your monologues, Naruto, and none of them suggest immunity to any kind of emotional hurt."

Naruto hissed, but Sakura's stare informed him that she would destroy him with the power of her brain if he tried to argue with her.

"I'm used to Sasuke's manpain," Naruto said, and scratched lazily at his hair. Itchy, itchy-needed a bath. "I mean. We could fix every single problem in the world tomorrow and the Bastard would still find some way to bare his ninja-boobs and rage about betrayal." Across the fire, Kakashi-Sensei made a funny choking sound behind his book. With his chakra bound, Sasuke's senses weren't heightened enough to hear his and Sakura's whispered conversation, but his absolutely blank face had a super fun combination of fear and rage skittering up Naruto's throat. "And I know the genjutsu left him rattled because Sasuke's only ever that dead behind the eyes when there's a shitstorm of crazy happening inside his skull-"

"It's more than that," Sakura mused, green eyes sharp and considering. "I mean, yes. He has corpse-eyes, so there's definitely a shit storm. But it's more than that."

"I know." Naruto's throat was tight and sour. "I'll have to hit him about it, eventually. But that's normal, so normal. What's Sai's deal? I thought we group-hugged the angst out of him a while back."

Across the fire, Sai tipped his chin the barest bit and leveled the flattest of stares in Naruto's direction. "Whatever," Naruto said back to Sai's unimpressed face. "My hugs could fix your shit. My hugs are made of light and fucking rainbows, you know this to be true."

In the flickering firelight, Naruto saw Sai's lips curve into a tiny smile. But it was still weak and barely a whisper and Naruto was going to rip some trees apart all of the trees if that was what it took to start fixing things.

"It's hard. Feeling like an outsider." Sakura watched the boys across the fire, chin tucked against her palm. "It hurts because you're so aware of it, because you can't stop being aware of it whenever you're around the people you're apart from."

Naruto sputtered. "Sai isn't an outsider! We spar all the time. He drew that super amazing picture of Kakashi-Sensei's 'new porn' dance. I bought him ramen!"

"Sometimes it takes more than a few bowls of noodles to fix a person's hurts," Sakura said, and rolled right over Naruto's deeply wounded squawk of objection. "Shut up, you know that. You're smarter than that."

"Sakura. I fell asleep during Iruka-Sensei's final ninja exam. Just…drooled all over my desk and Iruka-Sensei threw forty seven chalkboard erasers at my face."

Sakura rapped her knuckles against Naruto's temple-not hard enough to hurt but just like Naruto needed noodle bowls to help people, Sakura needed the hands that Granny Tsunade had taught to heal.

"There are other kinds of smart," Sakura said. "Took me a few years to figure that out. But there are other kinds of smart and you have them. Dummy."

Naruto leaned into the knuckles a little, because he'd been Sakura's teammate long enough to know that when they weren't smashing his face in they were meant as affection. "You're really smart. The smartest."

Sakura's smile was a warm and cozy thing. "Your attraction to my brain is bizarre and morally upsetting. Kakashi-Sensei says."

"Whatever. Kakashi-Sensei reads Jiraya-porn. Kakashi-Sensei doesn't get any opinions, ever."

Across the fire, Sai folded his face into a polite smile and said, "I've been informed that another way to foster friendship is by physical contact. Sasuke, is the knee an acceptable place to touch you or is that too threatening to your latent homosexuality?"

A sound, high-pitched and hysterical, filled the clearing. Judging by the way Kakashi-Sensei turned the next page with extremely casual fingers, he was never going to acknowledge that it had come from his own throat.

Sasuke didn't react at all to Sai's question-not even the barest hint of crazy Chidori eyes.

"You'd better talk to them," Sakura urged. "I mean. We both know it won't do any good for Sasuke but it might stop him from murdering Sai with his bare hands and his super calm serial killer face."

"I just…I don't…talking," Naruto repeated, with deep mistrust. "I'm shit at the talking thing, Sakura."

Sakura's pretty pink eyebrows arched upward. "Yes, I'm aware. I meant the special kind of talking that you do-where you beat them up with love and affection and motivational speeches and then come to me afterward so I can heal your idiot asses while we all cry a little about our renewed friendships." She threw an elbow at his side. "Go do that thing."

"You are my Northern Star," Naruto said worshipfully. "My guiding light forever and ever."

"Your security blanket," Sakura corrected, but she was still smiling. "Go."

Naruto went-or started to. He paused halfway to his feet. "Hey. Hey, Sakura. You didn't-that thing you said before. About how much it hurts to be an outsider. You didn't-you know that you're not an outsider, right? You're Sakura. You're our Sakura and you should never hurt, at all, okay?"

"Seriously," Sakura said, with the warmest smile Naruto had ever seen. "Seriously, you are such a fucking moron."

Naruto knew that the answering grin stretching his face was some total sappy bullshit, but he didn't care. He'd never been afraid to let Sakura see, not her. Compared to others, it barely hurt to love her at all. "Pffft. You already called me smart. No take-backs!" Naruto crowed, and went to horse-collar one the emo ninjas he had a habit of collecting with a warmth around his heart.

###

In hindsight, opening a conversation with the words, "You know I totally want you, right?" may have been a mistake.

Especially when the person on the other end of the conversation was Sai. Who offered a heroically bland face and responded with, "Are you going to show me your penis?"

"WHY IS THAT THE FIRST THING YOU ASSUME!" Naruto wailed, as his brain fizzled and died inside his skull. "JUST-EVERY TIME, SAI!"

Sai moved his shoulders in a careless shrug. "The book had many things to say about private conversations in the woods."

"I hate the book. Just for the record, Sai? I really hate your fucking book."

"Fine. If you dragging me to the woods for a secret meeting wasn't phallicly motivated-," Naruto threw down an accusatory finger, realized he had no words, and settled for gibbering angrily in Sai's general direction instead. "-then why did you bring me out here?"

"I wanted to talk to you," Naruto said. "About things. Things that have nothing to do with penises, okay?"

Sai's shoulders actually drooped a little, like a penis-free conversation was an upsetting thing. Manfully, Naruto pretended not to notice.

He explained, "When I said 'I want you', I meant in a ninja Team-Bro kind of way. I want you on my team, Sai. You know that, right?"

Sai was too well-trained to stiffen his spine or jerk back a little or react basically at all. Even his voice was the mellowest of mellow things as he said, "Sakura already gave me a talk about feeling included."

"And that's good," Naruto agreed. "Because Sakura is crazy smart and you should listen to everything she says. But you've been acting like a super ninja-bitch since you found us in the woods and realized that we're bringing Sasuke home to stay. So I thought, maybe? You might want to hear it from me, too."

For a long moment, the only sound filling the thickened air between the trees was the whining hum of cicadas buzzing their big, drunken selves around. Naruto watched Sai's face, pale and still so perfectly poised in the heavy dark.

"It's not a ridiculous assumption to make," Sai said at last, and so pleasantly, too. "It's basic mathematics, really. If a completed team is the product, the answer to a number problem, then each individual ninja is a variable needed to create the equation. Your team was incomplete without the Sasuke variable-the equation was imbalanced and couldn't be solved. My addition to the problem helped create a workable result." Sai's eyes closed and curved into happy crescents. "But I'm not a part of the true answer to your equation, Naruto. I never was."

"First of all, fuck you muchly for making me do math. That's such a dick move and-no, we are still not talking about penises, I will hit you." Naruto sucked a deep breath inside his lungs. "And, don't-don't smile like that. Just because you think it's socially appropriate or some shit. Smiles should be happy and Kakashi-Sensei smiles like that sometimes and it's not happy, Sai, it just hurts."

Naruto watched as the fake smile drained out of Sai's face like tea from a cracked china cup. Wondered if it was worse, the absolute emptiness left behind.

"You piss me off," Naruto informed him helpfully. "Like, so much do you piss me off. All this time we've been carting you around as a part of our team and now you're not owning to the position?"

"I was trained to be temporary. To fill in for as long as I was useful and then move on when that usefulness expired."

"And, what? You never thought you could be useful long term?" The sudden ringing silence in the air was so loud and it made Naruto want to punch a tree, or the ground, or maybe the leaders of every ninja secret society ever created-because here was somebody, another somebody, who'd been made to feel like less. There was a reason Naruto could find them so easily-there were too many, too many victims of ninja politics, and survivors of awful shit always knew what to recognize in others, didn't they?

Except. It didn't have to be a game of just victims and the people who made them that way. Naruto had learned really early on that people could only make you feel like less if you never forced them to acknowledge the more. You could take back what they tried to scrape away by kicking and screaming and being what Granny Tsunade called 'a fucking political nightmare dressed in orange'.

So, Naruto said, "That's some bullshit. Total, total bullshit. Okay? You're ours. And not in a temporary way."

Sai's breath hitched. Just the barest bit and probably completely unnoticeable to people who didn't have Naruto's years of experience wading through the emotional constipation of tragedy-ninjas.

"Perhaps," Sai allowed. "But only to occupy a space already carved out by someone else. Now that the original placeholder has returned-,"

"I don't want you to be like Sasuke," Naruto blurted, because meh. Subtlety was lame and overrated. "Holy shit, Sai, please don't be like Sasuke. That would-wow, that would be a lot because his sad comes with crazy and yours not so much and I don't think I can actually handle that much crazy of that variety at a single time, true?" That got a startled blink, which didn't look like much but had Naruto doing a victory dance inside his head. "I want you to be Sai. I want you to draw pictures of me doing stupid shit and give them to Granny Tsunade so she can put them on the Naruto Shame-Wall inside the tower. I want to watch Sakura beat your head in the next time you call her 'ugly'."

Sai winced, and touched the ribs Sakura had turned black and blue the last time he'd smilingly insulted her, which Naruto had watched from the sidelines. Watched with a large grin, because damn straight Sakura could defend her own honor.

"And Sai? I want you there to help us with the Bastard. I know it's going to be ugly, him being back, I'm not a total moron no matter what Kiba and his stupid fucking dog say. And I want you there to draw pictures of his manpain and ask questions about his penis, because I'm getting really sick of hearing about mine."

Sai's eyes had gotten progressively wider during Naruto's ramble. Not wide enough to make him look actually surprised. But almost enough for an actual expression and that was a big deal.

"I thought." Sai pressed his lips together for a moment, a bloodless line. "I thought-,"

"What, that our team is like a secret ninja tree house? Only one bitchy angst-ninja allowed?"

The fingers on Sai's right hand curled into a loose fist-not to hit anybody, Naruto knew. Sai's fingers always did that when they were itching for a pen, the one thing that kept him grounded.

"You're not Sasuke," Naruto continued. "I never thought you were-Sasuke never smiles, not even fake ones because showing his teeth in a non-murder grin is beneath him or some shit. You have a weird obsession with showing off your abs, and Sasuke's always been a tit-ninja. You both annoy the shit out of me in completely different ways." Naruto took a step forward, punched Sai's arm in a friendly fashion. "I'm not going to tell you to stop doing the creepy observation thing, because it's another thing that makes you Sai. But maybe take a second to stop studying the bonds between other people? And look at the ones you've managed to create."

"Would you come after me, Naruto? If I left."

"And kick your ass," Naruto said reassuringly. "Special chase-down and face-beating, just for you. I swear it."

Sai smiled at that, tiny and true. Which was maybe not the healthiest of responses but promises of 'together forever' enforced by physical violence was pretty tragically standard for Team Seven.

"Do we…hug now?" Sai wondered. "Hugging is an appropriate response to declarations of friendship."

Naruto grinned, big enough to fill his cheeks. "Mah-later. Later we can do the hugging thing, when Sakura is there to protect my virtue. Because you have ass-groping hands, Sai, I know this to be true, and I am not listening to you bitch about your drawings if I break your fingers for it."

Sai huffed out a soft sound-might have been a laugh and Naruto sure as shit wasn't going to call it a sob.

They didn't walk back to the campsite side by side-Naruto knew that his speeches were bitching awesome, but he also knew that some hurts needed more than words. So he left Sai in the little clearing to carefully reassemble his empty-face, because he knew that he'd need to spend some time now proving his words with actions.

But he also knew that Sai would follow him, would return to their fire and maybe feel a little more welcome around it. And that wasn't such a bad place to start from.

###

"You emo-ninjas are a lot of work," Naruto complained a little later, kicking his feet a little against the log he was sitting on.

Sasuke didn't have a response, even though he was the unquestioned King of emo-ninjas everywhere and maybe should have defended his people a little.

The campsite was suspiciously empty, because their teammates had conjured truly ridiculous excuses to be anywhere else in order to give Naruto a chance to pester Sasuke in private. Well, Sakura and Sai had conjured up excuses. Kakashi-Sensei had offered a cheerful, "Enjoy your talk of tears and emotion!" before fucking off to frolic in the forest, because seriously, he was such a dick.

"And I don't understand why I have so many of you," Naruto continued mournfully. "Why there are so many tragedy-planets orbiting my bright star of awesome. Because I recognize your obvious need for cuddles, maybe, and probably won't die when you knife me mid-Bro hug."

Still, nothing. Sasuke continued to stare at the fire like maybe he could put it out with the sheer force of his not-caring.

"You're not mad about Sai," Naruto said, because fine. If Sasuke wanted to shut down the face that Naruto had learned to understand, then Naruto would read his silences instead. Because there had been plenty of those throughout their friendship, and Naruto already knew how to keep breathing through the weight of them. "I mean, on some level you're mad about Sai because you're actually mad about everything really deep down. But he's not the reason why you're playing 'Guess my Bastard Emotions, because Talking is so much less fun that becoming a Bottle of Repressed Ninja-Feelings'."

"Why do we need to talk," Sasuke finally, finally said, his voice the flattest Naruto had ever heard it. "We'll be back in the Village tomorrow. That's fate, right? This was the way it was always going to end up, isn't that what you've been squawking at me for years now? So why talk about it."

Naruto hummed a little at the night sky. Kicked his feet a little more.

Eventually, he said, "Meh. I don't believe in fate. Kinda lame, the idea that nothing we do really matters because everything was already decided. That's some of your tragic thinking shit, not mine." Naruto's felt his mouth curve in a little smile. "But I do believe in meant. In knowing things are going to happen because you want it badly enough, because you know you're going to put the work in."

"So you wanted your ending more than I wanted mine," Sasuke said. Still so blankly, Naruto was going to kick him instead of the log pretty soon.

"I mean, I did want it pretty bad," Naruto agreed. "But not just me-Sakura wanted it, too. And Kakashi-Sensei, even though his favorite pastime is pretending he actually hates us all."

"You think I can't stand against the wants of others."

"Nah, I know you can," Naruto said. "Because you're such a bastard and doing the opposite of what people want gives you bastard-joy. But-Sasuke? It wasn't just the wants of others you were standing against."

"Really."

"Mmm," Naruto hummed.

"And what other wants am I fighting against, then?"

"Yours, I think." The stars were super bright tonight, and Naruto kept one eye fixed on them even as he watched Sasuke's shoulders tighten with the other. "Even though you'd rather Chidori yourself in the face than admit it. You want to come home, Sasuke. And that's harder to fight, true?"

There was a long, long silence. Naruto counted stars until his eyes blurred.

"You're such a fucking idiot," Sasuke said at last.

And Naruto grinned. Because the words were harsh. And pretty much anyone else wouldn't have heard it.

But Sasuke sounded like Sakura had before.

###

A/N: Maybe now the road can carry us home, without Team Seven tripping over stray emotions every five feet. Next Chapter: Sasuke's POV-All About that Rage, Bout that Rage, No Settle. Happy Reading!