The Subway Diaries ( 2/? )
By; Owai
Rated; R
Summary; The city is cold and empty, and the subway runs through it. In a world where the city lights blind you to everything real, Uchiha Sasuke tries to impress an empire, and meets a boy running from his own. AU.
---
It was the phone that had awoken Sasuke, its vibrations humming a sleepy annoyance into his consciousness as it danced erratically on the bedside table. It took effort to untangle his arms from the sheets that were wrapped precariously around his body, and only after he had reached for and dropped the cell did he notice the tingling sensation in his fingers, an allusion to the dazed night before that he only half-remembered.
When he finally got his hands on the elusive device, the caller ID flashed its warning and Sasuke hit the ignore button before he dropped it once more, i Sakura /i still blinking on the screen.
The mass of blankets to Sasuke's right convulsed, sweet morning mumbles falling like a cacophony of irritation on his ears as he sat up, back to the sunlight that was streaming in unblocked windows.
"Morning, lover."
How quaint. Lover. Sasuke smirked to himself, a rueful smile that held no real humor but only a strong sense of annoyance and what one could only describe as pity. Pathetic.
He didn't bother to hide his nakedness as he rose from the bed and walked to the dresser, brushing a white bra to the floor as he pulled a clean pair of boxers from the top drawer. Thin, cold hands slipped over his biceps from behind and brushed against his chest, something—he supposed—he was supposed to find erotic. One of his hands caught what had been misplaced swiftly and he turned with no real sense of haste.
"Who are you, again?"
There was a flash of hurt across blue eyes—women couldn't hide it as easily when he brutally cut them down—and a pout at full lips, one that Sasuke was sure would have worked on anyone that was interested. He wasn't. She was blonde and petite and naked as the day she had been born beneath that sheet but she'd already sucked him dry and Sasuke didn't like repeats.
"I'm the one you burst your swimmers for twice, honey." Her voice was as sour as a lemon, and her hands dropped immediately to her sides.
"Let me let you in on a secret—" Sasuke said as he pulled a shirt over his head and rooted around with his foot for the pants that he'd discarded the night before, "It isn't hard to make a man blow his load. I thought that was the first lesson they taught you at Quick 'n Easy University."
His ears were met with an insulted huff and the slam of a door a moment later. His favorite sheets ripped a trail of scorn down the stairs outside his loft, and Sasuke let out a belated growl as he went to collect the remains.
It wasn't as if his day were about to get any better, he realized. A transition through the packed subway, a stop to pick Naruto up at his Deathstar of Disaster, and Sasuke was off to buy books for school that he had never wanted to attend in the first place. Just another disappointment for himself and his father in a world i full /I of disappointments.
And the subway was packed.
Sasuke shifted uncomfortably between a man with a poorly disguised toupee and a woman with a handbag the size of a five year old child. He'd ended up near the back of the car again, and even though newly-manifested claustrophobia was encroaching, Sasuke still managed to keep an eye out for the platform of the boy with ghostly eyes and a face that was equally haunting.
He wasn't there, though–only a slow trickle of passengers and not even the man with the moustache to hint that this was the right stop. But it was the right stop, Sasuke realized– his stop, and it was with a curse and a mad squeeze for the door that he only just managed to not get clipped by the jaws of the subway car. Pulling at his jacket as if offended, Sasuke muttered darkly to the day and took off into the bright sunlight and the oblivion that waited beyond.
---
Naruto's door was unlocked.
He lived in the part of the city that Sasuke preferred to refer to as The Lesser Half. It was hardly run-down, but certainly wasn't the Uchiha District, or even upper town. The flowers that lined Naruto's apartment complex were violets—plain and ordinary—and the paint was white and cracked only if you looked up close.
And Naruto left his door unlocked.
It wasn't as if he had anything worth stealing, the blonde had rationalized to Sasuke one day a week after he lost his key and simply stopped using the deadbolt. Shikamaru, who had been lazily listening in had muttered something about privacy, but Sasuke had nullified that point with a quick quip about how Naruto could never get a girl, anyway–even if he did understand the meaning of the word.
It had quickly dissolved into a battle wherein Sasuke matched wits with his unarmed opponent and left Naruto sulking over a bowl of half-eaten ramen.
Naruto's trust in the rest of the city, however ridiculous, did make it easy for Sasuke to let himself in whenever he needed to. More often than not, he found himself asleep on Naruto's couch while the bewiskered boy watched late-night television, Sasuke all too exhausted to wade through the city of expectations his family offered up or just too angry to try. If they wanted him, they only ever sent Itachi (they had their own place, this part of the city went untouched by their multitudes), who was too busy to deal with his little brother most of the time, anyway, and couldn't be bothered to come to a hole-in-the-wall apartment to collect him. Most of the time Sasuke ended up being picked up by a cabby with a note and a grin that spoke of too-due compensation.
The handle gave and there was a shuffle behind the door as it opened, Sasuke's eyes catching the tamed mess of Naruto's living room, his mouth already preparing a degradation before he stumbled on the figure blocking his path.
No fucking way.
Sasuke's eyes narrowed in observation of the face he had seen the day before—the pale continence framed by dark locks, the ivory eyes matching the crisp white bandages meticulously wound around the forehead. Those eyes, widened in shock and what appeared to be a quickly masked sense of fear, narrowed into a defensive glare as Sasuke pulled in the legions of surprise that were wrenching at his body.
What the hell was he doing here?
It was only a short moment before Sasuke regained control of his expressions and voice—after all, whatever he was reacting to was unwarranted, just the shock of circumstance—and sneered.
"Hey, Sasuke! What the hell, bastard, I thought you said you were gonna be here for breakfast!" Naruto, looking smudged and unkempt, called from the threshold of the kitchen. Sasuke's eyes lingered, predatory on the face of the boy before him a moment longer, Naruto's outburst removing whatever odd traces of what Sasuke could only describe as fear that had been hidden there and wiping the slate of anything but a carefully alluded to challenge.
"I am," Sasuke replied before turning his eyes back to Naruto once more and stepping past the other and out of his shoes. His eyes cleared of the lingering images before them. "It's not like you're ready."
"That's because I was waiting for you, dumbass." Naruto muttered irritably, throwing a sticky, batter-infused dish towel at Sasuke's face, which the Uchiha caught deftly before contact. "Hey, Neji—Neji, wait—you gotta eat—where're you going, anyway? Are you going out to buy books for University? That's where we're going, maybe you could come with."
Sasuke, who had settled himself on the sunken couch, cocked an eyebrow slightly in Naruto's direction before taking the opportunity to further dissect the boy whose mere presence seemed to be mocking him. He looked no more comfortable than the day before, but still carried that promising air of self-confidence.
Neji flashed a glare that was smoldering, and Sasuke felt the corner of his mouth lift slightly into a smirk, a strange sensation waxing through him at the gesture.
"I said no." Neji responded icily, "I've finished with University and don't need books." He turned away again (eyes falling only briefly on Sasuke, though it was long enough) and Sasuke heard him mutter, rather distinctly to the door, "I don't need this," before he disappeared from view behind it.
Naruto huffed with consternation and took his sinking shoulders and expression back into the kitchen. "Bit of an asshole." He muttered, "Not like I'm not used to that ."
"Tch." Sasuke responded, sinking back into the couch and feigning disinterest as he turned on Naruto's half black and white television set. It murmured in an uncomfortable pitch for a few moments before the sound and picture evened out, lulling Sasuke into a painless state of vegetation. His mind didn't stay suspended for long, however–Naruto's constant crashing from the kitchen made it nearly impossible to keep his thoughts from jumping all over the place in a staccato sonata. There was only one place they were falling, anyway, and that whole endeavor of ignoring that train seemed rather pointless to begin with.
Resolve did very little to staunch the urge to scratch an itch, however.
Sasuke endured it a few moments more before throwing himself off of the dilapidated couch and into the kitchen with a growl. It was a war zone, but at least he could recognize the artillery.
"Who was that guy." His voice demanded over the swish of batter.
"Huh?" Naruto responded automatically, dribbling a creamy line onto a hot pan, "Oh, that was Neji. He's my new roommate. Didn't I tell you last night? I thought I did."
"Obviously not."
"Oh. Well. He is." Naruto shrugged and Sasuke rolled his eyes, leaning on the wall with his arms crossed in a manner that suggested he was waiting for further explanation. Naruto, Captain Oblivious, finally noticed and did a double-take. "Wh-aaaat?" He whined, "I don't know anything else. He just showed up and slept and bought some shit and now he's not here."
"You really are a moron." Sasuke assessed, "Don't you even interview the people you try to wrangle into paying half your rent?"
"Do you interview the girls you pick up at bars to fuck?" Naruto growled, waving a black spatula in the vicinity of Sasuke's face, "It's the same thing without the sex. You can see how much he wants to hang around, I highly doubt he wants to be my buddy."
"Tch. Like you care about any of that shit when you want to butt into people's business." Sasuke responded, eyes narrowing at an accusation that he felt was outside of Naruto's jurisdiction.
"Look, I tried, okay? I don't think he's gonna kill me in my sleep, so I'd like to try and keep him from doing it while I'm awake, too–if you don't mind. Don't know what the hell it is to you." He flipped a burnt pancake and Sasuke returned a promising smirk.
"Not a thing." He said after a moment. And then, "Let's go. I'll take you out to breakfast. I'm not eating that shit."
---
April brought spring, rain and a slew of judgments and ultimatums that left a sour feeling in the pit of Sasuke's stomach.
Expectation seemed to rest in every suggestion, every clipped word, every silence. He felt it most in the lingering glances of his father, for even when Itachi was absent from the family home, he was present in the silence. Brunches with his father became critical assessments of his credentials—this isn't good enough, this school will not prepare you, work harder—words were weapons thrown at Sasuke's back in a moment of weakness where i every /i moment with his father was a moment of weakness.
Sasuke found respite only in his mother. She overlooked his inadequacies—didn't see them at all, in fact—and reminded Sasuke that he was still welcome in his own home and that he would never stop being their son. Of him, they were proud.
Such words couldn't staunch the wild competition between himself and Itachi, though—that had been burned into him from too young an age; it was in his blood. It was mostly a one-sided affair nowadays—Itachi was older and had long since proven himself to the world and the family. He didn't need to use Sasuke for his ends anymore, and therefore had no reason to compete with him. For Itachi, Sasuke wasn't even a blip on the radar.
It was Sasuke that demanded his brother find time to beat him into the ground with a precision that was unrivaled by anyone he had ever encountered. Itachi carried out his duties with the deadly stroke of a genius too confident in his abilities. It was cool and calm and everything that Sasuke had only ever tried and failed to mimic to such a degree.
A week into the new school year, one such session found him lying on his back in the family dojo, breaths coming hard and heavy in his chest while stars burst in the back of his eyes. Sasuke could hear Itachi moving around somewhere behind him, gathering his possessions and saying nothing as he readied himself for departure in the way that this room always found them: Sasuke defeated and Itachi victorious. The heart in Sasuke's chest beat in painful recognition of his bent and bruised pride.
"I find you lacking." Itachi's choice of tone was blank and emotionless. Sasuke could barely remember when it had been anything but, and he could almost imagine the image of his father saying the same words. The worthless second son, not even deserving of an ounce of emotion from his perfect brother.
"Tch," It was hard to bring the disdain that was normally so apparent in his voice to the forefront now, in the face of all that he had ever wanted and failed to be. "I appreciate that." The sarcasm fell flat.
"Why are you wasting my time."
It was a ton of bricks ground to sand and syphoned down his throat.
"Why are you wasting mine?" Sasuke hissed, sitting up deliberately and snatching a sweaty towel from the floor in order to mop at his brow, "You're not training me, you're not helping me get any better—you're not even trying to beat me—you're just mocking me with every parried blow, like you can't be bothered to even be serious!"
Itachi's face could not have been carved for marble. It lacked the warmth for a carving of even that nature—it was simply a sheer rock ledge that dropped off to eternity. Or maybe just to the dead stop of a suicide plunge.
Sasuke's brother regarded him for a moment before slinging the bag of a week's clothing over his shoulder. This was just one more stop in the line before he could go back to his life.
"You're very foolish, Sasuke." Itachi said, and his voice sounded exasperated. Sasuke recognized it from every time he'd ever asked for training as a child. Every time he'd ever asked for Itachi's secrets. Sometimes, Sasuke thought his family didn't want him to succeed. That they already had their hero in Itachi. (And what a hero, his voice chided, all empty soul and marionette to his father—was that really what Sasuke wanted to become? Every time he saw Itachi he thought—yes. Every time his father found him inadequate, the answer was—yes. It was always yes.)
"Tell me something new, you bastard!" Sasuke was on his feet in a matter of seconds, and the yell shook the quiet atmosphere like a nuclear bomb. He had been done with worship a long time ago—Sasuke no longer had the energy to love something he had grown to hate. "Don't treat me like I'm not even worth taking the time to come up with a new synonym!"
There was an odd flash behind Itachi's eyes, and Sasuke's feet faltered for a moment before he found himself pressed painfully against the back dojo wall. His eyes widened, thoughts amounting to nothing. When had admiration turned to bitterness? Why hadn't he noticed the anger sneaking up on him?
"You're not trying hard enough. You lack enough i hate /I to beat me, and when you hate me, even desire to kill me, it won't be enough. You're too weak." The word was spat out like a bitter grape, and Sasuke could feel an invisible hand gripping his heart and squeezing it to death. "But if you want to destroy me—and I can see it in your eyes, brother—channel it into something you can use instead of this ridiculous brand of self-pity."
Itachi released him, and Sasuke suddenly realized just how great the pressure had been.
"I'm done. I'm tired of watching you be so pathetic." Itachi sneered as Sasuke's knees hit the ground, hands soon following. Sasuke heard the door slide shut and let out a strangled groan of frustration that sounded a little bit like shattering glass.
He was tired of it, too.
---
"It's to relax. Loosen up. Forget all the crap we learned in classes."
It had been a long week. Subway shock filtered into Neji's hand, his feet, threw his hair into a rhythm that was in opposition to the natural beat of life. The vibrations in the pole that his hand was currently closed around had numbed his elbow and was reminding him that his shoulders ached. The thud of every cross section in the tracks whispered that his feet weren't meant to stand so long. The incessant drone of voices in his ears begged him to get off at the next stop and turn around.
The blonde at his side was blocking the path into the next car.
"By getting drunk and wasting your money." Neji responded tiredly, eyes staring blankly at his reflection in the glass as the dark, inner-subway walls flew past unnoticed.
"It's not wasting it! Aren't you even listening to me?!" The yell ordered several glares, delivered on a silver plate. Or at least Neji imagined it was silver. Everything was silver to him.
"No. I'm responding to my own inner-dialogue aloud."
Naruto snorted. "What does that even mean?" He muttered as the car slowed to a stop. "Whatever, you'll enjoy it. You've been working all week, you've gotta be tired. Who doesn't want to relax?"
Neji failed to see how Naruto couldn't follow his own logic. Yes, he was tired. Thus, he would rather be in their apartment, in his room, sleeping. He'd only ever agreed to this because he'd thought it would shut Naruto up.
He was wrong. There was no shutting Naruto up.
Doors retracted into the car walls and Neji and Naruto exited onto a busy platform. Each time he entered the subway, Neji was reminded that life never stopped. It was a constant stream of running from place to place, ruled by a ticking clock, each hand getting closer and closer to twelve. Some things you just couldn't outrun. Neji knew—but he'd become good at running.
They broke into the April night as if out of a jail. The air that hit was cool but heavy, a punishment only a fraction better than the warm, humid air of the world below ground. Neji pushed his hands into his jacket and let out a nonspecific sigh of annoyance. At his side, Naruto seemed to be brimming with poorly-repressed energy. It was leaking like a milk carton in the sun.
The city lights glowed and Neji was blind for a moment before seeing all too well. Headlights lit his face and danced along the wet sidewalk. They threw dark caricatures of his and Naruto's forms against darkened businesses alongside the sidewalk, and it was finally as if Neji's ghosts had materialized. Despite how different this place was, it held a lot of home and he remembered it all too well.
"Hey—" There was a tug on Neji's jacket, and he looked back at Naruto only in time to see the blonde running ahead toward the opening of a darkened alleyway where three nondescript figures shone in the backlighting. "This is it! Come on, Neji!"
Neji's shadow flickered uncertainly, but moved forward at the same, steady pace he did.
"So this is your new roommate? You look kind of sickly." Said a boy to Naruto upon Neji's arrival. He seemed to possess neither manners nor a hairbrush. Neji's response was a gaze that didn't bother lingering.
"Kiba!" A pink-haired, well-dressed girl said as she jabbed the offender in the ribs. "Sorry about him—hi, Neji. I'm Sakura, and this is Ino. The jerk's Kiba." She gestured to a blonde and the boy that had addressed Neji originally.
"Where the heck are Shikamaru and Sasuke? I can't believe that bastard's late again." Naruto huffed, cutting off Neji's reply and crossing his arms while he formed a strange pout with slitted eyes and a rumbling growl.
"Shikamaru had to work again—Sasuke—"
"Tch."
Neji briefly wondered if the disdain and arrogance was warranted, or if the dark boy approaching couldn't be bothered to come up with a personality less abrasive. Upon their previous meeting, Neji himself hadn't been of mind to assess him outside of the drawl and sneer before fleeing—the sharp recognition sending his reflexes into overdrive. He'd been on edge like this for weeks and it was driving him insane.
It would be one month though—one full month before Neji would force himself to relax. Right now, edginess was just good common sense. He was still certain that the other—dark hair and eyes like clotted blood—was somehow familiar.
Neji turned halfway to allow for the approach, but his eyes were hooded and his posture was something like that of a threatened animal. The others mulled around him more or less oblivious.
"Finally," Naruto huffed as if offended by Sasuke's lack of punctuality.
"You just got here, moron, you were five feet in front of me."
"Oh yeah?" Naruto responded, "Trying to get a good look at my ass, were you?"
A collective symphony of groans lit the atmosphere around them, and Neji realized regrettably that his original assessment of Naruto had been correct. He was an untrained dog that wouldn't stop barking.
"Can we just go inside?" Sakura said, bouncing a bit as she snuggled into her jacket. "I'm cold and Ino keeps elbowing me in the ribs."
Amidst the sharp "hey!" and further complaints from Ino, the group shuffled down the alley and came out on a side-street lit by the neon oranges, blues and pinks of a flashing club sign feet above their heads as a thick rhythm beat through their spines. Despite the remoteness, it seemed to be well-visited, and a queue had formed outside the door.
The building went up several stories, and as the others dug about their pockets for I.D.s and extra cash, Neji took the opportunity to take a step back and look up.
He felt the blood drain from his face and forced his muscles not to lock up. The sign flashed Hidoke in bold, direct letters. A few centimeters beneath club & dance shone out softly next to a twisted emblem that Neji recognized all too easily, even as it was disguised as a sun. His forehead beneath the bandages prickled.
"—Neji, come on."
It was Naruto's pinch that drew his eyes downward to the faces whose eyes were now lingering on his face. He stared back at each, glare half-formed in the city lights. One after another, like birds dropping from a telephone wire, the gazes slipped away. Except for one. Even Naruto flinched, but a red gaze held his until Neji finally looked away, back to the blonde.
"I'm not going in there." He promised.
"What! Why not!?" Came Naruto's outcry, a theatrical nature forcing the blonde's hands into his hair as he gave what looked to be an angry tug. "Come on, man! You'll like it, stop jerking me around!"
Neji understood Naruto's irritation. His display was a little overdone, but Neji could understand that, too. His expression, however, did not shift.
"No."
He turned around and headed back down the alley.
---
He could hear the footsteps once the half-swathed beat of the club music finally faded. Had it not been for the fact that he knew exactly who was following him, Neji would have disappeared in an instant—or tried to. He was beginning to realize that it wasn't going to be quite that easy, but for now he had to focus on calming his flaring sense of danger—and either losing the tail or calling him out.
Neji cut into another alley instead of breaking onto the main street and bypassed the subway entrance, staying in the shadows of darkened businesses and sketching a path of varied difficulty out of the party district and into the business district. When the footsteps became masked by the swish of car after car, but did not fade entirely, Neji gave up and entered a lighted sidewalk, only to stop completely.
The footsteps also stopped, but finally continued to approach, as if an afterthought.
Predictably, the dark-haired, carmine-eyed boy reached him in seconds.
"We seem to have the same destination." Neji said dryly, gaze leveling somewhere just below the other's own. The arrogant expression that had taken that face hostage blossomed into an even more arrogant smirk as Sasuke slipped his hands into his jean pockets.
"Is that what they're calling tailing these days?" He responded, almost surprising Neji with his honesty for honesty's sake. A car veered by them, and Neji's expression turned, masking wariness.
"Why follow me." He asked finally, the question clear and direct. Sasuke met it with a certain amount of carelessness, beginning to walk and forcing Neji to keep in step in order to get an answer, which wasn't offered readily but prolonged by that unchanging, arrogant smirk.
"Curiosity."
That seemed like a reasonable answer to Neji—perhaps not the whole truth, but he was willing to let that go. He'd learned not to ask questions at an early age, and he didn't care to know further than skin deep for now.
"Why leave the club?" Sasuke clearly had no similar outlook.
Neji's eyes turned from the path before him, and his lips curled into a sneer that looked too much like a smirk. "This isn't quid pro quo." Another car rushed by, and the lighting change behind Sasuke's head gave him a classic look that Neji studied for a moment before Sasuke's expression deepened. It was, for all intents and purposes, deliberate.
"You looked up and it seemed like you saw a ghost."
Neji's heart beat an irregularly nervous rhythm in his chest (why did this boy look familiar, again?), but when he answered, his voice was smooth.
"You were watching, hm."
"Yes," Sasuke responded, not missing a beat, "when you saw me at Naruto's, you looked startled." His voice was calm, and Neji wondered if interrogation was built into him, or if words came so naturally that they flowed seamlessly together and apart, like the deltas of a river.
"I thought I'd recognized you." They had reached lower town and business began to give way to apartments. What had once been a line of street lamps turned into the warmer glow of porch lights, and the constant murmur of cars had become less frequent.
"Didn't you?"
Neji stopped, his shoes making a soft scuffing sound on the pavement. Sasuke continued on for a moment, as if he hadn't noticed Neji's response, but when he also stopped and looked over his shoulder, there was some kind of devilry in his expression. Then he turned and angled his head down, a shock of dark hair falling across his forehead, eyes dissecting Neji as if he were a butterfly on display—and the pieces started to click into place.
Neji quite disliked the subway, he realized. The world was too small.
"Hn." He replied vaguely, beginning to walk again as he watched the numbers of the apartments go up too slowly. They walked in a weighted silence until Neji could see the apartment he—or fate—had chosen. When he was about to ascend the steps, Sasuke stepped in front of him, an invasion of personal space that was almost too swift for Neji to avoid a collision. His mind recognized a certain brand of training and filed it away as his eyes narrowed in response.
"You don't fit in. You're trying too hard." Sasuke said, and when Neji didn't respond, leaned closer, leaving Neji to stare over his right shoulder as his warm breath brushed against Neji's cheek. "If you need a lesson..."
The tingle that went up Neji's sign was a warning to retreat, and he stepped out of the circle of Sasuke's warmth and under the light of the porch.
"Thank you for that valuable information." His voice was calm and trained, but a half-pitch off. He saw it register in Sasuke's eyes and the smirk that followed.
"Goodnight, Neji." Sasuke said. Neji unlocked the door and shut it behind him.
---
The restaurant was his mother's favorite, and Sasuke had only recently found himself taking an interest in it.
It was mostly due to a familiar dark head that seemed to be weaving its way in between tables, catching Sasuke's eyes off and on. He had not much been impressed with the seating hostess, but the promise of their waiter being with them shortly was enough to stow any discontent and keep at bay comments that he never would have uttered in front of his mother, anyway.
It was a week later and Itachi had just been offered a high-end job. They were celebrating, Sasuke's mother had said. Celebrations in the Uchiha household often went very much like this.
Sasuke's father would glower at the menu as his mother made helpful suggestions. Itachi seemed uninterested entirely, and Sasuke always seemed to place his own interest elsewhere.
Later on, they would be served and talk would turn serious. Each son would be assessed by his father; Itachi first, as he was the eldest, then Sasuke. This happened no matter the occasion, and afterward there was always the invariable potent silence. Sasuke anticipated it each time, and was running the typical questions and responses over in his head as he looked over, but did not register, the menu.
A slim, pale hand reached for his wine glass and he followed it to the source.
"Are you ready to order...Uchiha-sama." Neji said, his eyes studiously avoiding Sasuke and remaining fixed on Fugaku. Sasuke's father waved a hand, but it was Itachi that responded.
"A few more minutes, Neji-kun."
Sasuke's eyes snapped to his brother almost too quickly to notice the expression in Neji's eyes go from blank to almost stricken. It was a very minute change, however, and Sasuke wasn't certain that he'd noticed it at all. Itachi hadn't seemed to—in fact, when Sasuke looked over, his expression hadn't changed.
"He's new, isn't he?" Mikoto asked, clearly taking more interest than Fugaku, who hadn't even looked up, "How did you know him, Itachi?"
"We were at university together, he a few years behind. He's a Hyuuga." Itachi responded, noncommittal. Sasuke frowned and looked at his mother, whose face had taken on a softer edge as she glanced away courteously, her eyes looking sad.
Sasuke's jaw tightened. A Hyuuga. That explained everything, then. Well, almost everything.
Perhaps hardly anything at all.
Yet he wondered why he hadn't realized before.
---
b Author's Note; /b
1.) Hidoke; "Sundial." Its meaning and significance will become apparent later :