OHMIGAWD. I'm soooooooooooo sorry about being such a lazy bum. I promise, I'll be a better person next time. This chapter was ridiculously hard to write...blah. The first part at least. It got easier, but I'm still not certain I'm satisfied with it.

Anyway. Edited slightly to include minor footnotes that I didn't have time for earlier. Went to see Shakespeare's Scottish play(OMGSOAMAZING) but it was in the middle of a medow (ew, bugs) and the generator died. My mum was running lights, and I'm good friends with the artistic director (plus others) so we chatted, they ran about, and we had to call the show halfway through. TT.TT SO sucks.

Disclaimer: ...::snort::

Warnings: Language, mild violence, YAOI. Lots of almost-crying. Confused Naruto.

Pairings: InoNaru (minor), OroSasu (minor), NaruSasu (main, but later)...

Summary: Naruto has always had dreams of being invisible. After a falling out with his aunt and a run-in with the school bad ass, Sasuke, he finds he really is. Somehow he has to make Sasuke see him, or he'll never be seen again. Based on the movie The Invisible.

Naruto whistled as he walked along the road. It was a bright Friday morning, just after eight o' clock when the air still had a bit of chill, and he was going to be late to school, but that wasn't a problem. It wasn't that far, and he wasn't going to be that late.

He brushed a piece of dirt off his orange sweater, and pushed the sleeves up to his elbows. He didn't have his backpack, but with the end of the school year coming up so fast there was nothing they would be doing anyway. Plus, most of his books were in his locker.

The bell had just rung when he ran into his English class. Shikamaru sauntered in behind him, yawning, utterly uncaring as to how late he was.

Jiraiya glowered at them, his aged face stretching like a disgruntled frog.

"You're late, slacker."

Naruto opened his mouth to spout out a well rehearsed excuse, but the old pervert waved a hand and gestured to the rest of the class. "Shaddup and sit down," he said, rifling through the papers on his desk.

Naruto ran a hand through his hair, wincing as he pulled out a tangle, and plopped himself into his chair. He leaned forward to rest his face in his hands, smooshing his cheeks up into a puckered look. Ino was chatting with Temari, one of the older girls, and didn't turn to talk to him as usual.

Jiraiya made a triumphant noise, and pulled his grade-book out from under his desk. "Okay, brats," he growled, scratching his chin, "Let's talk about the poems we heard the other day."

Konoha high school worked on a rotating block schedule, with certain classes every other day. With six required classes, and other electives, the required courses would be categorized as A, B, C, D, E, and F. On one week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays would be ABC days, while Tuesdays and Thursdays would be DEF days. Then the next week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were DEF days, while the other days were ABC days. It was a system designed to prepare kids for college and the schedules they were to encounter after leaving high school. Unfortunately, three hour-and-a-half classes a day didn't cut down on the work-load at all. Also, excuses for not having enough time to complete the homework were deliberately ignored, because students had an extra day to slack off before being required to hand in said homework. (1)

Kankuro, Temari's older brother, spoke up first.

"Uzumaki's poem." Naruto perked up, blinking attentively at the large brunette. "What the fuck? 'Flying around like a bird'? Night doesn't fly. It's night. That's shit."

Naruto sat up, indignant. "Hey, bastard–"

"It's a simile. We learned about it," Chouji said, almost baffled at Kankuro's inability to understand literary devices. "I thought it was pretty good..."

"It doesn't even rhyme!" Kankuro's poem had been about puppets. It rhymed the whole way through; all three pages of it.

"What's that got anything to do with it?!" Naruto snarled, leaning forward to the older boy.

"It was crap. Uzumaki's always trying to make himself important, and 'cool'. He's just a loser emo kid, looking for attention."

Naruto bit his tongue. Ino was talking like she hadn't almost had sex with him the other night. Like she hadn't been thriving on his attention for the past several months. It hurt like a bitch, to be honest.

"Bastard's got issues, man," Kin said from the back. "Major mental issues."

Everyone chuckled when Sai murmured, "Whatever it was it sucked." Ino laughed the loudest.

"Hey. Is this a game?"

The rest of the class continued to chatter, ignoring him.

"Are you guys playing a game? You think this is funny?" Naruto turned around in his seat to look around the classroom better. Chouji and Shikamaru in the corner looked uncomfortable (Shikamaru actually just looked like he would rather be napping, but he seemed awkward with the situation anyway), and Aburame Shino just sat silent, completely uninterested in bashing his classmates.

Jiraiya walked past him, hands folded behind his back. His brows were drawn into a slight frown, as people continued to talk.

"Hello?" Naruto said. He stood up. "Anybody? Pay attention! Guys!" Doing a quick calculation in his head, he reassured himself that it was Friday, May 20th, and was not, in fact, April 1st. He wasn't sure if it was Pick-On-Naruto Day, but he probably would have noticed a whole lot sooner if that was the case.

No one noticed him. Jiraiya accidently ran into his shoulder as he continued to prowl the rows of desks. He didn't stop to apologize (not that he usually would).

Naruto promptly freaked. It was too familiar. It as just like his dreams. "Hello? Hello!" Wake up, everybody!" He stepped away from his chair, spinning helplessly in a confused circle. "Hey!" Breathing faster, he began to move, drumming on Kin's desk, and waving obnoxiously in Zaku's face. "Hello! Hello! Pay some fucking attention! I'm RIGHT HERE!" No one even looked at him. "Can anybody hear me?!"

Feeling panic creeping up around his chest, Naruto turned again, working his way towards the front. His hand brushed against Shino's thick edition of The Odyssey, and, without pausing to think, grabbed it from the science-genius's desk, hurling it as hard as he could at Jiraiya's infamous poem collection. The heavy book smashed into the shelf, knocking the whole thing to the floor with a loud crash and clatter.

Everyone jumped slightly.

Naruto tried to get a hold of his breathing, and dropped his arm. His fingers brushed against something. Looking down, he saw Shino's thick edition of The Odyssey, sitting on his desk.

He looked up.

The shelf on the wall, the one that had just come crashing to the floor, was exactly as it had ben before he took his anger out on it.

"Hey, brats." Jiraiya said, walking past Naruto again, not even looking at him. "This is supposed to be constructive criticism. Why don't we have this conversation when Uzumaki's actually here? We'll talk about this when he gets back to class, yeah?"

Naruto was on the verge of hyperventilating. His impossibly blue eyes darted around the hall wildly, watching students as they passed him with no sign of recognition. He had tried everything: dancing, waving his arms, blathering on insanely, and there was no reaction.

It was like he didn't exist.

The blond felt his heart pounding in his chest, his breath coming too fast, as he rounded a corner on his way to the principal's office.

And plowed straight into another person, knocking them down.

The girl (for it was a girl–small, black haired, and painfully adorable. Naruto had a feeling she had a crush on him, but he couldn't be sure. He was, after all, oblivious to that sort of stuff) yelped, falling back and landing hard. Her books scattered, papers everywhere. Her pale, pale eyes were wide in shock, and a fierce blush took her cheeks as an automatic defense reaction.

Naruto instinctively bent to help her up, but as soon as he blinked, he saw Hyuuga Hinata's purple-black hair bob as she brushed her long-cut bangs from her face. She held her books close to her chest, her simply stylish backpack held over one shoulder. Her long legs extended elegantly from a slim skirt, and her face was as moonlight pale as ever.

She didn't even glance at him, though he knew that she would have noticed as soon as he was within a fifteen foot radius, and would have promptly started blushing and stuttering as she always did.

"Fuck," Naruto said, and tried very hard not to cry.

"No, Miss Uzumaki.(2) Naruto hasn't come in to school today. His English professor said that he was absent first period, and no one has told me they saw him today."

Sarutobi was worried. Tsunade had called just fifteen minutes before, asking if her nephew had shown up at school. The panic in her voice was painfully obvious as she explained that she hadn't seen him since the night before.

The elderly principal stood in his office, staring out the window at the courtyard between the main building and the athletic centre, absently uttering reassurances to the distraught woman. There was a knock on his door. Shiranui Genma, one of campus security, opened the door without ceremony, poking his head in.

He shook his head, chewing frantically on a plastic straw.

No sign of Naruto.

Sarutobi had to ask Miss Uzumaki to hold when Genma popped back in, asking him to come talk to Kiba.

Naruto had been standing in the same room for quite a while, listening to his principal try and convince his aunt that nothing had happened to him.

But he remembered. He remembered now, what Sasuke had done to him.

There was a mirror hanging on one of the walls, and as Naruto snuck over to the phone (utterly ignoring how well the rest of the world had succeeded in not noticing him), he caught his reflection in it.

Scars, on his face. Six of them altogether; three on each cheek. He hadn't had them before, and as he approached the mirror, he could see that they were fresh. Naruto reached up a hand, caressing one set of scars, feeling the faint ridges in his once smooth flesh.

Acting on instinct, as most people do when they notice something new in their reflection, Naruto made a face. Then another. He stuck out his tongue, pulled his ears back and puffed out his cheeks, crossed his eyes (which didn't help him at all), and scowled at his reflection.

His reflection copied all those moves, but the blonde swore he saw something mischievous and evil in the eyes. They were really obnoxious.

A beep from the phone distracted him, and he turned back to his original goal.

Reaching out hesitantly, Naruto brushed his fingers against the shiny black surface of the land-line phone. His fingers left no oily residue and fingerprint smears like they should have, even though he felt the phone, real, solid, there beneath his hand.

He picked it up, almost expecting it to drop through his hand like he were made of air, but it didn't. It hummed, and vibrated slightly with the electricity running through it as he put it to his ear.

"Tsunade?"

"..."

"Hey, Tsunade? Granny?"

The woman on the other end of the line said nothing in return.

"Oi! Listen! Granny, you gotta listen to me! Hello?! Please, please, I'm DEA–"

Sarutobi came back in, and picked up the phone from where he left it on the desk earlier. Naruto watched from the corner. "Hello? Yes, Miss Uzumaki, it's me. No, we still haven't found any sign of Naruto ever coming in today. Have you called the police?" There was a pause while Naruto's aunt answered. The boy could hear her from far away, high pitched and tinny, but the words were indiscernible. "Well, wait for them in your house, they'll help you out. We'll continue to look around for someone who has seen him." The old man moved around his desk, sitting heavily in his plush leather chair. The comfort of it did nothing to his haggard face, and he brought one hand up to rub his forehead. "Yes, Miss Uzumaki, I'm sure. Yes, we'll keep in touch. All right. Good day, Miss Uzumaki."

He hung up, and dropped his head to the desk with a solid thunk. Naruto winced as he snuck out the door. Old people shouldn't do that. It might give them Alzheimer.

Tsunade was frantic when the police finally arrived at her house. She had gotten up that morning, wondering why she hadn't heard Naruto coming home last night; normally she was a light sleeper, and Naruto never really stayed out very late. After fifteen minutes of waiting for him to get to breakfast (after 7 years of living with the boy, she knew exactly how long it took him to wake up and get ready for school), she took it upon herself to go wake him up.

But when she entered his basement lair, there was no one there. Not only was the room empty, but the bed hadn't been slept in, and his backpack was still at the foot of his bed.

She had panicked, thinking the most awful things had happened to him, and then she remembered the conversation of the day before. She ran a hand through her long honey-blonde hair and pulled at a split end. The ticket. The ticket, how could she have forgotten the ticket? The flight to England, the argument, the...everything.

But she couldn't be sure, because his stuff was still there, in his room.

So she phoned the school, hoping that he had just spent the night at someone else's house without informing her. But no luck. They hadn't seen him.

When Sarutobi suggested she call the police, a "Well, duh" feeling washed over her. The police promised to send some people over, because despite the usual 48 hours needed to call it a Missing Persons case, Tsunade was well known, and missing people didn't happen very often in Konoha. So rarely in fact, that most of the town would get into an uproar when it happened.

Ding-dong.

Tsunade nearly ran to the door, pulling her dressing gown around her bust, pushing loose hair out of her eyes. She flung open the door, and stopped.

There were two officers, both roughly early to mid thirties. The police in front was rather...bizarre. His hair was an abnormally light colour, like a dirty, brownish platinum blond. It looked very much like his hair was actually gray, though he seemed much too young to be so (she couldn't really tell how old he should be, seeing as a good three-quarters of his face was covered). It was wild and windswept, sticking out to the left like a case of very, very bad bed-head. An eyepatch covered his left eye, and a dark blue cloth mask rode up over his nose. His right eye was the only thing she could see of his face.

"Yo," he said, lifting his hand lazily in a salute. He stood casually, dressed in plain clothes, and looked a bit more like a bum than a cop, but the badge on his belt, the gun on his hip, and the calculating look in his eye suggested otherwise. "You're Uzumaki Tsunade?"

She nodded, eyeing him suspiciously.

"My name is Hatake Kakashi. This is my partner, Umino Iruka," the gray-haired man said, gesturing to his partner, who waved sheepishly.

Iruka looked significantly more normal than his eccentric partner. His skin was coffee coloured, and his dark brown eyes twinkled comfortingly. His dark hair was drawn up into a high pony-tail, and his police uniform fit his broad shoulders well. A large scar, lighter than the rest of his skin, stretched across the bridge of his nose, and Tsunade wondered how he could have gotten such a wound without having broken his nose.

"We were told that you filed a Missing Persons report, is that true?"

"Um, yes," Tsunade muttered, and stood back to let the two men inside. "My nephew, Naruto went out yesterday afternoon and didn't come back. I called his school first," she said, leading them into the living room, gesturing for them to sit, "But they said he didn't come in to school. No one there has seen him..."

"Well, Miss Uzumaki, he could be at a friends house. Have you taken that into consideration?"

She nodded.

Iruka shifted in his seat. "Did your nephew say anything to you before he left? Did you have a fight, or was there some sort of indication that he might have left of his own accord?"

The distressed doctor heaved back a sob, and nodded again. In a faltering voice, she told the cops about their argument, about the ticket to London, and Naruto heading out that evening to a party. The Hyuuga's party. Then she hadn't heard from him.

The cops looked at each other. "Miss," Iruka spoke cautiously, careful not to upset Tsunade any more than she was, "This means that there is a large possibility that he has gone to London. We'll contact the airlines to see if he was on his flight. If not, we'll start conducting a search. We'll call you later," they stood up respectfully, and bowed slightly, "If you can find people you know care about your nephew, then they can help us with our search."

Tsunade nodded, and thanked the cops, blinking tears back.

They bowed again, and left, talking quietly.

Naruto approached his silent aunt. She sat on the sofa staring down at her clasped hands, still wearing her pajamas and dressing gown.

"Hey, Aunt Tsunade? Tsunade?"

She sighed, and stood, turning to the kitchen.

Naruto trailed after her, a pleading look on his newly scarred face.

"Tsunade-granny, you gotta listen to me. You gotta hear me. Please?"

The woman reached up, tying her hair back in a single high ponytail, and set about making tea. She always made tea when she was upset, the rest of the time is was coffee.

"Granny, I'm dead. You need to find me."

She kept her back to the doorway, and therefore to Naruto as well. Utterly unaware of his presence, she took a shaking breath, and waited for the water to boil.

"I'm dead. I'm dead and I'm never coming back."

For some reason, Tsunade's heart took a plummeting dive to her bare feet in response to a statement that she hadn't even heard.

(1) Because I'm lazy and unfortunately unoriginal, I just used my own school's system to deal with why Naruto would have had English on Wednesday and Friday and not Thursday. It works.

(2) Tsunade. I know, I know, but she doesn't have a family name, and since she's Naruto's paternal aunt (in this story XD) and unmarried, she's now an Uzumaki.

I don't even remember all the wonderfully lovely people who reviewed. (I'll go check that right now, shall I?)

OH. OMG, Lunar Chasmodai reviewed, and threatened to sick lesbian zombies on me::squeals:: YAY. Not so much with the zombie-eating-of-my-brains part, but the rest of it's cool. XD She's an amazing writer, so you all should go read her fics. Right now. Go!

LeiseFlustern, Anissina June, awegt4, blue-genjutsu, anime-love-xoxo, stuckinabottle (I love having regulars:D), and IceCreamXD, you ALL ROCK SO HARD. LOVE.

Also, because I got this comment a lot, no one checked Naruto's pulse becasue they were all freaking out. Like major. You saw how Sasuke reacted. (Crazy...) But yeah. Now I have to go. Or I'll be late.

I wish my mouse worked. Things would be so much easier if my mouse worked properly instead of freezing up on me. Stupid cordless mouses. Utter crap, never buy one.