Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.
Author's Note: Firstly, thank you to my reviewers - it gives me no end of joy to get that wee little e-mail from you. So thank you, Rosebunse and Ser Serendipity, who reviewed the previous chapter and let me know that yes, indeed, that I have readers out there! L'assassin orange and DivinePaladin, I hope you've enjoyed what you've read so far. Secondly, a huge thank you to all of you wonderful patient readers. We're nearing the end of our journey - in other words, my plan only has one chapter left. Can you imagine that? Do I have any regrets? Of course: 1) I might have benefited from a beta. 2) There are characters I regret killing so early on. The list can only go on. Anyhow, since we're so close to ending, do drop me a line - I'd love to know why the people who are reading this are, well, reading it. Or still reading it.
The conversation between Naruto and Sasuke took a very long time to sort out. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this awkward reunion scene. I can't say I enjoyed writing it at all, although I must confess, I enjoyed writing the ghosts in this chapter, very much. Best, Zen :D
At first Naruto toyed with the idea of walking into the hospital and simply asking at the reception for directions, but he quickly scrapped it. Sakura was always complaining that the hospital was like a maze. The last thing he wanted to do was walk into the morgue or, worse, the maternity ward.
Then he thought he had struck gold when it occurred to him that he could steal either Sakura or Ino's key-cards when they were off-duty, until the little voice of self-preservation at the back of his mind (which, despite what those around him seemed to think, did exist) reminded him that Sakura would pound him into a greasy little stain if he tried and Ino would, well, do stuff with his mind he could probably do without having done to him. And that still didn't solve the problem as to how to navigate his way to Sasuke's cell.
Kakashi and Tsunade didn't want him visiting Sasuke until as Kakashi put it 'things had settled down', and as Tsunade put it 'until she could trust the two of them not to try and kill each other on sight', which pretty much meant indefinitely. Tsunade had mentioned a whole lot of other reasons as well (the words 'agitate', 'provoke' and 'upset' cropped up several times, along with 'crazy' and 'batshit'), but, as it had already been made clear that Tsunade had no intention of letting him visit Sasuke anytime soon, Naruto paid them no attention.
There was nothing for it, but to ask for Sakura's help.
"Let you into the basement?" She considered it for a moment. "To see Sasuke-kun?"
"Well, he's probably getting pretty bored cooped up down there by himself. You can do that right?"
Sakura turned to face him. "Naruto, have you considered the possibility that maybe he wouldn't want you to visit him?"
Naruto shrugged. "Sure, but that was always normal for him, so that makes no difference."
"Was normal. Exactly." When a look of confusion flickered like a warning light across Naruto's face, Sakura sighed. "It's been a long time and a lot of things have happened to him. Sasuke's changed, Naruto. We don't know what's normal for him anymore, and then…then there's us."
"Us? What have we done?"
"With everything that's happened here because of the Plague, we've changed as well." Sakura looked up at the house they were passing. A section of its roof was patched over with a sheet of canvas, hiding a large hole where the tiles had been eaten away by fire. "I was just thinking the other day when Ino and I were helping out on the vivisection. Do you think he'd even know us if we went to see him? We're practically all strangers to each other now."
"We're not strangers to him, Sakura."
"Oh, I know that. I do really," she assured him quickly. "I guess I'm just being silly, but seeing him makes me think of old times, and then I start comparing myself now to what I was like in the past, back before the Plague, and then way, way back to the time before he left, and I hardly even recognise myself anymore."
They continued walking on towards the hospital. A team of men rushed past, carrying what looked to be a whole felled pine on their shoulders in the direction of the Academy.
"Well, I don't care if he's changed," Naruto said. "We can't let him make himself a stranger to us. In fact, I won't let him. I swear it. So long as my name is Uzumaki Naruto, which will be forever because Uzumaki Naruto is an awesome name and will totally go down in history, I won't let him."
"Because that's your ninja way?"
"Hell yeah!"
For a fleeting instant, Sakura looked at Naruto with a strange kind of look that he wasn't sure he had ever seen before. It was just a little bit sad, somewhat weary, but largely, for some reason, grateful.
The she snorted and elbowed Naruto in the ribs. "Looks as though some people don't change whatever happens."
"Ow…Sakura-chan, you're so cruel," he moaned, clutching his side.
"Times like these we need people like that," Sakura went on, whilst Naruto checked his ribs for fractures. "They're like anchors for the rest of us, when the world's going crazy."
Naruto lowered his hands. Did she really think that? About him? "Sakura - ?"
"Will an hour be alright?"
Naruto didn't immediately understand, but he soon worked out what she meant. "Seriously?"
"A siren goes off if the asylum door's unlocked for too long, so you'll need me there to lock you in and then let you out when you're done. My lunch break's an hour long. If you visit him during then, I'll be able to let you into the block, and wait for you outside. How does that sound?"
"Great!" Naruto exclaimed, beaming, before a thought occurred to him. "But, Sakura-chan, don't you want to see him too?"
Sakura shook her head. "Not especially. I see him every day remember?"
"Yeah, but, you don't exactly talk, right? You just check out his insides – "
"I don't think I'm ready to talk to him just yet."
Naruto closed his mouth.
They approached the hospital entrance walking side-by-side in silence.
Once she had gathered her thoughts together, Sakura spoke. "I liked him once, Naruto."
"Oh, don't we all know it," he said, nodding sagely, which earned him a scowl.
"Shut up. I think there's a part of me that still does feel something for him, but, the thing is, I don't know anymore what I even feel for him is. Before I visit him, I want to work that out." She stopped on the hospital steps. "Sometimes I wish I didn't feel anything for him at all."
"Sakura-chan – "
Sakura suddenly drew herself up straight, business-like and professional, and squared her shoulders. Her tone became brisk. "Anyway, my lunch break's at ten past one."
The change of topic was abrupt. Naruto took it in his stride. "Ten past one. Got it."
"Don't be late." Sakura pushed open the hospital doors open and left Naruto on the steps.
The lock behind Naruto clicked shut.
The walls of the corridor were gleaming white and blisteringly clean. More precisely, they had an unsettling over-cleanliness, the kind that suggested a very powerful scrubbing brush had been applied to them many, many times over.
To Naruto's amazement there wasn't a single guard, which was odd, but, as this place was supposed to be for patients and not prisoners, he wasn't sure what to expect. In any case, he looked down the row of cells and searched for signs of movement, ripples in the air, any indication that there were guards cloaking themselves in genjutsus that made them invisible.
There didn't seem to be anything amiss. Maybe it was just his lucky day. Naruto thought no more of it and, following Sakura's instructions, jogged to the end of the corridor, where he found a short flight of steps that went down to the next level down. Sasuke's cell was the first on the row.
The front of the cell was a transparent panel of plastic. About five inches thick, the panel was heat-resistant, shatter proof, and electrically insulating. It formed a nine by twelve feet wide window onto the occupant of the cell and distinctly reminded Naruto of a fish tank. Sakura had told him that the bathroom at the back had been designed to be narrow, cramped and have as poor ventilation as possible to stop patients hiding in them. He could see the small door. It wasn't much bigger than a large kitchen cupboard.
Abandon all hope for privacy ye who enter here, indeed.
And inside, sitting at a table, was Sasuke.
He was smaller than how Naruto remembered him. He had gotten thinner too, more ragged-looking, certainly a far cry from when Orochimaru had been ensuring that his 'future body' was well groomed and kempt. Dressed in a hospital jersey, he was leafing through the yellowed pages of a notebook, with his face buried in his free hand. Naruto had a strange feeling that Sasuke was wearing the jersey as though it was a disguise for a mission. It fit him, the fabric was comfortable, but he wasn't letting himself get comfortable in it.
On the whole though, he looked healthy, and not as disturbed as Naruto had been dreading he would be, from to Kakashi and Tsunade's warnings.
Relieved, Naruto waved through the plastic.
Sasuke continued reading, managing to look both deadly focused and bored stiff at the same time. He turned away from the window and scratched at the bridge of his nose, then went back to the notebook.
"Hey, you," Naruto narrowed his eyes. "I know you're ignoring me on purpose."
Still no response from the cell's occupant, who simply turned another page and pencilled a short note onto a pad of paper.
Perhaps the plastic panel was sound proof as well. Naruto ground his teeth. Sasuke continued to turn through the pages of the notebook. Well then, Naruto would just have to get his attention some other way.
After a five minute routine of dancing, pulling faces, and acrobatics, concluding with his last resort of a Harem-no-Jutsu human pyramid, Naruto remembered the old fashioned way of getting someone's attention: Knocking.
He was just moulding chakra about his fist when Sasuke glanced sideways and, apparently, at last saw him.
Most of his face was still covered by his hand, but Sasuke's face had never been especially helpful for working out what he was thinking anyway. It was usually about the eyes and, for a fraction of an instant before becoming guarded again, they flickered with surprise.
Then one eyebrow flexed in a gesture that Naruto translated to mean: Try that and I won't be in the least surprised, because it is a stupid thing to do and you are a moron, and morons, by definition, do stupid things.
Boy, Sasuke could be pretty vocal when he wasn't saying anything.
"I want to talk," Naruto mouthed slowly through the panel before Sasuke could turn away. He started to mime with his hands, snapping his hands like piranha fish and pointing at himself, just in case it wasn't clear. "I won't go -" he crossed his forearms in a giant X then thrust a thumb over his shoulder "- until –" he tapped his wrist "- I've spoken – " more snapping hands, "with you."
Two fingers pointed at Sasuke, who slowly blinked then, to Naruto's surprise, stood up from his desk.
A hatch was pushed aside to reveal a hidden communication grill. Sasuke set his chair beside it.
Naruto looked up and down the corridor and found a rack of folding chairs tucked under the stairs. He sat down, looked up and words failed him.
After three years, Sasuke was finally back.
It was as though nothing had changed at all. On the other side of the grill, Sasuke was wearing that very expression of supreme indifference with which he had always graced the world at large, whenever he wasn't smirking or scowling.
Then Sasuke lowered the hand from his face and Naruto's widening grin quickly shrank to nothing. Running across the bridge of Sasuke's nose was a long, shiny burn. Ropey and straight, as though the burn had been tracing something's edge, it was a red star of scar tissue and it painfully reminded Naruto of…something he had tried to forget, and then long given up doing so.
Naruto spluttered, "What happened to your face?"
Sasuke glared at him. "Nothing."
"Nothing. Right. Sure."
Silence settled between them and Naruto was left fishing for something to say next. Maybe, 'How do you not notice a troupe of naked blonde girls making a human pyramid outside your window?' would do the trick. Yeah, that could work as an ice-breaker, but no, that wasn't the kind of thing he was aiming for...
Sasuke snorted, quietly, but just loud enough that Naruto could hear. It sounded as though he was sharing some kind of a private joke with himself. Naruto didn't need three guesses to work out who the butt of the joke was.
Naruto scowled. "Okay, you were snorting at me in the corridor the other day as well. What's so funny?"
Sasuke closed his eyes, as though to shield them from the abrasive vision of orange in front of him. The mere sight of Naruto was giving him a bigger headache than the five hours he had spent decoding Kabuto's notes. "What do you want?"
Good question. Naruto scratched the back of his head. "To say 'welcome back', I guess. Lots of people said 'welcome back' to me when I came home, and I thought it was really nice. Then I figured nobody would have said it to you yet, what with so much crazy happening around here and all, so I thought I'd drop by."
Sasuke looked at him oddly. "Well, now you've said it. So you can go."
Naruto folded his arms behind his head and settled back into the chair, as though he was prepared to stay there all day. A vein in Sasuke's temple twitched. "It's good to have you back, Sasuke."
"Is it?"
"Course it is. I mean, you came back. On your own. Everybody thought I was going to have to snap your spine on the side of a mountain or something before we could even get you through the Konoha gates. Pretty glad it didn't have to come to that in the end."
Naruto laughed, but it came out more awkwardly than he would have liked.
There was a part of Naruto that was undeniably angry. It was the part that wanted to rail and rant and ram a fist into Sasuke's teeth, make him feel some of the pain they had gone through trying to retrieve him, only to have him thumb his nose in their faces and slip away, time and time again. To have Sasuke come back like this, it was like he was rubbing it into their faces that he had never asked for or needed their help, and that he had never even needed them.
What were they all to Sasuke? Did Naruto, Sakura or Kakashi even mean anything to him anymore? Had they ever meant anything to him to begin with that he could leave them behind so easily?
But that indignant anger of Naruto's had dissipated the moment Sasuke had stood up from the desk. If anything, Naruto was perhaps now feeling more buoyantly hopeful than he had in months, because if they meant absolutely nothing to Sasuke at all, Sasuke would surely never have opened the hatch.
It was a small blessing then that Naruto couldn't read minds. If he had happened then, at that very moment, to see into Sasuke's, he would have found that why Sasuke had opened the hatch, and was now bothering to sit and listen to this supreme idiot of idiots, was a mystery even to Sasuke himself.
Sasuke was busy telling himself that he had chosen to talk on a whim; that it had been an utterly spur of the moment decision; that it was natural every now and again to desire some kind of break from the near total silence of the sound-proofed cell; that he had very reasonably weighed his options and concluded that having Naruto miming outside his cell was one form of torture he had done nothing to justify being subjected to.
And now that Sasuke knew better than to give in to a whim, he was sorely tempted to close the hatch and get rid of Naruto for good. He didn't understand why Naruto had come. He said all he wanted was to welcome him back, but Sasuke didn't believe it for a minute. Nobody came to Sasuke these days without wanting something from him.
These days? As opposed to what days?
"Whether or not you think it's good that I am here in Konoha makes no difference to me," Sasuke said warily, as he tried to read Naruto's intentions from his face, from his involuntary movements. "Your opinion would not change that I am already here, so it is meaningless."
Wait. Was he really considering Naruto capable of having something as complex as an ulterior motive?
No, Sasuke couldn't underestimate him. Intelligent men used idiots as their pawns all the time, and no fool was more useful than one who nobody thought could be used. Somebody might have sent him for something. Sasuke had to stay on his guard.
"Heck, Sasuke, it's a nice thing people say to each other." Naruto flung up his hands and shook them in a fit of exasperation. "And it isn't meaningless, you idiot. Somebody says 'it's good that you're back', or 'they're glad to see you', it means that there've been people waiting for you, and that they're still there to help you out when things get bad. It's a reminder that you're not on your own." Naruto suddenly nodded to himself with a smug little grin of satisfaction. "That actually came out nearly as good as how it sounded in my head."
"So you're still in the habit of clinging to those around you when things get difficult, like a small child," Sasuke noted scathingly. "How old are you now? Nine? Eight?"
Naruto glared and squinted at Sasuke's face. Then all of a sudden, Naruto's eyes were welling with huge shiny tears.
"Sasuke," he sobbed, rubbing his eyes on the back of his hands, "we're all so sorry. We really had no idea. We had no idea Orochimaru's freaky experiments had - had tried to give you a sense of humour. It must have been so painful for you…"
Sasuke was on his feet before he knew he had even moved, then as the slow triumphant grin spread across Naruto's face, Sasuke realised his mistake. He had been provoked. Cursing himself furiously, Sasuke sank back into his chair, chakra itching under his skin.
It had been such a petty little provocation and he had risen to it so quickly! How did this idiot do it?
"So, I crossed a line there, didn't I?" Naruto continued to chatter as Sasuke regained his composure. "Right then, mental note - Orochimaru's experiments are a new line not to cross. Gods, no wonder you're crazy. All these lines in your head! What's the inside of your head like? Knitting?"
"Naruto…" Sasuke snarled, injecting the single word with as much venom as he could muster.
"Okay, alright. Maybe bringing up those experiments was a bit of a low blow." Naruto lowered his gaze to his shoes. After a minute of awkward silence, he cleared his throat. "He did some crazy stuff to you then?"
"Drop it."
"Oh, right. So he did." Naruto peered intently into Sasuke's face. "Well, I don't see any scales."
He really was the most insufferable first-rate idiot.
"And I guess the experiments weren't all bad if the stuff done to you is going to be used to help people here. How's everything going with the dissection-vivisection-same-difference research anyway? You know that Sakura-chan's on Tsunade-bacchan's team cutting you open?" Naruto said excitedly. "She and Ino are working really hard these days. Sometimes I get a bit worried they're working too hard, but that probably just means the rest of us have to up our game. Oh yeah! Sakura-chan wanted me to say, 'Hi!' for her. She would've come to see you today – yeah, she was really, really keen - but it's just…er…" Naruto chewed thickly on his tongue, "…she's really busy lately."
Sasuke had lapsed into a stony-faced silence. He seemed to be thinking. As far as Naruto was concerned, thinking as hard as Sasuke seemed to be thinking meant that he must be having a pretty serious argument, with himself, in his own head. Since that activity combined 'talking to yourself' and 'hearing voices', two signs of madness into one, it wasn't something Naruto considered especially healthy.
"Anyway," Naruto said loudly, deciding that Sasuke had stayed silent long enough. "All the research crap to one side, I should probably say that I lied a bit when I said that all I wanted was to wish you 'welcome back'."
"I knew it."
"Knew what?"
Sasuke spat out a puff of air like an angry cat. "Who was it? Kakashi? The Hokage? What else do they want from me now that they send you as their errand boy?"
"Believe it or not, bastard, I'm here because I want to be. As if the super-awesome Uzumaki Naruto would ever be anybody's errand boy!" Naruto huffed and folded his arms across his chest, but Sasuke's gaze remained unflinchingly sceptical. Naruto sighed and hung his head. "But you probably wouldn't believe me however many times I told you that. Fine, think what you like. I'm going to say my bit and then I'll come back to sort out your head another time. I wanted to talk to you about home."
To bring Sasuke home…you'll have to make him realise Konoha is his home. How you're going to that, I'll be leaving to you.
Trust Kakashi-sensei to dump his students with the hard part of the job. Well, maybe that was a bit unfair, Naruto conceded, given that Kakashi had come back in the dead of the night with two ex-ANBU blinded and one on a stretcher.
"Home?" repeated Sasuke, the word dropping between them like a dull, flat stone. "And I suppose you're going to be another one to give me the 'Konoha is my Home' spiel?"
"Well, I'm tempted to give you the 'You are an Arrogant Prick' spiel, but, I'll save that for another time." Naruto lowered his voice. "I was thinking more along the lines of 'Konoha isn't your Home'."
Sasuke snorted, which could have meant over a million things, but on this occasion translated to Naruto as, Obviously.
"When I was up in the Mountains with Ero-sen…er…Jiraiya," Naruto began, "I had a couple of days when I really missed people back home. It was a bit tough, although nothing I couldn't handle! The toads were all pretty nice about it. One night we all started talking about Konoha and home, and all that kind of stuff - "
Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Is there a point to this?"
"You asked for a spiel, so I'm giving you one, bastard," Naruto shot back gleefully. "Where were we? Oh yeah, and the toads said something which was pretty neat. They said that home was basically any place which kept good memories for a person. I didn't really get it at first, but they explained it like this.
"So for some folk, it's their house, or their town – all the good stuff that's happened in them, their house becomes home because their memories are imprinted onto it in some way or other.
"And then for some folk, their home is people. People keep memories safe. Friends and family store good memories for each other, so they're a kind of home as well. That's why you can move houses and towns and countries and still have a home, because those memories still exist with those people.
"My guess is that you never saw Konoha as your home at all. Your home was people, which makes sense because the Uchihas were a pretty tight clan – it was your family and then," Naruto pointed a thumb at his battered forehead protector, "it was us lot in Team Seven. Right? Do you see what I'm getting at?"
"There was nothing in anything you just said," Sasuke said curtly, "to get."
Ah well, it was worth a try. Naruto could work on it for next time. He'd make Sasuke get that Team Seven was a home for him. Eventually.
"Okay, so you think you don't have a home. So you should find one. Amongst Konoha people."
Sasuke scoffed. "Are Konoha people really worth having a home amongst?"
"Well, obviously – " Naruto started and, to the surprise of both of them, immediately fell silent.
Look at what people in Konoha have done to each other…What's the point of believing in people who are so willing to do the worst things to each other?
Naruto suddenly felt himself under intense scrutiny. Sasuke was regarding him curiously through the grill, as a microbiologist might do when something wholly unexpected crawls under the lens of their microscope. There was interest and, as the situation underwent a hasty recalculation, some uncertainty, but no particular malice towards what it saw.
"You've changed," Sasuke commented suddenly, drawing back from the grill.
Naruto blinked slowly. "You think so?"
You've worked out that your town isn't as great and golden as you always thought it was, rose the little voice unbidden from wherever it was always hiding, the one that was always so treacherous, so unreasonable, so critical of everything Sasuke did. Now, for a reason that was beyond Sasuke, it sounded sad.
That thought, however, somewhat inevitably underwent heavy editing between Sasuke's brain and mouth: "You've become even more stupid than before. I didn't realise that was possible."
Naruto opened his mouth for the sharpest, loudest retort he could think of, but found the words died away from him.
"That's the first time anybody's said to me that I've changed," he said instead. "Ever since I've come back, the only thing people have been saying to me is that I never change, that I'm just like how I've always been. They're always smiling when they say it as well, like it's a good thing. Sakura-chan was saying it just this morning too. She said, 'Looks as though some peopledon't change whatever happens'."
It was a well-known phenomenon that people in times of turmoil often sought out and took comfort in constancy. People also, in Sasuke's books, saw exactly what they wanted to see and, from that habit, what they expected to see. It did not surprise Sasuke, given what he had heard of the recent events in Konoha, that some were relying on Naruto, who had always seemed so stubbornly unchangeable (or as Sasuke saw it, unchangeably irritating) to remain just as he always had been.
"You've changed too," Naruto noted.
Sasuke lifted his eyebrows.
You seem more focused, not that you weren't focused before, but it's like you've got a real goal of some kind, with a real target, and a real end result, and you're more sure of your own skin because of it.
Thoughts, however, tended to be a lot more eloquent than words, and all of that simply translated into Naruto's mouth as: "You've become an even bigger bastard than before. I didn't realise that was possible. Then again, you lived with Kabuto and Orochimaru, and those two are the Archbishops of the Bastardhood, so no surprises there."
Sasuke snorted and turned up his nose.
It had been three years. As they mutually acknowledged and accepted changes that neither knew how nor when had occurred, but occur they had, Naruto felt those three years more keenly than he ever had before.
Naruto grimaced. Sasuke was scratching at the edges of the burn on his face again. He felt nauseous just watching.
That star of red knotted tissue reminded him all too painfully of another star, one that had refused to fade out of his memory - a dark one, branded across skin that was smooth and grey as stone, a monstrous face with fangs bared and red eyes shining.
It appeared in his dreams sometimes, flying at him on fleshy wings that creaked and snapped with every stretch of thick grey skin, in a thicket of black snaking lightning that chirped and chattered against the roar of thundering water.
And at the very moment Naruto thought he was about to die, and not only die, but watch a friend, his best friend, be devoured forever by some grey-skinned monster, he would wake up, heart racing, cold with sweat, feeling the wet punch of a phantom fist sliding through his chest.
"That burn on your face," he asked as casually as he could, "it is going to heal, isn't it?"
"It'll heal." Sasuke ran his fingers over the scarring. Perhaps something of Naruto's thoughts occurred to Sasuke as well. His hand drifted down to where his neck joined the shoulder before he lowered it. "Are you done now about 'home'?"
Naruto considered the question then nodded. "For now, yep."
Pushing himself to his feet, Sasuke indicated the stairs behind Naruto with a jut of his chin. "The exit is that way."
"Hey, you can't just close a convo like this!"
Sasuke dragged away his chair from the conversation grill then shrugged, as though to say, Just did.
He reached out to slide the hatch over the grill. The hatch met resistance. Sasuke regarded the two fingers Naruto had slid through the grill to block it with some bemusement. "I can, and I will, cut those off."
"Just one last thing!" Naruto wheezed, as the two fingers he'd stuck through the grill started to turn purple.
It seemed that the edge of the hatch was a lot blunter than Sasuke would have liked. "Fine."
"What were you laughing at?" Naruto asked again, tears beading at the corners of his eyes as Sasuke continued to apply pressure on the sliding hatch. "The other day in the corridor, and earlier today?"
Sasuke trawled through his memories. "Oh. That." The corner of his lips twitched up with the ghost of a smirk. "Two days asleep in the mental health ward?"
Naruto furrowed his brow in confusion. "Nope, I don't get how that's funny."
Sasuke snorted. "I was out in a day."
Understanding dawned on Naruto at last. "You're competing with me on the number of days spent in the mental health ward? Okay, now that is messed up. One day?" Sasuke nodded. "After the Uchiha Clan Massacre?" Another stiff nod. "Yeah, I don't think this is a fair competition, because, take it from me, bastard, you should have stayed in there way longer – Ow! Dammit, are you actually trying to - !?"
Naruto yanked his fingers out from the grill. Sasuke slid the hatch shut with a triumphant click and pointedly turned his back on his visitor. He went to the cupboard of a bathroom and disappeared.
Naruto was left standing in the silent corridor, cradling his hand with its two swollen fingers. How was he doing for time? He would probably just about avoid a shouting from Sakura –
On the whole though, that had all gone far, far better than Naruto had hoped to even dream. His expectations had generally involved a lot of staring and awkward silence, which, admittedly, there had been, but there had been conversation, there had been speech, and Sasuke had listened, and now Naruto was filled with so much hope.
Sasuke would be able to come home. He was certain of it.
Smiling radiantly, he sprinted up the flight of stairs. He couldn't wait to tell Sakura everything that had happened, although he doubted she would be impressed with some of the…er…banter.
He rapped his knuckles against the door at the entrance of the Demon Asylum. "Sakura-chan," he said, "sorry if I'm late. Please don't be mad. I – "
The lock clicked, the door swung wide and a vast expanse of black-cloaked bosom filled his vision.
Naruto leaned back and squinted up into the medic-nin's face, filled with a sudden sense of foreboding. "Oh. Bacchan."
"To. My. Office."
"So let me get this straight, there weren't any guards down there, because Sakura told you I wanted to talk to Sasuke today, and you were okay with that? More to the point, you were counting on me to try and get in to see him, without your permission?" Naruto stared at Tsunade over the heaps of paperwork. "Why?"
"To surprise him, of course," Tsunade answered straight-forwardly. "If we'd arranged for you to visit, Sasuke would almost certainly have gotten wind of it from somebody," she glared hard at Kakashi, "and you would've then got the same routine as the rest of us get when we try to talk to him."
"What's that?"
"A routine," said Tsunade shortly. "Telling us the bare minimum of what he thinks we expect to hear, so we thought that if you could catch him off guard, then you might be able to get something different out of him."
"So he was right." Naruto looked at them, aghast. "He thought you guys were using me to get something out of him."
"Naruto," Tsunade cut in firmly, "don't look so betrayed. We don't want anything from him."
"But you just said – "
"She meant, 'get something out of him' as in, quite simply, 'to get him talking', Naruto." Kakashi raised his palms to the heavens as though to implore of some great creator, Why are all my students such drama queens?
Naruto looked incredulously from Tsunade to Kakashi, then round to Sakura standing behind Tsunade's desk. He deflated, and lowered the fists he didn't even know he had raised. "So you just wanted somebody to talk to him?"
"Kakashi and I have been finding it difficult getting through to him and quite understanding what's going on inside his head."
"Yeah, but this is Sasuke – that's normal. Nobody ever knows what's going on inside his head," Naruto interjected. "What makes you think I'd have a better chance than you guys?"
"I currently run the research programme taking his body apart down to the molecular level. Kakashi was the one sent out to bring him back as a research subject. Sakura's one of my assistants on the project. We've all given him good reason to suspect that, when we talk to him, all we want to see is a well-behaved 'specimen' and find out more ways to exploit his body for science." Tsunade saw Kakashi flinch and bristle in the corner of her eye. "However, you, Naruto, have nothing to do with the research, so would be a different matter entirely."
"I get it," Naruto exclaimed. "What you're saying is I'd treat the bastard one hundred-percent like a human being?"
"Don't misunderstand us, Naruto, we treat him as humanely as he allows us to," Tsunade sighed and fiddled with a pencil on her desk. "Kakashi just thought some human humanising contact might do him some good."
"We thought some humanising contact might do him some good," corrected Kakashi pointedly.
Naruto picked over her words. All of a sudden, a terrible thought occurred to him: "Holy crap. You guys burned his face in one of your experiments, didn't you? That's sick. No wonder he doesn't want to talk to you."
"Actually, no, he did that to himself," said Kakashi lightly. "Sasuke set himself on fire to hold himself as a hostage against us. Long story, Naruto, but don't worry – it looks as though Orochimaru's tinkering improved Sasuke's healing abilities, so it'll heal over."
Naruto gaped and floundered as too many things he wanted to say fought to leap from his mouth.
"Anyhow, Kakashi will fill you in on the details later," Tsunade said briskly. She leaned across the desk. "So, what did you make of Sasuke? He should have been coming off the effects of the painkillers by the time you went to see him."
Naruto pushed down the thought that Sasuke had put a taper to his own face, swallowed and scratched his chin. "He seemed surprisingly normal."
Kakashi raised his eyebrows. "As opposed to?"
"Ax-crazy. He's still crazy, but…not so angry?" Naruto searched for the right words. "I was kind of expecting him to go ape and try to blow up the cell when I pissed him off, but it was like he was saving everything up for another occasion, to get really, really angry at somebody else."
Tsunade exchanged a grim look with Kakashi.
"Oh yeah! One thing I wanted to ask. He spends his whole day either in hospital or in that fish tank, right? I mean, he's fine now, but if you keep him cooped up like that, he will properly go crazy. As in, 'the-voices-in-my-head-are-my-only friends'-type crazy. Couldn't we, you know, take him for a day out in Konoha or something?"
To Naruto's dismay, Kakashi shook his head. "As much as that is a good idea, Naruto, we're avoiding taking Sasuke out of his cell unless it's absolutely necessary. He's a highly valuable…resource and the streets are still not as safe as we'd like them to be."
"We also can't forget that he was a rogue and that we don't know the entirety of the things he got up to under Orochimaru," Tsunade said, her expression clouding. "That he has 'laboratory experience' troubles me, especially Orochimaru's laboratories, even if it was only procuring supplies. Essentially, Naruto, Sasuke is currently serving an alternative prison sentence. It wouldn't do for a criminal to be walking freely in the streets, even under a disguise."
"But then, but then..." Naruto screwed up his face. "Couldn't he at least get a cell with a window? Just a small one?"
As Tsunade shook her head, Naruto wondered what was wrong with Sasuke that he could even cope in a room without a window. It was like he was used to living in...oh, Orochimaru's lairs were all underground, weren't they? Go figure.
"He'll get a day out soon, but it will be discrete," Tsunade said at last, lacing her fingers together on the desk. "It's one that we promised him. Alright, any other worries at all?"
Naruto thought. Nothing came to mind at first, but then he remembered something. "It's not about Sasuke, but I wanted to ask you something, Bacchan."
"Go on then," she said, shuffling the letters on her desk into the semblance of a pile.
"You kind of mentioned it in passing at the conference, so I figured it was something really evil, like trading your soul or killing kittens or something, so," he grinned eagerly, "what was the 'unacceptable deal' Madara wanted the Kages to make with him?"
Tsunade knocked the pile of letters to the floor. Sakura rushed forward to collect them up.
"Madara was demanding that the Raikage and Hokage hand over their Jinchuurikis in exchange for the Plague cure," Kakashi spoke up, as Naruto began to look around the room in concern. At Kakashi's words, the grin instantly slipped from his face. "But that's nothing for you to worry about anymore, Naruto. It's water under the bridge, all in the past. Right now, which is all that matters, is that Sasuke's here, we're making our own cure, and Madara's demands don't mean anything anymore."
Naruto's eyes slid to Tsunade, who was staring resolutely at a mark on her desk. "Bacchan would never have handed me over without a fight."
Tsunade rubbed her face with a hand and blinked at the ceiling, looking at anywhere but at Naruto. "It was your friend Gaara's request that the Kages asked the Jinchuurikis themselves what they were willing to do in the situation, and that we respected whatever decision the Jinchuurikis came to."
"So, it would have been my decision?" Naruto pointed at his own face as though to confirm his own significance. "And based on my decision people might not have got the cure?"
Tsunade nodded. Sakura finished collecting the letters that had fallen to the floor and piled them onto Tsunade's desk again. The blood had drained from her face.
"I don't think you can imagine, Naruto, how relieved I am that Sasuke was brought in when he was," Tsunade confessed, meeting Naruto's gaze at last, "and that I never had to ask such a thing of you."
Naruto exhaled slowly. "I'm glad I never had to answer."
Floating in a sea of suffocating warmth, there was a dull throbbing in his temples and only a shapeless chill where he knew his fingers should be. He could feel the thud of his heart in his chest, slow, heavy, beating out the time. Oars of a ship, he thought incoherently, he was just an oar moving to the time of a drum, pushing a boat on over a warm, dark sea.
He coughed. It hurt. To breathe was to plant a hook in his throat and to cough was to pull upon it.
The shadow standing next to the gurney blurred. The motion made him seasick, but the shadow left behind the warmth of a handprint on his shoulder, before it disappeared.
Fluid in his lungs rippled with every heartbeat.
He remembered a festival and a balloon filled with water, attached to a band around the wrist of a little girl. Possibly Hanabi, yes, it must have been Hanabi – the way she had bounced the water balloon like it had personally offended her. He remembered the sound of her hand slapping the balloon and the slosh of the water inside it.
If he got through this, Neji never wanted to see another water balloon ever again.
A cold waft of air. A door had been opened, and the surface he was lying on rolled forward into a room that was bright with lights and smelled of lemon and hissed with pressurised gas. And there were people around him, masked and gloved.
"Alright, Neji-kun," a voice pushed through the cotton in his ears, "we're going to ask you a few questions. How are you feeling? Are you comfortable?"
His lips were dry, his tongue felt too fat for his mouth. "What's going to happen to me?"
"We're about to put you under general anaesthetic," the voice answered, warm and reliable. "And then you're going to undergo a prototype surgical procedure, which we've received permission from your family to proceed with. Your uncle wishes you all the best of luck. He also wanted you to know that you have always made him proud, and that he has faith that you will continue to do so."
His heartbeat thudded in his ears. "Is this the procedure," he asked, staring up at the lights, "that they've based off Uchiha Sasuke?"
"Yes," said the voice. The lights twinkled. "Now I am inserting a needle into your hand. You might feel a little pain."
Air scoured his windpipe when he breathed, but aside from that he felt nothing.
He closed his eyes and snorted. "If an Uchiha could live through such a thing, then a Hyuuga would be able to live through it three times over."
That's the spirit, the voice whispered, more like a sigh of the wind than a voice. Now, son, do me proud.
When they rolled him into the theatre, Neji was smiling.
Around one in the morning, Kakashi knocked on the great plastic window and gently woke up the occupant. He let Sasuke out without a word, his wrists and his eyes unrestrained, as they had agreed, and together they made their way out of the asylum.
Lights and voices leaked wearily out of medic-nin offices. Machines hummed with power. Water dripped, splashed into already filled bowls. They climbed through the hospital in silence, passing doors with marbled glass that twisted their shadows in their wake.
A figure in black was waiting outside the room, just as Kakashi and Sasuke had been expecting.
"You have an hour," Tsunade told Sasuke, pushing the door open. "Maybe less."
She closed the door behind him.
There were fewer machines in the room than normally would have been expected. Sasuke noted that with no small satisfaction. This man didn't need life support technology. Nobody was interested in supporting his life. There was, however, an array of intravenous drips about the bed, as well as a dialysis machine tucked away into the corner, and a tube for the urinary catheter. Sasuke had wanted to watch the man die of the Plague, not dehydration or malnutrition, or renal failure.
Sasuke listened to the rasping breaths, heard his own blood begin to rush in his ears and the sparks spit and crackle about his hands.
He moved forward, eyes spinning, each step eager, each footfall savouring.
Danzo's face was white and slick with sweat. The blind had been pulled up on his window. Moonlight streamed in, crisp and clean-edged as a shard of ice. He didn't notice the figure coming out of the darkness behind him.
Sasuke pulled up the seat next to the bed, and, at the sound of the scraping chair, Danzo looked over his shoulder. If he was in any way stunned by the sudden appearance of his visitor, he hid it extremely well.
He raised an eyebrow, sighed and stared back at the red eyes above him. "The executioner, I presume?"
Time seemed to close about Sasuke and settle upon the moment like snow. Everything from before culminated with this point and everything after would extend from it. In the face of the moment, the only thing that mattered was the present.
"Come to watch me die, Uchiha Sasuke?" Danzo closed his eyes. "If it gives you any pleasure, I assure you, I am in agony. I have felt myself dying so slowly it has almost been intimate."
He saw everything in pin-sharp detail - a wrinkled and folded throat, rising and falling with diminishing strength with every passing minute; a chin striped with blood, black and red; a frame that had wasted away in bed instead of standing firm on a field of battle as it would have liked – and every unit of detail he committed to memory.
Sasuke looked down to the man's hand. It was trembling. "An executioner must confirm the death of his victim himself."
Danzo gave out a bark of laughter. "Ah, a thorough executioner! So you believe no death but that which you see with your own two eyes and feel with your own two hands?"
"You are an old man," Sasuke hissed, eyes flashing. "You're an old scared man, laughing because you are afraid."
"And you are a witless boy, rash and reckless," Danzo replied without hesitation, "blinkered to the rest of the world beyond his troubles."
They eyed each other in the dark, and the wind beat against the window and shook it in its frame.
Danzo hawked and spat into a bucket on the other side of the bed. Sasuke grimaced.
"Yes, rash, reckless, and blinkered," Danzo repeated wearily, lifting his head with a trail of pink spittle hanging from his lips, "but with all those things, on top of a ruthless willingness to do anything for the desired result, you remind me very much of myself when I was your age."
The suppressor tags under the bandages on Sasuke's chest warmed as his chakra spiked and flared against them. Static tingled along his arms. "I am nothing like you."
"Yet," Danzo murmured and he coughed as the air thickened with charge. "Yet."
"The reason why I am here," Sasuke lowered his voice to a whisper, "is so that the very last thing you see is your failure, old man."
Danzo heard Sasuke only as a voice from an increasingly distant shore. A part of his mind whispered that it was a ghost that was taunting him at his bedside - come ahead of its brethren to stop him escaping, a herald for the Uchiha dead who were on their way even then to lead him straight down to Hell.
"By my death I will ensure the future and honour of the village." His own voice seemed distant. "That is far from failure, Uchiha Sasuke. That is glory."
"You will die," Sasuke said, watching Danzo shiver and gasp for air, "and the last thing you will see is me, an Uchiha, living on, and the future of the town will be mine, old man, not yours, and the future you dreamed will, by my hand, never be realised."
To stand over the ashes of your enemy, to take everything that was his, to build your castle where your enemy's once stood, and to build it better than his ever was! To be the last man standing – that is the perfect revenge.
Sasuke leaned in closer until all that filled Danzo's eyes was a reflection of Sasuke's face, all ghostly white and points of red. "I'm going to destroy the very Konoha system you represented. I'm going to dig it out from its very roots. I will dedicate my life to erasing the mark of your existence, so that everything you achieved in your life never had any meaning."
Danzo drew in a deep shuddering breath. His hands and feet were already gone, set out on a path that he didn't want to follow. "You would try to change everything?"
"Yes," Sasuke replied. He could smell blood on the old man's face. "Things must change, and I will make them do so."
"And you will not rest satisfied until you have overturned everything necessary to make my efforts void. Yes, I - "
Danzo made a wet noise at the back of his throat. Blood welled up over his lips, dark and shiny.
He made no effort to wipe it away or to spit it out from his mouth. It bubbled up and poured down his chin, thick and mineral as tar.
Sasuke looked on, cataloguing the sight, etching the moment inside himself. He reached forward and seized Danzo's head by the ears. A spark leapt from his fingers and singed the old man's hair.
Danzo's single eye slid in and out of focus. Sasuke forced the old man to face him.
"How does it feel dying, knowing that I'm still here and setting out to destroy your legacy?" Sasuke shook Danzo by the ears and Danzo's eye rolled in its socket. "Go on, old man, lecture me now! Perhaps something about hate, anger, or the futility of revenge! Try it! I've heard them all!"
Blood poured from the corners of Danzo's mouth. He focused blearily on the ghost in front of him.
"If you succeed in changing Konoha," Danzo said, looking Sasuke in the eye and then beyond his shoulder where the shadows suddenly seemed thick and crowded, "then my existence would have had some meaning after all, because through my activities in Konoha…"
He could see them, faces white and raging, flickering with a ghoulish glow, men and women and children, some with eyes plucked clean from their sockets. They were leaning on Sasuke's shoulders, crowding the space behind his back.
He laughed, laughed until the blood flew from his mouth in one final bitter spray. "…through all I did here in Konoha, did I not create the man that you are now, Uchiha Sasuke?"
The ghosts reached out for Danzo with long, white arms, mouths soundlessly shaping his name.
Enraged, Sasuke fisted his hands in Danzo's collar.
"Look at me!" He shook Danzo so hard that blood splattered across the window and over his own face, sticky and hot. "Keep looking at me. See me. I am outliving you, old man. I've won. Do you see me? And nobody made me but myself. Do you understand that? Look at me!"
The old man's eye drifted to focus on a point over Sasuke's shoulder and Danzo seized. With a violent shudder and rattling breath, he went limp, and then still.
Sasuke stopped. He looked down at the old man in his hands.
He reached up and touched Danzo's neck and wrist. He held a palm over Danzo's mouth. He flicked the eye that was still apparently transfixed on empty space – no pulse, no breath, no blink reflex.
That was it?
Sasuke lowered the body and sat back in his chair. The temperature in the room felt two degrees colder than when he had entered.
That was it?
The muscles in his face were twitching. His breathing sounded loud and lonely in the room. The smell of sweat and sickness clung to the insides of Sasuke's nose and he gripped the armrests so tightly it was a miracle they didn't snap.
Cold air tickled the back of his neck like a breath and faded.
He breathed in slowly. Tasted blood.
Felt laughter rising from the pits of his stomach.
That was it.
"He's laughing," Tsunade realised, as they listened to the sounds coming out of the room. "That laughter – "
"It's quite something, isn't it?" Kakashi bent down and put his eye to the keyhole. "I can't see anything, but I guess that means it's all over."
The laughter stopped.
Tsunade and Kakashi took that as their definite cue to finally step into the room.
They found Danzo dead, as they thought they would. They had heard little of what had passed between the two, but they had heard Sasuke's raised voice before the laughter started and suspected that, at that moment, Danzo had been reaching his limits.
As for Sasuke, they found him sitting in the chair, his head resting on his chest, breathing deeply and evenly.
He was fast asleep.
The expression on his face was peaceful. It was the most peaceful Kakashi had ever seen it.
He looked younger for it.
Thank you for reading!
Next time: It all ends.