AN: Oh man, this fic is really bringing back memories. My current lover and I are planning a trip tomorrow to go and see the friend I made on the INSIDE. I hope you enjoy the new chapter.

Dipping My Toes In

I arrived in a cab around noon with my therapist Iruka. Iruka left around one, after seeing that my singular bag was in my apartment and that I wasn't having any superb meltdowns. At two my landlord left with a pat on my shoulder and a grin on his face, happy to have me back. He said he felt guilty about everything that happened, and to let him know if he could help.

It's now three in the afternoon, and I'm still standing here: awestruck. Nothing is where I left it, of course. Everything had been packed up into boxes when I was taken away. My furniture had been covered with plastic sheeting, which is now bunched up in a garbage bag by the door.

Logically I know this apartment is tiny, but to me it feels enormous. Regal, even. It's huge. My bedroom back on the inside could fit four times into my living room space. The open studio floor-plan of the place makes it feel even bigger, and I decide that the first thing I have to do is find my partitions and set them back up again.

Iruka is upset about my decision to stay in this place, and I sort of half agree with him. That's why when I pull my second-hand rice paper screens out of their plastic, I arrange the room completely differently. This time I make the living room huge instead of my bedroom. I barely manage to fit my bed and my nightstand in behind the screen, and that's just fine for me. It feels more like the inside, which for now I decide is a good thing.

I jumble through a box in the corner until I find a picture frame with my old boyfriend tucked inside of it, and quickly remove the offending photo. Instead I replace it with a secret keepsake given to me by one of the nurses: a Polaroid photo. The quality is shit, and my eyes are closed in the picture, but it's the only photo that's ever been taken with Itachi and I, and as my new best friend and crush, I think he's earned the right to be framed. I set the frame on my nightstand to help my old space feel a little more like my less older space.

I look out across the expanse of my living quarters, and I sigh. Everything was dusted, vacuumed, and otherwise pristine. The old man had seen to tidying everything up for me, and I kind of wish he hadn't. It would give me something to do. I have four days before my arranged meeting to go back into work – "time to adjust" – as Iruka put it, and I wish I didn't have it. I wish I could just dive in headlong with out the pause.

I spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking and marveling at my incredibly poor taste. Almost every knick-knack I find gets re-boxed to be taken to charity. I put the orange covers on my bed with a grimace and a promise that tomorrow I'll get a cab and find the nearest place to buy something less obtrusive. I walk over to my pack and pull a sheet of paper out of the thick manila envelope inside: it's my bank statement. I still have around two grand in savings – a habit I'm now very thankful for – and about four hundred in checking. I'm practically a king.

I sit on my old raggedy sofa and stare at the two piles of boxes mushed up against the wall: one empty, the other full. My life divided into almost equal parts. On my coffee table are various keys I've lined up as I unpack, and it takes me a good five minutes to remember what all of them are for. I have my car – which I haven't gotten my license back for yet – which is attached to the spare key to my apartment, a key to a little lock box I keep under my bed, a key to the studio space I rented, and four other keys kept purely out of sentiment.

I start to laugh at myself for how attached I feel I used to be. I really can't believe I kept the keys to every apartment I shared with a lover. It seems so cliché and ridiculous.

Next to the keys is my "little black book" to my old life. Every phone number, email address, mailing address, and name that I felt was important. Each page has a sketch to help me remember the person. I start thumbing through it and trying to remember who the people are. Some of them come to me easily. The number with a tiny psychedelic mushroom beside it is my stoner friend/neighbor two doors down. It's one of my many entries without a name, but this one is specifically nameless because Shikamaru has grown totally paranoid over years of exposure to every sort of drug imaginable. I can't help but laugh and turn the page. Some of the drawings are obvious, some terribly drawn, and others are both exquisite – if I do say so myself – and detailed. The current page is that of a man's back: muscled and taut. This entry is a particular favorite.

The back belongs to Kiba, a strongly opinioned and spunky veterinarian that I've slept with once and gotten drunk with a handful of times. He's the kind of guy I kept for cheering myself up. I used to wonder why the guy never visited me on the inside, but then I remember that I only ever had his number for work, and his work phone doesn't have caller id. It had always been me doing the initiating, and starting and ending whatever contact I chose for us to have. Like most of my relationships, really.

I take the prepaid phone out of my pocket and set it on the coffee table. My actual cell has been deactivated, and it's on my list of tomorrow's to-do's to go and get it hooked up again. But Iruka gave me this little prepaid ditty in the interim. Just in case there were any emergencies or I felt like the outside was too much and I needed to go back in.

I'm not sure if it's out of reflex or boredom or loneliness, but I snatch the phone back up and dial Kiba's number in. It rings twice before there's an answer.

"Inuzuka Animal Clinic," comes the deep but cheerful voice that's impossible to mistake as the doctor himself.

I feel my throat double clutch a few times; enough that he repeats his greeting, before I manage to get my voice under control.

"Hey, Kiba," I quietly half-stammer.

"…. Naruto?"

"It's been awhile."

"Yeah, it has," I can hear him leaning back in his squeaky desk chair. I can also hear his smile, "Where've you been?"

"That's a long story, my friend."

"Best told over beer?"

I laugh a little. I'm not allowed to drink anymore. Technically I shouldn't have been drinking before. It was the mix of alcohol and antidepressants that caused my little episodes.

"And pizza," I laugh out the usual greeting, "You do the drinking, and I'll eat enough pizza to put the place out of business."

"The usual haunt then?"

"Yeah."

"See ya at eight, Naru."

"Yeah."

I set the phone down after the line is silenced. My heart is racing and my eyes are filling with unshed tears. This is the first part of my life that it's been easy to drop back into. And I love it. I love the fact that in a few hours I'm going to be eating pizza and laughing. I can't remember the last time I had pizza.

I haul myself off the sofa and finish sorting through the last three boxes – clothes – and hanging them and folding them. I had never been a very tidy person, but having so little taught me to take care of what I had. Now I almost feel like apologizing to my clothes for all those days left scattered on the floor, waiting too long in between washings.

Once again I'm completely awestruck by how much of what I own is orange. I fill an entire box with it, and stack it with the other donations. In the end I decide to wear a pair of dark wash jeans and a black V-neck shirt. I stack the clothes neatly and walk into my bathroom to shower off the sweat of unpacking, and I feel decidedly empty.

I had thought that seeing the white and blue tiles of the bathroom would be the most difficult part of my homecoming, but instead it doesn't faze me at all. I look down at the tile, certain that it took an awful lot of bleach to get my blood out of the grout, and see it as just a bathroom. Everything that night had been a mistake. A stupid, painful, agonizing mistake. But I wasn't upset about it. It happened, so what? The past is the past, and I can't do anything about it.

I let out a sigh and a small smile graces my lips. I guess therapy really did work.

I shower and scrub using the small sample bottles that Iruka had given me as part of my "back to the real world" kit. When I'm done I dry off with a hideous orange towel – apparently the only color I own – and fluff my hair up a bit with my fingers. It's been so long since my hair's had any product in it, I'm certain I don't know how to use the stuff.

As I look in the mirror, I see myself as normal. I look different from how I used to, but normal. Sure, I'm not grinning ear to ear like an idiot and singing while I grease a handful of gel through my hair, but I'm normal. Adult, even. Maybe that's what the inside did to me: force me to grow up. Even my baby-fat is gone, and as I lift my hand up to my stomach, I'm surprised with how fit I look. Well, skinny is more the word. I don't have any sort of muscle, but I've grown an inch and slimmed down a lot. Turns out, the real way to lose weight is to eat healthy and exercise on a regular basis. Who would've thought?

I step out of the bathroom and tug my clothes on, only slightly astonished that I have to wear a belt – tightly – around myself to keep my pants up, and the shirt is rather baggy. I look at the clock on my wall and decide that I have enough time to buy some clothes that fit before I meet up with Kiba. I pull my wallet out of my bag – filled with the money Iruka and I withdrew this morning from my savings account – and dial the number on a small sheet of contacts that came with the manila envelope. In fifteen minutes a cab is waiting for me, and I give simple instructions to take me somewhere I can buy some nice clothes. The driver asks for more direction, but I tell him to surprise me, and with a huff he pulls us away from the curb.

We stop eight blocks later in front of a small and stylish looking boutique. I have to admit, the driver of my cab has good taste. I pay him the fare and ask him to pick me up in an hour – to which he agrees.

Inside the small shop I'm greeted with smiles and conversation that I respond to clumsily. One of the girls in the store finally figures out that I'm not much of a talker and slowly pulls me away from all of the noise and into a section of the store that's less boisterous in its clothing styles.

"So, I'm guessing we're looking for something simple? For a date, maybe?"

I smile at her and her blonde hair and half shrug.

"Not a date. Just a friend. But I guess I've lost a lot of weight, because my clothes practically drown me now."

She nods in the affirmative, and pulls a tape measure from around her neck. She steps behind me and loops the plastic around me, giggling softly as she peeks at the size ta in the back of my pants.

"Well, no wonder, doll. You're wearing a thirty-six, and you're barely a thirty," she smiles as she rounds back to my front, "The skinny looks good on you, though."

She winks and walks over to a rack full of jeans, picking out a pair of skinny cut jeans, and then twirls around to snatch a white V-neck t-shirt with some sort of Asian print on it.

"Give these a go."

"I uh…," I stare at the jeans with more than a little hesitation, "I've never worn skinny jeans before. Aren't they for… you know… teenagers?"

She scoffs at me and gives me a playful punch on the arm.

"What rock have you been living under?" – I fight the urge to blurt out the name of my sanitarium before she continues – "You just try them on, and we'll at least see how they fit. My name's Liz. Just holler once you've changed and we'll take a look."

With a slight bustle she ushers me into one of the curtained fitting rooms, and I find myself face to face with jeans tighter than anything I've ever worn before. I gulp down a nervous knot in my throat, and sidle the jeans on. Surprisingly, they go on and up without the aid of Crisco or fishing line, and once I have them buttoned, they look decent.

'To hell with decent, Naruto, look at your ass!'

I chuckle to myself, slip on the shirt – a little tight, despite the lost weight – and step out with a call of my helpers' name.

"Wooooow," she catcalls as the rest of the staff turns and claps, "You didn't tell me you were hiding a hottie under all that fabric!"

I blush and ruffle my hair as she comes to check the fit.

"How does that top feel? Too snug?"

If a salesperson had asked me such a thing two years ago, I probably would've gotten upset that she'd called me fat, and let the store empty handed. Instead I just nod, and she gives me a small smile. I try on a few more shirts before I decide – not so shockingly – on a black, print free V-neck.

"Well, you might've walked out with the same outfit you walked in with, but at least this one fits better," she says as she finishes ringing up the tags we've cut off the clothes. It's been ages since I wore something right out of the store, but as she bags my old clothes, I realize I'm having fun, "You have fun with your "friend" now, you hear? And come see us again!"

I smile, nod, say goodbye to the staff, and step out into the drizzly evening. It's almost exactly an hour later, and my cab is waiting for me. I half-run through the falling droplets and bounce into the cab.

"Lookin' sharp," the cabbie mumbles, giving me a smile in his rear view mirror.

I thank him for the compliment, and off we drive into the rain to Gianni's – the best pizza in town. I feel almost confident in my new clothes. They feel more like me and less like who and what I was before I was on the inside. I know that I'm still the same person, but I also know that I'm not.

AN: I still remember the first time I had pizza after being on the Inside, and how magical it was. I didn't even know I missed pizza until I had finished an entire large supreme combo on my own. It was lustful.