note: So...it's been a while.

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Naruto thinks he should be better than this. He thinks it should be easier to come back to himself, to separate the past from the present, to not become confused by names and faces that he isn't sure he really knows. It's all over, the war is done. This is supposed to be the start of his real life.

He wonders why he feels so stuck.

Naruto had been awake in that tent, his entire body strung tight and too aware of her hands skimming through his hair, the tips of his fingers. She had finished healing him by then, but she hadn't stopped touching him. He desperately never wanted her to stop.

With his eyes closed, in that silence, he could be selfish. He could pretend that they were alone, that Sakura-chan was touching him like he'd always, in dreams, wanted her to; that Sasuke-teme hadn't been three feet away, an unanswered question between his best friend and Sakura thick in the air between them. With his eyes closed and her fingers in his hair, pretending had been the easiest thing in the world.

"Hello, Naruto-kun." Hyuuga Hinata is waiting for him outside of his small apartment. Her back is pressed as close to the wall of the building as humanly possible, but when passersby give her curious, lingering looks, she meets their gaze with a steady stare of her own.

Naruto smiles at her, and her cheeks warm into that familiar pink. "Hey Hinata, what'd you need?"

Naruto isn't stupid, he may have been oblivious to the girl's attentions before, but she'd faced a god for him, had bled for him in a way that few people ever had. His heart thumps in yearning, but he can't pretend that it's for the girl in front of him. Naruto isn't so cruel.

"I thought…if you are not busy, if you do not mind, that maybe we could have lunch together? And talk?"

"As friends," she adds after a moment.

"As friends," he repeats, holding out his hand. Hinata takes it softly, hesitantly, and he can feel her pulse hammering through the thin skin of her wrist. It's a very explicit intimacy, and Naruto almost snatches his hand back because he doesn't have the right and he can't give Hinata what he thinks she wants, what she deserves.

But Hyuuga eyes are perceptive, and Hinata quickly drops his hand. The silence lingers for just a second too long, and Naruto can't tell if the small smile on her face is forced.

"Alright, Naruto-kun…Ramen?"

The blond rubs his head sheepishly, "Nah, let's try something new today, Hinata-chan."

Hinata is kind, and beautiful, and has wept her life-blood for him. She has uncomplicatedly, steadfastly, loyally loved him since before he'd ever done anything to deserve even a measure of what she gave. He could cling to her, Naruto knows, but he still isn't worth it, and what has he ever done for this girl?

They eat onigiri in silence in a quiet spot near the Hyuuga compound, and every time their fingers touch Naruto feels the heat of Hinata's blush. She looks at him with stars in her eyes but no expectations on her lips. Naruto wants to yell at the unfairness of it all. He doesn't deserve her; he doesn't want her. And that truth makes him feel the worst of all.

So self-centered, Naruto-kun, an amber-eyed snake had once said to him, right before he sank his fangs into his best friend's flesh.

This isn't about him. And Hinata is entitled to so much more. Naruto swallows and drops the half-eaten rice ball onto the cheap paper plate, rubs the slightly sticky hand over his eyes, tries to forget Sakura's fingers in his hair, her voice soft in his ear.

"I'm sorry, Hinata." She knows without asking, and even if her smile is wobbly, he feels the sincerity right down to his bones. Naruto wishes he could love her.

"You're not staying?'

Sasuke's eyes don't waver from the training post in front of him. Tsunade's still working on constructing their prosthetic arms, but the Uchiha hadn't let something as stupid as a missing limb stop him from training. Of course.

Ass, Naruto adds in his head after a beat of silence, half-fond.

Just as his patience is about to run thin, Sasuke nods. "I think it'll be a while yet before I can come back, before I can feel like myself again."

Naruto understands, but—

"What? But this was what we fought for—Dammit, Sasuke-teme, what about Sakura-chan? How could you just leave her—!"

Sasuke finally turns to look at the blond, slumped and sweaty against a spindly tree from his own drills. "You underestimate her. Idiot."

The insult is a familiar afterthought, and Naruto snarls with half-hearted indignation. He doesn't underestimate Sakura-chan. If there is one person who knows very personally just what she's capable of, it's him.

"What the fuck does that mean? How are you going to hurt her like this again—Fuck, you asshole!"

Swearing at the kunai that'd just landed inches from his face, Naruto pushes himself to his feet, and the two men begin.

God, Naruto doesn't underestimate Sakura-chan. She holds a special kind of power over her two oldest teammates. Power that comes from having been failed in the worst of ways. She could cut them both deep with just a look, just a word.

With just the shame.

And even in his dreams, she owns him.

In waking, he'd memorized the callouses on her palms from pulling her up off the floor time after time as they'd trained together. In his sleep, the roughness of her hands against his bare skin contrasts with the softness of her touch. He can't see her, he has never dared to imagine what she would look like underneath that red shirt, the pale skirt. Sometimes there's a glimpse of strong, tanned thighs and a slender arm, the swell of her breasts underneath red fabric, but he doesn't think he's capable of imagining anything that could compare with the reality.

His nights are either filled with her or his nightmares, and if it's the former, Naruto never fails to wake up hard and aching, sweat slicking his skin. He never touches himself, keeps his hand pinned to his side.

He has no right.

The nightmares don't come as often as Naruto thinks they should. The fact that he'd only lost an arm, it doesn't feel like enough penance for all the friends who'd died in his place.

When they do come though, tremors wrack his body and he throws up until he's dry-heaving in the darkness on all fours. It's disgraceful; he should be strong enough to bear the memories, it's the least he can do for Neji, for Ino's father, for Gai. For all the jounin and chunin and genin who'd fallen, who hadn't held the weight of legends in their hands and their eyes, who'd died simply because Konoha had asked them to.

Naruto struggles to extricate himself from his twisted sheets, his skin clammy with sweat. He'd closed his windows against impending summer rain, but now his apartment is stiflingly hot and humid. The air is heavy, sticky like molasses, and the darkness is silent and still. He staggers for the window and nearly falls out of it trying to open it with his one good arm.

Slumped against the windowsill, his chest heaving with his greedy gasps of the cool night air, Naruto's lips quirk into a wry half-smile, "Heh, what a hero."

It does rain that night, and everything around his window gets drenched, but Naruto doesn't care. He doesn't think he can take the quiet again, it reminds him too much of being trapped under the red moon.

Sakura keeps trying to meet his eyes, and her hands—determined, strong, capable—they constantly reach for him. Naruto doesn't understand it; he's going half-mad trying to figure her out. He's doing the best he can, trying to adjust to life after the war, to their happily-ever-after, but Sakura keeps saying the wrong things and she keeps goddamn touching him, and Naruto doesn't know how much more he can take.

"I'm doing the right thing, aren't I? Sasuke-teme's back and I'm trying to leave them alone to do…whatever it is they want to do. Sasuke says I'm underestimating Sakura-chan but what the hell does that even mean? Isn't this supposed to be the easy part?" Naruto raises himself onto one elbow and looks expectantly down at the Yondaime's giant stone face. Silence answers him.

Sighing in frustration, the blond's head drops back against his arm, the rock pleasantly warm under his body. He tries to imagine what his father would do; what advice he would have doled out. Then Naruto remembers the few brief moments he'd spent with Minato and Kushina...Okay, maybe his father wouldn't have been so helpful after all.

Naruto doesn't know if he'll ever be able to get the smell of ash and flame out of his nose. He's seen so many funeral pyres being lit in the months since the end of the war that he swears the searing red of the fire has been permanently imprinted on the back of his lids. Every death is hard, but Sasuke and Sakura-chan stay close by his side, so Naruto finds the strength.

The funerals for the fallen that he hadn't known had been bad, but when the faces in the caskets belonged to people that Naruto had been familiar with, people that he'd fought with, when he only had empty coffins to stare into because the bodies were too badly destroyed, or lost, that was worse.

And the night before Neji's funeral, he'd cried for the first time since the end.

When he leaves his apartment the next morning, Hyuuga Hinata is waiting for him by his front door, covered head to toe in the same simple black clothes he himself is wearing.

Ignoring the discomforting sense of deja-vu, Naruto raises a hand in greeting. "Good morning, Hinata-chan."

After that first awkward lunch together, he and Hinata had forged a tentative friendship. Naruto wasn't trying to find a substitute for Sakura-chan per se, it was just that sometimes he needed time away from the other members of Team Seven, from the stifling weight of the council's expectations.

He can tell that the other girl is nervous; her knuckles are white with the evidence of her anxiety.

"Naruto-kun…For Neji-san's funeral today…will you stand with the rest of the clan? He was much closer to you than he was to me, and I think he would have liked it…if you were there too."

Naruto tries to say yes, to agree and to reassure, but it's impossible to string together a sentence. He settles for a trembling smile instead, and Hinata meets it with a watery smile of her own.

Sakura had been quiet when Naruto informed his teammates that he wouldn't be with them today. She'd looked at him with creases between her eyes, a sight that he was getting used to nowadays, but she'd voiced no objection. Sasuke had simply nodded.

Now from his vantage point at the front of the crowd, Naruto instinctively seeks out Sakura's distinctive pink hair. He finds her at the back of the group, standing close to Sasuke. The black sleeves of their shirts are touching. Her eyes are fixed on the speaker—Gai, for once solemn and subdued—and she doesn't seem aware of the proximity at all. Naruto swallows; was this how the bastard and Sakura always looked together? At-ease, her brightness a contrast to the Uchiha's dark hair and pale skin. Somebody in the crowd bumps into Sasuke, and the man tenses, instinctively moving even closer to Sakura. She looks at Sasuke and smiles, just for a fraction of second, before her attention is once again fixed on Gai. The exchange had lasted only moments, but Naruto feels like he has been gutted.

Maybe this is how it's supposed to be.

By the time Naruto forces himself to look away, Gai has finished speaking, and Hinata takes his place at the podium. Naruto shifts his attention to her, and the girl's speech, said with quiet conviction, ekes out a genuine smile from him. At the end, Naruto slips his hand into Hinata's and whispers, "Neji would have been proud."

"You can't leave."

Sasuke actually manages to look amused. "Are you really going to try and stop me, dead-last?"

Naruto kicks off from where he's sitting on top of Sasuke's kitchen counter. The Uchiha had taken residence in one of the few buildings left standing after the war. Like Naruto's own apartment, the abandoned complex is in one of what used to be Konoha's seedier neighborhoods. After the attacks, all utilities had stopped and most of the building's former tenants had chosen to move to the temporary housing in Konoha's more reputable areas instead.

When Naruto offered to let Sasuke bunk with him, the Uchiha had decided that he would rather live in this shithole with other squatters for company instead. Nobody mentioned the perfectly intact Uchiha district.

"You're not supposed to leave yet. We still need you here. Sakura still needs you here."

Sasuke pauses in his packing, and turns to survey the blond. Even though his eyes are dark, Naruto can feel the Rinnegan beginning to flare in Sasuke's left eye.

"You really are stupid. Sakura doesn't need me, have you even tried talking to her since everything happened?"

"I talk to Sakura-chan!"

Sasuke sighs and turns back to his half-filled bag. "Whatever. If you can't figure it out on your own, I'm not going to help you."

"You can't keep avoiding me forever, you know."

Naruto keeps his eyes on the pile of half-sharpened kunai in front of him, but the red and pink of Sakura remains in his peripheral vision, impossible to ignore.

"I'm not avoiding you." Speaking is difficult, and the lie rolls like boulders off his tongue. Once, Naruto had told Sakura the one thing that he couldn't abide by were liars. Now, the hypocrisy threatens to bubble from his mouth, and it's a struggle to swallow the guilt stuck in his throat.

"Look at me."

Because it's Sakura-chan, it's impossible for Naruto to disobey. She's backlit by the sun, her hair in disarray, as if disturbed by agitated hands. Naruto wants to pull her close, smooth the pink strands, brush the furrows from her forehead. He ignores the urges and tries to avoid her eyes, but it's Sakura-chan, so he meets her gaze for the first time in days and the green is a sucker-punch to the gut.

He has to look away.

"I haven't been avoiding you, Sakura-chan."

There's a sharp intake of breath, and then Sakura's dropping in front of him and rocking back on her heels. Her face is so close, he can feel the heat coming off of her, he can count each individual eyelash and make out the dark ring circling the green of her eyes. Something roars inside of him, and Naruto realizes it's want.

He barely hears Sakura's question, is barely able to respond with a practiced smile and practiced words. If he doesn't get out of here right this second, Naruto knows, he will burst and do something that they'll both heavily regret.

(He thinks it's almost worth it.)

But even if Naruto doesn't think he could ever stop himself from wanting Sakura, he would rather rip himself apart than completely cut her out of his life. It'll always be like this for them, Naruto realizes, a game of push and pull, give and take. How much more could she give him? How little would he be willing to take?

They're supposed to be a three-man team, but even after Sasuke's departure, Naruto feels like there'll never be room for a third.

"You seem distracted."

Naruto nearly jumps, and he looks up to meet Kakashi's inscrutable gaze. He'd been spending the afternoon with the older man so the new Rokudaime could give him a lesson in the finer points of politics. Naruto may not have been a candidate for the sixth Hokage, but it's no secret that he's expected to take the mantle of the seventh.

"If you think this is too boring…" Kakashi's tone is icy, and Naruto can't blame him; these lessons are just as excruciating for his former teacher as they are for him. They're even worse now that not thinking about Sakura-chan occupies so much of his time.

"Sorry, Kakashi-sensei. It's just more complicated than I thought it would be."

Kakashi puts down the papers he'd been holding to fully regard Naruto, who squirmed under his gaze. When he speaks again, it's with a deliberate slowness.

"You know, as somebody who has experience with this sort of thing, most of the time it's really not. Opportunities are rare, take advantage of them."

Naruto thinks there's a pretty good chance that Kakashi hadn't been talking about inter-village politics either.

"No."

Naruto doesn't know if this a nightmare or a daydream, only that Sakura is pulling him inexorably closer, and the heat of her fingers on his new arm is burning straight through his clothes and under his skin.

He waits for her to stop, for the motion to end, but she presses herself against the lines of his body until he's remembering another heavy silence, another time when she'd pulled herself flush against his back. He hadn't let himself think of that day since it'd happened, the words he'd always wanted to hear dropped from her lips like blood money: any lie to keep him safe.

"Sakura-chan…" her name slips despite himself, and her lips instinctively part as his exhale ghosts over her skin. Naruto isn't sure if he's still breathing. He thinks he might die right this second and not realize it.

Sakura doesn't say anything, but her eyes are huge and green, the pupils blown. She lets go of his arm, only to lift her hands to his face, her fingers barely tracing over the lines etched on his cheeks.

Naruto only has a moment to realize that the buzzing that's drowning out all other noise is in his own head when Sakura leans forward and presses her lips to his.

The world tilts. He's stopping and starting all at once.

This is just a dream.

He kisses her back.

It's not.

Naruto runs. He runs like a coward but he can't escape the memory of her soft mouth parting under his with a wet gasp, or the sound of her quiet moans as he'd poured all of his frustration, his anger and his confusion into that kiss.

She owns him completely now, body and soul.

—

tbc

note: Obviously the exam went terribly if it took me this long to write the chapter. (Actually, it's been so long that I don't even remember if I did well or not.) Concrit is appreciated, and I'll try my best to have the next and last chapter out as soon as possible!