Posting this half-hour early. Don't care: too sleepy. Good night and enjoy.

It was different when they were alone like they were. Tsunami had let them deal with themselves uncomfortably, going to check on her sleeping son while the shinobi focused on dealing with their injuries. Sakura had offered to get Kakashi-sensei settled since she was the least injured, leaving Sasuke and Naruto down in the kitchen alone to heal their own hurts as Tazuna settled in for his first night of sleep in his own bed in several weeks.

Sasuke's fingers were gentle as they helped her unlash her arm and wrestle off her jacket, and Naruto did her best to hold in her gasps and hisses as he worked. She sighed as he straightened her arm so slowly she didn't even feel it, "I hate this. What the hell have we even been doing? Training since we were seven and this is the best we can do? Pathetic. I just-" She hissed and cut herself off as her hands fisted.

Sasuke gently pried her fingers open and helped her arm relax so he could manipulate it again. "We need to train more."

Naruto ground her teeth, "But we always need to train more! That's the thing, Sasuke: No matter how much better we get, there's always been someone out there even stronger. I just... what's the point? Are we... what are we even fight for here?"

His fingers tightened on her skin, not enough to hurt, but certainly enough to get her attention and show that he wasn't as unaffected as he'd seemed. Storm blue eyes turned to where he was carefully prodding her hellishly bruised arm, gently poking the bones back into their proper places before the Kyuubi's healing could kick in and force them to rebreak it. "We're fighting for each other. That's what we're fighting for: to protect each other so things like this-" he lifted her arm so she couldn't ignore it, "-don't happen again. So we're strong enough that no one can take us from each other."

Naruto lowered her head, her bangs shadowing her eyes, and hid the ache she felt for Sasuke every time he mentioned that. She knew that that was his central drive: to become strong enough that no one could ever take the ones he cared about from him ever again, to become strong enough to hunt down Itachi and Shisui and beat the truth out of them about why they'd slaughtered the Uchiha clan.

Naruto had a mother and father when Sasuke didn't. She didn't get to spend much time with her father because he was a Jounin and what time he didn't spend on missions was spent with Ino because she was the clan heir and had so much to learn from him, politics and Jutsu alike. She knew what it was to yearn and to love and resent at the same time, but Naruto didn't know what it was like to have her most precious people ripped away from her. When she trained, it was to show the village that they couldn't ignore her, that they couldn't just pretend she was a dirty little secret, that she was worth more than the scorn they aimed at her for being the Kyuubi, even if she hadn't known the exact details at first.

Naruto had Makoto and Inoichi still, and she had Ino still. She couldn't even begin to imagine Sasuke's pain, to imagine what it'd be like to have her parents torn away from her by her sister.

And she wouldn't... She wouldn't let Sasuke experience anything like that again. She'd protect him, give him a reason to go on, just like she had back then. They were each other's anchor, Sasuke giving her a reason to fight the village's scorn and her giving him a reason to get back to his feet and keep going. She hadn't known what it was like to have someone depend on her until Sasuke had needed her to keep himself strong, and he'd helped her become better, helped her on Taijutsu, helped her school work, helped her plan pranks, too.

Sasuke knew what it was like to have expectations placed on him just for who he was, what his name represented to the village. Sasuke knew what it was like to live in the shadow of an older sibling who could already do so much, so much that he couldn't. Sasuke knew what it was like to see that disappointment in a parent's eyes.

That's what she was fighting for. She wouldn't let Sasuke or Sakura die, she couldn't-

Kakashi's hand on her head as he smiled down at her, "In this world, there are people younger than you... and stronger than me."

She couldn't let them end up like Zabuza, life snuffed out in a single instant of inattention. I am... tired of seeing people around me die. Kakashi-sensei, the Demon Brothers, Zabuza. Two Chuunin, two Jounin- even if Kakashi had been faking.

Naruto nodded, "Stronger. We need to get stronger." She hissed and whined when he splinted her arm so she wouldn't disrupt it too much until it healed.

Sasuke smirked at her and poked the wrapped appendage again, "You especially."

She pouted at him, "It hurts..."

"Bear it stoically like a shinobi."

"Shinobi my ass."

He stared hard at his work, "Will that work?"

Naruto tested it by flexing her hand and expertly hiding the wince, "Yeah, should. I'll be up and ready tomorrow morning."

"That soon?"

"Yeah, I mean, it's not the first time I broke my arm."

"Excuse me? When did you break your arm before? Where was I at?"

"Last year, on... well, you were busy." It wasn't Sasuke's fault the Uchiha clan massacre happened the week of her birthday. She'd always forgiven him for missing the day, they celebrated it in other ways on other days to make up for it.

"Hn."

"I got caught up with a clan elder who ordered me to move things from an old storage unit. He ordered me to not leave until it was done, and I wasn't going to let him have the satisfaction of winning, so I stayed there and did it- until a group of villagers caught me on the way to the secondary storage unit late that night. I don't think they meant to do anything much, and to be fair, it wouldn't have happened at all if I hadn't been carrying something too big and heavy for me."

Sasuke's voice was dangerously quiet, "Tell me."

"Someone threw a bottle, then more people threw bottles, then other things. I tried to back away and run, but I slipped on something and went down. The crate I was carrying fell on me wrong and cracked by forearm perfectly across the middle. My scream brought some near-by ANBU who helped me home. I pranked the ever loving hell out of the clan elder, then got in trouble for it because who the hell else is capable of sneaking around the clan compound like I can? The old bastard brought the matter before Tousan officially, but once he got the whole picture, he ordered me to sort through a different old storage unit. The one with all the scrolls from the Kino clan."

"Wait. So you pranked a clan elder, and in punishment, your father... gave you access to all the Kino clan's scrolls?"

Naruto beamed at him, "Yup~! That's where I found the Jutsu I used to beat Mizuki-sensei."

Sasuke gave a close-eyed smirk and shook his head, "Only you."

She rolled her eyes and made a twirling motion with the index finger of her good hand. Sasuke obligingly turned around and presented his back and the blood-crusted back of his shirt. He reached down with both hands to pull it over his head and she smacked him on the back of the head, "Don't even think about it!"

He grunted and glared at her over his shoulder.

She glared right back, "Don't glare at me, teme, and don't you dare rip that shirt off when it's stuck to your back with your own blood. I will kick your ass."

He rolled his eyes and turned back to front. She pulled close the medical supplies he'd been using to treat her and soaked a cloth with peroxide, pressing it against the back of his shirt to break down the dried blood. His shoulders twitched, "Just pull it off."

"Shut up, you masochist. Deal with it." After a half-second of silence, she added: "Stoically, like a shinobi." Only Sasuke would prefer the sensation of pain that came with ripping open a wound instead of the tickling feel of peroxide.

It only took a few minutes for her to separate the cloth from his back, enduring his grumbling the whole time, and Sasuke finally threw off the shirt like it had personally insulted him. Blood began seeping sluggishly from the large gash immediately. It made her cringe just to see, the huge cut going from his right shoulder to the opposite hip.

Naruto snickered as she carefully wiped away the blood on Sasuke's back, "Do you have any idea how many of our old classmates would kill to be in this position, here, with you, in the middle of the night, shirtless and at their mercy?"

"But that was never you."

Sasuke's surprising severity in the situation (or maybe it was Naruto's unnatural levity while dealing with open wounds?) sobered her reactions in an instant. "No, it never was."

"Why? Even Sakura and Ino, at first..."

Naruto shrugged where he couldn't see and dabbed clotting agent on his cut carefully. He'd managed to Substitute just in time; any deeper and the wound would have cut into muscle and interfered with his fighting ability. She could have said that she'd just been affected by the same reason that eventually resulted in Sakura and Ino's disinterest: that watching someone snoring just took all the mystery and romance out of the tragically shy hero and, later, poor genius orphan things. She could have told him that it was because she saw the same loneliness in him that she felt herself, how no one wanted to know either of them for who they really were, only because of their families.

In the end, she almost didn't say anything as she gently wrapped the bandages around his chest and back to keep pressure on the slash until it healed. She let her hand rest against the warmth of his back seeping through the bandages, voice quiet in the emptiness of the kitchen, "You can't see shiny things in the dark."

The silence echoed between them when Sasuke spoke, punctuated by a short nod: "You can't see lights in the sunshine."

And they were right back to that place that held only the two of them, Sasuke overshadowed by his own darkness, and Naruto herself overlooked because of the very light she exuded. She leaned her forehead between his shoulderblades, "I'll always be your friend. I took an oath."

In the darkness, they would shine together.

xxx

And there you go. Shorter chapter, but full of fluff to compensate. And I shall now lay out the pairings most have probably been wondering about.

SasuFemNaru, Mina(ko)Kashi, and AnkoUsa. There will be no Mamoru in my fic, or if he is, expect him to be an enemy, because I just cannot successfully hide my hatred for him.

I've got the other Study Nine's pairings planned, too. The only one of which I'm revealing for now is... InoSaku. (Yes! Ino and Sakura, having grown out of their Sasuke infatuation and actually measured him by human standards instead of fangirl ones, realize he's not for them, and just how close they are and how much they mean to one another.)

XXX