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Naruto sits alone in a park. Since the end of the Fourth Shinobi Great War, Hidden Leaf had rapidly industrialised, peace giving time for innovation and creation. The electric lights of the park are almost blinding in their whiteness. Naruto, framed by the shadows the lighting casts, has never looked sadder.
“You going to come out of there?” Naruto finally asks the silence. There is no reply, of course there isn’t. He’s talking to himself. “Sasuke, I’ve fought you. As if I’m going to forget the way your chakra feels.”
One eye opens in the darkness.
“There we go,” Naruto smiles. “I’ve missed you.”
Out of a tree in the darkness drops an equally dark figure. His cloak swirls around him as he lands with a small cloud of dust. Oh, he’s changed. His hair is longer, one side dripping down to cover his left eye- the Rinnegan. He’s taller too, and slightly broader, but other than that has retained his lithe, athletic figure. But he’s older. Naruto can see some lines on his face. It makes something inside him ache.
“Sasuke,” Naruto stands. “It’s been a while.”
They face each other as they had atop those stone statues, as though preparing for a war.
“Naruto,” Sasuke fights the urge to scuff his feet on the dirt floor.
“I’m now older than my father ever was,” Naruto holds apart his hands. “Did you know that?”
“Naruto-” Sasuke bites back on his urges. He’s spent all his life biting back on everything he’s ever wanted. “I came to wish you a happy birthday.”
“But not to stay, right?” They stand apart in ways more than physically. Something has broken Naruto inside. What is it? What had happened when Sasuke was away?
“I-”
Naruto crosses the distance between them in two long strides. Now they are face to face. Sasuke is a little bit taller than Naruto now. The centimetres between them seem to be electrified. This is what Sasuke was afraid of, should he return.
“Thank you for coming,” Naruto whispers.
Sasuke finds his one arm winding around Naruto’s waist and pulling him flush against him. Naruto makes a startled noise but then relaxes and winds his arms around Sasuke’s neck.
“Now why did you do that?” Naruto asks, his hands playing with the ends of his hair. He sounds sad.
“My body just moved on its own.”
“I see.”
They stay that way, two bodies together, shrouded in darkness and exposed in light.
“One day, Sasuke, I will have everything it is that I want,” Naruto promises him. His breath is hot against Sasuke’s skin. “And that includes you.”
“I’ve got to go,” Sasuke pulls away from him sharply. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Sasuke?”
Sasuke is gone as quickly as he appeared, disappearing in a cloud of dust. All that is left in his place is a small rock.
“Shouldn’t you be getting married?” Shino asks Naruto one day when they’re in-between teaching the new generation of genin. “Even Sakura has found someone. She’s moved on from Sasuke, you know. God knows he didn’t love her anyway.”
Naruto stops a practice fight from getting out of hand with a well-timed shadow clone.
Shino almost smiles. It is for the reason of his shadow clones that the students fear the sound of Naruto’s boots coming down the hallway- he could be everywhere at once. No one else had that much control over their shadow clones.
“I don’t think I have to be,” Naruto rubs the back of his head. “Kakashi never was.”
“Kakashi never desired a family,” Shino says. “Don’t you?”
Shino knows the answer to his question already, just as he knows the answer to why Naruto sat alone in the park at night, as though waiting for someone who was never coming home.
“He’s not coming back.”
Naruto stops dead in his tracks.
“Please do try to live in the meantime.”
“Oi, Konohamaru! Stop that!” Naruto chooses to dart off to Konohamaru, who was attempting a Rasengan on an older student, instead of sending a shadow clone. Shino sighs. All these years, and Naruto is still as stubborn as ever.
Sasuke stills thinks back to that day when he left Naruto alone in a park at night, when he was scared out of his wits by something he couldn’t control.
Distance only made it worse, it seems.
He stops to help a pregnant woman cross a rickety bridge with a heavy bag. He shoulders her burden and guides her across the bridge, and gets thanked gratefully in return, with a small bow hampered by her bump and a soft smile.
“It’s nothing,” Sasuke deflects.
“It’s everything to me,” she points to herself.
There is a house near the bridge. From the house, a child runs out and grabs the woman by the legs.
“Mama!” He shouts.
Sasuke uses another rock to teleport away, and when the woman turns around, it is like he never existed in the first place.
Sasuke then helps return a dog to a child who lost it. It is a very pretty dog, yappy and loud. Sasuke finds it annoying, but the child bursts into tears when the dog runs towards it from Sasuke’s arms.
As he sees what must be her father crouch beside her, smiling softly, a revelation hits Sasuke, so profound it almost knocks him off his feet. As he sees the way the village rallies around this small girl and her dog, he realises that while he doesn’t mind being alone, he doesn’t like being lonely.
“Why are you so burdened?” He is asked by an elderly woman who passes him on the road.
Sasuke starts. He turns to her, and sees with a slight pang of shock that she is blind. Her cane taps taps the ground in front of her. “What do you mean?”
“Your chakra is very sad,” the lady says. “But you seem like a good person.”
“I’ve- I’ve done things,” he says. “I’m atoning for them.”
The lady shakes her head. “What you’re doing isn’t atonement,” she pokes Sasuke with the cane. “You’re just punishing yourself.”
Sasuke comes back to that park bench with the woman’s words ringing in his ears, but when Naruto and him make eye contact he stops dead.
“Sasuke!”
I can’t do this. Is all Sasuke thinks. Oh god, I can’t do this.
“What are you doing here, Sasuke?”
Sasuke turns and makes as if to run away, but is stopped in his tracks by a shadow clone.
“Stop running away from me!” Naruto suddenly shouts, and the clone disappears with the force of his emotion. Sasuke turns to look at him, and finds, with a pain that resonates deep within him, that Naruto is crying. “What is it about me that you’re so afraid of? Why won’t you let yourself be loved?”
“I don’t deserve it,” Sasuke murmurs.
“To hell with that! You’re a goddamn chicken, you know that? You’re such a bitch! You’re- you’re- you’re no fucking good!” Once the swears start, they don’t stop coming. “I want to punch you so bad, Sasuke. Love does not have to make you weak! And you don’t have to deserve it. Because love is something I give of my own free will and it is something I choose to do and it is not something you get to hold at an arm’s length because you’re afraid! ”
“I’m not afraid.”
“After all these years you’d think I can see through your lies, Sasuke. Come back when you’re ready to let yourself be loved. I don’t want to talk to you until then,” Naruto pushes outwards with his hands, and a wall of wind punches into Sasuke and sends him tumbling feet over head until he’s lying, dizzy, beyond the park gates. “I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want to hear from you again until you understand. It’s been years, Sasuke. And you say I’m stubborn.”
It’s five years before Sasuke says the name Naruto again, and when he does it is to a little boy who is lost in the woods. “Hey, you know Naruto, right?”
“Yes?” The boy says. The tears on his face have not dried. “The Hokage?”
“I’m his friend,” Sasuke bends down to be at his height. “I’ll get you out of here, I promise.”
“How do I-”
“Here,” Sasuke hands him one of his kunai. “If I betray you, you can kill me, okay?”
The boy stares at the kunai in his hands. “Okay.”
It’s six years before he says the word Konoha again. It is to a boy who asks where he’s from.
“I’m from Konoha,” he says softly.
“That’s where Naruto is from!”
“Yes."
“He didn’t do it alone, though,” another voice at the tavern joins them. It is a man who looks to be old enough to have fought in the shinobi war. “He saved the world with common folk like you and me, and his two friends.”
“You saw them?” Sasuke asks.
“Yes,” the man says. “A pink-haired woman with the hundred healings mark, and an Uchiha.”
“An Uchiha saved the world?” The boy gasps.
“That’s right,” the man takes a long drink and while doing so, he winks at Sasuke. “They were both heroes.”
It’s seven years before he stands at the gates of Konoha again.
Naruto is still sitting on that park bench when Sasuke walks through the park gates and removes his hood.
His pale skin is set alight by the sunset. Naruto sees him standing there, and watches with surprise as Sasuke makes quick work of the cloak and drops it by a lamppost. Underneath, he is wearing a thin black shirt and typical loose pants perfect for fighting. Naruto keeps watching as Sasuke undoes the sword belt at his side and drops it on top of his cloak. Then, he takes several kunai out of his pockets and places them on the ground too.
Naruto is standing by now, watching Sasuke intently until he stood there in nothing but his shirt and his trousers, without any weapons, without any cloak. His left shoulder flaps in the breeze. Using one hand, he pulls back the hair that covers his left eye and tucks it behind his ear.
“Sasuke?” Naruto calls out, hesitantly.
“I’m sorry,” Sasuke bows his head slightly, and then Naruto is running, running towards him, until they slam into each other and both go tumbling to the ground.
Naruto pins Sasuke down by the throat, breathing heavily. “You can’t keep doing this, you know.”
Sasuke’s mismatched eyes stare at him.
“You cannot keep coming back into my life and giving me hope and then taking it away from me!” Naruto shouts. His voice cracks on the last syllable. “I- I can’t keep doing this, you understand?”
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” Sasuke says, staring at the sky, a point just off Naruto’s face.
Naruto makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat and presses his forehead to Sasuke’s chest, his knees on the sides of his body, pinning him in. “We’re so old now,” he says. He sounds like he’s crying. “We’re so old. Look at you. You’ve got lines on your face.”
“I’m now older than Itachi ever was,” Sasuke dreams. “You’re older than your father was. We’ve both grown up.”
“Remember when we were kids?” Naruto keeps his face pressed into his chest. He smells of sweat and something undeniably Sasuke. “Oh, how I hated you.”
“We kissed,” Sasuke mumbles. Naruto can feel the vibrations in his chest. “Twice. Do you remember that?”
“How could I forget? It was gross,” the other laughs shakily. “This life- not how you expected it would go is it?:
“It doesn’t mean it was bad,” Sasuke whispers. “Just because it didn’t go how it was planned, doesn’t mean it was bad.”
Naruto looks up at him. “Why are you here?”
“We’re both older now,” Sasuke sits upwards in a burst of power. He and Naruto both knew keeping him pinned was just a show. He cups the side of Naruto’s faee with his one hand. “I’ve had time.”
“To what?”
“To understand what you said to Obito, all those years ago,” Sasuke presses his forehead to Naruto’s. “No more masks.”
Naruto tears up again. “Who are you this time?”
There is a ghost of a smile playing about Sasuke’s lips. “I’m Uchiha Sasuke. I’ve come back for the people I love.”
Tears drip from Naruto’s face onto Sasuke’s lap. “You mean that?”
“I did say I was sorry to keep you waiting,” Sasuke actually smiles this time. “We’re both too old to keep playing this game, aren’t we?”
“I could have told you that ten years ago, Sasuke,” Naruto sniffs and then yanks Sasuke forward by the shirt.
Naruto tastes salty, like miso and tears.