Chapter Text
The fact was that at the Valley of the End, Sasuke and Naruto had shouted a lot of very personal things at each other, which hadn’t mattered, because of the whole mutually assured destruction situation. If you absolutely had to bare your soul to someone, the best time to do it was in the final moments before you both died. And then they both had lived. Which was awkward. What did you even say, after something like that?
Well, if you were Naruto, apparently you said things like this:
“Is this your sock? On the floor? Again?”
The offending sock was waved in front of Sasuke’s face. Sasuke scowled and slapped Naruto’s hand away. “No,” he lied, and then, somewhat antithetically, he added, “I put it in the laundry basket. You must have knocked it out.”
“I did not! It was on the floor in the bathroom! You’re such a liar, you—” Thereafter followed some indecipherable grumbling from Naruto as he stomped around his apartment, picking up discarded shirts and pants. The next time he passed Sasuke on the couch, though, he glared at him again and burst out, “Why do you even have socks? You wear sandals!”
“My feet get cold,” said Sasuke. He debated pointing out that ninety-five percent of the clothes scattered on the floor of Naruto’s apartment were, in fact, Naruto’s, and that it was thus hypocritical of him to whine about Sasuke being a slob for the occasional forgotten sock. However, Naruto could make the obvious counterpoint that this was, in fact, his apartment, which was exactly what he’d done last time Sasuke had brought this up—after which Sasuke had snapped fine then, I’ll leave, prompting Naruto to tackle him into the kitchen counter, which had cracked. Then they had shouted at each other for a while about whose fault the damage was (It was YOUR BUTT that HIT THE COUNTER, Naruto had shouted; YOU were the one who PROPELLED my butt into the counter, Sasuke had shouted back). And then Sasuke had left in a huff to go sleep at Sakura’s.
Sasuke spent a moment weighing the pros and cons of starting this argument again, just for something to do. But he had slept at Sakura’s two nights ago after that whole thing about the toothpaste, and his back was still stiff from her aggressively firm couch. Besides, earlier he had seen Naruto putting certain groceries in the fridge that suggested mackerel might be on the menu tonight. So Sasuke opted to keep his mouth shut.
***
After Sasuke had regained consciousness in Konoha’s hospital—well, he’d been on too many painkillers to do anything. The good stuff, as Kakashi had said when he visited, eyeing the IV drip appraisingly. And after that…
After that… uh…
After that, there was a big, blank hole, like someone had tried to erase a wrong answer on a test and ripped right through the paper. Sasuke didn’t really remember what had happened for a while. Presumably this was also thanks to the painkillers. But after that, when Sasuke was no longer stoned out of his mind, he had considered leaving Konoha. He had considered it many times. More than once he had made it as far as the gate. No one—well, no one aside from the devastatingly annoying newly anointed junior jounin who had the gall to identify as Sasuke’s self-appointed “best friend”—would have stopped him. In fact, most of his peers and all of his seniors would probably have been overjoyed to see him gone.
And part of him truly did loathe Konoha—a deep, simmering, poisonous kind of hatred that clawed at the inside of his ribs and burned at the back of his throat, the kind of hatred that had a tendency to flare up out of nowhere and make him scream himself hoarse and punch through walls. But. Lying on the ground bleeding out right beside Naruto, too weak to do more than roll his eyes in Naruto’s general direction for one last glimpse, that had been… nice. It was a messed-up thing to say about a violent near-death experience, but nonetheless, it was true.
Mostly, though, Sasuke was exhausted. He was eighteen, almost nineteen, which meant he’d now spent exactly two-thirds of his life fueled by rage. He couldn’t do it anymore. He needed a break. Especially since he was now down one arm. And Naruto had a couch, so…
Besides, Konoha was, quite literally, not the same village he’d left when he was twelve. He wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing, or if it really meant anything at all, other than a bunch of shiny new buildings and a hokage who kept falling asleep during council meetings. What it did mean for sure was that Sasuke was homeless; due to a notable dearth of Uchihas in the village, nobody had bothered to rebuild the Uchiha compound after Pein razed it to the ground. In the place where his house had once been, there was now a konbini, a laundromat, and a small dog park.
The first time Sasuke had gone to take a look, there had been a handwritten sign taped up in the window of the laundromat announcing that they were CURRENTLY OUT OF CHANGE, SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. In the dog park, two little girls had been chasing after a big dog, watched over by their parents. Eventually the dog had turned around too fast and knocked over one of the girls, who had started crying. At this point, Sasuke had gone to the konbini, bought two bottles of umeshu, and—sometime later—been caught by Naruto’s neighbour drunkenly trying to break into her fourth-floor bedroom window, after which he had thrown up in the hall, twice.
(Allegedly. Sasuke didn’t actually remember that part himself.)
These days when Sasuke visited the old Uchiha compound, he was accompanied by Naruto, who stood next him and fidgeted and breathed too loud. Once, when the setting sun was painting the sky above the laundromat a stunning orange-pink, Naruto had put his arm around Sasuke’s shoulders. It had been a nice moment—almost romantic, in a way. It had been such a nice moment that, in retrospect, it had not deserved to be ruined by Sasuke telling Naruto he ought to wear more deodorant, upon which Naruto had removed his arm from around Sasuke’s shoulders and punched him in the face.
***
“Well, I’m heading out,” said Naruto, shrugging on his flak jacket. He’d gotten good at zipping it up one-handed, much better than Sasuke, to Sasuke’s irritation. “Gotta meet the kids.”
“Okay,” said Sasuke. He was still in his pyjamas, which were actually Naruto’s pyjamas, which accordingly smelled like Naruto. Sasuke had expected this to gross him out. Somehow, it did not.
“What about you? Any big plans for the day?”
Sasuke shrugged.
“You could come help my team with their training,” Naruto suggested, now hopping on one foot as he tugged on a sandal. “You’d totally scare the shit out of them. It’d be awesome.”
“I’m busy,” said Sasuke. He wasn’t, at all, but hanging around with a bunch of genin brats wasn’t his idea of a fun time.
“Well, if you have time, can you do the dishes?” asked Naruto.
“Sure,” said Sasuke.
When the door had closed behind Naruto, Sasuke eyed the dishes. Despite some truly ingenious stacking, they were still taking up all of the limited counter space in the small kitchen. Still, there weren't that many of them. They would take him, what, half an hour? He had all day. So he finished his rice, carefully balanced his dirty bowl in such a way as to avoid an avalanche, and flopped out on the couch with his book.
Several weeks back, Naruto had checked out a selection of scrolls from the military library for Sasuke, Sasuke’s own library card still being frozen due to international terrorism charges and also 1900 ryo in late fees. Sasuke had looked through one or two of the scrolls when Naruto first brought them home. They provided tactical analysis of historical operations, and discussions of military psychology, and other relevant topics of that nature. Then Sasuke had discovered Naruto’s Icha Icha collection, inherited from Naruto’s old teacher, and the scrolls had sat untouched ever since.
He had a strong suspicion that Jiraiya’s books were not what one might call good literature. But it wasn’t like he had much to compare them against, the burning desire for vengeance having eaten up most of the hours in his life that might otherwise have been spent reading fiction. The stories sucked him right in. More importantly, they were generously punctuated with interesting bits involving a lot of throbbing and moaning and related activities, things that Sasuke had never given much thought to before.
He intended to read maybe a chapter this morning. Then he would get dressed and do the dishes and… go train, or something. He was technically now a qualified jounin on the mission roster, not that the mission desk seemed to have realized this. But at the end of the chapter the heroine’s long-lost twin sister reappeared suddenly, and then at the end of the next chapter the twin sister turned out to be evil, and after that there was a whole elaborate plot involving the evil twin sister seducing the heroine’s childhood best friend, and then there was an extended period of angst-ridden unresolved sexual tension between the heroine and the childhood best friend interwoven with an elaborate criminal heist, and at that point Sasuke only had about a hundred and fifty pages left anyway, so—
“Are you still in your pyjamas?” Naruto demanded.
Sasuke’s head jerked up with a start. He blinked. He blinked some more. His eyes seemed to have stopped working properly; he could barely make out Naruto’s figure by the door. He was just starting to panic, his Sharingan activating instinctively, when Naruto flicked on the light, upon which Sasuke discovered that the daylight outside had already faded into dusk. His eyes worked fine. The problem was that he’d spent eight straight hours reading.
Naruto looked at the dishes, untouched on the counter from this morning.
“I just have two more pages,” said Sasuke.
***
When Sakura opened her door and saw Sasuke, she just sighed and stepped aside. “What was it this time? Don’t tell me it was your stupid fruit argument again…”
“It wasn’t the fruit argument,” said Sasuke. He put down his bag, and frowned. In addition to the sandals he’d just taken off, Sakura’s genkan housed a second pair of sandals, about the same size as his. Sasuke definitely had bigger feet than Sakura, besides which Sakura always wore her boots these days.
“Well, then, what?” Sakura demanded.
Sasuke shrugged, and pointed to the sandals. “Whose shoes are those?”
Somewhat to his surprise, Sakura’s face flushed as pink as her hair. “I—um—well, they’re Lee’s. He left them when he—what? Stop making that face! And don’t change the subject! What happened?”
“We got in a fight,” Sasuke said stiffly. “It’s not a big deal. Why did Lee leave your house without his shoes?”
“Er—it’s some training exercise—he has these sort of rubber glove things that go on his feet, so that he can—would you stop making that face?”
“Sorry,” said Sasuke, not really sorry.
He followed Sakura into her apartment, which was much nicer than Naruto’s. Technically, Sakura could have lived in the jounin block too; she was still on active duty, and even took the occasional mission. Mostly, though, she worked at the hospital, and since the only medic-nin more qualified than Sakura was Tsunade herself, the hospital paid Sakura well. Really well. And she only took A- or S-rank missions, which also paid well. These days, she had money. Her downtown apartment reflected this.
While Sakura tidied up from her dinner, Sasuke hovered by the couch, which he eyed with distaste. It was new and fashionable and thus deeply uncomfortable, always leaving his back stiff and putting cricks in his neck.
“Naruto lets me sleep in his bed,” he said.
“How generous,” said Sakura. She thrust a stack of blankets and a pillow into Sasuke’s hand. “Please feel free to make yourself comfortable on the couch.”
Sometimes he missed the old Sakura, the one he’d known on Team Seven. She’d been insufferable, just as bad as Naruto—but she would have let him sleep in her bed, no question, and she probably wouldn’t have kicked and squirmed around all night like Naruto did. This Sakura had grown out of her old crush. And she was mean about it. There might have been some lingering resentment from the time she’d decided to kill him with her own two hands a couple years back. Or maybe she was just like this now.
When Sakura had gone to bed, pointedly closing the door to her room behind her, Sasuke tried unsuccessfully to get comfortable on the couch. When this proved to be futile, he gave up, accepted that his spine would have a permanent dent in it, and stared up at the ceiling, washed silver by the moonlight coming in through Sakura’s uncurtained living room windows.
It hadn’t been about the dishes. No. Naruto hadn’t even seemed mad about the dishes. He had just started doing them himself, casting the occasional concerned glance over at Sasuke, as if worried Sasuke might be losing his mind. And when Sasuke had finished the last page, he had even gotten up to help, because washing dishes one-handed was a pain in the ass. So that had been fine. And then they had made donburi for dinner, and that had been fine too.
No, the problem had arisen after dinner, when Naruto was sitting at the table, mending a tear in his shirt from the D-rank-of-the-day, and thus shirtless. Afterwards, Sasuke could not really say what made him look up from his book (the next one in the series) and ask, very casually, “Do you want to have sex with me?”
First Naruto had yelped in pain as he jammed the needle into his thumb. Then he had gone red, brilliantly red, all the way across his face and down his neck, like a terrible sunburn. Then he had turned to stare at Sasuke in disbelief and said do I want to do WHAT with you? Sasuke didn’t know what had happened after that, because by this point he had already been climbing out the window. It had occurred to him as he was walking down the side of the building that this might have been an inappropriate way to go about things. Spending the night at Sakura’s had seemed prudent. So, no, it hadn’t been “the fruit argument,” for real.
He woke up to a series of stabbing pains in his spinal column and the murmur of voices coming from Sakura’s bedroom. Sakura was saying, “Well, yeah, but—” only to be cut off by—ah. Yes. That was definitely Naruto’s voice. Sasuke would recognize that excitable squawk anywhere. Naruto was probably perched on the windowsill, talking to Sakura through the bedroom window. Sasuke couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying.
“No, you’re right, I think it would be for the best,” said Sakura. “Okay. I’ll take him this morning.”
So at breakfast, when Sakura opened her mouth to speak, Sasuke was prepared. “I’m busy,” he said, before she’d even gotten out her first word.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” snapped Sakura. “Anyway, you’re not busy. And you’re not allowed to spend all day indoors reading porn anymore. It’s rotting your brain. You’ll turn out like Kakashi-sensei. Now eat your breakfast and put some clothes on—I’m supposed to be in surgery at ten.”
***
As far as Sasuke could tell, the hokage’s office had not changed much since Kakashi took over, although the room definitely contained more dog hair, which made Sasuke’s eyes itch and his nose run. Kakashi himself looked half-dead, and his official robes had a rumpled quality that suggested he’d slept in them several nights in a row—but that was normal for Kakashi, so Sasuke didn’t make much of it. He wasn’t even that surprised when Sakura opened the door on Kakashi attempting to crawl under the desk in a flurry of papers.
“Oh, it’s just you two,” said Kakashi. He dusted himself off and settled back into his chair, snatching a few stray papers out of the air and pushing them into a disorderly stack. “I was expecting Iruka… I’m afraid I’m behind on my reporting for the academy by a couple of weeks, er, that is, months… but please, come in. How are my cute little students doing this morning?”
“Sasuke’s an active jounin—” Sakura started.
“I know,” said Kakashi, nodding. “I’m very proud.”
“Don’t cut me off,” Sakura snapped. Kakashi looked slightly alarmed. “Sasuke’s an active jounin and yet he hasn’t been assigned a single mission since he got reinstated. Put him back on the roster.”
“Ah, well, yeah,” said Kakashi. He coughed an apologetic sort of cough that made Sakura’s mouth purse into a dangerous white line. “Right, so, the thing is, the kind of missions Sasuke is qualified for tend to involve leaving the village…”
“So?” said Sakura.
Kakashi coughed again. Sakura’s mouth pursed tighter. She crossed her arms. Oh no. As subtly as he could, Sasuke inched away from her. “Well, you know… the whole probation thing… given that he’s not allowed to leave the village…”
“He’s not?” said Sakura, momentarily startled out of her mounting wrath.
“I’m not?” said Sasuke. This was news to him. Annoying news. Yes, he did still routinely contemplate leaving the village, ideally after torching the entire place to the ground, but lately he’d started to settle in, sort of. He took a perverse comfort in the dark looks cast in his direction by other shinobi, knowing ninety-five percent of his so-called coworkers wanted him gone (or, ideally, dead). And now it turned out he’d been accidentally following the rules all along? Infuriating.
“Since when?” Sakura demanded. “How come no one told him? How come no one told me?”
“Since the council voted to reinstate Sasuke at jounin rank with probationary restrictions on his movement and activities for a six-month period,” said Kakashi. His eyes were now fixed on Sasuke, watching him inscrutably from above his mask.
“What? But Sasuke’s on the council!” protested Sakura.
This was true. One of Kakashi’s early acts as hokage had been to reconfigure the regular council so that the village was no longer in the tenuous position of being run by two mummified octogenarians on the verge of keeling over dead at any given moment. Now each clan head had a seat, as did representatives from the hospital, the academy, the jounin command, the chuunin command, ANBU, and several civilian organizations. By virtue of being the only surviving member of one of Konoha’s founding clans, Sasuke had grudgingly been afforded a seat, at Kakashi’s insistence. In a general sense, Sasuke had taken great satisfaction in the appointment, because it had pissed off most of the other council members, who hated his guts. In a more specific sense, though, the purpose of the council was to provide guidance for the management of the village, and Sasuke really didn’t give a shit about what the village did these days. Let the damn place rot. He usually didn’t bother to show up.
“I might have missed that meeting,” he admitted.
“You didn’t miss it,” said Kakashi. “You were there. You voted in favour.”
“Oh,” said Sasuke. He was pretty sure he could hear Sakura’s jaw creaking as she ground her teeth beside him.
“They’re long meetings. Hard to stay focused,” Kakashi said charitably. Before Sakura could get violent, he added, “How about a few D-ranks? We’ve always got lots of those. Nice and close to home. Just to get back into the swing of things, you know?”
Kakashi and Sakura both looked at him expectantly.
“Whatever,” said Sasuke.
***
Naruto and his three genin were at training ground fifteen when Sasuke eventually found them. Or rather, twenty Narutos and two or three of each of his genin were there. The genin and their clones looked exhausted. All the Narutos were also a little sweaty, but in an exciting way. Sasuke loitered at the edge of the field, watching the sparring session.
Early on, Naruto and Sasuke had both discovered one significant drawback to being down one arm each: most ninjutsu required hand-signs, and most hand-signs required two functional hands. Sasuke could do a lot without weaving hand-signs; Naruto, not so much, although when he went into sage mode he was able to unlock the Sakura-like power of Hitting Things Really Really Hard. Tsunade was working on some kind of horrific fucked-up bioprosthetic involving Senju Hashirama’s cells, but she refused to attempt the procedure until she could confirm for sure that it would lead to the desired one additional arm rather than a nightmarish array of extra limbs all over Naruto’s body.
In the meantime, Naruto had come up with a solution that was… that was… hrrrrng… okay, fine, Sasuke could admit it, that was cool. Naruto had figured out how to channel Kurama’s chakra into a sort of chakra arm, one that could form hand-signs, and had the added benefit of annihilating anything else it touched at the subatomic level. Privately, Sasuke had tried to imitate it himself with his Susanoo—but while Susanoo was great for indiscriminate mass destruction, it was less great for imitating fine motor skills. He’d given up after he’d blown out all the windows on the east side of the jounin block for the second time.
Right now, Naruto’s chakra arm was in the process of punching through genin shadow clones, one after another, dissipating them pop-pop-pop until only one of each genin was left standing (or, in the case of one of the boys, kneeling and clutching at his stomach as one of Naruto’s shadow clones patted him apologetically on the back).
“Hey, not bad! You guys lasted a whole ten seconds this time! Getting better!” said Naruto.
“No we’re not, sensei,” said the girl, who looked tired and sore and irritable. She and the other boy helped their teammate upright.
Naruto laughed. “Well, yeah, you guys still kinda suck. But you’ll get there!” He glanced around and saw Sasuke. “Uh—hey, take care of the rest of these clones, and then you can head out for the night. I’ve gotta go.”
“Sensei!” protested the girl, now looking tired and sore and downright livid—but before she could articulate a legitimate protest, one of Naruto’s clones had her pinned. Sasuke watched the three genin struggle while the real Naruto jogged over to him, letting his chakra arm fade.
Naruto looked happy to see him, and not like he was planning on challenging Sasuke to a fight to the death over Sasuke’s ill-advised and mutually unanticipated attempt to proposition him last night. That was a good sign. Naruto slowed when he got closer, though, squinting at Sasuke suspiciously. “Hey, what happened to your face?” he demanded.
What had happened to Sasuke’s face was a geriatric, overweight cat named Hime-chan, who had been “stuck” up a tree and was violently opposed to being lifted down. This had been the subject of Sasuke’s first official Konoha mission in six years, for which he had received 200 ryo in compensation.
Sasuke explained this to Naruto, who sniggered and said, “Aww, Sasuke-kun, was the widdle kitty too tough for you?”
If anyone else had said this to Sasuke, they would have been dead on the ground before they’d finished the sentence. Because it was Naruto, Sasuke just kicked his legs out from under him and sat on him. They were still wrestling twenty minutes later when Naruto’s bedraggled genin limped past.
“G’night! Eight o’clock at the bridge tomorrow morning, don’t forget!” Naruto told them, while Sasuke ground his face into the dirt. “Ow, hey, you’re getting gravel up my nose—”
“Um… sensei, are you… is this… okay?” asked the shorter and less injured of the two boys, who was helping support the weight of his taller and more injured companion.
“He’s fine. He’s not even using his stupid arm thing,” said the girl, rolling her eyes. “Come on. Let’s drop Ichiro at the hospital and go home.”
Once Sasuke had finally forced Naruto to concede the fight, he got off him and helped him to his feet. They dusted themselves off and briefly compared bruises.
“So—” started Naruto.
Sasuke cut him off. This was his moment. “Ichiraku?” he said, and Naruto’s eyes lit up.
***
Naruto, an adult man of jounin rank and (with the obvious exception of Sasuke) the most powerful shinobi in the world, still used a wallet shaped like a frog. It was not just that he had never bothered to replace the cutesy frog wallet he’d had as a kid; that old thing had fallen to pieces long ago. No, he had actively chosen to go out and buy an identical replacement, and then he had the nerve to complain when his genin team made fun of him for it.
He was arguably one step ahead of Sasuke, though, who didn’t have a wallet at all, and honestly hadn’t needed one up until this afternoon, due to having no money. But there were certain advantages to having 200 ryo kicking around loose in your pocket. When the frog wallet emerged after Naruto had finished his fourth bowl of ramen that night, Sasuke was faster, slapping the entirety of his paycheque down on the counter with a smirk.
“Uh… don’t you want to save that?” Naruto asked doubtfully. “I don’t mind paying. I ate more than you anyway—”
“I’m paying,” said Sasuke.
“But—”
“I’m paying,” Sasuke insisted. “This is a date.”
“What?” said Naruto. His face was starting to go red again. He glanced at old man Teuchi and his daughter behind the counter, who were both staring at them open-mouthed, and leaned in closer so he could mutter into Sasuke’s ear, “Sasuke, you’re supposed to ask about that before you do the date…”
“Fine,” said Sasuke, rolling his eyes. “Would you like to be currently going on a date with me?”
“Well, I—I mean—what d’you—well, I—” Naruto was going steadily redder. Then he frowned. “Wait, is this just because you want to—”
“It’s because I’m in love with you,” said Sasuke. Upon reflection, and to his profound dismay, this seemed to be true. It was the only logical explanation. A clatter from behind the counter indicated that old man Teuchi had dropped one of his pots.
Naruto was now practically glowing with embarrassment. “Well, geez, when you put it like that…” he muttered. “Do you—I mean—you really mean that? Like, for real?”
“Apparently,” said Sasuke, still coming to terms with it himself.
“Geez,” Naruto said again.
“I know,” Sasuke said glumly.
Naruto scrunched up his face, which was still bright red. He appeared to be thinking. Sasuke knew from experience that this was a process that could go on for a while.
Finally, Naruto glared at Sasuke and said, “Well, okay then, sure. But I’m not changing my name.”
Sasuke rolled his eyes again, hard enough that he felt his optic nerve twinge. “It’s one stupid date. We’re not getting married. I don’t want you to take my name anyway.”
“Huh? Why not?” Naruto demanded. “You think I’m not good enough to be an Uchiha? Is that it? Huh?”
What Sasuke felt was that Naruto and Sakura were the only reasons he was here at all, and that it didn’t matter what names they had. How he communicated this was by saying, “Uchiha Naruto sounds lame.”
“Wha—that’s—well, Uzumaki Sasuke sounds even lamer!”
“Tch. Like I would ever change my name—”
“Oh, oh, so my name’s not good enough for you, is that—”
***
“Again?” said Sakura, when she opened the door. “You mean you’re still fighting?”
“This is a different fight,” said Sasuke, as he stepped into her apartment and slipped off his shoes. When he bent over, he hissed and clutched at his side; Naruto had slammed him against a telephone pole hard enough to bruise some ribs.
“Of course it is,” said Sakura, and heaved a sigh. “Well, what now?”
Sasuke hesitated. He considered telling her the truth: we went to Ichiraku on our first date, I told him I was in love with him, we fought about who would have a lamer name if we got married, and then we beat the shit out of each other in the middle of the street. Oddly, the prospect of saying this to Sakura didn’t seem that embarrassing, not even the I told him I was in love with him part. Sasuke was beginning to suspect he’d lost the ability to feel embarrassment somewhere around the same time he’d lost his left arm. What stopped him was the slight chance that Sakura might actually be annoyed enough to kick him out, which meant he would either have to go back to Naruto’s place—unthinkable—or else—what? Crash with Kakashi? No thanks.
“It was the fruit argument again,” Sasuke lied.
***
This time Sasuke was woken up by someone knocking on Sakura’s door first thing in the morning. For a while he ignored it, rolling over and contorting his spine in the other direction to balance out the musculoskeletal damage while he waited for whoever was at the door to lose interest and go away—but the knocking persisted. Eventually Sasuke gave up, got up, and opened the door.
“I’m sorry I said your name was lame,” Naruto blurted out. He looked like he hadn’t slept much.
Sasuke just stared at him. He also hadn’t slept much, but that was thanks to Sakura’s terrible couch, not because he’d gone to bed mad. Well—he had gone to bed mad, but only in the generic way he always went to bed mad. It wasn’t personal.
“‘Cause I know your family’s really important to you, and stuff,” Naruto mumbled. He addressed this bit to Sasuke’s feet, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “So. I’m sorry for saying that. I didn’t mean it.”
Sasuke continued to stare at him. This… was not what he’d expected. All he could think to say was, “You put your shirt on inside out.”
Naruto glanced down at his shirt and pulled a face. “Aw, man…”
***
By the end of the morning, which was spent largely on or around the saggy, standard-issue couch in Naruto’s apartment, Sasuke had become very enlightened in certain areas of life. For instance: kissing. His first-ever kiss had been with Naruto, accidentally, when he was twelve. His second and third and fourth and fifth kisses had now also been with Naruto, but they were way more exciting. Kissing was fantastic. Somehow, he hadn’t expected that. It seemed so… mundane. Although there was definitely a lot more hair-pulling and biting and pinching than Jiraiya’s books had led Sasuke to believe. They’d managed to tear a strip off the upholstery and break a couple of plates, too. Actually, it wasn’t really all that different from what happened when he and Naruto fought, except that Sasuke didn’t have to pretend that he wasn’t getting wildly turned on by it. Until—
“Whoa, whoa, wait a sec,” said Naruto, pushing Sasuke off him. He was panting, and his shirt was tangled around his arm, and his lip was sort of swollen where Sasuke had accidentally elbowed him in the face a couple of minutes ago.
“What? Huh?” said Sasuke, dazed, definitely in love, or at the very least in lust.
“It’s just,” said Naruto, “if you really want to date me—well, uh, there’s something I should probably tell you—”
“So tell me,” Sasuke said. Impatiently, he resettled himself over Naruto’s hips and grabbed him by the bicep, hard, sinking his nails in.
“It’s just—hn—it’s just that—ouch, what the heck—”
“Sorry—”
“No wait, actually, do it again—”
“Like this?”
“Yeah, like that, just like that—ah—wait, no, look, the thing is—”
“The thing is what?” Sasuke demanded. He shifted forward and bit Naruto’s neck, which prompted Naruto to cut himself off with a sort of strangled moan.
“Y’know what? Doesn’t matter. Probably won’t be an issue. Don’t even worry about it,” gasped Naruto, grabbing Sasuke by the back of his hair and yanking hard enough to make Sasuke’s eyes water. “C’mere—”
***
Naruto got a lot of mail. Invitations to various diplomatic events. Strange women asking him to marry their daughters. Long, excruciatingly boring personal letters from the kazekage, complete with painstakingly hand-pressed flowers between the pages. That sort of thing.
In contrast, Sasuke did not get very many letters, maybe because he didn’t have a real address. There was the occasional death threat, or challenge to single combat. Both were depressing; he was often hard-pressed to disagree with the death threats, and the challenges to single combat just didn’t enrage him like they used to. These days, he usually just threw all his mail away unopened.
This one he did open, in part because it had been slipped directly under Naruto’s door, but also because the envelope was pastel pink, with Sasuke’s name written on it in big bubbly characters, accompanied by a small heart.
“Ooooooh, Sasuke,” said Naruto, grinning slyly at him and prodding him in the ribs as he peered over Sasuke’s shoulder. “A secret admirer, huh? Someone liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes you.”
After Sasuke had shoved Naruto off him, wrestled him for control of the letter, made out with him briefly, and then escaped out the window to sit on the roof for some peace, he ripped open the envelope.
Dear Uchiha-san, it said, in the same bubbly handwriting. Please allow me to introduce myself: my name is Natsugita Ayako, and I am writing to you because it has recently come to my attention that you have begun making romantic advances towards Uzumaki Naruto. If you intend to continue this course of action, please be advised that I will have no choice but to—here Sasuke, already losing interest, started skimming—single combat—first of seven—subsequent exes—fight to the death—blah blah blah. Nothing interesting. Sasuke ripped the letter into pieces with his teeth and let the wind tug them away from him. He went through the hand-signs for a katon and imagined setting the fragments of paper on fire—but he still hadn’t figured out the katon one-handed, so nothing happened, and the pieces just drifted away in the wind.
“Who was it from?” Naruto asked later, when they were getting ready for bed.
Sasuke nudged him aside for better access to the bathroom sink and spat out a mouthful of toothpaste. Naruto didn’t like him getting death threats. He got all worked up about them. “Karin,” Sasuke lied. “She says I owe her money.”
***
Crying was not something Sasuke was good at these days, not since getting back to Konoha. He understood, in theory, how it worked. He had cried when he was a genin, usually despite his best efforts, but the older he got, the harder it became. Now things built and built and built and then burst out at inconvenient times, and there was nothing he could do about it. This morning, for instance, he had woken up in a cold sweat from an uneventful dream about having dinner with his parents. He had crawled out of bed and gotten dressed, leaving Naruto still snoring; but when he put on his flak jacket, the zipper had snagged, and when he tugged harder, it broke. This had simply been the last straw.
Naruto came running into the living room in his underwear a minute later to find Sasuke curled up on the floor, clutching his vest and howling. Then Naruto had run to the window, which he’d yanked open, and Sasuke had heard him shout to his downstairs neighbour, “Tentennnnnn! Can you tell my kids I’m gonna be late?”
After that he’d managed to heave Sasuke up onto the couch, where he’d sat with him for a couple of hours, patting his back in a confused sort of way. “You know we can replace it, right?” Naruto kept saying. “The zipper? It’s super easy. I’m pretty sure I even have an extra around here somewhere. I could fix it right now…”
Eventually, because a person could only cry for so long, Sasuke wore himself out and fell asleep. When he woke up about an hour later, Naruto had moved from the couch to the table, where he was going through his kit, sharpening his kunai and inspecting his holsters for microtears.
“Oh, hey,” said Naruto, when Sasuke sat up and looked around blearily. “Uh… you feeling better…?”
“I’m fine,” said Sasuke. He rubbed his eyes, which felt raw and swollen. His head was pounding. He got up, went to the sink, looked for a clean glass, failed to find one, and contorted himself sideways to take a few swallows of water directly from the tap instead.
“If you give me your vest, I can replace the zipper now,” said Naruto.
“It’s fine,” said Sasuke. He put the vest on and left it hanging open. “I didn’t want to do it up anyway. I’m going to work.”
“What? But—”
“Thanks,” Sasuke added, as he grabbed his shoes and went to the windowsill, “for, you know.”
“Oh yeah, no problem,” said Naruto. He was still staring at Sasuke in bewilderment. “Don’t you wanna wash your face or something? It’s all messed up—”
But by this point Sasuke had already taken off, walking down the side of the building and leaping to the nearest rooftop. Within ten minutes or so, he was at the mission desk, where he cut ahead of an indignant Kiba with his bratty genin team and slammed his hand down on the table.
If Iruka had been on duty today, he probably would have put Sasuke in time out like one of his six-year-olds, jounin or not. But the chuunin working the desk right now looked young, probably fresh out of her exams. She was staring at Sasuke in alarm, her eyes tracking the Uchiha crest on the sleeve of Sasuke’s shirt and Sasuke’s swollen, tear-stained face. Ever so slightly, she leaned back in her chair. “Um… yes?”
“I’m an active jounin,” Sasuke informed him. “Uchiha Sasuke.”
“Um… okay…” said the chuunin.
“Give me every D-rank you have,” said Sasuke.
***
The thing about D-rank missions, Sasuke reflected as he walked back to Naruto’s place late in the evening, covered in mud, blood, grass clippings, cat hair, dog hair, dead leaves, and sawdust—the thing about D-rank missions was their diversity. It was all coming back to him, floating up through the sludgy, murky memories of his genin days that he’d spent the last several years of his life actively repressing. C-ranks were always escort this person here, or deliver this message there. Anything ranked above that and you just ended up getting the shit kicked out of you or, if you were lucky, kicking the shit out of other people.
But D-ranks? Nothing was off the table. He’d mowed someone’s lawn this afternoon. He’d walked three dogs. Carried groceries. Ripped weeds out of vegetable gardens. Found another missing cat. Fixed someone’s shed. He was confident he’d never talked to so many old ladies before in his entire life. One of them had made him sit down and eat a piece of fish pie because she said he looked “too pale,” and afterwards she’d spent thirty minutes showing him pictures of her grandchildren, despite his pronounced lack of enthusiasm.
Right now what Sasuke needed was a bath, and a meal that wasn’t instant ramen, and at least twelve straight hours where he didn’t have to so much as look at another human being. And also a new zipper on his vest, because actually, having it flapping open and sliding off his left shoulder all day had been kind of annoying.
What he did not need was some random kid throwing a pinecone at his head. But that was what he got.
Sasuke was not, by nature, a patient or forgiving person. In the instant it took him to whip around, his hand clutching instinctively at the back of his head, the tomoe in his eyes were already spinning. His Sharingan detected the second pinecone even before it had been thrown, tracking its trajectory and suggesting to him twenty-one feasible options for dodging. His astonishment at being attacked by a twiggy girl wearing oversized glasses and a t-shirt with a cartoon frog on it meant that he made use of none of them. The second pinecone hit him in the chest, not all that hard, and fell to the ground.
Sasuke had spent most of his life training to respond to situations in which other people were actively attempting to kill him, or his friends, or someone under his charge. But that training had done nothing to prepare him for the utter, dumbfounding shock of having pinecones thrown at him in a back alley by a girl who looked like a preschool teacher.
He caught the third pinecone in mid-air and tossed it away from him. The girl’s hands balled up into fists at her sides. He could see her shaking, either with fear or anger. Her glasses were sliding down her nose; she pushed them back up, and took a step towards him. Without Sasuke really thinking about it, chidori crackled around his hand, the lighting illuminating the alley a jittery blue-white while its high-pitched chirping echoed between buildings.
“Go away,” he said.
Her eyes had gone wide as she took in his chidori. Now she took a step backwards, and Sasuke watched her throat bob in a nervous swallow. He could see her resolve about to break. You didn’t need to know who the Uchiha were to look one in the face and see a messy and painful death in your immediate future.
But then she raised one trembling, accusatory finger, and she stepped forward again, and she sucked in a deep breath, and shouted, “YOU’LL NEVER MAKE HIM HAPPY, YOU CRAZY-EYED CREEP!”
Chidori fizzled out. Sasuke went back to staring at her in astonishment. “What?” he said.
“HE’S GOT A BIG HEART!” the girl shrieked. “WHAT CAN YOU GIVE HIM? YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE FEELINGS!”
“Yes I do,” said Sasuke, stung. He scowled. “Who are you?”
“My name,” said the girl, her scrawny chest puffing up self-importantly as she spoke, “is Natsugita Ayako.” She planted her hands on her hips, and looked at him expectantly.
“Okay?” said Sasuke.
“Natsugita Ayako,” she repeated, sounding less certain about it. “Um—I sent you a letter?”
“Didn’t get it,” said Sasuke.
“You did! You did! I made sure you did!” Natsugita Ayako protested. “I slipped it under your door!”
Under his door…? What…? He hadn’t—oh, no, wait. It must have been—yeah, the pink envelope. What had he done with it…? Had he even opened it? He couldn’t really remember.
“I don’t think I read it,” he admitted.
Natsugita Ayako sagged. Her glasses slipped again. She pushed them back up, and chewed at one thumbnail nervously. “But—but I spent a really long time on it!” she protested. Sasuke was alarmed to note a tremor in her voice, one that suggested tears might be imminent. “I used my special holographic stickers! I said I was going to rip your heart out through your eye sockets!”
“I get a lot of that,” said Sasuke, shrugging.
Natsugita Ayako’s lower lip wobbled. Then she charged at him.
“I WAS NARUTO’S GIRLFRIEND FIRST!” she screamed. “YOU WEREN’T THERE FOR HIM! I WAS! SO GO AWAY!”
“You were Naruto’s what?” demanded Sasuke. But it was too late for her to answer, because she’d made the mistake of looking him in the eyes. He’d already caught her in a reflexive Tsukuyomi. Since he did feel kind of bad about the special holographic stickers, he made an effort to ensure the genjutsu wasn’t too torturous—a hallucinatory seventy-two hours of old Takahashi-san showing off her photo albums. Or was that actually worse than getting your skin flayed off? Well, too late now. He caught her skinny body as she collapsed, threw her over one shoulder, and took off for Naruto’s apartment.
***
“Hey, you’re back!” said Naruto, when Sasuke kicked the door open a couple minutes later. He sounded immensely relieved, as if he hadn’t been confident this was a foregone conclusion.
“Of course I’m back,” snapped Sasuke. “Where else would I go?”
“Well, I—uh—wait, who’s—”
“Natsugita Ayako,” said Sasuke. He slung her unconscious body onto the couch, whipping a pillow behind her head just before her skull cracked against the hard wooden armrest. As her body twisted, something dislodged from one of her pockets and skittered across the floor. Sasuke bent to pick it up. It looked like the leg off some kind of stuffed animal, a teddy bear or something: fluffy, and pink, and speckled with glitter. Sasuke felt his lip curl in distaste. And yet, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain, he found himself slipping it into his own pocket. Then he looked up at Naruto, who was staring back at him blankly.
“Huh? Who?” said Naruto. “Wait, shouldn’t we take her to the hospital? Should I get Sakura?”
“I hit her with Tsukuyomi. She’ll wake up soon,” said Sasuke. He narrowed his eyes. “She says she used to be your girlfriend.”
“Huh? What?” said Naruto. He crouched beside her, and peered at her face. Then his eyes widened. “What the—Aya-chan?”
“So you do know her,” said Sasuke. Something hot and acidic simmered in the pit of his stomach. He glared at her, and wondered if maybe seventy-two hours of old Takahashi-san’s ugly grandchildren had been getting off a bit lightly after all.
“Yeah, but she’s not—I mean, we never—geez, I only met her, like, twice,” said Naruto. His face scrunched up as he tried to think. “She’s from—uh, Tea Country, I think? When I was traveling with Ero-Sennin, I saved her from these missing-nin and then we went out for dango after. But she wasn’t my girlfriend or anything.”
“But you went out for dango?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Did Jiraiya come with?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Did she pay?”
Naruto blinked at him, and frowned. He opened his mouth. He shut his mouth. He opened his mouth again. “Okay, I see where you’re going with this, but—”
“Did she pay,” Sasuke repeated.
“Yeah,” Naruto admitted. He huffed out an irritated sigh. “Man, why doesn’t anyone tell me when they’re trying to take me on a date? Guess that explains why she kept trying to grab my hand, though…”
“And this was when?” asked Sasuke. He was staying very calm. He felt perhaps he wasn’t receiving due recognition for how incredibly calm he was staying right now.
“Uh… I dunno, four years ago?”
“So what,” said Sasuke, “is your ‘girlfriend’ from when you were fourteen, who you went on one ‘date’ with in Tea Country, doing in a Konoha back-alley, throwing pinecones at me?”
He intended the question to be rhetorical, just to highlight the peculiarity of the situation. He didn’t actually expect Naruto to have an answer. As it happened, however, the words were barely out of Sasuke’s mouth before Naruto had started to fidget, looking very shifty indeed.
“Okay, don’t get mad,” said Naruto, a guaranteed assurance that the next thing to come out of his mouth was going to get Sasuke mad as hell. “I really didn’t think—ah, geez. Look, the thing is—if you really wanna do the whole dating thing, for serious—you kinda might have to, uh, fight a couple of people. Like… people I’ve… you know. In the past. People I’ve gone out with. You kinda might have to, uh, defeat them. In combat, kinda deal.”
“A couple of people,” Sasuke repeated flatly.
“Yeah, not that many,” Naruto said quickly. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, his lips moving silently as he counted something out on his fingers. “Like… three? Or five? No, four. I don’t think more than six? But I didn’t really expect Ayako-chan, so maybe…”
Four or five or six or maybe (Sasuke could fill in the blanks) seven. Naruto had gone out with four or five or six or maybe seven people in the, what, five years, six years Sasuke had been gone. That was… that was…
Well, fine, he supposed it wasn’t so unreasonable. A lot had changed since Sasuke had first been put on Team Seven with Naruto, when Naruto had just been that bratty, annoying, gross little kid who no one else in Konoha really liked. These days people smiled and waved at Naruto when he was out around the village. Not just their old classmates, either. Civilians. Older shinobi. Women. A lot of women. Sasuke had noticed. It was impossible not to notice. Good for Naruto. That was what he’d always wanted.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but unlike Sasuke, Naruto had spent all those intervening years living around a whole bunch of normal people with normal lives who were presumably interested in normal things, like grocery shopping, and going on dates. So what? Who cared?
The combat thing, that seemed weird, though. Sasuke would be the first to admit his own personal experience was woefully lacking, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t normal. From what he remembered of his own family, people had just gotten married without having to literally fight their way through each other’s embarrassing romantic histories.
“Why?” Sasuke asked.
Naruto shrugged. “I dunno. There’s, like, a league, or something. A club? It wasn’t my idea. I guess everyone needs a hobby, right?”
This was a ridiculous answer. Luckily, Sasuke was still feeling very calm. And reasonable, too. All those horrible things Natsugita Ayako had screamed at him in the alley echoed in his head. The chances that he was about to do something he might regret had never been higher.
“This is stupid,” said Sasuke.
Naruto grinned and rubbed the back of his head. “Yeah, I know. Sorry.”
“I’m not fighting your stupid exes,” said Sasuke. “Fight them yourself.”
Naruto was no longer grinning. “You don’t have to be a jerk about it—”
“I didn’t want to date you anyway,” snapped Sasuke.
“Huh? You were the one who—well, fine! Good! Like I wanted to date you! With your stupid hair!”
“My stupid hair? I’ll show you stupid hair—”
***
Sakura sighed when she opened her door. “I really wish you guys would—” she started, but before she could finish her sentence, she was taking a hasty step backwards in alarm. This was because Sasuke had just let out a wordless growl of irritation and turned on his heel, sprinting down the open hall of Sakura’s apartment building and vaulting over the railing to race across the rooftops, back towards the jounin block.
***
Naruto did a bad job of pretending he hadn’t been crying when Sasuke climbed back in through the window. He was still an ugly crier, which was surprising. Considering how much practice Naruto got at it, Sasuke thought he might have found a way to improve on that by now.
“Did Sakura kick you out?” Naruto asked. He was making tea. Without asking he pulled another cup out of the cupboard and set it on the counter.
“No,” said Sasuke. He shrugged out of his vest and slung it on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “Can you fix the zipper after all? The sleeve keeps falling off my shoulder.”
“Sure,” said Naruto, still sniffling.
Sasuke looked at the fitful, sleeping face of Natsugita Ayako, still out cold on the couch. Her glasses had slid all the way off her nose this time, right onto the ground. Sasuke picked them up and set them on the table so they wouldn’t get stepped on. He jerked his head in Natsugita Ayako’s general direction and said, “Do I have to kill her?”
“Wh—no! Geez!”
“Well, you said defeat,” Sasuke pointed out. This did come as a relief, though. He had already killed a lot of people. He didn’t particularly like it, nor did he particularly want to do it again, at least not more than he had to, and not to girls who looked like they still had to have their parents book their dentist appointments for them. “Where do I find the other exes?”
Naruto shrugged. “Dunno. They just show up when they’re ready, I guess.”
“Tch.” That was annoying. He’d been hoping to take care of the other four-to-seven of them before he went to bed. “Who else is there?”
“Ha! Like I’d tell you. You’d just make fun of me.”
That was even more annoying, but before they could start fighting about it, Natsugita Ayako began to stir on the couch. They watched her clutch at her head and squint blearily around the room, until Sasuke handed her back her glasses, which she fumbled onto her face.
The first thing she saw was Sasuke. This prompted her to scramble backwards on the couch as all the colour drained out of her face, which was understandable. Sasuke could recognize that his face was not the first thing people wanted to see after being subjected to seventy-two simulated hours of family photos and the subsequent full-body shutdown that followed. Then she saw Naruto, who had grabbed one of the cups off the counter and was grinning down at her cheerfully. “Hey, Aya-chan! Here, I made you some tea. It’s been a while, huh? How’re you doing? How’s your brother? This is my friend Sasuke, I don’t know if you remember me telling you—”
“I remember,” said Ayako, sounding bitter. “You spent our whole date talking about him.” She sat up and accepted the tea, and blinked a couple of times as the hot water fogged up her glasses. The colour returned to her cheeks again, until she was flushing a noticeable pink. “Um. Wow. You’ve gotten really tall…”