・・・log. (NARUTO AND SASUKE IN THE HALL 8D)
Who: Uzumaki Naruto (misoawesome) and Uchiha Sasuke (exorbit).
When: January 25 @ 0300 HOURS.
Where: The hall outside Naruto's suite.
Summary: Naruto walks into a pedobait!Sasuke. The two proceed to completely misunderstand each other for about an hour straight until Naruto knocks Sasuke out. Naruto then takes ko'd!Sasuke back to his room to mother him and otherwise "wtf" about his current circumstances.
Rating: PG13 for some language and mindfuckery.
Warnings: Naruto thinks Sasuke is 16. Sasuke thinks Naruto is a figment of his imagination. They kick the crap out of each other. End of story.
Naruto had seen a lot of really weird things in his day. He had, honestly, it was just that nothing really compared to waking up in the middle of who-knew-where with a guy with who-knew-what kind of mental disease trying to kill him for no perceivable reason whatsoever. Oh, and by the way, he was not only no longer in Sage Mode, he was also no longer in Konoha, nor was he fighting Pein. And no one familiar was around. And everybody seemed to wanna kill him. Or severely maim him. Or severely maim him and then kill him.
Go figure.
He'd managed to get out of the room in one piece, but not without difficulty - he pulled his jacket back on with a scowl, zipping it back up from the bottom, muttering to himself.
It wasn't as if he was accustomed to living with people who were as stubborn as he was; hell, even the verb "living" was a stretch. As far as he was concerned, he wasn't living here so much as he was stuck here, and he wasn't stuck here until somebody told him where the hell here was.
He snarled to himself and dragged a hand back through his hair and was paying so little attention that he ran straight into the hall's only other occupant. He didn't think he could be entirely blamed, since the kid was almost half-a-head shorter than he was but--
"Jeez, watch--"
...and then he stopped dead still.
......okay, this officially couldn't get any weirder.
"...Sasuke?"
"Shut up, figment." The voice was the same, low and mumbling, head bowed and those spikes that defied gravity and all sense of anything real in the world as far as hair went - soft to the touch the way they should've been gelled but Naruto knew better than anyone that they weren't - it was unmistakable. Sasuke Uchiha, who'd been missing from Konoha for years and to suddenly turn up here.
He shouldered past Naruto in the hallway, unsteady on his feet, and wavered a bit before righting himself and continued on the way he'd been going. "Thirty two doors," he mumbled to himself, "thirty-two, is that somehow significant, only one clock and not a single door leading out. Clever. Which of these ..."
Dazed black eyes lifted, skimming upwards with a frown. "Maybe the ceiling itself?"
It was like Naruto didn't even exist to him. Not only that but Sasuke looked different, still skinny-pale and familiar but in that ache-pang way, questionable fashion from his older teenage years ditched for how he'd looked as a kid. Dark blues, the Uchiha symbol across his back like a target, small hands, small everything.
"Sasuke!" Naruto grabbed for his wrist in a blatant disregard of that silent demand for privacy - of course he did. He always did. Itachi would obviously know something like that, obviously, that Naruto was outspoken and too-clingy, too...whatever he was supposed to be. But the size was all wrong. All wrong. He was too tall, too big in the chest. (Weird. Itachi didn't get things wrong-- ...well, very often counted, but "ever" was the appropriate word and would he let. Go. Already.)
"Sasuke, what are you doing here?!"
"... you keep going 'Sasuke, Sasuke' so at least that's accurate."
He flinched back and jerked his hand free of Naruto's touch. Itachi's genjutsu were always so thorough, why would he have made a mistake like this, some strange miscalculation in how Naruto looked? Sasuke's own mind would have filled in those blanks, and Itachi was never careless. He stared at the boy with no hint of real recognition, eyes narrowing in a shimmer of spinning tomoe and confusion.
"Why would he have me seeing you of all people. This is stupid."
Sasuke turned his back with another annoyed breath and resumed counting doors. "Thirty-seven, thirty eight ..."
"YOU'RE STUPID."
The blow came like a torpedo to the chest, with the exception that it was Naruto's unnaturally-warm knuckles colliding with the side of his face, and Naruto's too-loud voice that left Sasuke's ears ringing.
But at least he only hit him once.
"And what the hell are you talking about accurate?! I asked you a question, asshole! What the hell are you doing here?! Where's your little mod squad?! Where the hell are we, and why the hell are you so damn tiny?!"
Sasuke hadn't expected that. Itachi had crafted this genjutsu really well, his senses were dulled and his chakra had been at least halved, by his estimation, nothing was working right. That was to be expected. Still, even stuck in such an obvious illusion with his throat hurting him and painfully closed up and his body aching and weak from the fight before he'd been locked here -- he hadn't expected that.
His face whipped to the side, eyes wide and a hand lifting immediately to catch himself before he crashed into the wall. He clutched a the spot and coughed, then spat to the side where his teeth had cut into the inside of his cheek. "... so 'm supposed to fight you I guess," he mumbled, licking his lower lip with a short breath in.
"Damn, Itachi, that's pretty fucked up but whatever. Doesn't look like Naruto anyway so what do I care." His voice rasped, wavering with frustrated anger. Sasuke hauled back and hit him back, not bothering to pull the punch in the least. Even at thirteen he hit fucking hard. Dizzy redblackred eyes watched as Naruto went flying, skidding back a good several feet along the ground.
Sasuke nearly went stumbling after him from the momentum before catching himself on his feet. "... 's that why I'm here and not back at the compound Itachi? You're going to make me do this too?"
"Do what? What the hell are you going on abou-- And I am not Itachi! The hell, did you go blind or something?!" Naruto was still rubbing his jaw, which felt majorly inflamed if you asked him, not that he had any medical expertise. Shit, Sasuke's knuckles were incredibly bony. That really hurt, and of course, with his chakra supply halved and his link to Kyuubi almost entirely absent, it was going to be a total kick in the pants to try and heal, and it hurt about five times as much as it would have if he had been able to block it with chakra.
"The hell are you on!"
He reached instinctively for his pack then stilled, mouth twitching and eyes concealed by his hair. Right, no weapons, Itachi really had thought of everything. Without even looking he knew his wire was gone from under his arm-coverings, he didn't have a single kunai on him, was he supposed to fight Naruto with nothing at all? Since when had he done anything for reasons other than what he, Sasuke, wanted ... damn.
"The genjutsu... the clocks might be wrong," he fell into a loose defensive stance, his breathing a bit choppy. Fuck, his throat hurt a lot, the least Itachi could have done was put him on an equal fighting ground. "It's only been an hour, feels like longer but it's only been an hour, fifty-nine minutes and a half specifically so ... so until this part fades and I end up back at the compound, I fight you. Right?"
"Wh-- this isn't a genjutsu you asshole! Like I didn't think of that, whadyou think I am a complete idiot?!" Naruto's nose was certainly wrinkling up in a way that seemed moderately characteristic - too bad his face was too long for it to really look like him. There was a whole bunch of him that was just all-wrong. And of course he was spewing a whole bunch of stuff to bait Sasuke into defenselessness...
...the sadistic bastard.
"A figment wouldn't think so. A figment wouldn't know it was in a genjutsu since it's part of it so don't fucking start talking to me like you know anything!"
Sasuke backed up a half-step, eyes torn with sudden fury as the tomoe caught and spinned, ineffective here. Of course it wouldn't work in a genjutsu like this but damn it, he still tried. "I'm going to remember to kick your ass when I get out of here," he added as his fingers flexed into tight fists, "this is sick. This is sick, since when did you ever talk to me like that? Itachi you're way off."
Naruto was staring at him, eyebrows knitted and fists clenched so tightly they were shaking a little. His expression was a quick-passing photo array of disbelief to roundabout confusion to stubbornness and determination.
This was completely impossible.
"Did you go crazy?"
Itachi had been dead for almost a month.
Even Naruto knew that.
"Why the hell are you so small, teme!"
Why was Sasuke wearing those clothes? And his neck, there were bruises that Naruto hadn't seen there in fucking years, even though Sasuke occasionally got roughed up in battle, bruises like that were unique and tended to stand out in the memory. Black, where fingers had been, crushing in. Lifting up, until a thirteen year old body dangled, hands scrabbling at Itachi's wrist, too far off the floor for his feet to touch -
yeah. They stood out in the memory.
"I'm not small, what the hell are you talking about now?" Sasuke's jaw clenched, teeth bared and gritting, "shut up, stop talking to me! I don't want to hear anything you have to say!"
He backed up again, then staggered and nearly fell, righting himself again with a hand against the wall. "Leave me alone."
"No!"
Naruto could holler. Hell, Naruto could yell, bellow, thunder, pretty much any obnoxiously loud noise you were looking for, Naruto could make it the best of anyone he knew, excepting maybe Kiba, who he only liked because it felt like he had to. Naruto could make all the noise in the known world, and he was not going to give up.
Sasuke was acting crazy. Really crazy.
But that didn't mean--
Naruto wasn't going to stop chasing him until he caught him, and when he caught him, he was going to beat him within an inch of his life if that was what it took to drag him back to Konoha. And he didn't care if it was Konoha with a gigantic hole in the center in the middle of it, or Konoha like Konoha was supposed to be, didn't care who he had to fight to get Sasuke back.
Tiny or not.
Naruto tackled him.
Sasuke went down surprisingly easily considering the last time they'd fought, hitting the guy had felt like his knuckles had impacted with a brick wall. He lacked the sharp muscle definition of relentless hard training and swinging that sword of his around, he felt just like ...
A kid, that hit the ground waaay harder than healthy.
His head knocked into tile floors, a sharp pained sound escaping. Stars exploded across Sasuke's vision before he started struggling, violently, without anything near finesse or talent or any of the techniques Kakashi-sensei had beaten into them - literally at times, really - on how to get away from an opponent. He squirmed and coughed, and tried to kick free, face twisting in a fury of panic.
"No, no, stop it stop it stop --"
This wasn't right, Itachi's genjutsu were always way too cruel, this was too much.
Naruto's face contorted in an expression of concern which was honestly just over the top, and he didn't hit him, but he was weighty. (To be expected of a specter that was so fat - it coincided with Itachi's anal-retentive logic, at least.) He didn't seem to know what was wrong - which, of course, had to mean that he seemed to realize that something was, indeed, wrong - or why Sasuke was thrashing about in a way that seemed to mimic that of a bird with a broken back, or a fish on dry land.
The words are you okay temporarily escaped him, and so he opted to move his body instead of his mouth, pinning Sasuke's legs with his knees, and scrabbling to grab his hands.
"What the hell is the matter with you?!"
At least the hallways were empty for once. There were other people here but aside from the strangers in their rooms when they'd both blinked awake in this place, they hadn't run into any yet. It was a mixed blessing.
Especially when Sasuke went fucking hysteric under him as though being pinned down wasn't something he could totally break free from if he just tried, Naruto knew he could, they'd sparred together way too many times for a hold like this to really work but he was heavier, and Sasuke was fucking. wounded.
The second he grabbed and pinned Sasuke's wrists the kid started screaming, thrashing and trying to fight back but not with near the strength Naruto knew he actually had, and could fight back with. It was diluted up, halved and then halved again from injuries on top of the weird power of this place.
"LET ME GO LET ME GO GET OFF ME STOP IT STOP IT STOP--"
"SASUKE, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"
It was frightening, really, the tortured expression that was written into Sasuke's face and coursing along the wired muscle of his body - Naruto didn't know what to read into it. Hell, he had no idea what was even going on. Hell, maybe he was in a genjutsu. Maybe this was genjutsu Sasuke, specially designed to rip his brain out by looking too young and acting nothing like Sasuke would ever act. Well, unless he was crazy. Maybe he was. Maybe they were all crazy and--
Aw, fuck it, Naruto had no idea what was going on in the slightest, and trying to deal with Sasuke screaming like a banshee and kicking around like a four-year-old mid-tantrum was kind of breaking his mind a little bit.
It was even worse when he stopped.
After one last straining heave against his hands, nails biting into the palms so tight they dribbled blood down his wrists, Sasuke finally fell limp, panting in short wild gasps and eyes squeezed so tightly he saw spots.
Tortured panicked stillness. "If I don't watch it'll change it always changes," he mumbled like a mantra, "it'll show something else ..."
"What the hell do you think this is? Where do you think we are? This isn't a movie, the lights don't just go dark while the screens pan out! Stop acting so freaky, you pompous asshole!" Naruto knotted his hands around Sasuke's wrists like old roots. "Just cut it out already!"
"You should fucking know you were there, if you're really Naruto then you know already you saw it happen, you should be waking me up, not playing a part in this ... this whatever the hell it is he's trying to prove I don't even know," Sasuke twisted his hands uselessly, jerked at his left wrist, and breathed out a ragged hiss. He swallowed against the pain in his throat. His head was killing him, absolutely killing him.
"Itachi's genjutsu. In the hall. There's twenty-three hours left."
Naruto was quiet for a long time.
"Sasuke, that was like." Sasuke can almost see him doing the math in his head. Basic arithmetic. Of course the idiot wouldn't know how to do basic arithmetic. (Every detail down to the wire, so--) "That was almost four years ago, what the hell are you on?"
His face was breaking into fragments of disbelief and then contorting in anger again as those same hands that were choking his arms grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upward.
"What the hell did they do to you, bastard?!"
"What they, just him, just one person," Sasuke hissed as he was hauled up again, manhandled like a misbehaving kid. He'd always hated it when he was grabbed by the front of the shirt or the scruff of the neck, it immediately bristled him right on edge.
His eyes snapped open, glaring furiously - two tomoe spinning, just two.
Naruto remembered those eyes with a hell of a lot more black to them.
"That was two hours ago," he hissed, "let me go."
Naruto's expressions were changing too fast for them to really be called expressions; he couldn't put the damper down on any specific emotion and so he was just letting them flicker in and out through the dark room of his mind at their leisure, which wasn't as leisurely as you'd think. The only word he could come up with was--
"No."
His fingers balled tighter.
"No way, you tell me what's going on and you tell me what's going on right now!"
"I just did!" Sasuke's voice cracked, in the way of adolescents far too young to be in shit as deep as they were, but more-so because his throat was killing. him. and Naruto was being anything but helpful, holding him up at an angle as he was that strained it. He hung like so much dead-weight, breathing raggedly, and sucked a bit of blood from the corner of his lower lip where Naruto's punch had split it.
He looked so earnest about it, pissed off and still on edge and ready at any moment to collapse again to enraged hysterics, but. Those eyes, bigger than Naruto remembered them and different, younger than he remembered, weren't lying.
He felt himself crack a little.
Just a little, a simple, delicate, paper-thin crack that ran from the very center of his up his chest and into his throat, and he didn't know what the hell was going on but, goddamnit.
"I'M TELLING YOU, THIS ISN'T A GENJUTSU."
It didn't feel right if he didn't punctuate dropping Sasuke's collar so unceremoniously without yelling a little bit. (Who was going to care, anyway.)
Sasuke fell back and caught himself with palms that skidded a bit against the tile floor. He stared back, blinking, before something twisted about his face, tightening about the mouth and eyes. They pulled back in a small frustrated snarl, "yes it IS!" because even in an illusion, he hated being screamed at.
Especially by this person. He was going to drop-kick Naruto off a roof next time he saw him for this shit, even if indirectly it wasn't his fault at all. Itachi had a sick, twisted sense of humor. Sick mind, but that really only went hand-in-hand with his humor, now didn't it?
Just like Naruto's mentally retarded sense of humor went with his--
Well.
That spoke for itself.
(So did the specter, as it was.)
"NO IT ISN'T!" But it wasn't like they were talking about a dream where Naruto could just pinch him and if it hurt, the illusion that he was dreaming would dissipate. This is the way genjutsu worked - it was a weirdly elaborate thing, but it was Itachi we were talking about here, so even if he got everything about Naruto wrong--
"I ORDER YOU TO STOP BEING A CRAZY MIDGET RIGHT. NOW."
Sasuke's eyes flared open, jaw clenching in that familiar way he'd always done when they were younger and Naruto'd done something to genuinely piss him off and shit, that had never ended well for him. Not even once.
He twisted, and a leg bent, one hand bracing to the ground for leverage. His foot caught Naruto right in the center of the chest and sent him flying. Sasuke fell back and watched, absently dragging the back of one hand across his still-bleeding mouth as the orange idiot went crashing back against the wall, leaving a sizeable dent.
"Shut up figment," he hissed finally and staggered to his feet, far too unsteady for his pride, "I'm not crazy."
"If I'm a figment," Naruto griped, a little breathlessly as he tried to heave back upright from his place on the floor, "which I'm not," he emphasized the word "not" in this sentence, "then you're talking to yourself. Which is a typical sign of craziness, f'I'm not mistaken, and for future notice, if you kick me into another wall, I'm gunna beat you up. I don't care if you've been inexplicably fun-sized in some crazy freak accident."
"You're making no sense at all." Sasuke propped a hand against the wall and leaned there, deciding pride be damned, he could barely keep to his feet and his ribs really, really hurt. He winced and wrapped an arm around his side, and finally looked away, with a rasp to his breathing that really wasn't healthy.
"Where's the clock," he mumbled, "that had to've at least killed an hour."
"I don't keep a watch on me, who d'you think I am?" Naruto clambered up to his feet at last with difficulty, using one hand against the wall to steady himself. "Soon as you start makin' any kinda sense, I'll give it a shot. Asshole."
"Shut up, figment."
And they were back to square one. It was all somewhat circular and that feeling of total deja vu wasn't helping at all.
Sasuke turned away from him and felt his way along the wall, back towards his room. Shit, he was going to lay down for awhile, if the genjutsu didn't decide to toss him into some new hell where his bed turned into fire or something. He wouldn't put anything past Itachi at this point.
"Hey, don't go walking off, what the hell!" Naruto was after him in an instant, wincing slightly as he moved because of the pains shooting along his stomach, but moving fast enough to do his profession and ancestry proud. He grabbed for the forearm this time and pulled, hard.
"How old are you?!"
It nearly pulled Sasuke right over, being grabbed at like that. He hissed and jerked back in response, furious at being manhandled yet again. "Thirteen," he bit out, "why do you keep touching me? Do it again and I'm gonna break that hand."
Naruto looked like his brain had just stalled out.
"...you're how old?"
Sasuke rubbed at his wrist, then coughed again. "Thirteen."
What was the point of this? This entire segment of the genjutsu was making no fucking sense at all, just giving him a really, really awful headache. Being slammed into the tile hadn't helped much, he was so dizzy he could barely see.
Naruto was just standing there, which wasn't a very productive thing to do, and seeing that the majority of genjutsu was designed to serve some kind of purpose - usually inflicting damage to an enemy'd psyche - it just didn't fit very well with the whole "genjutsu" idea. In fact, very little of this fit with the whole genjutsu idea, but the fact of it was that Sasuke knew what he knew, was aware of what he was aware of, and there was simply no way that this wasn't a genjutsu.
Even if nothing was jiving with anything else.
Naruto's fingers balled into fists as his stomach crawled.
"...and how old am I?"
"Thirteen. We're only a couple months apart," Sasuke rubbed an arm wearily across his eyes, annoyed. "Are you gonna get out of my way or do I have to fight you some more?"
Naruto looked like he was on the verge of falling off of something but whatever it was it wasn't visible to anyone but him.
"........do I look thirteen to you?"
His voice shook slightly. He bared his teeth slightly.
"Do I?"
"You look like someone who's gonna be really dead if you don't get out of my way. I'm going to go lay down," Sasuke rubbed at his eyes again, then gripped against Naruto's shoulder and shoved. Hard.
He didn't wait and watch the theatrical stagger, or how it sent the orange idiot crashing into a wall again. "God, my head," he mumbled and continued on his way, "Itachi this is really, really not helping."
Naruto slugged him right in the back of it just then, too. Which really didn't take any sort of edge off the ache, thank you for asking.
"DO I LOOK LIKE YOUR LOWLIFE BROTHER?! KNOCK IT OFF!"
"Ghh!" Sasuke staggered forward, but he didn't do anything expected, like whirl and snarl and try to fight back, or scream at him. Or even the violent hysterics from before.
He simply fell.
Adolescent limbs crumpled, bruised up from the battle he'd been in before even arriving, and something as simple as a blow to the back of the head finally took him down. Insult to injury, his head hit the floor again and knocked him the rest of the way out, a pale spill of skin and dark, dark clothes and hair on the ground.
"...sonovabitch."
Naruto stared down at Sasuke for a total of fourteen seconds before uttering a whole symphony of colorful language and stooping down to shake him. "Sasuke-- Oi, Sasuke-- sonovabitch." He spat curses from between his teeth like watermelon seeds and, like a habit, grabbed the Uchiha's wrist and hauled him up by holding his arm over his own neck, and his hand against Sasuke's waist, grumbling darkly all the while.
The blonde carried his friend back down the hall in this manner, increasingly irritated, with each step, that he wasn't tall or strong enough that Sasuke's feet didn't drag on the floor. He elbowed the door to his suite open and managed to get to his own bedroom without incedent, which was incredibly lucky, even for him, and, with aching back and belly, he hoisted Sasuke's indecently slim body up onto his bed.
Not like he was planning to sleep anyway.
He dragged his fingers through his hair, agitatedly, not near effiminate enough to sit down on the bedside and start petting Sasuke's face or anything like that. He wasn't a medic, didn't know if he'd killed him or broken his skull or what - he moved about anxiously for two minutes or so before making a deeply uncomfortable sound and hoisting Sasuke further up the bed, so that his head rested on the pillows rather than on the bedsheets.
He wasn't seriously bleeding or anything.
Naruto took this as a good sign, and sat down in a chair to find that he was shaking.
He took the opportunity, while no one was watching, to cover his face with his hands, and wonder what the hell was going on and why this was happening now of all times.
Thirteen?
"The hell."
When: January 25 @ 0300 HOURS.
Where: The hall outside Naruto's suite.
Summary: Naruto walks into a pedobait!Sasuke. The two proceed to completely misunderstand each other for about an hour straight until Naruto knocks Sasuke out. Naruto then takes ko'd!Sasuke back to his room to mother him and otherwise "wtf" about his current circumstances.
Rating: PG13 for some language and mindfuckery.
Warnings: Naruto thinks Sasuke is 16. Sasuke thinks Naruto is a figment of his imagination. They kick the crap out of each other. End of story.
Naruto had seen a lot of really weird things in his day. He had, honestly, it was just that nothing really compared to waking up in the middle of who-knew-where with a guy with who-knew-what kind of mental disease trying to kill him for no perceivable reason whatsoever. Oh, and by the way, he was not only no longer in Sage Mode, he was also no longer in Konoha, nor was he fighting Pein. And no one familiar was around. And everybody seemed to wanna kill him. Or severely maim him. Or severely maim him and then kill him.
Go figure.
He'd managed to get out of the room in one piece, but not without difficulty - he pulled his jacket back on with a scowl, zipping it back up from the bottom, muttering to himself.
It wasn't as if he was accustomed to living with people who were as stubborn as he was; hell, even the verb "living" was a stretch. As far as he was concerned, he wasn't living here so much as he was stuck here, and he wasn't stuck here until somebody told him where the hell here was.
He snarled to himself and dragged a hand back through his hair and was paying so little attention that he ran straight into the hall's only other occupant. He didn't think he could be entirely blamed, since the kid was almost half-a-head shorter than he was but--
"Jeez, watch--"
...and then he stopped dead still.
......okay, this officially couldn't get any weirder.
"...Sasuke?"
"Shut up, figment." The voice was the same, low and mumbling, head bowed and those spikes that defied gravity and all sense of anything real in the world as far as hair went - soft to the touch the way they should've been gelled but Naruto knew better than anyone that they weren't - it was unmistakable. Sasuke Uchiha, who'd been missing from Konoha for years and to suddenly turn up here.
He shouldered past Naruto in the hallway, unsteady on his feet, and wavered a bit before righting himself and continued on the way he'd been going. "Thirty two doors," he mumbled to himself, "thirty-two, is that somehow significant, only one clock and not a single door leading out. Clever. Which of these ..."
Dazed black eyes lifted, skimming upwards with a frown. "Maybe the ceiling itself?"
It was like Naruto didn't even exist to him. Not only that but Sasuke looked different, still skinny-pale and familiar but in that ache-pang way, questionable fashion from his older teenage years ditched for how he'd looked as a kid. Dark blues, the Uchiha symbol across his back like a target, small hands, small everything.
"Sasuke!" Naruto grabbed for his wrist in a blatant disregard of that silent demand for privacy - of course he did. He always did. Itachi would obviously know something like that, obviously, that Naruto was outspoken and too-clingy, too...whatever he was supposed to be. But the size was all wrong. All wrong. He was too tall, too big in the chest. (Weird. Itachi didn't get things wrong-- ...well, very often counted, but "ever" was the appropriate word and would he let. Go. Already.)
"Sasuke, what are you doing here?!"
"... you keep going 'Sasuke, Sasuke' so at least that's accurate."
He flinched back and jerked his hand free of Naruto's touch. Itachi's genjutsu were always so thorough, why would he have made a mistake like this, some strange miscalculation in how Naruto looked? Sasuke's own mind would have filled in those blanks, and Itachi was never careless. He stared at the boy with no hint of real recognition, eyes narrowing in a shimmer of spinning tomoe and confusion.
"Why would he have me seeing you of all people. This is stupid."
Sasuke turned his back with another annoyed breath and resumed counting doors. "Thirty-seven, thirty eight ..."
"YOU'RE STUPID."
The blow came like a torpedo to the chest, with the exception that it was Naruto's unnaturally-warm knuckles colliding with the side of his face, and Naruto's too-loud voice that left Sasuke's ears ringing.
But at least he only hit him once.
"And what the hell are you talking about accurate?! I asked you a question, asshole! What the hell are you doing here?! Where's your little mod squad?! Where the hell are we, and why the hell are you so damn tiny?!"
Sasuke hadn't expected that. Itachi had crafted this genjutsu really well, his senses were dulled and his chakra had been at least halved, by his estimation, nothing was working right. That was to be expected. Still, even stuck in such an obvious illusion with his throat hurting him and painfully closed up and his body aching and weak from the fight before he'd been locked here -- he hadn't expected that.
His face whipped to the side, eyes wide and a hand lifting immediately to catch himself before he crashed into the wall. He clutched a the spot and coughed, then spat to the side where his teeth had cut into the inside of his cheek. "... so 'm supposed to fight you I guess," he mumbled, licking his lower lip with a short breath in.
"Damn, Itachi, that's pretty fucked up but whatever. Doesn't look like Naruto anyway so what do I care." His voice rasped, wavering with frustrated anger. Sasuke hauled back and hit him back, not bothering to pull the punch in the least. Even at thirteen he hit fucking hard. Dizzy redblackred eyes watched as Naruto went flying, skidding back a good several feet along the ground.
Sasuke nearly went stumbling after him from the momentum before catching himself on his feet. "... 's that why I'm here and not back at the compound Itachi? You're going to make me do this too?"
"Do what? What the hell are you going on abou-- And I am not Itachi! The hell, did you go blind or something?!" Naruto was still rubbing his jaw, which felt majorly inflamed if you asked him, not that he had any medical expertise. Shit, Sasuke's knuckles were incredibly bony. That really hurt, and of course, with his chakra supply halved and his link to Kyuubi almost entirely absent, it was going to be a total kick in the pants to try and heal, and it hurt about five times as much as it would have if he had been able to block it with chakra.
"The hell are you on!"
He reached instinctively for his pack then stilled, mouth twitching and eyes concealed by his hair. Right, no weapons, Itachi really had thought of everything. Without even looking he knew his wire was gone from under his arm-coverings, he didn't have a single kunai on him, was he supposed to fight Naruto with nothing at all? Since when had he done anything for reasons other than what he, Sasuke, wanted ... damn.
"The genjutsu... the clocks might be wrong," he fell into a loose defensive stance, his breathing a bit choppy. Fuck, his throat hurt a lot, the least Itachi could have done was put him on an equal fighting ground. "It's only been an hour, feels like longer but it's only been an hour, fifty-nine minutes and a half specifically so ... so until this part fades and I end up back at the compound, I fight you. Right?"
"Wh-- this isn't a genjutsu you asshole! Like I didn't think of that, whadyou think I am a complete idiot?!" Naruto's nose was certainly wrinkling up in a way that seemed moderately characteristic - too bad his face was too long for it to really look like him. There was a whole bunch of him that was just all-wrong. And of course he was spewing a whole bunch of stuff to bait Sasuke into defenselessness...
...the sadistic bastard.
"A figment wouldn't think so. A figment wouldn't know it was in a genjutsu since it's part of it so don't fucking start talking to me like you know anything!"
Sasuke backed up a half-step, eyes torn with sudden fury as the tomoe caught and spinned, ineffective here. Of course it wouldn't work in a genjutsu like this but damn it, he still tried. "I'm going to remember to kick your ass when I get out of here," he added as his fingers flexed into tight fists, "this is sick. This is sick, since when did you ever talk to me like that? Itachi you're way off."
Naruto was staring at him, eyebrows knitted and fists clenched so tightly they were shaking a little. His expression was a quick-passing photo array of disbelief to roundabout confusion to stubbornness and determination.
This was completely impossible.
"Did you go crazy?"
Itachi had been dead for almost a month.
Even Naruto knew that.
"Why the hell are you so small, teme!"
Why was Sasuke wearing those clothes? And his neck, there were bruises that Naruto hadn't seen there in fucking years, even though Sasuke occasionally got roughed up in battle, bruises like that were unique and tended to stand out in the memory. Black, where fingers had been, crushing in. Lifting up, until a thirteen year old body dangled, hands scrabbling at Itachi's wrist, too far off the floor for his feet to touch -
yeah. They stood out in the memory.
"I'm not small, what the hell are you talking about now?" Sasuke's jaw clenched, teeth bared and gritting, "shut up, stop talking to me! I don't want to hear anything you have to say!"
He backed up again, then staggered and nearly fell, righting himself again with a hand against the wall. "Leave me alone."
"No!"
Naruto could holler. Hell, Naruto could yell, bellow, thunder, pretty much any obnoxiously loud noise you were looking for, Naruto could make it the best of anyone he knew, excepting maybe Kiba, who he only liked because it felt like he had to. Naruto could make all the noise in the known world, and he was not going to give up.
Sasuke was acting crazy. Really crazy.
But that didn't mean--
Naruto wasn't going to stop chasing him until he caught him, and when he caught him, he was going to beat him within an inch of his life if that was what it took to drag him back to Konoha. And he didn't care if it was Konoha with a gigantic hole in the center in the middle of it, or Konoha like Konoha was supposed to be, didn't care who he had to fight to get Sasuke back.
Tiny or not.
Naruto tackled him.
Sasuke went down surprisingly easily considering the last time they'd fought, hitting the guy had felt like his knuckles had impacted with a brick wall. He lacked the sharp muscle definition of relentless hard training and swinging that sword of his around, he felt just like ...
A kid, that hit the ground waaay harder than healthy.
His head knocked into tile floors, a sharp pained sound escaping. Stars exploded across Sasuke's vision before he started struggling, violently, without anything near finesse or talent or any of the techniques Kakashi-sensei had beaten into them - literally at times, really - on how to get away from an opponent. He squirmed and coughed, and tried to kick free, face twisting in a fury of panic.
"No, no, stop it stop it stop --"
This wasn't right, Itachi's genjutsu were always way too cruel, this was too much.
Naruto's face contorted in an expression of concern which was honestly just over the top, and he didn't hit him, but he was weighty. (To be expected of a specter that was so fat - it coincided with Itachi's anal-retentive logic, at least.) He didn't seem to know what was wrong - which, of course, had to mean that he seemed to realize that something was, indeed, wrong - or why Sasuke was thrashing about in a way that seemed to mimic that of a bird with a broken back, or a fish on dry land.
The words are you okay temporarily escaped him, and so he opted to move his body instead of his mouth, pinning Sasuke's legs with his knees, and scrabbling to grab his hands.
"What the hell is the matter with you?!"
At least the hallways were empty for once. There were other people here but aside from the strangers in their rooms when they'd both blinked awake in this place, they hadn't run into any yet. It was a mixed blessing.
Especially when Sasuke went fucking hysteric under him as though being pinned down wasn't something he could totally break free from if he just tried, Naruto knew he could, they'd sparred together way too many times for a hold like this to really work but he was heavier, and Sasuke was fucking. wounded.
The second he grabbed and pinned Sasuke's wrists the kid started screaming, thrashing and trying to fight back but not with near the strength Naruto knew he actually had, and could fight back with. It was diluted up, halved and then halved again from injuries on top of the weird power of this place.
"LET ME GO LET ME GO GET OFF ME STOP IT STOP IT STOP--"
"SASUKE, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!"
It was frightening, really, the tortured expression that was written into Sasuke's face and coursing along the wired muscle of his body - Naruto didn't know what to read into it. Hell, he had no idea what was even going on. Hell, maybe he was in a genjutsu. Maybe this was genjutsu Sasuke, specially designed to rip his brain out by looking too young and acting nothing like Sasuke would ever act. Well, unless he was crazy. Maybe he was. Maybe they were all crazy and--
Aw, fuck it, Naruto had no idea what was going on in the slightest, and trying to deal with Sasuke screaming like a banshee and kicking around like a four-year-old mid-tantrum was kind of breaking his mind a little bit.
It was even worse when he stopped.
After one last straining heave against his hands, nails biting into the palms so tight they dribbled blood down his wrists, Sasuke finally fell limp, panting in short wild gasps and eyes squeezed so tightly he saw spots.
Tortured panicked stillness. "If I don't watch it'll change it always changes," he mumbled like a mantra, "it'll show something else ..."
"What the hell do you think this is? Where do you think we are? This isn't a movie, the lights don't just go dark while the screens pan out! Stop acting so freaky, you pompous asshole!" Naruto knotted his hands around Sasuke's wrists like old roots. "Just cut it out already!"
"You should fucking know you were there, if you're really Naruto then you know already you saw it happen, you should be waking me up, not playing a part in this ... this whatever the hell it is he's trying to prove I don't even know," Sasuke twisted his hands uselessly, jerked at his left wrist, and breathed out a ragged hiss. He swallowed against the pain in his throat. His head was killing him, absolutely killing him.
"Itachi's genjutsu. In the hall. There's twenty-three hours left."
Naruto was quiet for a long time.
"Sasuke, that was like." Sasuke can almost see him doing the math in his head. Basic arithmetic. Of course the idiot wouldn't know how to do basic arithmetic. (Every detail down to the wire, so--) "That was almost four years ago, what the hell are you on?"
His face was breaking into fragments of disbelief and then contorting in anger again as those same hands that were choking his arms grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upward.
"What the hell did they do to you, bastard?!"
"What they, just him, just one person," Sasuke hissed as he was hauled up again, manhandled like a misbehaving kid. He'd always hated it when he was grabbed by the front of the shirt or the scruff of the neck, it immediately bristled him right on edge.
His eyes snapped open, glaring furiously - two tomoe spinning, just two.
Naruto remembered those eyes with a hell of a lot more black to them.
"That was two hours ago," he hissed, "let me go."
Naruto's expressions were changing too fast for them to really be called expressions; he couldn't put the damper down on any specific emotion and so he was just letting them flicker in and out through the dark room of his mind at their leisure, which wasn't as leisurely as you'd think. The only word he could come up with was--
"No."
His fingers balled tighter.
"No way, you tell me what's going on and you tell me what's going on right now!"
"I just did!" Sasuke's voice cracked, in the way of adolescents far too young to be in shit as deep as they were, but more-so because his throat was killing. him. and Naruto was being anything but helpful, holding him up at an angle as he was that strained it. He hung like so much dead-weight, breathing raggedly, and sucked a bit of blood from the corner of his lower lip where Naruto's punch had split it.
He looked so earnest about it, pissed off and still on edge and ready at any moment to collapse again to enraged hysterics, but. Those eyes, bigger than Naruto remembered them and different, younger than he remembered, weren't lying.
He felt himself crack a little.
Just a little, a simple, delicate, paper-thin crack that ran from the very center of his up his chest and into his throat, and he didn't know what the hell was going on but, goddamnit.
"I'M TELLING YOU, THIS ISN'T A GENJUTSU."
It didn't feel right if he didn't punctuate dropping Sasuke's collar so unceremoniously without yelling a little bit. (Who was going to care, anyway.)
Sasuke fell back and caught himself with palms that skidded a bit against the tile floor. He stared back, blinking, before something twisted about his face, tightening about the mouth and eyes. They pulled back in a small frustrated snarl, "yes it IS!" because even in an illusion, he hated being screamed at.
Especially by this person. He was going to drop-kick Naruto off a roof next time he saw him for this shit, even if indirectly it wasn't his fault at all. Itachi had a sick, twisted sense of humor. Sick mind, but that really only went hand-in-hand with his humor, now didn't it?
Just like Naruto's mentally retarded sense of humor went with his--
Well.
That spoke for itself.
(So did the specter, as it was.)
"NO IT ISN'T!" But it wasn't like they were talking about a dream where Naruto could just pinch him and if it hurt, the illusion that he was dreaming would dissipate. This is the way genjutsu worked - it was a weirdly elaborate thing, but it was Itachi we were talking about here, so even if he got everything about Naruto wrong--
"I ORDER YOU TO STOP BEING A CRAZY MIDGET RIGHT. NOW."
Sasuke's eyes flared open, jaw clenching in that familiar way he'd always done when they were younger and Naruto'd done something to genuinely piss him off and shit, that had never ended well for him. Not even once.
He twisted, and a leg bent, one hand bracing to the ground for leverage. His foot caught Naruto right in the center of the chest and sent him flying. Sasuke fell back and watched, absently dragging the back of one hand across his still-bleeding mouth as the orange idiot went crashing back against the wall, leaving a sizeable dent.
"Shut up figment," he hissed finally and staggered to his feet, far too unsteady for his pride, "I'm not crazy."
"If I'm a figment," Naruto griped, a little breathlessly as he tried to heave back upright from his place on the floor, "which I'm not," he emphasized the word "not" in this sentence, "then you're talking to yourself. Which is a typical sign of craziness, f'I'm not mistaken, and for future notice, if you kick me into another wall, I'm gunna beat you up. I don't care if you've been inexplicably fun-sized in some crazy freak accident."
"You're making no sense at all." Sasuke propped a hand against the wall and leaned there, deciding pride be damned, he could barely keep to his feet and his ribs really, really hurt. He winced and wrapped an arm around his side, and finally looked away, with a rasp to his breathing that really wasn't healthy.
"Where's the clock," he mumbled, "that had to've at least killed an hour."
"I don't keep a watch on me, who d'you think I am?" Naruto clambered up to his feet at last with difficulty, using one hand against the wall to steady himself. "Soon as you start makin' any kinda sense, I'll give it a shot. Asshole."
"Shut up, figment."
And they were back to square one. It was all somewhat circular and that feeling of total deja vu wasn't helping at all.
Sasuke turned away from him and felt his way along the wall, back towards his room. Shit, he was going to lay down for awhile, if the genjutsu didn't decide to toss him into some new hell where his bed turned into fire or something. He wouldn't put anything past Itachi at this point.
"Hey, don't go walking off, what the hell!" Naruto was after him in an instant, wincing slightly as he moved because of the pains shooting along his stomach, but moving fast enough to do his profession and ancestry proud. He grabbed for the forearm this time and pulled, hard.
"How old are you?!"
It nearly pulled Sasuke right over, being grabbed at like that. He hissed and jerked back in response, furious at being manhandled yet again. "Thirteen," he bit out, "why do you keep touching me? Do it again and I'm gonna break that hand."
Naruto looked like his brain had just stalled out.
"...you're how old?"
Sasuke rubbed at his wrist, then coughed again. "Thirteen."
What was the point of this? This entire segment of the genjutsu was making no fucking sense at all, just giving him a really, really awful headache. Being slammed into the tile hadn't helped much, he was so dizzy he could barely see.
Naruto was just standing there, which wasn't a very productive thing to do, and seeing that the majority of genjutsu was designed to serve some kind of purpose - usually inflicting damage to an enemy'd psyche - it just didn't fit very well with the whole "genjutsu" idea. In fact, very little of this fit with the whole genjutsu idea, but the fact of it was that Sasuke knew what he knew, was aware of what he was aware of, and there was simply no way that this wasn't a genjutsu.
Even if nothing was jiving with anything else.
Naruto's fingers balled into fists as his stomach crawled.
"...and how old am I?"
"Thirteen. We're only a couple months apart," Sasuke rubbed an arm wearily across his eyes, annoyed. "Are you gonna get out of my way or do I have to fight you some more?"
Naruto looked like he was on the verge of falling off of something but whatever it was it wasn't visible to anyone but him.
"........do I look thirteen to you?"
His voice shook slightly. He bared his teeth slightly.
"Do I?"
"You look like someone who's gonna be really dead if you don't get out of my way. I'm going to go lay down," Sasuke rubbed at his eyes again, then gripped against Naruto's shoulder and shoved. Hard.
He didn't wait and watch the theatrical stagger, or how it sent the orange idiot crashing into a wall again. "God, my head," he mumbled and continued on his way, "Itachi this is really, really not helping."
Naruto slugged him right in the back of it just then, too. Which really didn't take any sort of edge off the ache, thank you for asking.
"DO I LOOK LIKE YOUR LOWLIFE BROTHER?! KNOCK IT OFF!"
"Ghh!" Sasuke staggered forward, but he didn't do anything expected, like whirl and snarl and try to fight back, or scream at him. Or even the violent hysterics from before.
He simply fell.
Adolescent limbs crumpled, bruised up from the battle he'd been in before even arriving, and something as simple as a blow to the back of the head finally took him down. Insult to injury, his head hit the floor again and knocked him the rest of the way out, a pale spill of skin and dark, dark clothes and hair on the ground.
"...sonovabitch."
Naruto stared down at Sasuke for a total of fourteen seconds before uttering a whole symphony of colorful language and stooping down to shake him. "Sasuke-- Oi, Sasuke-- sonovabitch." He spat curses from between his teeth like watermelon seeds and, like a habit, grabbed the Uchiha's wrist and hauled him up by holding his arm over his own neck, and his hand against Sasuke's waist, grumbling darkly all the while.
The blonde carried his friend back down the hall in this manner, increasingly irritated, with each step, that he wasn't tall or strong enough that Sasuke's feet didn't drag on the floor. He elbowed the door to his suite open and managed to get to his own bedroom without incedent, which was incredibly lucky, even for him, and, with aching back and belly, he hoisted Sasuke's indecently slim body up onto his bed.
Not like he was planning to sleep anyway.
He dragged his fingers through his hair, agitatedly, not near effiminate enough to sit down on the bedside and start petting Sasuke's face or anything like that. He wasn't a medic, didn't know if he'd killed him or broken his skull or what - he moved about anxiously for two minutes or so before making a deeply uncomfortable sound and hoisting Sasuke further up the bed, so that his head rested on the pillows rather than on the bedsheets.
He wasn't seriously bleeding or anything.
Naruto took this as a good sign, and sat down in a chair to find that he was shaking.
He took the opportunity, while no one was watching, to cover his face with his hands, and wonder what the hell was going on and why this was happening now of all times.
Thirteen?
"The hell."