April Fools prompt fill
Title: Twisted, Tangled.
Word count: 690
Warnings: Angst. Also, this is un-beta’ed so it is bound to be fraught with grammatical errors.
Disclaimer: Naruto and all its characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto. If I owned Naruto, Iruka would get much more screen time.
Author Notes: Written for April Fools Day 2012 and based on the prompt ‘Regretful Drinkinginging’ from Vescas.
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This entanglement had to end, they were no good for one another. Both too broken and jaded to trust another person with themself, their whole self. Both of them trying to pull the other up while they slowly sank into the darkness.
It was a familiar mantra, a collection of thoughts that he repeated every morning when he found himself, again, in an increasingly familiar bed that was not his own. He knew that neither of them could survive like this. They both needed to be with people who could stabilise them, ground them, not with someone who was so similar that if their souls were swapped nobody would notice. Of course, they had very different masks that they hid behind.
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They both knew they were no good for each other; but it was only outside the privacy of the bedroom that they willing to admit this. At first they had tried to simply avoid interacting with one another, in the hope that keeping apart would prevent an encounter. But when they continued to find themselves waking up together their strategy changed.
It was not something they discussed; they never talked, because forming an attachment would only make it worse. Although, when in those brief moments that he was honest with himself, he knew that he had formed some kind of an attachment to the other man.
In any case they had found themselves being openly aggressive, which wasn’t very shinobi like because they were both well aware of Rule 25. But they had hoped that by brazenly being so abrasive to one another they could finally convince the other to stay away. Permanently.
And it had worked, for a while. Until the argument that would drawn the attention of all the active shinobi over twenty, when the Chunin exam nominations took place. After falling into bed together that night one of them finally spoke, the first three words to be spoken while the two of them were together in bed.
“This must stop.”
It was spoken quietly, almost a whisper, while both were still coming down from the high and lay panting beside one another. He had grunted in agreement as they lay there quietly, not touching but not moving away, until both had succumbed to sleep.
The next morning he had awakened earlier than usual. It was probably the sense of finality that had seeped into his bones. He sat up in bed and stared at the still sleeping form of his...his...
Not ‘lover.’ There had never been any love between them, and even if he had formed an attachment it was not a romantic one. It was more like the attachment one gets to a particular type of bread. You prefer to eat it but if another kind is presented to you then you won’t refuse.
Not ‘fuck buddy’ either. Although what they did couldn’t be called anything other than fucking, the ‘buddy’ part of that name was certainly not applicable to this situation. It implied a certain amount of shared feeling, often a friendship, that did not exist between himself and the other man.
The fact he could not think of an accurate term to classify their relationship showed just how twisted and dangerous their association was.
And yet he could not tear himself away just yet. He sat in the other mans bed; drinking in the site of him, the smell of him while he slowly gathered the courage to leave. It was strange; he had never before felt this sadness, this difficulty to leave. He had done it countless times before. And yet this feeling of regret was slowly bubbling up inside him. It had come, perhaps, because he knew in his heart of hearts that this would be the last time that he would be here. The others mans confession from the previous night now felt like it had released him to finally move past this... thing that had existed between them for so long.
He took one last look; one final gulp of the sleeping mans presence before placing a soft kiss on an unmasked cheek; and leaving the house. Forever.
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AN: Why, why, why must my brain turn everything into angst! I never intend to write it and yet somehow it just ends up that way. This isn’t very April Foolsy... *grumbles* stupid muse.
Moving on. I hope at least some of you were surprised with the little twist at the end. At first I was going to leave it so that it could have been from either mans perspective; but then Iruka insisted on showing everyone how damaged and broody he can be so I let him do the actual leaving.
I’m not sure I managed to sell the idea that they were ‘both too broken and jaded’ to form a stable relationship, even one that was purely sexual. In any case I hope it was somewhat enjoyable.