[Fic] Depth Perception, Part II: Ignite
If I keep watching the trailer for Death Note the movie enough times, I just might cure myself of my popslash addiction. On the other hand, I just found out that "Dani California" is going to be the movie's theme song. Now I really love this song and I've been loyal to The Red Hot Chili Peppers since the Blood Sugar Sex Magik days, but I have to ask: WTF does this have anything to do with DN?! Although, "I love my baby to death" is a sentiment I'm sure most DN slashers can appreciate ;)
DP II came back all streamlined and improved. I know who I love to death ♥
Depth Perception
Part II: Ignite
- - - - - - - - - - - -
way up north I took my day
all in all was a pretty nice day
- - - - - - - - - - -
Naruto was halfway out of the country before it occured to him that it was kind of pointless to rescue Itachi if he was just going to leave the Uchiha to bleed to death from his extensive injuries. The nearest center of civilization was a small gambling town in the northwest of Fire Country, so that was where headed. Navigating through the milling throngs of fortune-seekers, Naruto tried his best not to appear conspicuous-a feat greatly mitigated by the unconscious man on his back-and quickly located an herbalist shop.
The elderly pharmacist took in his customers’ sopping wet attire, observed Itachi’s scratched hitai-ate and Naruto’s wild-eyed expression, and tried to slam the door in their faces. He soon had a sudden change of heart, however, when Naruto grabbed him by the front of his sweater vest and shoved the steely blade of a kunai against his throat.
While the trembling doctor administered to Itachi, Naruto wandered out into the noisy, neon-lit streets, his mind ricocheting with a thousand vague possibilities. It was risky to stay in one place for too long, but he was banking on at least a week of freedom before the Akatsuki had enough time to regroup and dispatch someone after them. And judging from Kakashi’s and Sakura’s reaction, Naruto thought he might as well be captured or dead as far as Konoha was concerned, so at least that was one less thing to worry about.
There was one matter that he would not allow himself to dwell upon, in spite of how much his mind might wish otherwise: what would he say to Itachi when-if-when the other man regained consciousness? The way he figured it, there was no point in beating himself up over something he couldn’t control at the time being; it would do nothing but deliver another cruel twist to the knife in his heart. He’d cross that bridge when he got to it. For now, there were bigger fish to fry.
Consider, for instance, the maddening logistics of becoming a Missing Nin. Naruto was sure his stomach dropped some twenty notches when he realized with a jolt that he didn’t have much to his name other than his weapons and the clothes on his back. Evidently, he hadn’t stopped to think this venture through carefully enough. Fuck.
He might have been able to bully the doctor into treating Itachi, but that didn’t mean that he was going to ditch the medical bill too. That was just so… douchebag-ish and Naruto was firmly one of the good guys, even if he had recently gained some unsavory association. He briefly pondered the feasibility of knocking over the local bank, and then figured that such behavior wouldn’t do much for his non-douchebag image.
He strolled past a gaudy sign denoting a pawnshop, and before he knew it, his fingers had strayed to the tourmaline-watered gem hanging around his neck, delicately tracing the jewel’s sharp-cut face.
After a moment’s deliberation, Naruto sucked in his breath and entered the shop, squinting his eyes to readjust to the dim light. The gloomy room was cluttered with all manners of knick-knacks-tarnished gold watches, elegant silver pitchers, even some poor soul’s ancestral scrolls hanging on the peeling walls. The ancient painted faces looked pinched and sour, as though lamenting their ill fortune. Naruto was just tilting his head to one side to fully examine an intricate-looking apparatus made entirely of pewter and amethyst crystal, when he heard a dry cough coming from behind.
A door stood at the back of the shop, obstructed from sight by a tall chest of drawers. It had opened while Naruto hadn’t been looking, and behind the dusty glass counter was an old man, so withered and decrepit he might have stepped straight from one of the scrolls on the wall. His small, beady eyes were sharp and shrewd, however, as they surveyed his visitor over the golden rims of a pair of prim-looking pince-nez.
"Is there something I can help you with, young man?" asked the newcomer, his thatched face passive.
"Uh, well," Naruto stammered, momentarily forgetting his original purpose. "Are you the owner of this shop?"
The old man shrugged indifferently, as if to say ‘Isn’t that obvious?’
Naruto reached for his necklace and pulled it around his head. For some odd reason, his hand felt as though it were being weighed down with iron. "I have something I’d like you to look at. I... I’ve been told it’s worth a lot."
The shop-owner laid out his spidery palm unhurriedly and took the proffered jewel, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose to get a better look. Naruto thought he could detect a flash of astonishment pass through those dark eyes, dimming their astute light, but in a second the look had gone and the blank mask was firmly back in place.
"A nice bit of trinket," the man threw off-handedly. "But not, I’m afraid, as valuable as you have been brought to believe. I can only give you this much for it." And with that, he jotted down a few digits on a handy scrap of paper and pushed it towards Naruto. One look at the scrawled number squeezed the breath out of his chest, made white-hot anger bubble its way up his throat.
"How dare you, you stingy geezer," he shouted in the nonchalant face. "Don’t you know that this is the legacy of the Shodai Hokage, that..."
The words choked and fell away, inchoate. A minute had passed before Naruto realized that his mouth was hanging agape, gasping like a fish on land. The shop-owner stared at him bewilderedly, insouciant manner for once abandoned. Quickly, he forced his mouth shut, grabbed his necklace, and bolted from the shop, ignoring the old man’s imploring cries.
Once outside, Naruto staggered heavily against a power pole for support, tried to puke but nothing came up. The wave of heart-sickness crushed him under, bringing hot tears rolling to the surface.
No. It didn’t have to come to that. He wouldn’t let it.
In the end, he decided to swallow his pride, take a leaf out of Tsunade’s book, and buy a lottery ticket. Placing his entire future in the hands of a wispy slip of paper and his wavering luck seemed slightly ludicrous, but he was desperate.
The fact that he won proved that there was still some justice in the world.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I don’t, didn’t think we’d end up like this
- - - - - - - - - - -
It took three days for the herbalist doctor to patch up Itachi’s various injuries. Naruto made sure to add a hefty tip to the bill-though judging by the man’s constant jumpiness, he didn’t seem to appreciate the gesture all that much-before removing themselves from the pharmacy to one of the ubiquitous hotels that littered the streets in between the rowdy casinos.
On the fourth morning, Itachi opened his eyes, sat up with a jolt, and made an exemplary effort to cough up his lungs.
Naruto was deeply engaged in the perusal of a dog-eared map he’d bought at the local tourists office in hopes of devising a feasible course of action-should he continue north and enter the vast highlands of Earth Country, or turn around and cross the southern sea, eventually sailing to parts yet unknown-when he heard the shuddering hack and jerked his head up. All that was visible of Itachi’s face were his left eye, his mouth, and a strangely unmarred cheek; the rest was concealed by thick white gauze. In the watery morning light, his eye seemed huge and blurred, the black of the iris advancing over the white surface. His glare, Naruto reflected with an exasperated smirk, had lost none of its intensity, however.
Naturally, the first words out of the Uchiha’s mouth were: "Where am I?"
"Kakure-ana," Naruto informed him. "You know where that is, right?"
"Yes," Itachi returned. His voice sounded gritty, like fingernails on sandpaper, the vowels rusty from long disuse. "Northwest of Fire Country." A pause. Then, "How did I get here?"
And there it was. Naruto held the words delicately in his mouth for a second or two, testing out their shape and feel against his tongue before speaking. "I brought you here. You were injured after fighting Sasuke-unconscious-and I, uh, I took you and ran before the ANBU got their hands on you. You haven’t woken up since-uh, that is, until now."
He said this in one breath, and then stopped, waiting for a reaction. His eyes insisted on focusing on Itachi’s hand, the long fingers clutching at the edge of the blanket, and he noticed suddenly that the enameled nails were chipped. Perhaps it was because he had never seen the Uchiha as anything less than absolutely pristine at any given time, but for some reason this oddity seemed strangely profound, as though the chipped nail-polish might hold the keys to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Or maybe just the secrets in his heart.
"I see," came the reply. Yes, he saw. And now, since fighting was clearly out of the question, they were going to have to ‘talk about it’.
Or not, as it turned out. Itachi, apparently deciding that he had exceeded his speech quota for the day, gingerly lay back down onto the bed and turned onto his side, away from Naruto. And then there was nothing but silence and dust particles dancing in shafts of sunlight. The problem would not be addressed that day.
Nor any of the days that followed. After the initial conversation, Itachi never said more than three words at a time, drifting in and out of convalescent sleep, the lean contour of his body unmoving saved for the soft heaving of breaths. Naruto left food-hot, hearty chicken soup directly from the hotel restaurant-and water on the bedside table, and sometimes when he came back to the room they had been touched, but sometimes not. The hours passed slowly within the confines of those four walls, an antithesis to the rest of the town’s hectic bustling.
One afternoon, Naruto took his (unnoticed) leave to drop by the pharmacy and pick up a new package of herbal medication.
The first clue that something was amiss came in the form of the tumbled-over shelves in the front room. When Naruto stepped into the shop and saw the tiled floor covered in scattered herbs and broken fragments of the china grinding bowls, he was immediately on the alert. There was something in the air: a scent, both familiar and out of place, mingling with the aromatic fragrance of crushed leaves.
Kunai drawn, Naruto edged his way towards the entrance to the inner room, and peered around the doorway, his ears strained to catch even the slightest disturbance.
In the piss-yellow light of the naked bulb, the old doctor lay spread-eagled on his back, his head lolling at a grotesque angle. A thin trickle of blood crawled from the corner of his open mouth. He was dead.
Naruto took a long, careful look, and then flew from the room, his feet scrabbling on the cobblestone pavement for purchase. In less than five minutes, he was back at the hotel, armed to the teeth.
He advanced upon the stairs, quiet as a mouse, and at the head of the landing, spied two masked shinobi squatting in front of his room, making to break down the door. Their attire did not include the red-cloud cloak.
Silently, he heaved a sigh of the relief. So the Akatsuki had not come after them just yet. These two vigilantes were undoubtedly some local riffraff-an unfortunate downside to hiding in a gambling center-who were somehow involved in the organization’s crime network, and had been called upon to deal with a runaway prisoner on short notice. It was clear that the Akatsuki was still under the impression that Itachi was either dead or captured by Konoha ANBU. Even so, Naruto thought with a huff, they were grossly underestimating his abilities. Who did they think he was, the old herbalist? He’d so show them.
And then he proceeded to do so.
His conjecture proved correct: his pursuers were far from S-Rank criminals. One was dispatched with a flick of kunai blade even before he was aware that he was being attacked. The second was slightly peskier, narrowly avoiding Naruto’s shuriken and sending him spiraling out of his jump with a basic water jutsu. He didn’t move out of the way fast enough, however, when Naruto’s Kage Bunshin cannoned down from above and finished him off with a fatal stab to the nape of the neck. But as Naruto flung the door open and rushed into his room, he heard a resounding thunder of footsteps on the staircase. So they had opted for strength in number. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
Itachi was standing at the foot of the bed, and his eye flickered onto Naruto upon his entrance. It was the first time he saw the Uchiha on his feet since the Sasuke incident.
"We've got company," Naruto croaked breathlessly. "Can you walk?"
Itachi turned his bandaged head towards the commotion in the corridor for a moment, expression blank. Then, without a word, he vaulted out the open window and, landing gracefully on his feet, disappeared into the crowded streets. Naruto stood rooted to the spot, mouth open-wasn't he still bed-ridden an hour ago?-and then came to his senses and sped off after the older man. He caught up with Itachi at a fork in the road and together, they made off for the town's northern gate. Earth Country it was, then.
Behind them came sounds of confused shouting, growing louder by the minute. Naruto supposed that they would get away much faster if he were to do all the running, but now that Itachi was no longer unconscious, there was just no help for it.
Crossing his fingers in a familiar seal, he whispered: "Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"
The 'popping' sound that accompanied the wisps of chakra smoke informed him that ten shadow clones had materialized in his stead. Without breaking his run, Naruto shouted instructions back at the clones: "Divert them! Keep them away from the gate, whatever you do!"
As he followed a step behind Itachi, Naruto kept his eyes fixed on the way the Uchiha's pony tail swung back and forth as he ran. It was just another day, he told himself, in his helter-skelter life.
- - - - - - - - - - -
we maybe on this road
but we’re just impostors in this country
- - - - - - - - - - -
The past and present are now countries apart.
The village of Hatasa, says Naruto’s guidebook, is a quaint little coastal town literally at the pinecone-edge of the world, perched daintily at the very tip of the Iwa peninsula. You step out of the lush landscapes that characterize Waterfall Country’s side of the border, and onto the rough plateaus of Earth Country, all bird-bones and dusty sandstones, cross through the cool shadows of the hilly pine-and-almond forest, and suddenly the soil beneath your wandering feet turns to sand, fine and white and salt-laced, seashells crushed underfoot, saline breeze whipping on your face, and that’s when you know the ocean is near.
The wooden planks of the piers creak noisily beneath Naruto's feet as his eyes scan the sea-bound horizon: dotted with the black specks of fishing boats, all seeking their daily bread in the traitorous bowels of the ocean. Hatasa, like any fishing village, has its fair share of empty graves. The sea gives, and then takes back. Out here, everyone is a fisherman, or is trying to be, and their backs are bent by the age of seventeen-the culmination of a lifetime pulling the nets. The young and the old cannot be differentiated-every face is a cracked and weathered web of lines, carved by water and sand and wind, pungent with the rough tang of sea-salt. Even the houses seem sad and reduced, little more than shabby, crooked shacks all built of the same rain-stained pinewood. Buildings, people, landscape-all bear the mark, give off the feeling of resignation, the end of the earth.
The caw of the seagulls, he thinks, is the loneliest sound in the world. His thoughts are wildly scattered-he has never felt so distracted in his life-and that is dangerous territory. In an attempt to focus on something, he begins grasping at straws, and then his mind is drawn to the cabin on the hill less than half a mile from here, where Itachi is doing Kami-knows-what to occupy his day. Compared to those first days in Kakure-ana, Naruto thinks he doesn’t have any clearer a picture of what goes on in the Uchiha’s head, and now isn’t that a comforting thought?
He’s still here though. That has to count for something.
Shaking off the stray thought, Naruto pivots on his heels and walks away from the ocean, turning into the main boulevard where most of Hatasa’s businesses take place. He peers through the grimy, wind-wiped windows of the shops that line both sides of the street. Fishing supplies. Boat repairs. Smoky pubs, where a few red-eyed old-timers haunt the bar, drowning themselves in sake. Finally, at the end of the street, he spots a solitary restaurant-simply titled Takahashi’s Place-from which the wholesome aroma of cooked food emanates. Upon closer inspection, the restaurant appears slightly dingy and unwelcoming, a far-cry from the homely atmosphere of Ichiraku. But no matter: food is food regardless of the environment, and he really doesn’t need to be thinking about Konoha right now.
He parts the hanging flaps and enters the fairly empty restaurant: most of the townsfolk are out on their boats at this time of day.
"Can I help you?" a sullen voice pipes up.
A waitress has appeared at his side, pen and notepad in hand. She looks about his age, maybe older, with a bosom shelf and long dull-red hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. In the gloom, her pale face seems haggard and worn.
"Oh hi there, um..." He glances at her name-tag. "Yoko-neesan." She nods her head slightly, bored. "I was just wondering the if I could get some take-out ramen here."
Yoko clicks her tongue. "Got to ask Takahashi. Don’t ask for anything complicated though, lest he burns it. Then again," she adds, "he burns most everything anyway."
Ramen is complicated?
"Hey, Takahashi," Yoko barks, her gruff voice bellowing like a foghorn. "You got a customer. Can you do ramen?"
"Never heard of it," comes a deep growl from the smoking kitchen. "I don’t do nothing but fish here. You want something else, you go someplace else."
Naruto will remain calm. He will not rise to the occasion and-too late. "Well, I would, asshole, if there were anywhere else to go in this shithole of a village." Beside him, Yoko raises a thin eyebrow and breaks into a smirk.
"What did you call me?" grunts the disembodied voice. There is a lumbering of footfalls and then a giant of a man steps into the room, squeezing through the narrowing opening of the kitchen doorway. He appears to be in his late fifties, dark-skinned and powerfully-built, waving around a soup-ladle in one hand and (inexplicably) a book in the other.
"Well," challenges Takahashi, "care to repeat what you said earlier, pipsqueak?"
"I called you an asshole, asshole," Naruto shoots back, spitting with rage at the fact that he has to gaze up-and up, and up-to look Takahashi in the eyes. "And don’t fucking call me short."
"Well you kinda are," Yoko chimes in, twirling a lock of hair in between her fingers, clearly amused by the unfolding display of machismo. "How old are you, anyway? Thirteen? Fourteen?"
"I’m seventeen," he shouts, growing more annoyed by the minute. Why did he have to come here again? He’d rather eat bark.
"Like hell you are," she says, mouth forming a surprised ‘O’. "Like hell you’re as old as me." Turning suddenly to Takahashi, she quips, "This one’s feisty, boss. Might be good for that opening of ours."
"What are you talking about?" Naruto asks, furrowing his brows in confusion. "What opening?"
"How’d you like to be a kitchen hand?" Yoko says, grinning. "The pay’s not half bad."
"And what makes you think I’d want to work for him?" he sneers, jabbing a finger at Takahashi.
"And what makes you think I want a runty shrimp working for me?" returns the older man jauntily. "You probably can’t even lift ten kilos without breaking your back, shorty!"
"Oh yeah?" Naruto yells. "I’ll show you. I can so do your stinking job."
"Fine," Takahashi throws flippantly. "Be here at 8 AM sharp tomorrow morning, and I’ll see what you got. And you’d better not be late!"
"Fine!" Naruto returns. "I’ll be here!"
They stare daggers at each other for a very long minute.
"Fine, fine, all’s good," says Yoko. "Now can you both drop it before I choke on all the testosterone fumes in this room?"
- - - - - - - - - - -
so we go along and we said we’d fake it
- - - - - - - - - - -
So he has a job.
An hour later, the words still sound a bit surreal when he repeats them to Itachi while unwrapping their dinner (which does indeed turn out to be badly burnt fish). When he has finished the account of his town adventure, Naruto finds himself gazing earnestly at the Uchiha as if expecting a compliment or a pat on the head. Predictably, he receives neither.
"Well?" he prods. "Haven’t you got anything to say about that?"
Itachi just raises an eyebrow quizzically. This is becoming something of a running theme in Naruto’s life as of late.
"I mean, I’ll be away all day," he presses on insistently. "So what are you going to do around here while I’m working?"
"I wasn’t aware that I required your entertainment," Itachi says dryly. "In any case, my present condition doesn’t allow me to participate in any, ah, taxing activities, even if you would oblige to provide them."
Whoa. Talk about hormonal overload, because Naruto thinks he’s just blown something at those words, and damn if that wasn’t a euphemism. Bad train of thought. And now Itachi is turning his attention to the (undercooked) rice-balls, and Naruto so should not be this obsessed over the way his pink lips curl sensuously over the onigiri, the sharp tip of a moist tongue flicking out momentarily to catch a stray piece of fish roe filling. He so shouldn’t be. This obsession is all of the bad.
"That’s not what I meant, you ass." Huh. That came out snarky. And he used to be such a laid-back kind of guy. When the hell did this start?
"I’m sure I have no idea what you mean," replies Itachi, who always seems to know a lot about things he doesn’t know anything about.
"Whatever," Naruto fumes. Really, he’s just fucking hopeless, and please Kami-sama don’t let him have a hard-on too, because that would just be so unclassy. Not that Naruto is usually very classy, but he understands the general sentiment, and this sort of behavior is explicitly not it. Classiness, in his limited knowledge, involves a lot of poetry and fine cuisine and expensively seasoned wine. What it does not entail is an unhealthy fixation with sex (sex with Itachi, for that matter-will that ever stop sounding weird?), and probably a lot of other things that Naruto is not going to think about while sitting down to dinner, because that would be wrong.
And like he should even be thinking about the last time something happened anyway. The memory only serves to remind that he is playing with fire, and at any moment the flame could erupt and consume him absolutely, until there is nothing left but ashes and charred bones.
Those were the bad days.
- - - - - - - - - - -
we could break a silver lining
- - - - - - - - - - -
A week after the incident in the gambling town, he and Itachi were once again lying low in a rural inn on the northern border of Rain and Grass Country. It was much too close to both the River Country and Konoha for comfort, but with Itachi still recovering from his injuries, it was as far as they could manage for the time being.
Naruto remembered that he had gone out in the morning to do some scouting and purchase medical supplies, and didn’t come back until it was mid-afternoon, when the shadows on the ground had grown long and slanted. He remembered walking up the corridor to his room, clicking the key into the lock, pushing open the door, and coming upon a scene of wreckage.
The room looked as if a cyclone had recently blown through. Mattresses were overthrown, sheets torn to rags, and the various pieces of broken junk lying haphazardly on the floor bore vague resemblances to formerly functional furniture and appliances. For a heart-stopping moment, Naruto was seized with the horrible fear that the Akatsuki had already caught up with them.
Then he saw Itachi standing at the window with his back to him, apparently unharmed, absorbed in staring out at the streets outside beyond the glass pane. With a relieved sigh, he approached Itachi. That was his first mistake.
"Hey, what are you doing out of bed?" he asked. "And what the hell happened in here?"
The question had barely left his mouth when his back found itself getting painfully intimate with the wood paneling on the wall. If Naruto had known that the first thing Itachi would try to do upon regaining use of his limbs was to strangle him, he was sure he would have left the bastard to the proverbial wolves and have been done with this sorry ordeal by now.
If only everything in life were that simple.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he spat into Itachi’s heavily bandaged face, which was hovering a bit too close to his own. Itachi’s one visible eye was dark and inscrutable, and Naruto felt something rise in his chest that might have been fear.
He never did know what to fear until it was too late.
"Naruto," said Itachi in a voice that might as well be dead, "do you know what I did today?"
"What?" Damn if that didn’t come out squeaky. "And would you mind letting go of my neck?"
Apparently, he did mind. "I tried to activate the Sharingan today, Naruto."
Heart in throat? Check. Blood frozen in veins? Check.
"And you know what happened?"
"What." A statement, not even a question.
Itachi’s lips curled into a twisted smirk. "Nothing, Naruto. Nothing at all."
For a moment, Naruto couldn’t seem to make his vocal cords work. He blamed this on his overwhelming confusion. "What do you mean?"
The smirk widened cruelly. "Exactly that, Naruto." The fingers around his throat tightened a little, delicately skirting the barrier of pain. Naruto also found he didn’t like the way Itachi kept saying his name like some kind of perverse mantra.
"I can’t activate the Sharingan, nor can I control my chakra any longer. My dear little brother sealed all the channels during our battle, and I cannot reopen them."
Naruto stared at Itachi slack-jawed, not knowing what to make of the information he’d just been given. Kami-sama. What had Sasuke been doing, what madness could he have been pouring into his head during his time with Orochimaru? What kind of techniques could do that to a person, turning their own body into a prison of flesh and bones? The surrounding destruction was suddenly explained. Oh, he could just picture Itachi pacing the room in a silent fury, systematically upending the furniture, tearing the flowery curtains apart in that cold dispassionate manner that he went about everything else in life.
Caged tiger, indeed, and damn, what was he supposed to do now?
He tried speaking, but the words got choked and died in his throat. Then Itachi sidled closer, bridging the distance between their bodies in one fluid movement, and pressed his lips against Naruto’s ear. His breath brushed a hot, damp trail across the sensitive lobe. Naruto shuddered when a tongue flicked into his concha.
"It seems Sasuke’s finally learned to be thorough, has he not?" The words were slick as poison; they burned their way into Naruto’s skull with each slowly enunciated syllable. "A job well-done if I may say so myself."
Naruto pondered his options for a tense moment. Then he gingerly flattened his palms against Itachi’s chest in an effort to push him off, hoping that the contact would help calm the Uchiha and persuade him to go back to resting. That was his second mistake.
His head hit varnished pine with a sickening crunch as his body was roughly shoved up against the wall. Itachi swiftly gripped both of Naruto’s wrists with one hand and used them to trap his arms above his head. This position was becoming a bit too familiar.
"Itachi!" Naruto yelped, trying to keep the high-pitched note of panic out of his voice. In any other time, at any other place, but damn it. Not. Like. This.
Instead of replying, Itachi clamped his sharp teeth aggressively onto the soft juncture of Naruto’s neck and shoulder, and bit down hard. His free hand wormed its way up Naruto’s undershirt, making him shiver. Itachi’s skin was always very cold.
Dizzily, Naruto told himself that he could get out of this situation; Itachi, in his weakened condition, could be deflected easily enough. With a flick of his wrist and the proper application of chakra, the Uchiha would be flat on his back and summarily back in bed in no time, where Naruto hoped he would stay for the remainder of his useless days instead of walking around molesting unsuspecting people. Just the right amount of chakra, and he would manage it.
"Itachi!" he said again, this time more firmly and with a generous side-helping of gritting teeth.
The older man froze mid-nibble and slowly turned to face him. The moment Naruto saw the simmering rage in his black eye-and it was wrong, so very wrong for it to still be so dark: that was the heart of the problem-he immediately understood what this was all about.
Because for Itachi, it had always been about power, hadn’t it? His, the Akatsuki’s, even the Kyuubi’s: it had always been about power, and now…
Now his power had been stripped away. Or rather, locked down, nailed shut, and manacled in a place so near, yet so frustratingly out of reach. And Itachi… Itachi could be broken.
Naruto knew he could overpower Itachi and return the balance to the way it had been. But even as he thought this, it became only too clear to him that the moment he did, the moment he tore the other’s body off of him, he would break him, and then everything that had passed between them up until then would be irrevocably lost.
No, he could not do that.
So the real question was, what could he do?
"Alright," Naruto croaked weakly, feeling a little sick. "Alright. Just… just don’t try anything too… athletic. Your ribs are broken, you idiot."
His words-permission-might as well have fallen on deaf ears, if the gnashing of teeth on his shirt collar was anything to go by. Itachi’s nails dug painfully into his hipbones, trailing purple bruises in the shape of half-moons in their wake, long fingers desperately tearing and catching on fabric in search of whatever bit of dominance there was to be found.
- - - - - - - - - - -
and I rode along side
till you lost me there in the open road
- - - - - - - - - - -
At sixteen years, five months and eleven days old, Uzumaki Naruto thinks he doesn’t really know much about love.
When he was twelve, he thought love was Sakura-chan and the way his stomach would flutter giddily at her pretty smile, as if there were a million butterflies jostling around for room in there, until he felt he might explode into dancing sparks, like fireworks in the summer.
Love, too, and to a less desirable extent, was the way Sakura would look at Sasuke-not the happy, simpering manner she put on to draw his attention, but the one when she thought he wasn’t looking at her. It was a soft, longing expression, sort of sad and wistful, and that more than anything made Naruto’s heart blaze with the simple jealousy only a childhood crush could afford.
Then he got older, and the world went a bit pear-shaped. One day, when he was fifteen, he and Sakura were sitting in his favorite ramen bar, sharing a meal and talking about nothing in particular, when she suddenly looked him straight in the eyes, the line of her mouth set in poignant grimness, and said, "You always want what you can’t have, don’t you, Naruto?"
He remembers looking down at his cooling bowl for a long time before smiling choppily and answering, "That makes two of us, doesn’t it?"
Sakura just stared at him. Then she shook her head and called him an idiot, but her eyes seemed a little brighter all the same. Later, he flicked dry fish cakes into her hair while she shrieked with laughter and poked him in the ribs with chopsticks, and for a moment it felt like nothing had changed.
So yeah, Sakura might have been his first love, but that doesn’t matter anymore because he left her standing in the rain, just as Sasuke had left him before that. Come to think of it, Naruto might have loved Sasuke too, and that’s how he knows that love hurts. Love to a person’s heart is like a knife to skin: it wounds its way into the tender spots, cutting sweetly and painlessly, and you never know you’ve been touched until the blood comes gushing forth and squeezes you dry. Whenever he imagines himself in love, it is always an insubstantial sensation, like he’s not really there or has his eyes closed. This formless, generic person to whom he is making love is no one at all, a nonentity, and Naruto thinks it will remain this way until he learns more about love.
Naruto doesn’t know much about love, but that’s what he does know. And because he has always known these things, he knew right way, that day in the inn with his back grinding uncomfortably against the wall and Itachi’s burning mouth wrapped around his cock like a furnace or an iron brand, that it wasn’t love at all. Rather, what they had between them was something like an acceptable level of companionship, or a mutually beneficial relationship, or a disease of the skin. He could go on, but variations on the same theme earned him no brownie points for creativity.
And he wished he’d been smarter, had just that much more foresight, because it seemed no matter how hard he tried, no matter what precautions he took, things still ended up a little broken anyway.
But that was enough, Naruto thought blearily when Itachi had rolled off his slumped form and walked away. It was enough, he thought-watching Itachi drop onto the unmade bed like a stone, the anger leaking out of his weary limbs even as he fell-because obviously Naruto didn’t know shit about love, so he probably wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.
- - - - - - - - - - -
and I’m so sad
like a good book I can’t put this day back
a sorta fairy tale with you
- - - - - - - - - - -
end of part ii
DP II came back all streamlined and improved. I know who I love to death ♥
Depth Perception
Part II: Ignite
- - - - - - - - - - - -
way up north I took my day
all in all was a pretty nice day
- - - - - - - - - - -
Naruto was halfway out of the country before it occured to him that it was kind of pointless to rescue Itachi if he was just going to leave the Uchiha to bleed to death from his extensive injuries. The nearest center of civilization was a small gambling town in the northwest of Fire Country, so that was where headed. Navigating through the milling throngs of fortune-seekers, Naruto tried his best not to appear conspicuous-a feat greatly mitigated by the unconscious man on his back-and quickly located an herbalist shop.
The elderly pharmacist took in his customers’ sopping wet attire, observed Itachi’s scratched hitai-ate and Naruto’s wild-eyed expression, and tried to slam the door in their faces. He soon had a sudden change of heart, however, when Naruto grabbed him by the front of his sweater vest and shoved the steely blade of a kunai against his throat.
While the trembling doctor administered to Itachi, Naruto wandered out into the noisy, neon-lit streets, his mind ricocheting with a thousand vague possibilities. It was risky to stay in one place for too long, but he was banking on at least a week of freedom before the Akatsuki had enough time to regroup and dispatch someone after them. And judging from Kakashi’s and Sakura’s reaction, Naruto thought he might as well be captured or dead as far as Konoha was concerned, so at least that was one less thing to worry about.
There was one matter that he would not allow himself to dwell upon, in spite of how much his mind might wish otherwise: what would he say to Itachi when-if-when the other man regained consciousness? The way he figured it, there was no point in beating himself up over something he couldn’t control at the time being; it would do nothing but deliver another cruel twist to the knife in his heart. He’d cross that bridge when he got to it. For now, there were bigger fish to fry.
Consider, for instance, the maddening logistics of becoming a Missing Nin. Naruto was sure his stomach dropped some twenty notches when he realized with a jolt that he didn’t have much to his name other than his weapons and the clothes on his back. Evidently, he hadn’t stopped to think this venture through carefully enough. Fuck.
He might have been able to bully the doctor into treating Itachi, but that didn’t mean that he was going to ditch the medical bill too. That was just so… douchebag-ish and Naruto was firmly one of the good guys, even if he had recently gained some unsavory association. He briefly pondered the feasibility of knocking over the local bank, and then figured that such behavior wouldn’t do much for his non-douchebag image.
He strolled past a gaudy sign denoting a pawnshop, and before he knew it, his fingers had strayed to the tourmaline-watered gem hanging around his neck, delicately tracing the jewel’s sharp-cut face.
After a moment’s deliberation, Naruto sucked in his breath and entered the shop, squinting his eyes to readjust to the dim light. The gloomy room was cluttered with all manners of knick-knacks-tarnished gold watches, elegant silver pitchers, even some poor soul’s ancestral scrolls hanging on the peeling walls. The ancient painted faces looked pinched and sour, as though lamenting their ill fortune. Naruto was just tilting his head to one side to fully examine an intricate-looking apparatus made entirely of pewter and amethyst crystal, when he heard a dry cough coming from behind.
A door stood at the back of the shop, obstructed from sight by a tall chest of drawers. It had opened while Naruto hadn’t been looking, and behind the dusty glass counter was an old man, so withered and decrepit he might have stepped straight from one of the scrolls on the wall. His small, beady eyes were sharp and shrewd, however, as they surveyed his visitor over the golden rims of a pair of prim-looking pince-nez.
"Is there something I can help you with, young man?" asked the newcomer, his thatched face passive.
"Uh, well," Naruto stammered, momentarily forgetting his original purpose. "Are you the owner of this shop?"
The old man shrugged indifferently, as if to say ‘Isn’t that obvious?’
Naruto reached for his necklace and pulled it around his head. For some odd reason, his hand felt as though it were being weighed down with iron. "I have something I’d like you to look at. I... I’ve been told it’s worth a lot."
The shop-owner laid out his spidery palm unhurriedly and took the proffered jewel, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose to get a better look. Naruto thought he could detect a flash of astonishment pass through those dark eyes, dimming their astute light, but in a second the look had gone and the blank mask was firmly back in place.
"A nice bit of trinket," the man threw off-handedly. "But not, I’m afraid, as valuable as you have been brought to believe. I can only give you this much for it." And with that, he jotted down a few digits on a handy scrap of paper and pushed it towards Naruto. One look at the scrawled number squeezed the breath out of his chest, made white-hot anger bubble its way up his throat.
"How dare you, you stingy geezer," he shouted in the nonchalant face. "Don’t you know that this is the legacy of the Shodai Hokage, that..."
The words choked and fell away, inchoate. A minute had passed before Naruto realized that his mouth was hanging agape, gasping like a fish on land. The shop-owner stared at him bewilderedly, insouciant manner for once abandoned. Quickly, he forced his mouth shut, grabbed his necklace, and bolted from the shop, ignoring the old man’s imploring cries.
Once outside, Naruto staggered heavily against a power pole for support, tried to puke but nothing came up. The wave of heart-sickness crushed him under, bringing hot tears rolling to the surface.
No. It didn’t have to come to that. He wouldn’t let it.
In the end, he decided to swallow his pride, take a leaf out of Tsunade’s book, and buy a lottery ticket. Placing his entire future in the hands of a wispy slip of paper and his wavering luck seemed slightly ludicrous, but he was desperate.
The fact that he won proved that there was still some justice in the world.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I don’t, didn’t think we’d end up like this
- - - - - - - - - - -
It took three days for the herbalist doctor to patch up Itachi’s various injuries. Naruto made sure to add a hefty tip to the bill-though judging by the man’s constant jumpiness, he didn’t seem to appreciate the gesture all that much-before removing themselves from the pharmacy to one of the ubiquitous hotels that littered the streets in between the rowdy casinos.
On the fourth morning, Itachi opened his eyes, sat up with a jolt, and made an exemplary effort to cough up his lungs.
Naruto was deeply engaged in the perusal of a dog-eared map he’d bought at the local tourists office in hopes of devising a feasible course of action-should he continue north and enter the vast highlands of Earth Country, or turn around and cross the southern sea, eventually sailing to parts yet unknown-when he heard the shuddering hack and jerked his head up. All that was visible of Itachi’s face were his left eye, his mouth, and a strangely unmarred cheek; the rest was concealed by thick white gauze. In the watery morning light, his eye seemed huge and blurred, the black of the iris advancing over the white surface. His glare, Naruto reflected with an exasperated smirk, had lost none of its intensity, however.
Naturally, the first words out of the Uchiha’s mouth were: "Where am I?"
"Kakure-ana," Naruto informed him. "You know where that is, right?"
"Yes," Itachi returned. His voice sounded gritty, like fingernails on sandpaper, the vowels rusty from long disuse. "Northwest of Fire Country." A pause. Then, "How did I get here?"
And there it was. Naruto held the words delicately in his mouth for a second or two, testing out their shape and feel against his tongue before speaking. "I brought you here. You were injured after fighting Sasuke-unconscious-and I, uh, I took you and ran before the ANBU got their hands on you. You haven’t woken up since-uh, that is, until now."
He said this in one breath, and then stopped, waiting for a reaction. His eyes insisted on focusing on Itachi’s hand, the long fingers clutching at the edge of the blanket, and he noticed suddenly that the enameled nails were chipped. Perhaps it was because he had never seen the Uchiha as anything less than absolutely pristine at any given time, but for some reason this oddity seemed strangely profound, as though the chipped nail-polish might hold the keys to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Or maybe just the secrets in his heart.
"I see," came the reply. Yes, he saw. And now, since fighting was clearly out of the question, they were going to have to ‘talk about it’.
Or not, as it turned out. Itachi, apparently deciding that he had exceeded his speech quota for the day, gingerly lay back down onto the bed and turned onto his side, away from Naruto. And then there was nothing but silence and dust particles dancing in shafts of sunlight. The problem would not be addressed that day.
Nor any of the days that followed. After the initial conversation, Itachi never said more than three words at a time, drifting in and out of convalescent sleep, the lean contour of his body unmoving saved for the soft heaving of breaths. Naruto left food-hot, hearty chicken soup directly from the hotel restaurant-and water on the bedside table, and sometimes when he came back to the room they had been touched, but sometimes not. The hours passed slowly within the confines of those four walls, an antithesis to the rest of the town’s hectic bustling.
One afternoon, Naruto took his (unnoticed) leave to drop by the pharmacy and pick up a new package of herbal medication.
The first clue that something was amiss came in the form of the tumbled-over shelves in the front room. When Naruto stepped into the shop and saw the tiled floor covered in scattered herbs and broken fragments of the china grinding bowls, he was immediately on the alert. There was something in the air: a scent, both familiar and out of place, mingling with the aromatic fragrance of crushed leaves.
Kunai drawn, Naruto edged his way towards the entrance to the inner room, and peered around the doorway, his ears strained to catch even the slightest disturbance.
In the piss-yellow light of the naked bulb, the old doctor lay spread-eagled on his back, his head lolling at a grotesque angle. A thin trickle of blood crawled from the corner of his open mouth. He was dead.
Naruto took a long, careful look, and then flew from the room, his feet scrabbling on the cobblestone pavement for purchase. In less than five minutes, he was back at the hotel, armed to the teeth.
He advanced upon the stairs, quiet as a mouse, and at the head of the landing, spied two masked shinobi squatting in front of his room, making to break down the door. Their attire did not include the red-cloud cloak.
Silently, he heaved a sigh of the relief. So the Akatsuki had not come after them just yet. These two vigilantes were undoubtedly some local riffraff-an unfortunate downside to hiding in a gambling center-who were somehow involved in the organization’s crime network, and had been called upon to deal with a runaway prisoner on short notice. It was clear that the Akatsuki was still under the impression that Itachi was either dead or captured by Konoha ANBU. Even so, Naruto thought with a huff, they were grossly underestimating his abilities. Who did they think he was, the old herbalist? He’d so show them.
And then he proceeded to do so.
His conjecture proved correct: his pursuers were far from S-Rank criminals. One was dispatched with a flick of kunai blade even before he was aware that he was being attacked. The second was slightly peskier, narrowly avoiding Naruto’s shuriken and sending him spiraling out of his jump with a basic water jutsu. He didn’t move out of the way fast enough, however, when Naruto’s Kage Bunshin cannoned down from above and finished him off with a fatal stab to the nape of the neck. But as Naruto flung the door open and rushed into his room, he heard a resounding thunder of footsteps on the staircase. So they had opted for strength in number. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
Itachi was standing at the foot of the bed, and his eye flickered onto Naruto upon his entrance. It was the first time he saw the Uchiha on his feet since the Sasuke incident.
"We've got company," Naruto croaked breathlessly. "Can you walk?"
Itachi turned his bandaged head towards the commotion in the corridor for a moment, expression blank. Then, without a word, he vaulted out the open window and, landing gracefully on his feet, disappeared into the crowded streets. Naruto stood rooted to the spot, mouth open-wasn't he still bed-ridden an hour ago?-and then came to his senses and sped off after the older man. He caught up with Itachi at a fork in the road and together, they made off for the town's northern gate. Earth Country it was, then.
Behind them came sounds of confused shouting, growing louder by the minute. Naruto supposed that they would get away much faster if he were to do all the running, but now that Itachi was no longer unconscious, there was just no help for it.
Crossing his fingers in a familiar seal, he whispered: "Kage Bunshin no Jutsu!"
The 'popping' sound that accompanied the wisps of chakra smoke informed him that ten shadow clones had materialized in his stead. Without breaking his run, Naruto shouted instructions back at the clones: "Divert them! Keep them away from the gate, whatever you do!"
As he followed a step behind Itachi, Naruto kept his eyes fixed on the way the Uchiha's pony tail swung back and forth as he ran. It was just another day, he told himself, in his helter-skelter life.
- - - - - - - - - - -
we maybe on this road
but we’re just impostors in this country
- - - - - - - - - - -
The past and present are now countries apart.
The village of Hatasa, says Naruto’s guidebook, is a quaint little coastal town literally at the pinecone-edge of the world, perched daintily at the very tip of the Iwa peninsula. You step out of the lush landscapes that characterize Waterfall Country’s side of the border, and onto the rough plateaus of Earth Country, all bird-bones and dusty sandstones, cross through the cool shadows of the hilly pine-and-almond forest, and suddenly the soil beneath your wandering feet turns to sand, fine and white and salt-laced, seashells crushed underfoot, saline breeze whipping on your face, and that’s when you know the ocean is near.
The wooden planks of the piers creak noisily beneath Naruto's feet as his eyes scan the sea-bound horizon: dotted with the black specks of fishing boats, all seeking their daily bread in the traitorous bowels of the ocean. Hatasa, like any fishing village, has its fair share of empty graves. The sea gives, and then takes back. Out here, everyone is a fisherman, or is trying to be, and their backs are bent by the age of seventeen-the culmination of a lifetime pulling the nets. The young and the old cannot be differentiated-every face is a cracked and weathered web of lines, carved by water and sand and wind, pungent with the rough tang of sea-salt. Even the houses seem sad and reduced, little more than shabby, crooked shacks all built of the same rain-stained pinewood. Buildings, people, landscape-all bear the mark, give off the feeling of resignation, the end of the earth.
The caw of the seagulls, he thinks, is the loneliest sound in the world. His thoughts are wildly scattered-he has never felt so distracted in his life-and that is dangerous territory. In an attempt to focus on something, he begins grasping at straws, and then his mind is drawn to the cabin on the hill less than half a mile from here, where Itachi is doing Kami-knows-what to occupy his day. Compared to those first days in Kakure-ana, Naruto thinks he doesn’t have any clearer a picture of what goes on in the Uchiha’s head, and now isn’t that a comforting thought?
He’s still here though. That has to count for something.
Shaking off the stray thought, Naruto pivots on his heels and walks away from the ocean, turning into the main boulevard where most of Hatasa’s businesses take place. He peers through the grimy, wind-wiped windows of the shops that line both sides of the street. Fishing supplies. Boat repairs. Smoky pubs, where a few red-eyed old-timers haunt the bar, drowning themselves in sake. Finally, at the end of the street, he spots a solitary restaurant-simply titled Takahashi’s Place-from which the wholesome aroma of cooked food emanates. Upon closer inspection, the restaurant appears slightly dingy and unwelcoming, a far-cry from the homely atmosphere of Ichiraku. But no matter: food is food regardless of the environment, and he really doesn’t need to be thinking about Konoha right now.
He parts the hanging flaps and enters the fairly empty restaurant: most of the townsfolk are out on their boats at this time of day.
"Can I help you?" a sullen voice pipes up.
A waitress has appeared at his side, pen and notepad in hand. She looks about his age, maybe older, with a bosom shelf and long dull-red hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. In the gloom, her pale face seems haggard and worn.
"Oh hi there, um..." He glances at her name-tag. "Yoko-neesan." She nods her head slightly, bored. "I was just wondering the if I could get some take-out ramen here."
Yoko clicks her tongue. "Got to ask Takahashi. Don’t ask for anything complicated though, lest he burns it. Then again," she adds, "he burns most everything anyway."
Ramen is complicated?
"Hey, Takahashi," Yoko barks, her gruff voice bellowing like a foghorn. "You got a customer. Can you do ramen?"
"Never heard of it," comes a deep growl from the smoking kitchen. "I don’t do nothing but fish here. You want something else, you go someplace else."
Naruto will remain calm. He will not rise to the occasion and-too late. "Well, I would, asshole, if there were anywhere else to go in this shithole of a village." Beside him, Yoko raises a thin eyebrow and breaks into a smirk.
"What did you call me?" grunts the disembodied voice. There is a lumbering of footfalls and then a giant of a man steps into the room, squeezing through the narrowing opening of the kitchen doorway. He appears to be in his late fifties, dark-skinned and powerfully-built, waving around a soup-ladle in one hand and (inexplicably) a book in the other.
"Well," challenges Takahashi, "care to repeat what you said earlier, pipsqueak?"
"I called you an asshole, asshole," Naruto shoots back, spitting with rage at the fact that he has to gaze up-and up, and up-to look Takahashi in the eyes. "And don’t fucking call me short."
"Well you kinda are," Yoko chimes in, twirling a lock of hair in between her fingers, clearly amused by the unfolding display of machismo. "How old are you, anyway? Thirteen? Fourteen?"
"I’m seventeen," he shouts, growing more annoyed by the minute. Why did he have to come here again? He’d rather eat bark.
"Like hell you are," she says, mouth forming a surprised ‘O’. "Like hell you’re as old as me." Turning suddenly to Takahashi, she quips, "This one’s feisty, boss. Might be good for that opening of ours."
"What are you talking about?" Naruto asks, furrowing his brows in confusion. "What opening?"
"How’d you like to be a kitchen hand?" Yoko says, grinning. "The pay’s not half bad."
"And what makes you think I’d want to work for him?" he sneers, jabbing a finger at Takahashi.
"And what makes you think I want a runty shrimp working for me?" returns the older man jauntily. "You probably can’t even lift ten kilos without breaking your back, shorty!"
"Oh yeah?" Naruto yells. "I’ll show you. I can so do your stinking job."
"Fine," Takahashi throws flippantly. "Be here at 8 AM sharp tomorrow morning, and I’ll see what you got. And you’d better not be late!"
"Fine!" Naruto returns. "I’ll be here!"
They stare daggers at each other for a very long minute.
"Fine, fine, all’s good," says Yoko. "Now can you both drop it before I choke on all the testosterone fumes in this room?"
- - - - - - - - - - -
so we go along and we said we’d fake it
- - - - - - - - - - -
So he has a job.
An hour later, the words still sound a bit surreal when he repeats them to Itachi while unwrapping their dinner (which does indeed turn out to be badly burnt fish). When he has finished the account of his town adventure, Naruto finds himself gazing earnestly at the Uchiha as if expecting a compliment or a pat on the head. Predictably, he receives neither.
"Well?" he prods. "Haven’t you got anything to say about that?"
Itachi just raises an eyebrow quizzically. This is becoming something of a running theme in Naruto’s life as of late.
"I mean, I’ll be away all day," he presses on insistently. "So what are you going to do around here while I’m working?"
"I wasn’t aware that I required your entertainment," Itachi says dryly. "In any case, my present condition doesn’t allow me to participate in any, ah, taxing activities, even if you would oblige to provide them."
Whoa. Talk about hormonal overload, because Naruto thinks he’s just blown something at those words, and damn if that wasn’t a euphemism. Bad train of thought. And now Itachi is turning his attention to the (undercooked) rice-balls, and Naruto so should not be this obsessed over the way his pink lips curl sensuously over the onigiri, the sharp tip of a moist tongue flicking out momentarily to catch a stray piece of fish roe filling. He so shouldn’t be. This obsession is all of the bad.
"That’s not what I meant, you ass." Huh. That came out snarky. And he used to be such a laid-back kind of guy. When the hell did this start?
"I’m sure I have no idea what you mean," replies Itachi, who always seems to know a lot about things he doesn’t know anything about.
"Whatever," Naruto fumes. Really, he’s just fucking hopeless, and please Kami-sama don’t let him have a hard-on too, because that would just be so unclassy. Not that Naruto is usually very classy, but he understands the general sentiment, and this sort of behavior is explicitly not it. Classiness, in his limited knowledge, involves a lot of poetry and fine cuisine and expensively seasoned wine. What it does not entail is an unhealthy fixation with sex (sex with Itachi, for that matter-will that ever stop sounding weird?), and probably a lot of other things that Naruto is not going to think about while sitting down to dinner, because that would be wrong.
And like he should even be thinking about the last time something happened anyway. The memory only serves to remind that he is playing with fire, and at any moment the flame could erupt and consume him absolutely, until there is nothing left but ashes and charred bones.
Those were the bad days.
- - - - - - - - - - -
we could break a silver lining
- - - - - - - - - - -
A week after the incident in the gambling town, he and Itachi were once again lying low in a rural inn on the northern border of Rain and Grass Country. It was much too close to both the River Country and Konoha for comfort, but with Itachi still recovering from his injuries, it was as far as they could manage for the time being.
Naruto remembered that he had gone out in the morning to do some scouting and purchase medical supplies, and didn’t come back until it was mid-afternoon, when the shadows on the ground had grown long and slanted. He remembered walking up the corridor to his room, clicking the key into the lock, pushing open the door, and coming upon a scene of wreckage.
The room looked as if a cyclone had recently blown through. Mattresses were overthrown, sheets torn to rags, and the various pieces of broken junk lying haphazardly on the floor bore vague resemblances to formerly functional furniture and appliances. For a heart-stopping moment, Naruto was seized with the horrible fear that the Akatsuki had already caught up with them.
Then he saw Itachi standing at the window with his back to him, apparently unharmed, absorbed in staring out at the streets outside beyond the glass pane. With a relieved sigh, he approached Itachi. That was his first mistake.
"Hey, what are you doing out of bed?" he asked. "And what the hell happened in here?"
The question had barely left his mouth when his back found itself getting painfully intimate with the wood paneling on the wall. If Naruto had known that the first thing Itachi would try to do upon regaining use of his limbs was to strangle him, he was sure he would have left the bastard to the proverbial wolves and have been done with this sorry ordeal by now.
If only everything in life were that simple.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he spat into Itachi’s heavily bandaged face, which was hovering a bit too close to his own. Itachi’s one visible eye was dark and inscrutable, and Naruto felt something rise in his chest that might have been fear.
He never did know what to fear until it was too late.
"Naruto," said Itachi in a voice that might as well be dead, "do you know what I did today?"
"What?" Damn if that didn’t come out squeaky. "And would you mind letting go of my neck?"
Apparently, he did mind. "I tried to activate the Sharingan today, Naruto."
Heart in throat? Check. Blood frozen in veins? Check.
"And you know what happened?"
"What." A statement, not even a question.
Itachi’s lips curled into a twisted smirk. "Nothing, Naruto. Nothing at all."
For a moment, Naruto couldn’t seem to make his vocal cords work. He blamed this on his overwhelming confusion. "What do you mean?"
The smirk widened cruelly. "Exactly that, Naruto." The fingers around his throat tightened a little, delicately skirting the barrier of pain. Naruto also found he didn’t like the way Itachi kept saying his name like some kind of perverse mantra.
"I can’t activate the Sharingan, nor can I control my chakra any longer. My dear little brother sealed all the channels during our battle, and I cannot reopen them."
Naruto stared at Itachi slack-jawed, not knowing what to make of the information he’d just been given. Kami-sama. What had Sasuke been doing, what madness could he have been pouring into his head during his time with Orochimaru? What kind of techniques could do that to a person, turning their own body into a prison of flesh and bones? The surrounding destruction was suddenly explained. Oh, he could just picture Itachi pacing the room in a silent fury, systematically upending the furniture, tearing the flowery curtains apart in that cold dispassionate manner that he went about everything else in life.
Caged tiger, indeed, and damn, what was he supposed to do now?
He tried speaking, but the words got choked and died in his throat. Then Itachi sidled closer, bridging the distance between their bodies in one fluid movement, and pressed his lips against Naruto’s ear. His breath brushed a hot, damp trail across the sensitive lobe. Naruto shuddered when a tongue flicked into his concha.
"It seems Sasuke’s finally learned to be thorough, has he not?" The words were slick as poison; they burned their way into Naruto’s skull with each slowly enunciated syllable. "A job well-done if I may say so myself."
Naruto pondered his options for a tense moment. Then he gingerly flattened his palms against Itachi’s chest in an effort to push him off, hoping that the contact would help calm the Uchiha and persuade him to go back to resting. That was his second mistake.
His head hit varnished pine with a sickening crunch as his body was roughly shoved up against the wall. Itachi swiftly gripped both of Naruto’s wrists with one hand and used them to trap his arms above his head. This position was becoming a bit too familiar.
"Itachi!" Naruto yelped, trying to keep the high-pitched note of panic out of his voice. In any other time, at any other place, but damn it. Not. Like. This.
Instead of replying, Itachi clamped his sharp teeth aggressively onto the soft juncture of Naruto’s neck and shoulder, and bit down hard. His free hand wormed its way up Naruto’s undershirt, making him shiver. Itachi’s skin was always very cold.
Dizzily, Naruto told himself that he could get out of this situation; Itachi, in his weakened condition, could be deflected easily enough. With a flick of his wrist and the proper application of chakra, the Uchiha would be flat on his back and summarily back in bed in no time, where Naruto hoped he would stay for the remainder of his useless days instead of walking around molesting unsuspecting people. Just the right amount of chakra, and he would manage it.
"Itachi!" he said again, this time more firmly and with a generous side-helping of gritting teeth.
The older man froze mid-nibble and slowly turned to face him. The moment Naruto saw the simmering rage in his black eye-and it was wrong, so very wrong for it to still be so dark: that was the heart of the problem-he immediately understood what this was all about.
Because for Itachi, it had always been about power, hadn’t it? His, the Akatsuki’s, even the Kyuubi’s: it had always been about power, and now…
Now his power had been stripped away. Or rather, locked down, nailed shut, and manacled in a place so near, yet so frustratingly out of reach. And Itachi… Itachi could be broken.
Naruto knew he could overpower Itachi and return the balance to the way it had been. But even as he thought this, it became only too clear to him that the moment he did, the moment he tore the other’s body off of him, he would break him, and then everything that had passed between them up until then would be irrevocably lost.
No, he could not do that.
So the real question was, what could he do?
"Alright," Naruto croaked weakly, feeling a little sick. "Alright. Just… just don’t try anything too… athletic. Your ribs are broken, you idiot."
His words-permission-might as well have fallen on deaf ears, if the gnashing of teeth on his shirt collar was anything to go by. Itachi’s nails dug painfully into his hipbones, trailing purple bruises in the shape of half-moons in their wake, long fingers desperately tearing and catching on fabric in search of whatever bit of dominance there was to be found.
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and I rode along side
till you lost me there in the open road
- - - - - - - - - - -
At sixteen years, five months and eleven days old, Uzumaki Naruto thinks he doesn’t really know much about love.
When he was twelve, he thought love was Sakura-chan and the way his stomach would flutter giddily at her pretty smile, as if there were a million butterflies jostling around for room in there, until he felt he might explode into dancing sparks, like fireworks in the summer.
Love, too, and to a less desirable extent, was the way Sakura would look at Sasuke-not the happy, simpering manner she put on to draw his attention, but the one when she thought he wasn’t looking at her. It was a soft, longing expression, sort of sad and wistful, and that more than anything made Naruto’s heart blaze with the simple jealousy only a childhood crush could afford.
Then he got older, and the world went a bit pear-shaped. One day, when he was fifteen, he and Sakura were sitting in his favorite ramen bar, sharing a meal and talking about nothing in particular, when she suddenly looked him straight in the eyes, the line of her mouth set in poignant grimness, and said, "You always want what you can’t have, don’t you, Naruto?"
He remembers looking down at his cooling bowl for a long time before smiling choppily and answering, "That makes two of us, doesn’t it?"
Sakura just stared at him. Then she shook her head and called him an idiot, but her eyes seemed a little brighter all the same. Later, he flicked dry fish cakes into her hair while she shrieked with laughter and poked him in the ribs with chopsticks, and for a moment it felt like nothing had changed.
So yeah, Sakura might have been his first love, but that doesn’t matter anymore because he left her standing in the rain, just as Sasuke had left him before that. Come to think of it, Naruto might have loved Sasuke too, and that’s how he knows that love hurts. Love to a person’s heart is like a knife to skin: it wounds its way into the tender spots, cutting sweetly and painlessly, and you never know you’ve been touched until the blood comes gushing forth and squeezes you dry. Whenever he imagines himself in love, it is always an insubstantial sensation, like he’s not really there or has his eyes closed. This formless, generic person to whom he is making love is no one at all, a nonentity, and Naruto thinks it will remain this way until he learns more about love.
Naruto doesn’t know much about love, but that’s what he does know. And because he has always known these things, he knew right way, that day in the inn with his back grinding uncomfortably against the wall and Itachi’s burning mouth wrapped around his cock like a furnace or an iron brand, that it wasn’t love at all. Rather, what they had between them was something like an acceptable level of companionship, or a mutually beneficial relationship, or a disease of the skin. He could go on, but variations on the same theme earned him no brownie points for creativity.
And he wished he’d been smarter, had just that much more foresight, because it seemed no matter how hard he tried, no matter what precautions he took, things still ended up a little broken anyway.
But that was enough, Naruto thought blearily when Itachi had rolled off his slumped form and walked away. It was enough, he thought-watching Itachi drop onto the unmade bed like a stone, the anger leaking out of his weary limbs even as he fell-because obviously Naruto didn’t know shit about love, so he probably wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.
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and I’m so sad
like a good book I can’t put this day back
a sorta fairy tale with you
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end of part ii