[fic] Just a wind away from happy {sasunaru}, p.1
Title: Just a wind away from happy
Pairing: >__> SasuNaru. All I'm good for.
Written by: ezyls_girl , inspired by many. X__X
Rating: PG-15. Swearing/semi-questionable content.
Summary: Sasuke is a moody coffeeholic and Naruto waits. Because love transcends time, and the wind carries it all.
Warnings: Unbeta'd. D: Saptastic ending, crazy love relationships and a whole lotta dirty talk. From a 69-year-old. AU.
Notes: This is a love declaration and one-day late birthday gift to peridottears , who is not only my Toma in TomaPi, but also a Narutard. I went into your fandom for you, Dottie-dear, and even though this is AU beyond AU and really kinda-twisted, I hope you kinda like it anyway. XD. References to JE-like names o.O; and the story-part inspired, once again, by the amazing blue_orbs' KinKi/TomaPi Back-Stories in IHC, as well as Johnny's Cash's Ring of Fire. 4,806 words. AND IGNORE THE CUT-TEXTS THIS IS ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE A VERY SERIOUS STORY OKAY. ♥
A man by the name of Tanaka, the owner of a successful coffee shop in Aoyama, stops by his own place once in a month and orders a small drink to taste. He takes a newspaper off the shelf to read, seats himself at the nearest table next to a complete stranger, and then strikes up a conversation, inquiring as to how well they think the business is doing. This is the deciding factor for the deployment of many of the café’s staff. Tanaka-san poses nothing but the simplest questions-ranging from how the French toast tastes today to whether or not the supervisor behind the counter resembles a large gorilla. In this way, he can gather and negate any harm that will make his coffee shop any less successful.
The strategy works surprisingly well. The customers are friendly, show an intelligent point of view, and never stick gum under the chairs. Tanaka-san is pleasantly treated, contrary to the general belief of how regular coffeeholics should behave. And their advice is more or less well thought-out. It was thanks to a certain Inohara-san that he learned how polka-dotted wallpaper was a decoration far more suitable for a children’s playroom, and through another Sanada-san that he understood that the proper use for an umbrella stand with no functioning legs is as a coffee-bean grinder.
Tanaka thought of himself as a very forgiving, open-minded person. Although this may seem a little too prideful coming from a man who counts the change from the cashier’s drawer by himself, if you were to look at the bigger picture it wasn’t impossible to think it untrue. Tanaka was skilled in making people feel uncomfortable and inadequate around him (it was common business courtesy to appear unimpressed-it lowered prices considerably), but at the same time he also believed in the ideal of there being nice people in the world. He was compassionate, and this was what made him different from the asocial records shop owner next door and the suspicious bartender who single-handedly manned the club down the street with a shotgun. He had his philosophies, of course. People who dress a certain way will behave a certain way. Never trust a guy who orders more than three drinks in one go. Policemen work for no one but themselves. Tanaka was a practical man. He judged books by their covers. And he was arbitrary, to the point where people would call him the Victorian King behind his back-he was only 69 this year, for god’s sake. It didn’t ever stop him from letting a couple of the homeless wanderers in for a few soft chocolate-chip cookies, a latte, and maybe a bed in one of the booths, if they promised to shower with Lemon Zest beforehand.
It was the way he ran things. Street bums are journeyers, he thinks, just hopeless romantics searching for hopeless solutions in the hopelessly dirty terrains of a city street. They will continue to be street bums until the day they figure out that they’ve finished their journey. He wants to believe that he’ll be able to fix at least a few of them along the way.
In early August, he sits down next to a young, dark-haired boy.
“He’s been here for a whole week,” he hears a furtive whisper from one of the counter girls, “You’d think he’d have brought in a girl by now. So damn fine…” The busboy she’s talking to giggles in response.
Girls will be girls, Tanaka finds the corners of his mouth turn up, somewhat excited himself despite his practical personality. Young people rarely come into his old-style coffee shop. The wallpaper is a bit of a quixotic maroon color, the stripes of the walls fading against it. He has Picasso and mixed-media photographs hanging behind the counter; a combination that was supposed to create an effect of pleasing everyone but over the years had turned into more of a haphazard jungle of aesthetically-fake. The beanbag chairs needed a washing, the bamboo tables a little creakier than he had last seen them, and the wooden armchairs seemingly bent out of shape. Time to have a sit-down with the café-manager.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tanaka watches as the boy orders a dark coffee. He is mildly surprised when he witnesses the kid down half the cup in one large gulp, sans cream and sugar.
Yosh, he thinks. I’ve found my advisor.
When Tanaka casually maneuvers himself down beside the boy, he is careful to examine this customer. Closer-up, this kid seems far too mature in composure in contrast to his appearance. At the same time, there’s an air of childishness in the way his fingers curl around the coffee cup. When the boy releases his mug after a second sip, he is looking at his own hands as if they were some newly-discovered artifact dug-up from under volcano ashes, flexing long fingers back and forth and carefully tracing each fingernail, dark eyes following the path of his fingers slowly, methodically, in circles and lines. His hair was styled in one of those pop idol haircuts, the kind that looked messy but was not actually messy at all and arranged to look like that. Except this boy looked like he had started the trend. Tanaka makes a decision to interrupt the flow of the mood (as if hadn’t already, by placing his plaid-overall-clad-self next to someone dressed like a pop culture icon, the old man noted to himself with a little smirk). It’s a move that he will certainly regret (or perhaps rejoice) in the months to come.
“So, my friend, how do you find your coffee today? Too sour? Too sweet? Or, god forbid, too painful to swallow?”
“It’s wonderful,” the customer replies in a somewhat apathetic manner, and then goes back to staring at his fingers, waiting for the man talking to him to leave.
Adolescents are such difficult specimen to deal with, ne, Tanaka-san thinks to himself, “Feeling alright?”
“All right.”
He certainly didn’t look all right, the old man thought with a snort. All pale and angsty-eyed. The absolute picture of all right, he certainly was. “Really?” He prompts instead, “Are you sure? Shouldn’t be drinking to much coffee at such a young age, ne. I have some oolong tea in the back shelves if you’d like. Imported from Thailand. Great mind-straighter-outer. It’s on the house.”
This time -and Tanaka applauds his own conversational skills- he’s rewarded with a lengthier response. “Well,” the boy hesitates, flexes his fingers again, “I feel…like I don’t understand myself anymore. Like…I don’t belong in this world.”
Suicidal. Another one of those. Tanaka breathes a sigh of relief. At least it hadn’t been something completely out of this world. But then again, suicidal…
“I don’t want to pry,” he chose these next words carefully, “but are you really okay?”
“Perfectly fine.”
And that’s the last he hears from this boy as his customer gets up and leaves by the front door. The bell tinkles after him in a manner more fit for a funeral home than a café.
Tanaka debates on whether or not he should inform the police or check the black coffee grinder for traces of drugs.
--
Uchiha Sasuke is sitting on a log when he realizes that this is going to last for a really long time. It’s not going to go away, it’s not going to lose speed, nor will it grow and gather and explode. It’ll just be another thing he’ll wake up to, fall asleep with, plant doubts and hopes and fears in. He’ll die with this, or kill himself while he’s still struggling in it.
He peers down (disdainfully? uncomfortably?) at the problem next to him. Naruto is snoring, sprawled across the grass in a shape similar to a cat flung across an oven rack, his back to Sasuke and a wide grin plastered over his face. His old teammate is sleeping in a happiness that shouldn’t be there, a complete disregard for the fact that they are in enemy territory, could be killed or captured at any time.
You idiot, he wants to say.
Then his face starts to soften, and with startled emotion Sasuke remembers that this is where is gets bad.
This is where it gets bad, when he traces a finger over Naruto’s face, sketching a line over Naruto’s cheek, this is where it gets bad, when the line stretches down the bridge of Naruto’s nose, past his mouth and his chin, all the way to the bottom of his neck. This is where it gets bad, when Sasuke wonders, tries to remember the exact moment he had figured it all out.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t remember. It’s been such a long time.
And since that day, he’d been like a house caught in a flood, caved-in and hollowed-out and unoccupied, as wrong and as disturbing as it sounds.
Naruto snorts, rolls over.
You stupid, stupid…
Naruto chooses this moment to open his eyes and start laughing. Sniggering. Giggling.
“What’s so funny?” His eyes narrow in a typical-Sasuke response.
“You’re sitting on a log.” Naruto points out, yawning. “Don’t tell me you don’t think that that’s at least a little ironic.”
He doesn’t want to smile, but does anyway and then hates himself for it.
How did it go again?
I fell for you like an idiot. Like a child. Like a fucking rock dropping into a bottomless pit, a well eight-hundred-million feet deep. Without a sound, without a warning. Sinking, lightless, weightless under the water.
And the scariest thing is that I want to be there.
God, why did it have to sound like a scene out of some crappy-Naruto stretches again, and the hem of his shirt rides a little up his abdomen to reveal tanned skin and toned muscle. And in that moment he felt such a powerful, blinding wave of whatever-it-was-called coming to the surface, bubbling up and he wanted to do something about it, but he couldn’t. Sasuke sucks in his breath.
Shitshitshit.
--
A few days later, Tanaka finds the boy back in his coffee shop, sitting at a corner table and gulping down black coffee. This had been an unplanned visit from Owner-san, and most of the employees behind the counter were wearing strained expressions. No one fully understands why the coffee shop owner is back, not even the old man himself.
“I shouldn’t have interfered with life,” the boy starts off, once Tanaka is seated.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Uchiha.”
“Uchiha?” Tanaka-san says, bemused, “you mean like the Uchiha in that old anime? I used to love the show when I was a little kid, ne. Watching Naruto with my brother. Uchiha Sasuke was always my least favorite though. Such a moody kid, if there ever was one. Anyway, sorry for interrupting your story, how did you interfere with who’s life?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” the boy named Uchiha scratches his pop-culture-icon head. “My memories are all different from how I used to remember them. Mixed up. I feel kinda like I’ve just climbed up out of a steep well.”
“You mean, your memories are all intact, but they’re water-logged.”
“That’s right.”
--
Sasuke wiped the blood from his mouth. “Naruto. Go, now.”
“Are you insane? I’m going to leave you!”
He smiled grimly to himself. If you wanted irony…“I can take them. Leave before I hurt you.”
“But…your wound…”
He laughed. The sound is hollow. “Uchiha Sasuke can handle a small scratch. They still need a hokage. They don’t need me.”
“I need you.”
He jumped, startled and certain that his ears had been mistaken. “What?”
“I need you, Sasuke.” Naruto said, and he heard the uncharacteristic emotion in those words, “I still need you. You’re an amazing fighter, the best tactician. I’m not going to abandon you.”
“You’re an idiot, you know.”
“You and Sakura-chan have taken turns telling me that for the greater part of my life. I know. I’m an idiot.”
“And I’d be one too if I don’t make you escape. Just go. I can handle it.”
I fell for you like an idiot.
“I can’t.” Naruto panics, then.
And he realizes that it’s impossible to push this any further. They’re already stuck in the enemy’s base; decampment would be beyond dangerous and probably futile with two people-unless there was an opportunity to simulate or create a diversion. Simple reasoning came out with the best solutions; it was what made him the tactician.
But they had nothing between the two of them. Since running away from capture, the two of them were left with the clothes on their backs and two daggers Sasuke had kept hidden in his headband.
He makes the last decision, then.
“I love you.” He whispers, pressing his mouth against Naruto’s lips and taking off his head tie, shoving it into his old teammate’s hands along with both daggers. And this is enough to freeze Naruto in his tracks, to make him openly astonished and still as a furniture fixture. It’s enough to gain that extra time to jump out from behind their hiding position and divert the attackers.
“W-Wait…! Uchiha-” Naruto’s frantic whisper came behind him, but he was a minute too late. Uchiha was gone.
It’s so unreal, all of it. Him confessing, the incredulous response.
A week later, when Sasuke is still within captivity, the captain of the guard laughingly tosses him something that the emissary had delivered. The war was over, and they are to release him within in a week. He is free to go wherever he wants to go.
Barely concealing the excitement of being let free (despite the heavy wounds he had suffered in the torture chamber), Sasuke leans down and retrieves the object that had been thrown into his cell. His fingers shake as he unties the package, but the bubble of joy in his gut promptly disappears when he unravels its contents.
It’s his headband. The same one he had pressed into Naruto’s hands at that moment when he had decided.
Across the symbol of the Konoha leaf, there is a deep, deep scratch.
You are no longer welcome, the meaning pounds through his head.
He wants to laugh. And cry. Better at the same time.
--
Uchiha accepts the oolong tea offer the third time Tanaka comes to visit him. But as the old man watches the boy take tentative licks of the strong tea, he realizes that Uchiha is just showing a reluctant sign of courtesy and so he snatches the cup out of the teenager’s hand with an unsatisfied smile, “If you’re not going to enjoy high-class tea, just tell me.” And then he proceeds to drink the rest of it by himself, going behind the counter to make a regular black coffee for the boy.
“It’s only polite to tell me your name after I’ve told you mine,” Uchiha replies, grumpy but happily settling down with his coffee.
“I don’t know your full name,” Tanaka says defensively, “Unless if you’re actually called ‘Sasuke’. That’d be a laugh.”
“Then laugh.” Sasuke frowns, annoyed.
--
He doesn’t want to go home. Hell, he doesn’t even have a home.
In reality, he doesn’t know what to do with his life anymore. He is always driven by something. He would have a goal, one impossible goal that he would convince himself that he could achieve. He was like the vicious cycle of the generations of people who dream of tunneling through a mountain of gold with bare hands, or bailing the ocean dry with a plastic pail. It could never happen, but he would dream.
He used to be so strong. He could do anything; take over the world, sleep with a million girls, kill everyone on the planet. He’s unable to do anything, now. It’s all gone. That willpower, the drive, the heart.
[part two]
Pairing: >__> SasuNaru. All I'm good for.
Written by: ezyls_girl , inspired by many. X__X
Rating: PG-15. Swearing/semi-questionable content.
Summary: Sasuke is a moody coffeeholic and Naruto waits. Because love transcends time, and the wind carries it all.
Warnings: Unbeta'd. D: Saptastic ending, crazy love relationships and a whole lotta dirty talk. From a 69-year-old. AU.
Notes: This is a love declaration and one-day late birthday gift to peridottears , who is not only my Toma in TomaPi, but also a Narutard. I went into your fandom for you, Dottie-dear, and even though this is AU beyond AU and really kinda-twisted, I hope you kinda like it anyway. XD. References to JE-like names o.O; and the story-part inspired, once again, by the amazing blue_orbs' KinKi/TomaPi Back-Stories in IHC, as well as Johnny's Cash's Ring of Fire. 4,806 words. AND IGNORE THE CUT-TEXTS THIS IS ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE A VERY SERIOUS STORY OKAY. ♥
A man by the name of Tanaka, the owner of a successful coffee shop in Aoyama, stops by his own place once in a month and orders a small drink to taste. He takes a newspaper off the shelf to read, seats himself at the nearest table next to a complete stranger, and then strikes up a conversation, inquiring as to how well they think the business is doing. This is the deciding factor for the deployment of many of the café’s staff. Tanaka-san poses nothing but the simplest questions-ranging from how the French toast tastes today to whether or not the supervisor behind the counter resembles a large gorilla. In this way, he can gather and negate any harm that will make his coffee shop any less successful.
The strategy works surprisingly well. The customers are friendly, show an intelligent point of view, and never stick gum under the chairs. Tanaka-san is pleasantly treated, contrary to the general belief of how regular coffeeholics should behave. And their advice is more or less well thought-out. It was thanks to a certain Inohara-san that he learned how polka-dotted wallpaper was a decoration far more suitable for a children’s playroom, and through another Sanada-san that he understood that the proper use for an umbrella stand with no functioning legs is as a coffee-bean grinder.
Tanaka thought of himself as a very forgiving, open-minded person. Although this may seem a little too prideful coming from a man who counts the change from the cashier’s drawer by himself, if you were to look at the bigger picture it wasn’t impossible to think it untrue. Tanaka was skilled in making people feel uncomfortable and inadequate around him (it was common business courtesy to appear unimpressed-it lowered prices considerably), but at the same time he also believed in the ideal of there being nice people in the world. He was compassionate, and this was what made him different from the asocial records shop owner next door and the suspicious bartender who single-handedly manned the club down the street with a shotgun. He had his philosophies, of course. People who dress a certain way will behave a certain way. Never trust a guy who orders more than three drinks in one go. Policemen work for no one but themselves. Tanaka was a practical man. He judged books by their covers. And he was arbitrary, to the point where people would call him the Victorian King behind his back-he was only 69 this year, for god’s sake. It didn’t ever stop him from letting a couple of the homeless wanderers in for a few soft chocolate-chip cookies, a latte, and maybe a bed in one of the booths, if they promised to shower with Lemon Zest beforehand.
It was the way he ran things. Street bums are journeyers, he thinks, just hopeless romantics searching for hopeless solutions in the hopelessly dirty terrains of a city street. They will continue to be street bums until the day they figure out that they’ve finished their journey. He wants to believe that he’ll be able to fix at least a few of them along the way.
In early August, he sits down next to a young, dark-haired boy.
“He’s been here for a whole week,” he hears a furtive whisper from one of the counter girls, “You’d think he’d have brought in a girl by now. So damn fine…” The busboy she’s talking to giggles in response.
Girls will be girls, Tanaka finds the corners of his mouth turn up, somewhat excited himself despite his practical personality. Young people rarely come into his old-style coffee shop. The wallpaper is a bit of a quixotic maroon color, the stripes of the walls fading against it. He has Picasso and mixed-media photographs hanging behind the counter; a combination that was supposed to create an effect of pleasing everyone but over the years had turned into more of a haphazard jungle of aesthetically-fake. The beanbag chairs needed a washing, the bamboo tables a little creakier than he had last seen them, and the wooden armchairs seemingly bent out of shape. Time to have a sit-down with the café-manager.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tanaka watches as the boy orders a dark coffee. He is mildly surprised when he witnesses the kid down half the cup in one large gulp, sans cream and sugar.
Yosh, he thinks. I’ve found my advisor.
When Tanaka casually maneuvers himself down beside the boy, he is careful to examine this customer. Closer-up, this kid seems far too mature in composure in contrast to his appearance. At the same time, there’s an air of childishness in the way his fingers curl around the coffee cup. When the boy releases his mug after a second sip, he is looking at his own hands as if they were some newly-discovered artifact dug-up from under volcano ashes, flexing long fingers back and forth and carefully tracing each fingernail, dark eyes following the path of his fingers slowly, methodically, in circles and lines. His hair was styled in one of those pop idol haircuts, the kind that looked messy but was not actually messy at all and arranged to look like that. Except this boy looked like he had started the trend. Tanaka makes a decision to interrupt the flow of the mood (as if hadn’t already, by placing his plaid-overall-clad-self next to someone dressed like a pop culture icon, the old man noted to himself with a little smirk). It’s a move that he will certainly regret (or perhaps rejoice) in the months to come.
“So, my friend, how do you find your coffee today? Too sour? Too sweet? Or, god forbid, too painful to swallow?”
“It’s wonderful,” the customer replies in a somewhat apathetic manner, and then goes back to staring at his fingers, waiting for the man talking to him to leave.
Adolescents are such difficult specimen to deal with, ne, Tanaka-san thinks to himself, “Feeling alright?”
“All right.”
He certainly didn’t look all right, the old man thought with a snort. All pale and angsty-eyed. The absolute picture of all right, he certainly was. “Really?” He prompts instead, “Are you sure? Shouldn’t be drinking to much coffee at such a young age, ne. I have some oolong tea in the back shelves if you’d like. Imported from Thailand. Great mind-straighter-outer. It’s on the house.”
This time -and Tanaka applauds his own conversational skills- he’s rewarded with a lengthier response. “Well,” the boy hesitates, flexes his fingers again, “I feel…like I don’t understand myself anymore. Like…I don’t belong in this world.”
Suicidal. Another one of those. Tanaka breathes a sigh of relief. At least it hadn’t been something completely out of this world. But then again, suicidal…
“I don’t want to pry,” he chose these next words carefully, “but are you really okay?”
“Perfectly fine.”
And that’s the last he hears from this boy as his customer gets up and leaves by the front door. The bell tinkles after him in a manner more fit for a funeral home than a café.
Tanaka debates on whether or not he should inform the police or check the black coffee grinder for traces of drugs.
--
Uchiha Sasuke is sitting on a log when he realizes that this is going to last for a really long time. It’s not going to go away, it’s not going to lose speed, nor will it grow and gather and explode. It’ll just be another thing he’ll wake up to, fall asleep with, plant doubts and hopes and fears in. He’ll die with this, or kill himself while he’s still struggling in it.
He peers down (disdainfully? uncomfortably?) at the problem next to him. Naruto is snoring, sprawled across the grass in a shape similar to a cat flung across an oven rack, his back to Sasuke and a wide grin plastered over his face. His old teammate is sleeping in a happiness that shouldn’t be there, a complete disregard for the fact that they are in enemy territory, could be killed or captured at any time.
You idiot, he wants to say.
Then his face starts to soften, and with startled emotion Sasuke remembers that this is where is gets bad.
This is where it gets bad, when he traces a finger over Naruto’s face, sketching a line over Naruto’s cheek, this is where it gets bad, when the line stretches down the bridge of Naruto’s nose, past his mouth and his chin, all the way to the bottom of his neck. This is where it gets bad, when Sasuke wonders, tries to remember the exact moment he had figured it all out.
Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t remember. It’s been such a long time.
And since that day, he’d been like a house caught in a flood, caved-in and hollowed-out and unoccupied, as wrong and as disturbing as it sounds.
Naruto snorts, rolls over.
You stupid, stupid…
Naruto chooses this moment to open his eyes and start laughing. Sniggering. Giggling.
“What’s so funny?” His eyes narrow in a typical-Sasuke response.
“You’re sitting on a log.” Naruto points out, yawning. “Don’t tell me you don’t think that that’s at least a little ironic.”
He doesn’t want to smile, but does anyway and then hates himself for it.
How did it go again?
I fell for you like an idiot. Like a child. Like a fucking rock dropping into a bottomless pit, a well eight-hundred-million feet deep. Without a sound, without a warning. Sinking, lightless, weightless under the water.
And the scariest thing is that I want to be there.
God, why did it have to sound like a scene out of some crappy-Naruto stretches again, and the hem of his shirt rides a little up his abdomen to reveal tanned skin and toned muscle. And in that moment he felt such a powerful, blinding wave of whatever-it-was-called coming to the surface, bubbling up and he wanted to do something about it, but he couldn’t. Sasuke sucks in his breath.
Shitshitshit.
--
A few days later, Tanaka finds the boy back in his coffee shop, sitting at a corner table and gulping down black coffee. This had been an unplanned visit from Owner-san, and most of the employees behind the counter were wearing strained expressions. No one fully understands why the coffee shop owner is back, not even the old man himself.
“I shouldn’t have interfered with life,” the boy starts off, once Tanaka is seated.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Uchiha.”
“Uchiha?” Tanaka-san says, bemused, “you mean like the Uchiha in that old anime? I used to love the show when I was a little kid, ne. Watching Naruto with my brother. Uchiha Sasuke was always my least favorite though. Such a moody kid, if there ever was one. Anyway, sorry for interrupting your story, how did you interfere with who’s life?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” the boy named Uchiha scratches his pop-culture-icon head. “My memories are all different from how I used to remember them. Mixed up. I feel kinda like I’ve just climbed up out of a steep well.”
“You mean, your memories are all intact, but they’re water-logged.”
“That’s right.”
--
Sasuke wiped the blood from his mouth. “Naruto. Go, now.”
“Are you insane? I’m going to leave you!”
He smiled grimly to himself. If you wanted irony…“I can take them. Leave before I hurt you.”
“But…your wound…”
He laughed. The sound is hollow. “Uchiha Sasuke can handle a small scratch. They still need a hokage. They don’t need me.”
“I need you.”
He jumped, startled and certain that his ears had been mistaken. “What?”
“I need you, Sasuke.” Naruto said, and he heard the uncharacteristic emotion in those words, “I still need you. You’re an amazing fighter, the best tactician. I’m not going to abandon you.”
“You’re an idiot, you know.”
“You and Sakura-chan have taken turns telling me that for the greater part of my life. I know. I’m an idiot.”
“And I’d be one too if I don’t make you escape. Just go. I can handle it.”
I fell for you like an idiot.
“I can’t.” Naruto panics, then.
And he realizes that it’s impossible to push this any further. They’re already stuck in the enemy’s base; decampment would be beyond dangerous and probably futile with two people-unless there was an opportunity to simulate or create a diversion. Simple reasoning came out with the best solutions; it was what made him the tactician.
But they had nothing between the two of them. Since running away from capture, the two of them were left with the clothes on their backs and two daggers Sasuke had kept hidden in his headband.
He makes the last decision, then.
“I love you.” He whispers, pressing his mouth against Naruto’s lips and taking off his head tie, shoving it into his old teammate’s hands along with both daggers. And this is enough to freeze Naruto in his tracks, to make him openly astonished and still as a furniture fixture. It’s enough to gain that extra time to jump out from behind their hiding position and divert the attackers.
“W-Wait…! Uchiha-” Naruto’s frantic whisper came behind him, but he was a minute too late. Uchiha was gone.
It’s so unreal, all of it. Him confessing, the incredulous response.
A week later, when Sasuke is still within captivity, the captain of the guard laughingly tosses him something that the emissary had delivered. The war was over, and they are to release him within in a week. He is free to go wherever he wants to go.
Barely concealing the excitement of being let free (despite the heavy wounds he had suffered in the torture chamber), Sasuke leans down and retrieves the object that had been thrown into his cell. His fingers shake as he unties the package, but the bubble of joy in his gut promptly disappears when he unravels its contents.
It’s his headband. The same one he had pressed into Naruto’s hands at that moment when he had decided.
Across the symbol of the Konoha leaf, there is a deep, deep scratch.
You are no longer welcome, the meaning pounds through his head.
He wants to laugh. And cry. Better at the same time.
--
Uchiha accepts the oolong tea offer the third time Tanaka comes to visit him. But as the old man watches the boy take tentative licks of the strong tea, he realizes that Uchiha is just showing a reluctant sign of courtesy and so he snatches the cup out of the teenager’s hand with an unsatisfied smile, “If you’re not going to enjoy high-class tea, just tell me.” And then he proceeds to drink the rest of it by himself, going behind the counter to make a regular black coffee for the boy.
“It’s only polite to tell me your name after I’ve told you mine,” Uchiha replies, grumpy but happily settling down with his coffee.
“I don’t know your full name,” Tanaka says defensively, “Unless if you’re actually called ‘Sasuke’. That’d be a laugh.”
“Then laugh.” Sasuke frowns, annoyed.
--
He doesn’t want to go home. Hell, he doesn’t even have a home.
In reality, he doesn’t know what to do with his life anymore. He is always driven by something. He would have a goal, one impossible goal that he would convince himself that he could achieve. He was like the vicious cycle of the generations of people who dream of tunneling through a mountain of gold with bare hands, or bailing the ocean dry with a plastic pail. It could never happen, but he would dream.
He used to be so strong. He could do anything; take over the world, sleep with a million girls, kill everyone on the planet. He’s unable to do anything, now. It’s all gone. That willpower, the drive, the heart.
[part two]