Fic: The Art of Coming Home
May. 31st, 2010 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
platedlizardTitle: The Art of Coming Home 2/?
Fandom: Naruto
Characters/Pairing: Naruto/Sasuke, Iruka, Itachi
Rating: G, at least for now :)
Summary: After final battle Sasuke deals with blindness, depression, grief, and the art of coming home.
Chapter One.
When the light faded away Naruto was on the ground, not moving, his clothes and hair red with blood., blood running free into the soil. Iruka was at his boy's side in an instant, but all he could was stare—he didn't even know where to start. Naruto had bee—looked like---he was skinned. The fox had done so much damage. His hands spread out over Naruto, desperately trying to stop the flow with his pitiful healing jutsu, better suited for fixing the cuts and bruises and minor burns of the classroom than anything like this. His old jounin-sensei hadn't exactly encouraged his team to learn healing jutsu, if you were injured you were expected to fix yourself up or you were left behind. Sometimes he thought he had spent most of his adult life trying to escape that man's influence. As a teacher he made sure he never placed his kids with a jounin-sensei like that.
Strong hands closed on his shoulders as Sakura-chan knocked him out of the way. He stepped back and looked up into Kakashi-san's exhausted face.
“Don't worry,” the Copy-nin said, “This...effect is expected.”
“But he--” Looks skinned, he wanted to say, Looks flayed alive, but his throat swelled shut. He couldn't say it. He couldn't.
Kakashi-san smiled under his mask and patted his shoulders. “Have faith in your students Sensei.” He nodded toward Sakura-chan and Iruka turned to look. Naruto was covered in the deep green glow of healing chakra that emanated from Sakura's hands. Sakura-chan looked strong and competent, in control and confident, so different from the loud but secretly insecure little girl he had taught just a few years ago. Iruka blinked, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. It didn't matter how many times he saw it, watching his kids mature into competent ninjas always brought tears to his eyes. He was so damn proud of her.
“See?” Kakashi-san said.
“Yes,” Iruka croaked. He cleared his throat. “You've done a good job with them.” I'm glad I trusted you.
Kakashi sighed, “Well, two out of three isn't too bad I suppose.”
Suddenly reminded Iruka started scanning the battlefield for Sasuke-kun. The boy had been thrown far in that final explosion.
“No,” he said softly, his eyes fixing on a distant figure lying far too still on the other side of the giant crater that up until recently had been a forest. “You did good with him too, he was fighting to save Naruto.”
Kakashi snorted, clearly doubting his words. “Maa, if you say so,” Kakashi said doubtfully.
“I do,” Iruka said, conviction ringing in his voice as he started across the battlefield. “Have faith in your students Sensei,” he echoed, smiling.
Behind him the jounin gave a weak chuckle.
***
Sasuke woke up disoriented in the middle of the night. He wasn't lying on his bed, and for one moment he didn't know where he was. Panic closed his throat and he sat up, thrashing weakly as his legs tangled in something, and for one moment he couldn't tell up from down while the Kyuubi blazed down at him, snarling in pleasure at his weakness.
His hand hit the back of the couch and instantly he calmed. Nothing was wrong, he was safe. Iruka must have put a blanket over him when he fell asleep, that was all. He was grateful in a way, at least the chuunin hadn't insulted him by carrying him back to bed like a helpless child. Sasuke untangled the blanket and stood, walking out the front door into the cool night air. He raised his face to the sky and closed his eyes. It changed nothing about the fox's afterimage that was permanently burned into his, into his brother's eyes, but it made it seem less real, somehow, and the natural darkness of the night made his blindness less important. It probably wasn't safe for him to go outside, too many people from his own year hated him, with perfect justification, for the things he had done. Sasuke knew for a fact that if it wasn't for Naruto he probably would have been dead by now. He really couldn't blame them.
It was cool, but he didn't mind. Sasuke sat on the swinging bench on the porch and breathed deeply, simply enjoying the sound of tree frogs chirping nearby. Orochimaru hated them, but Sasuke never minded. They reminded him of Naruto and his stupid frog purse and he found it impossible to hate them as the Snake Sanin had encouraged him to do. Even deep within the labyrinth of Sound's laboratories he could hear them, the tiny creatures somehow working their way past all the safeguards. They reminded him of all the good things of Fire Country, of the few times he gone camping with his family that had nothing to do with training, of time spent by his family's lake, of the C and D-rank missions that took him and the rest of Team Seven out of the village. He should have tried to divorce himself from them, but he couldn't. They seemed so tiny and harmless, and at the time he never let himself think about the memories they dredged up. Now, however, he realized they sounded like home.
He sat outside for a long time, listening to the frogs.
Sometime around dawn the frogs faded away, to be replaced by songbirds. It was cold, but Sasuke had never minded the cold. In the distance a dog barked. He could hear Iruka begin to stir in the house as the village began to wake up, and a moment later Sasuke heard the door open.
“Ah, there you are. Good morning Sasuke.”
Sasuke grunted something vaguely at his guardian. It was a bit hard to think of him as a warden when the man insisted on cooking him breakfast every morning.
Iruka chuckled. “I have the rice maker on, why don't you come inside and take a shower and warm up while I make onigiri? Your lips are a little blue.”
As soon as he said it Sasuke suddenly felt cold. He nodded and followed Iruka back into the house.
“Good kid,” Iruka smacked his shoulder as he passed him. Sasuke had been expecting it and to his mild surprise he sensed the touch a fraction of a second before Iruka's hand connected.
Perhaps he was getting better.
A half an hour later Sasuke walked into the kitchen running his fingers through his damp hair, wearing a pair of plain pants, a fishnet shirt, and a worn leather coat that Sakura and Naruto had bought for him from a second hand store just before they let him out of the hospital. Naruto said they made him look 'tough', causing Sakura to giggle. Sasuke just hoped it didn't look too stupid on him. He knew he couldn't be a shinobi any more, but that didn't mean he wanted to look like a civilian. He felt carefully for the table and pulled a chair out just as Iruka set a plate in front of him. He knew without asking that the onigiri were made with short-grained brow rice and the plat would also contain a hard-boiled egg and either a fruit or vegetable dish. Iruka was kind of a health nut.
“Are you coming today?” Iruka asked as Sasuke ate. Sasuke shrugged, then nodded. He wanted to go back to sleep, but if he did that Naruto would come over and bother him about it, and helping out with a classroom full of kids took less energy than dealing with Naruto when he was determined to be annoying.
“Good!” Iruka said, a bit too cheerfully for that time of the morning in Sasuke's opinion. “Naruto is coming over too, and I have a team-building exercise planned.” His voice went from cheerful, to cheerfully sadistic. “Good thing you're wearing that, and that it didn't rain last night, or you would be crawling through the mud.”
Great.
A couple pills dropped onto the plate in front of him. Mechanically he swallowed them with his tea, even though he wasn't sure they were doing anything.
“I had a seizure yesterday,” he commented.
“You did? When?,” Iruka asked sounding concerned, but not overly worried. It was, after all, something they were both fairly used to.
“While you were at school. I was sleeping to off when the moron woke me up.”
Iruka rapped his knuckles with a pair of chopsticks. “Language. And if I had known that I would have made him leave you alone. Are you hurt?”
Sasuke shrugged. “I had warning.”
Iruka sighed explosively. “We'll go see Tsunade-sama after school. Maybe she can adjust your dosage.”
Sasuke just shrugged again, as far as he was concerned it was only one more humiliation on top of a long list of humiliations, each and every single one of them fully earned. He didn't deserve his pride, it had brought nothing but misery and pain for everyone around him.
Sasuke jumped slightly as Iruka ruffled his hair. “Come on, put the dishes in the washer, and let's go.”
***
Naruto appeared in a swirl of wind and fire. For a moment Sasuke was breathless as Naruto's chakra pulsed over him, like being engulfed it the backflare of a katon. Sasuke automatically swung his cane—he had to use a goddamned cane like a blind man—between himself and the fire.
“What?” Naruto laughed. “You want to fight me with that?”
Sasuke forced himself to lower the cane. “No,” he said, grinding his teeth. He knew the idiot was grinning at him. “When did you learn that jutsu?”
“Nice, right?” Naruto sounded cocky, but underneath Sasuke thought he could hear a hint of insecurity. Sasuke knew that some small part of Naruto would always be the lonely little boy who just wanted to be acknowledged by an uncaring village. “I bugged Kakashi aaaallllllll last week and he finally agreed to teach me. Only works in the village though.”
Sasuke snorted. “I know.” Then, and only because Naruto needed to hear it, “Kabuto tried to teach me, but I never got the hang of it,” he said grudgingly. Which was true, Summoning was never his strong-suit, and self-Summoning was even more difficult then usual. He could probably do it now, but teleporting blind struck him as an amazingly stupid thing to do.
Naruto laughed, pleased. “It's awesome! You should try it sometime, maybe I could teach you.”
“Yes, that's right. I'll just Summon myself blind in a village full of people who hate me.”
“Hey! What did I tell you last week?! No negativity! Positive thoughts! Positive!”
Oh god, Sasuke thought, he's been hanging around with Lee. I might have to kill him after all.
Fortunately, before Sasuke was forced to defend himself and the world from the prospect of a Lee-and-Master-Gai-inspired-Naruto Iruka came to his rescue and sent them into a tiny patch of woods to set up some traps. The training ground was small compared to the ones he was used to, but he could remember a time when it had seemed huge. Sasuke follow the bright-hot glow of Naruto's chakra through the woods his cane tapping off tree trunks and boulders, stringing chakra-wire haphazardly. Naruto was nearly silent out here in the forest, what little noise he made was almost certainly deliberate, to make it easier for him to track. The grove had been used often enough that most of the lower-hanging branches had been blown or sliced off at one point or another, which made navigating such a complex environment easier. Once the traps were set they took their positions, fading back into the forest.
In the distance Sasuke could hear children, going by their voices they were one of the older classes—perhaps this year's genin-candidates. The sound made him twitch, it had been a long five years since he had been their age, a long five years since the world was a simple black and white.
Itachi, he remembered, had warned him about thinking in terms of black and white. He had warned him of that inexplicably in the middle the clan's private training grounds one day when he was six and now he wondered if that had been the first indication of a rift between Itachi and their family. Sasuke pressed his temple to the trunk of the trees he was sitting and listened to his brother, as he always did when Itachi chose to visit him. He could feel his brother's hand on his shoulder as he listened to Naruto spring the first of the traps. “He caught most of them, that was a bit more complex than they usually can handle at that age,” Itachi commented.
“I wouldn't know,” Sasuke said.
“Tch, little brother. There are more ways to see then with the eyes. Expand your mind a little.””
Sometimes he wondered if he was going insane.
As the exercise started Sasuke remained hidden, choosing to let Naruto deal with the children. He felt Itachi settle on the branch beside him. “Why are you here?”
“Tch. You won't let me die.”
Sasuke huffed and sat down beside the ghost of his brother. “You are dead. I killed you.” The words were sour in his mouth, if only he had known...
“Foolish Sasuke, I wanted to die.” A ghostly hand ruffled his hair and Sasuke wanted to cry. How could a hallucination feel so real? “I had wanted to die for eight years, but I was waiting for you. I wanted my death to make you stronger.”
Sasuke laughed bitterly. “Yes. That worked out so well.”
“Mmm, you're still alive.” Itachi leaned into him, an arm slung carelessly around his shoulders. He had no breath even when he spoke. “That was my main goal all along.”
Sasuke sighed and closed his eyes. He did not feel like fighting with a figment of his imagination.
“Pay attention.” The ghost of his brother poked his shoulder. “Naruto-kun is going to make a good jounin-sensei one day.”
In the distance the remaining children were running loose, but their footsteps were ordered and their voices excited but without a hint of panic. He listened carefully, Naruto had created a clone to be on their side and get them organized. They were planning a counter-attack to free their teammates.
Sasuke listened to the battle, and gradually his brother faded away to his relief. But he would be back. Itachi was something that would never ever leave him, he knew. His brother was always, one way or another, the most important person in the world to him, the night Itachi slaughtered their family on the orders of Konoha's council of elders made sure of that. Killing his brother only strengthened the bond between them.
Sometimes Sasuke thought he out of all of Team Seven understood Kakashi best. The dead were more real than the living to him as well.
Naruto and his clone kept the children busy for more than an hour, their mingled shouts of outrage and triumph shattering the natural silence of the grove and driving the small creatures who made it their home into hiding. The exercise ended when Iruka called a break for lunch. Naruto dissipated his clone and joined him on the branch.
“Hey,” Naruto said, the hot glow of the fox burning into Sasuke. “You didn't join us.”
“Hn.”
“Don't feel like talking today?” Naruto snorted. “Fine, whatever. Mope if you want, Mr. McMopey-Moperson.” Sasuke barely managed to deflect the playful punch Naruto sent his way with his cane. “Whatever. Want to go get lunch?”
Sasuke hesitated, but only for a second. “Not ramen.” Not that he had anything against ramen, it was just that Naruto ate too damn much of it.
“What, you think I'm still twelve? We can go get sushi if you want,” Sasuke shuddered at the thought, in his opinion this far from the ocean raw fish was a bad idea, “Or katsu.”
Fried pork did sound good. “Katsu's fine.”
“All right!” Sasuke dodged another attack by jumping out of the tree, there was a brief moment of panic when the entire world just went away and then he was rolling to his feet, cursing. Jumping blind was like jumping into a void.
“You okay?” Naruto said, landing next to him.
“I'm fine,” he said, reorienting now that he was on his feet.
“You sure? You really scared me for a moment.”
“It's fine.” He shrugged and let Naruto take the lead. He could feel Naruto's concerned gaze, but what could he do? There were some things that he simply had to accept.
“Sasuke?” Naruto said as the waitress led them to the back of the restaurant, possibly as a compromise between preventing village's black sheep from chasing off the customers without pissing off the future Hokage.
“Yes?” He didn't need eyes to see Naruto's smile. It glower brighter then the fox's chakra, shining like a spotlight on all it touched.
“I'm really glad you're back.”
And for a moment things were really fine after all.
Fandom: Naruto
Characters/Pairing: Naruto/Sasuke, Iruka, Itachi
Rating: G, at least for now :)
Summary: After final battle Sasuke deals with blindness, depression, grief, and the art of coming home.
Chapter One.
When the light faded away Naruto was on the ground, not moving, his clothes and hair red with blood., blood running free into the soil. Iruka was at his boy's side in an instant, but all he could was stare—he didn't even know where to start. Naruto had bee—looked like---he was skinned. The fox had done so much damage. His hands spread out over Naruto, desperately trying to stop the flow with his pitiful healing jutsu, better suited for fixing the cuts and bruises and minor burns of the classroom than anything like this. His old jounin-sensei hadn't exactly encouraged his team to learn healing jutsu, if you were injured you were expected to fix yourself up or you were left behind. Sometimes he thought he had spent most of his adult life trying to escape that man's influence. As a teacher he made sure he never placed his kids with a jounin-sensei like that.
Strong hands closed on his shoulders as Sakura-chan knocked him out of the way. He stepped back and looked up into Kakashi-san's exhausted face.
“Don't worry,” the Copy-nin said, “This...effect is expected.”
“But he--” Looks skinned, he wanted to say, Looks flayed alive, but his throat swelled shut. He couldn't say it. He couldn't.
Kakashi-san smiled under his mask and patted his shoulders. “Have faith in your students Sensei.” He nodded toward Sakura-chan and Iruka turned to look. Naruto was covered in the deep green glow of healing chakra that emanated from Sakura's hands. Sakura-chan looked strong and competent, in control and confident, so different from the loud but secretly insecure little girl he had taught just a few years ago. Iruka blinked, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. It didn't matter how many times he saw it, watching his kids mature into competent ninjas always brought tears to his eyes. He was so damn proud of her.
“See?” Kakashi-san said.
“Yes,” Iruka croaked. He cleared his throat. “You've done a good job with them.” I'm glad I trusted you.
Kakashi sighed, “Well, two out of three isn't too bad I suppose.”
Suddenly reminded Iruka started scanning the battlefield for Sasuke-kun. The boy had been thrown far in that final explosion.
“No,” he said softly, his eyes fixing on a distant figure lying far too still on the other side of the giant crater that up until recently had been a forest. “You did good with him too, he was fighting to save Naruto.”
Kakashi snorted, clearly doubting his words. “Maa, if you say so,” Kakashi said doubtfully.
“I do,” Iruka said, conviction ringing in his voice as he started across the battlefield. “Have faith in your students Sensei,” he echoed, smiling.
Behind him the jounin gave a weak chuckle.
***
Sasuke woke up disoriented in the middle of the night. He wasn't lying on his bed, and for one moment he didn't know where he was. Panic closed his throat and he sat up, thrashing weakly as his legs tangled in something, and for one moment he couldn't tell up from down while the Kyuubi blazed down at him, snarling in pleasure at his weakness.
His hand hit the back of the couch and instantly he calmed. Nothing was wrong, he was safe. Iruka must have put a blanket over him when he fell asleep, that was all. He was grateful in a way, at least the chuunin hadn't insulted him by carrying him back to bed like a helpless child. Sasuke untangled the blanket and stood, walking out the front door into the cool night air. He raised his face to the sky and closed his eyes. It changed nothing about the fox's afterimage that was permanently burned into his, into his brother's eyes, but it made it seem less real, somehow, and the natural darkness of the night made his blindness less important. It probably wasn't safe for him to go outside, too many people from his own year hated him, with perfect justification, for the things he had done. Sasuke knew for a fact that if it wasn't for Naruto he probably would have been dead by now. He really couldn't blame them.
It was cool, but he didn't mind. Sasuke sat on the swinging bench on the porch and breathed deeply, simply enjoying the sound of tree frogs chirping nearby. Orochimaru hated them, but Sasuke never minded. They reminded him of Naruto and his stupid frog purse and he found it impossible to hate them as the Snake Sanin had encouraged him to do. Even deep within the labyrinth of Sound's laboratories he could hear them, the tiny creatures somehow working their way past all the safeguards. They reminded him of all the good things of Fire Country, of the few times he gone camping with his family that had nothing to do with training, of time spent by his family's lake, of the C and D-rank missions that took him and the rest of Team Seven out of the village. He should have tried to divorce himself from them, but he couldn't. They seemed so tiny and harmless, and at the time he never let himself think about the memories they dredged up. Now, however, he realized they sounded like home.
He sat outside for a long time, listening to the frogs.
Sometime around dawn the frogs faded away, to be replaced by songbirds. It was cold, but Sasuke had never minded the cold. In the distance a dog barked. He could hear Iruka begin to stir in the house as the village began to wake up, and a moment later Sasuke heard the door open.
“Ah, there you are. Good morning Sasuke.”
Sasuke grunted something vaguely at his guardian. It was a bit hard to think of him as a warden when the man insisted on cooking him breakfast every morning.
Iruka chuckled. “I have the rice maker on, why don't you come inside and take a shower and warm up while I make onigiri? Your lips are a little blue.”
As soon as he said it Sasuke suddenly felt cold. He nodded and followed Iruka back into the house.
“Good kid,” Iruka smacked his shoulder as he passed him. Sasuke had been expecting it and to his mild surprise he sensed the touch a fraction of a second before Iruka's hand connected.
Perhaps he was getting better.
A half an hour later Sasuke walked into the kitchen running his fingers through his damp hair, wearing a pair of plain pants, a fishnet shirt, and a worn leather coat that Sakura and Naruto had bought for him from a second hand store just before they let him out of the hospital. Naruto said they made him look 'tough', causing Sakura to giggle. Sasuke just hoped it didn't look too stupid on him. He knew he couldn't be a shinobi any more, but that didn't mean he wanted to look like a civilian. He felt carefully for the table and pulled a chair out just as Iruka set a plate in front of him. He knew without asking that the onigiri were made with short-grained brow rice and the plat would also contain a hard-boiled egg and either a fruit or vegetable dish. Iruka was kind of a health nut.
“Are you coming today?” Iruka asked as Sasuke ate. Sasuke shrugged, then nodded. He wanted to go back to sleep, but if he did that Naruto would come over and bother him about it, and helping out with a classroom full of kids took less energy than dealing with Naruto when he was determined to be annoying.
“Good!” Iruka said, a bit too cheerfully for that time of the morning in Sasuke's opinion. “Naruto is coming over too, and I have a team-building exercise planned.” His voice went from cheerful, to cheerfully sadistic. “Good thing you're wearing that, and that it didn't rain last night, or you would be crawling through the mud.”
Great.
A couple pills dropped onto the plate in front of him. Mechanically he swallowed them with his tea, even though he wasn't sure they were doing anything.
“I had a seizure yesterday,” he commented.
“You did? When?,” Iruka asked sounding concerned, but not overly worried. It was, after all, something they were both fairly used to.
“While you were at school. I was sleeping to off when the moron woke me up.”
Iruka rapped his knuckles with a pair of chopsticks. “Language. And if I had known that I would have made him leave you alone. Are you hurt?”
Sasuke shrugged. “I had warning.”
Iruka sighed explosively. “We'll go see Tsunade-sama after school. Maybe she can adjust your dosage.”
Sasuke just shrugged again, as far as he was concerned it was only one more humiliation on top of a long list of humiliations, each and every single one of them fully earned. He didn't deserve his pride, it had brought nothing but misery and pain for everyone around him.
Sasuke jumped slightly as Iruka ruffled his hair. “Come on, put the dishes in the washer, and let's go.”
***
Naruto appeared in a swirl of wind and fire. For a moment Sasuke was breathless as Naruto's chakra pulsed over him, like being engulfed it the backflare of a katon. Sasuke automatically swung his cane—he had to use a goddamned cane like a blind man—between himself and the fire.
“What?” Naruto laughed. “You want to fight me with that?”
Sasuke forced himself to lower the cane. “No,” he said, grinding his teeth. He knew the idiot was grinning at him. “When did you learn that jutsu?”
“Nice, right?” Naruto sounded cocky, but underneath Sasuke thought he could hear a hint of insecurity. Sasuke knew that some small part of Naruto would always be the lonely little boy who just wanted to be acknowledged by an uncaring village. “I bugged Kakashi aaaallllllll last week and he finally agreed to teach me. Only works in the village though.”
Sasuke snorted. “I know.” Then, and only because Naruto needed to hear it, “Kabuto tried to teach me, but I never got the hang of it,” he said grudgingly. Which was true, Summoning was never his strong-suit, and self-Summoning was even more difficult then usual. He could probably do it now, but teleporting blind struck him as an amazingly stupid thing to do.
Naruto laughed, pleased. “It's awesome! You should try it sometime, maybe I could teach you.”
“Yes, that's right. I'll just Summon myself blind in a village full of people who hate me.”
“Hey! What did I tell you last week?! No negativity! Positive thoughts! Positive!”
Oh god, Sasuke thought, he's been hanging around with Lee. I might have to kill him after all.
Fortunately, before Sasuke was forced to defend himself and the world from the prospect of a Lee-and-Master-Gai-inspired-Naruto Iruka came to his rescue and sent them into a tiny patch of woods to set up some traps. The training ground was small compared to the ones he was used to, but he could remember a time when it had seemed huge. Sasuke follow the bright-hot glow of Naruto's chakra through the woods his cane tapping off tree trunks and boulders, stringing chakra-wire haphazardly. Naruto was nearly silent out here in the forest, what little noise he made was almost certainly deliberate, to make it easier for him to track. The grove had been used often enough that most of the lower-hanging branches had been blown or sliced off at one point or another, which made navigating such a complex environment easier. Once the traps were set they took their positions, fading back into the forest.
In the distance Sasuke could hear children, going by their voices they were one of the older classes—perhaps this year's genin-candidates. The sound made him twitch, it had been a long five years since he had been their age, a long five years since the world was a simple black and white.
Itachi, he remembered, had warned him about thinking in terms of black and white. He had warned him of that inexplicably in the middle the clan's private training grounds one day when he was six and now he wondered if that had been the first indication of a rift between Itachi and their family. Sasuke pressed his temple to the trunk of the trees he was sitting and listened to his brother, as he always did when Itachi chose to visit him. He could feel his brother's hand on his shoulder as he listened to Naruto spring the first of the traps. “He caught most of them, that was a bit more complex than they usually can handle at that age,” Itachi commented.
“I wouldn't know,” Sasuke said.
“Tch, little brother. There are more ways to see then with the eyes. Expand your mind a little.””
Sometimes he wondered if he was going insane.
As the exercise started Sasuke remained hidden, choosing to let Naruto deal with the children. He felt Itachi settle on the branch beside him. “Why are you here?”
“Tch. You won't let me die.”
Sasuke huffed and sat down beside the ghost of his brother. “You are dead. I killed you.” The words were sour in his mouth, if only he had known...
“Foolish Sasuke, I wanted to die.” A ghostly hand ruffled his hair and Sasuke wanted to cry. How could a hallucination feel so real? “I had wanted to die for eight years, but I was waiting for you. I wanted my death to make you stronger.”
Sasuke laughed bitterly. “Yes. That worked out so well.”
“Mmm, you're still alive.” Itachi leaned into him, an arm slung carelessly around his shoulders. He had no breath even when he spoke. “That was my main goal all along.”
Sasuke sighed and closed his eyes. He did not feel like fighting with a figment of his imagination.
“Pay attention.” The ghost of his brother poked his shoulder. “Naruto-kun is going to make a good jounin-sensei one day.”
In the distance the remaining children were running loose, but their footsteps were ordered and their voices excited but without a hint of panic. He listened carefully, Naruto had created a clone to be on their side and get them organized. They were planning a counter-attack to free their teammates.
Sasuke listened to the battle, and gradually his brother faded away to his relief. But he would be back. Itachi was something that would never ever leave him, he knew. His brother was always, one way or another, the most important person in the world to him, the night Itachi slaughtered their family on the orders of Konoha's council of elders made sure of that. Killing his brother only strengthened the bond between them.
Sometimes Sasuke thought he out of all of Team Seven understood Kakashi best. The dead were more real than the living to him as well.
Naruto and his clone kept the children busy for more than an hour, their mingled shouts of outrage and triumph shattering the natural silence of the grove and driving the small creatures who made it their home into hiding. The exercise ended when Iruka called a break for lunch. Naruto dissipated his clone and joined him on the branch.
“Hey,” Naruto said, the hot glow of the fox burning into Sasuke. “You didn't join us.”
“Hn.”
“Don't feel like talking today?” Naruto snorted. “Fine, whatever. Mope if you want, Mr. McMopey-Moperson.” Sasuke barely managed to deflect the playful punch Naruto sent his way with his cane. “Whatever. Want to go get lunch?”
Sasuke hesitated, but only for a second. “Not ramen.” Not that he had anything against ramen, it was just that Naruto ate too damn much of it.
“What, you think I'm still twelve? We can go get sushi if you want,” Sasuke shuddered at the thought, in his opinion this far from the ocean raw fish was a bad idea, “Or katsu.”
Fried pork did sound good. “Katsu's fine.”
“All right!” Sasuke dodged another attack by jumping out of the tree, there was a brief moment of panic when the entire world just went away and then he was rolling to his feet, cursing. Jumping blind was like jumping into a void.
“You okay?” Naruto said, landing next to him.
“I'm fine,” he said, reorienting now that he was on his feet.
“You sure? You really scared me for a moment.”
“It's fine.” He shrugged and let Naruto take the lead. He could feel Naruto's concerned gaze, but what could he do? There were some things that he simply had to accept.
“Sasuke?” Naruto said as the waitress led them to the back of the restaurant, possibly as a compromise between preventing village's black sheep from chasing off the customers without pissing off the future Hokage.
“Yes?” He didn't need eyes to see Naruto's smile. It glower brighter then the fox's chakra, shining like a spotlight on all it touched.
“I'm really glad you're back.”
And for a moment things were really fine after all.
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Date: 2010-06-01 09:47 pm (UTC)Hopefully Juugo and Suigetsu are being saved for something really cool. Juugo deserves having a fix for his situation that does not rely on others, maybe something like a reverse curse-seal, and Suigetsu deserves collecting the remaining Seven Swords.
(I like Sasuke, but he needs a spanking. Bad boy! No
Narutobiscuit!)