Title: The Walking Wounded
Author: tsubaki-hana
Series: Naruto
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi.
Summary: Divinely barren and wickedly wise. (Time has taught Naruto many things. It is a shame that it came at so high a cost. SasukeNaruto, one-shot.)
- - - - -
“When you are away
my heart comes undone
slowly unravels
in a ball of yarn
The devil collects it
with a grin
our love in a ball of yarn
he’ll never return it.”
-Bjork, Unravel
- - - - -
The sky is raw with thunder and lightning, and his nose is filled with the metallic tang of it, even if it does taste like blood in the back of his throat. But the storm is beautiful, despite its drab coloring and monotonous hushing rain sounds. He is alive enough to feel the chill of the water, but numb enough to think and not hurt.
He didn’t always think that he would wander the roads the way that he did, crossing the mountains and forests like some poor wraith, some lonely child that can’t seem to find his mother’s hand (And you never will, because you have no mother and you don’t know why).
He used to have dreams and aspirations, and he had a friend or two that would stand by him faithfully. His clothes were always bright, his hair always short and springy, and he knew he had his sense of self (a word that you are now hesitant to use, listening to the sibilant hiss of your breath). After all, nothing was more important than valuing himself, because he had very little else. There are (were) three others, but he feels better when he doesn’t think about it.
He used to be happy, and there was very little a person could do to take that from him.
He used to be.
Smiling wryly, feeling rain water leak from his forehead to follow the crease of his eyebrow and slide down the side, he thinks in terms of tenses, and how stupid they had seemed only a few years before. He sometimes could remember that he had never been much good at grammar, a crudely spoken child to the end. (You are crude now, but it is not the same, because now when you speak, everything means something else and possibly nothing at all at the same time.)
There’s a lot of things he did and does.
Time, he thinks, is my greatest opponent, and it always slips between my hands and the letters of my verbs.
- - - - -
Towns never held much appeal for him, and after years of wandering the world, he didn’t much care if he never saw one again. All they were was musty sheets and cheap whores (and for this you feel sorry, watching them enter and leave rooms with a bleeding heart.) He has spent years watching the roadside destroy itself.
As a child, he thinks he laughed at it.
As an adult (or something like one), he watches with heavy thick heartbeats, the kind that makes him feel gravity more strongly.
Tonight, he sleeps in a pile of needles molded leaves, watching the rain drip from above. It is not warm, it is not safe, but he is happy because he doesn’t have to watch another woman (somebody’s mother or sister, always someone’s daughter) spread her legs just to survive.
He has left most of his money to one woman already, saying she needed it more than he did and that her services wouldn’t be needed. In every face he sees a friend, and in hers, he can see girls from his past, colorful birds that pass his mind, and this hurts more than anything.
Closing his eyes, he tries not to think about one in particular.
She is already dead.
- - - - -
Not many people bother asking why he is wandering, suffice to say that he is, and that he shows no signs of stopping. His standard issue shoes have long since had the soles worn out of them, and now he wears cheap zori from some convenience store, barely worth the yen that they cost. (He keeps the old shoes, but not for sentimental reasons so much as the fact he plans to repair them.) His flak jacket is grossly tattered, and the orange has long since faded into some other shade, something that makes Naruto think of evening and the musty smell of monsoons and sweat, a faded (beautiful) color of yellow ochre.
Everything is dirty, but he doesn’t care the same way he might have. He bathes when he can, sleeps where he is most comfortable, and stands to walk again in the morning.
He doesn’t know why he’s wandering either, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Something inside of him does know, and he will let that part of him wander still.
Today he walks by an open road, and to each side he can see the villagers from a place far behind him planting rice in the marshy waters, standing as tall and thin as the reeds themselves. In the thin morning mist around them, they are small giants, and he feels as though he is trespassing on their land.
Contradictorily, one woman with a child at her side waves at him, her smile a beacon.
He waves back and smiles, not because he is happy, but that he is unable to look away from the dark eyes of the child, soft and friendly. He cannot be more than five years old.
“And what brings a young man such as you all the way out here, hmm?” says the mother, and he likes her already, her voice strong and gentle. Without the mud and sweat that cover her, she would be a very lovely woman.
He stops, walks a few feet toward her.
“Just traveling.”
“Ah, so it is.” She pulls one hand up to the side of her head, standing up straight. “But you will not find much the farther north you go.”
He turns to look at the mountains that have steadily gotten closer to him for the past three days. He is in no hurry to reach them, for looking at them he feels that he has nearly reached the end of the world (And you will climb those mountains, reach the top, and fall some unmeasurable distance into nothing. Is that not what the legends say happens to the heedless wanderer?)
“I don’t think I am looking for anything.” He says wistfully, eyes soft.
The mother frowns, not unkindly, and looks to the north herself, each hand planted firmly against her waist, her son’s arm firmly around one of her legs, pulling at the work pants. He watches her, curious, entranced by her narrowed dark eyes that are framed with unkempt hair and thin brows. Her son watches him, sooty lashes and pale faced with little dirt stains here and there, and it is as if they have met before.
“You seek something, but do not know what it is.” She says, clucking her tongue in what must have been matronly, not condescending but factually.
“If there is something, then I do not think I will find it.” The statement fills him with more deep regret than he could possibly imagine, and somewhere he remembers a promise that he has never fulfilled. He does not think he will be able to.
Despite his own sudden sorrow, the woman beside him laughs, ruffling her child’s dark hair gently, picking little pieces of wild grass from her son’s hair. He wonders what that might feel like.
“So negative, and yet so young.” She sighs a little. “Have some measure of faith in yourself, because even if you do not know where you are going, there is an end to every path and at that point someone will be there waiting for you.”
He does not bother contradicting her. All of his friends are dead now, lost in an (impossible) mission from years before. He barely remembers their names anymore. (You can still see one girl’s hair, but it is the wrong color in your memory, too pale and aged, and another is barely a phantom of thought, grey and melancholy in a much too green forest. There is one other, but he doesn’t have a name or face anymore. He had changed too much when you last saw him.)
He doesn’t even know his own anymore.
The woman looks at him sadly, thin lips turning down and her hair just a little more brittle than you recall from a minute ago.
“Rest your heart, in whatever manner a man such as yourself would do. Look,” she points and he follows the line of her finger, noting the little cracks where the mud is drying.
Before them the mountains raise up, and as if everything is made clearer by her gesturing hand, he sees the line of the road that meets at the base of the mountain, miles upon miles away from where they are. His feet ache, and his lungs burn, and yet, he still manages a smile. From beside him, be feels the woman smile as well.
“Go there, and you will have found your end at last.”
“Seems a bit far, don’t you think?” he asks roughly, and when he turns, he can see nothing but the mist behind him, and the echoes of the son’s laughter. At the base, where only moments ago the two stood, he can see the rice, fully grown, heavy with amber grains.
He turns, heart beating a little faster, and walks briskly away.
The son’s laughter does not fade away, familiar to him and yet very different from what he can remember. In another (not-so-distant) lifetime, he would have called the woman and child by other names.
The names are lost to him, even if one of them is on the tip of his tongue. (But all the same, someone has to remember them because if you don’t then no one will.)
- - - - -
“How long has that kid been standing over there anyway?” he hears someone say, and opening one lazy (blue) eye, he can see the wooden floor, the eaves of a shop that he has been standing on, waiting for the dreary rain to stop for a while. He is tired, more tired than he has ever been and he doesn’t think that any amount of sleep could assuage it.
On the other side of the shop, two elderly people look at him through averted glances (and you are sharply reminded of all those years of being hated, though you can’t properly recall why). They are old, more wrinkled than anyone he has seen before, and at first he does not catch what gender they are.
“Hours, my friend, hours.” One says, and he is quite certain that it is a woman. “I don’t think he has anywhere else to go.”
“Well I don’t like the look of ‘im.” says the other, also a woman with an unkind look to her, lips tight and eyes sharp enough to draw blood with. “Looks like one of those shinobi out of the south, rough and reedy. Saw the likes of them back in the war.”
He hears the other sigh. “That was years ago, hardly worth mentioning, not to mention it was farther away from here. Iwagakure is several days march from here.”
The unkind woman looked away, sipping her bitter tea ambitiously, drowning out what her friend had to say. He is reminded again of someone, but does not dwell on it, instead stepping out with soggy shoes onto the water drenched earth.
Behind him are the wastes of the Earth Country, beneath him the path that he has chosen to follow, and before him the mountains, never seeming any closer than the day before. But his heart keeps beating for them, and he will go, if only to quell the urgency in his chest.
But instead of leaving, he listens for a moment to the ladies sitting on the eaves opposite to him.
“But there have been ninja in and out of here for weeks.” says the unkind woman. “Always skulking about, especially the pale one.”
“Let’s not speak badly of our village’s guests. They pay well, and do little harm other than being a bit bossy. Besides,” she says, and he finds himself waiting to hear, “that one missing nin can do more for us than our own miserable boys.”
“One of those miserable boys is your son, you know.”
“And he can be miserable to his heart’s content.”
He walks forward, ignoring them now. He knows of the missing nin in all their forms, knows that he should hate them, but can’t bring himself to care. So little was important now (and was it ever, you ask yourself) and he had so far to go.
From each window he feels hostile eyes, but he is used to it.
Including the ones that burn him with their intensity (somewhere beneath his left shoulder).
- - - - -
The days are running together now, mercurial and just as poisonous. He is ill, unbearably so, and each chill breeze almost brings him to his knees with trembling. The closer to winter that he comes, the less hope he has of ever reaching the end of the pathway. But he will complete it, he will get there if it is the last thing he ever does.
He cannot keep promises, he cannot be the strongest, and he cannot always have everything the way he wants it, but he can damn well try.
The soldier like trees have gotten denser, the air thinner and chiller (this you know by the fact that it will start snowing soon, rain intermingled with white), and now the road is nowhere as steady as it might have been in the past. He now has to weave back and forth between boulders and trenches in the roads. He is no longer as sure of his footing, and stumbles frequently.
His body anticipates the cold, and he can remember missions in the past where he has dealt with it, fell face down in it, conquered it. He is prepared for it, or more accurately, he is prepared to die in it if necessary. He has considered it, and while his mind rages against it, his imagination is strong enough to show him visions of being found in the spring, without rot and blue like ice. He would be as pristine as the moment he fell.
When it finally starts to snow, he plods along as bravely as he can, tripping on a stone and getting back up with feverish aches. He is getting closer to the end of his ability to stand, and walks his death march up toward the mountains.
He wants to reach the end.
He wants to throw himself from the edge of the world that doesn’t remember him, and that he does not remember either.
Falling, letting himself be covered, he breathes shallowly, thinking the melted snow against his heated skin might be someone’s tears. They feel nice and he closes his eyes and relishes the feeling. It may be his last.
It is not, and before falling into sleep, he feels long fingered hands grab his shoulders and pull him up, rough but careful of his head. He is shocked at first, unable to wake himself properly, but soon settles down, pulled onto someone’s back.
Oh, he thinks, God has finally come to get me.
- - - - -
The feeling of a cold towel over his head is more than enough to wake him, shaking like dried vines in the wind, but when he tries to pull himself up, he is held down by one wide hand across his chest that gently pushes him into the ground. Where ninja reflexes would tell him to kick and struggle, he finds that he cannot. He coughs, listening to the liquid move in his chest.
“Don’t move.”
For a moment he is arrested by the sound of this voice, a clipped tenor that is rich with impatience and lordship. He has heard it before, many times (and sometimes when you did not want to), but cannot put a face with it.
Or rather, he tries not to. He has not hoped in so long that it has become a painful thing, brushing against the inside of his rib cage with fiery wings. (And such is hope to you, a phoenix that constantly dies and revives itself endlessly.)
He opens an eye, looking through blurred colors for what he seeks. It is dark here, but there is a glow near him that he presumes must be fire. Despite its presence, he is still freezing, each nerve wracked with pain from frostbite.
“Who are you?” he asks warily, and looks up into the black ness above him.
There is a long (disappointed) silence.
He coughs again, thickly, and struggles to sit up. I will drown, he thinks, I will drown while I am completely dry. Near him, someone props up his back and holds him steady while he coughs. Blinking owlishly, he struggles to clear his vision with fists that won’t close. He is afraid that he has gone blind.
“Hn, to think you’d let yourself go to waste like this.”
He feels saddened by thus, not because he is offended, but because he doesn’t know what there was before what he is now.
“What was I then?”
“What?” The word is metal and cutting, dragging little lines into his mind. Each swipe tries to clear his mind with pain.
“I don’t know what I was. I don’t know what I am now.”
“Or is it that you don’t know who you are?”
The silence falls again, and he tries to study his hands, but they are only dim blotches in his vision, barely distinguishable from his shirt. His coat is beneath him, covered in dirt from the floor. They must be in a cave.
There is a sound of disgust from beside him, but contrary to the noise, he is laid back down very gently, as though the hand at his neck and the one at his lower back were afraid he’d break in half. From the way he feels, he wouldn’t be surprised. His matted (longer than it ought to be) blonde hair gets stuck between his savior’s fingers.
“Unbelievable.” The other voice hisses.
You smile, cheeks wane in the visible light. The markings on the side of his face pull as well, but it feels like scar tissue. “So who am I? You seem to know, and I can’t recall ever meeting you before.” (You can, but you just don’t know where so much as why.) He tilts his head, toward the fire, letting the smoke burn his eyes. It feels good.
“You were my friend.”
There is sadness in this tone, very different from what he has heard most recently. The idea of waterfalls and lightning come to mind, but do not take shape, just color and light. Primarily, he sees red and blue, shades of feeling rather than energy.
“And you were my enemy.” This time it is harsh, but there is no feeling behind it, as though nothing was there to give it support. In this he recalls the desert and cracked earth, and he remembers the flash of a cruel blade through his shoulder and through his friend’s heart (whose hair is not pale pink, but ripe red with her own blood). There is ash, and there is music that has no tune but the steady percussion of his own pulse. Above all else, there is the memory of eyes staring into his own, unrepentant in their neutrality.
Such dispassionate eyes, he says to himself, such cold charcoal eyes, like some withered kingdom.
The taste of sand is on his tongue.
The thought of friendship is on his mind.
The feel of chakra is in his hands.
“But above all else, you were Naruto, and I can no longer see that in you.”
He feels like crying, but he can’t because doing so would be cruel to this person with him, this person that he knows will have cold charcoal eyes and was once his friend. He cannot do it because he does not want to ruin whatever this person remembers of him.
The world hasn’t forgotten him entirely.
But an ocean of time remains between them, and he has no boat.
- - - - -
He is always cared for, and where the food (miso ramen, like the kind from the convenience store) that this person brings him is a mystery to him, but he accepts it and eats it with no hesitation. Next to him, his companion always watches with a glare of disgust but his body betrays him, slouched and comfortable on the flak jacket.
He is always called Naruto, and he isn’t sure if he is right when he responds to it.
His companion always sighs and looks at him from unfathomable dark eyes.
“You’ll remember something soon,” says the sharp-eyed man, “and then you’ll hate me just the way you ought to. You’ll see, we’ll be at each other’s throats just as soon as you knock some sense into that thick skull of yours.” There is a smile playing at the pale lips. “And then I’ll knock your brains out right after.”
He never feels really threatened, just a vague sense of amusement, like they’re playing a game. “Why don’t you just knock my brains out now and save yourself a few bruises?” he asks, without really meaning it.
“Because you’re not Naruto right now, and until you are, it’s not worth it.”
He laughs, but what he really wants to do is punch the bastard in the face.
“When will you know that I’m Naruto, and not just a waste of time?”
“When you start acting stupid, dobe.” The look of utter irritation on the man’s face makes him scrunch his own up, upper lip pushed out in frustration.
“I’m not stupid, teme!”
The quiet that follows is painful, and he almost immediately regrets saying it. The sharp-eyed man looks at him dully, but shakes his head after a moment’s pause, as though it just wasn’t what he was looking for. There was something that might have once been between them, and perhaps is still there now, but is divided by a name.
He searched the man’s face himself, and drawn in the lines of his brow and the firm set of his mouth, he knows he ought to see something of a lifetime. (You have no life for yourself, and instead define yourself by the memories that you have been told rather than your own. They are too fragmented to make anything cohesive.) His friend is handsome, undeniably so, and he is perceptive enough to realize there is not only a name, but a million hurts separating them as well. No matter how many times he is told, the truth does not stick.
He is Naruto.
Or at least that’s what he’s supposed to be.
- - - - -
“I don’t suppose that you know anything about me yet, do you?”
He stays quiet, the silence speaking volumes for him. The sharp-eyed man turns away, and he pretends that he does not see the mournful expression that crosses the fine featured face.
He is being unfair, and he doesn’t know how to stop.
- - - - -
He doesn’t like waking alone, not when he knows that he doesn’t have to. He isn’t very fond of this cave, but he accepts it, because it is the only place that is guaranteed that the sharp-eyed man will return to. It is a home of a sort, no matter how cold or dreary it could be.
This time, when he wakes and all there is before him is a dim fire pit, he feels indignant, as though his companion had no right to leave whatsoever. (Even if the memories are not there, your feelings most certainly are.) He makes a passing attempt at standing, legs shaking noisily beneath him, and fumbles against the cave wall, limping toward the light of the outside world. It is a mellow light, angry and red against the darkness. For a moment, he fears that everything around him might be burning.
Slouching toward the entrance like some lanky animal, he sees the red is not fire, but snow, lit by a sunset that is directly before him, pouring between barren tree branches that stand like bone fingers. From atop one of them, the sharp-eyed man balances, swaying in the breeze as though he were part of the tree.
“What are you doing out here?”
He is startled, but continues looking out carefully, eyes darting and weaving about the landscape, trying to map this moment. Each new memory prompts an old one, and this one, he thinks, makes him think of piers and evenings alone, looking for someone, but never each other.
I was looking for you, of course.” he says irritably, and walks a little into the snow, feet already numb. “I thought you might have left me.”
“Again?”
There is a meaning there, and he is so close to understanding it.
“I dunno, were you planning on doing it repetitively?”
“Hn.”
There is a smirk in his companions’ face, barely perceptible, but now he sees it more often than before. He is glad for it, because everything else the sharp-eyed man expresses is just so inherently lonely.
There is a rush and hiss of snow falling from the tree, and instead of standing above him, his companion is in front of him, the shadows hiding his face in sharp relief. Somewhere in the darkness where the sharp eyes ought to be, he thinks he sees softness.
“Why can’t you remember me?” the man says, and the melancholy in his voice is unmistakable. “Why is it that I can see you in every move that you make, but I am just a nameless face in your sight?”
He feels shame, and bows his head.
“I want to.” he starts, but the words are thick on his tongue, awkward but practiced as if he has anticipated this moment his whole life. “I want to remember everything, but I can’t, and she told me that I wouldn’t until I got to the end of my path.”
“The end of your path?”
“I am walking to the end of the world.” he says as if it were the most matter of fact thing in the world. “I’ve been looking for something (“or someone,” you whisper) for so long that I’ve forgotten what it was. She seems to think that I’ll find it at the end of the world.”
He expects ridicule, some sort of sarcasm from the man before him. Scorn would be far better than this confrontation. But across from him, he can hear something that sounds like a gentle sigh, barely perceptible save for the cloud of breath that shows in the snowy air.
To his surprise, he is pulled into a chill embrace, thin fingers bunching in his back shirt desperately and his head pressed into the crook of a warm neck, pale and swanlike in his vision. The white of the haori that is beneath his chin smells of crisp snow and something softer and fragrant, salty sweet. His own arms wrap hesitantly around his friend’s waist.
“And you have looked for a long time,” says the man, and now he can feel the syllables of a name, just barely away from his voice. “You have looked far longer than I ever thought you would, you stubborn idiot.”
He does not ask, but let’s his eyes water miserably into the white fabric, barely able to see the fan printed onto the collar of the shirt.
“Then what am I looking for? What am I looking for?” he cries, voice shaking and fingers tight against the fabric of the haori. “I know that I should know, that I do know, and I know that you should be a part of it.”
They’re pressed up against the wall of the rock now, just a few feet away from the cave that they have stayed in for only God knows how long. The stone is cold and wet against his back, but he doesn’t care, too angry at everything, feeling a chill hand run underneath his shirt and trace the vertebrae of his spine and the other hand wander up to brush up against his dirty hair.
“I suppose I waited too long.” said the voice by his ear, and turning to face it, he finds himself looking directly into dark eyes (only not so much dark as grey and ashen in the sunset, eyes that do not cry like your own).
The memory of such a stare is already there, both gazes mournful and youthful, his own glittering with tears of disappointment and the other’s (and to this face, you name him Sasuke, because no one else has ever been that close to you) filled with regret, hesitance.
“Sasuke.” he says tremulously.
He closes the distance between them, lips and teeth seeking out the other’s and meeting as though in battle. The pressure is intense, and with his back to the wall he is hypersensitive, feeling frost melt and trickle down his shoulder. They are both tall, but he is shorter than Sasuke, feeling himself be pulled higher and higher until he is no longer on the ground at all.
He wonders if it will be like then and that Sasuke will drive a hole into his chest.
Sasuke looks at him meaningfully, no longer as cold (or was he ever?) or as indifferent. Six years have changed a lot of things, but nothing ever touches the almond shape of his eyes, intense and unavoidable when focused. Now, they look at him, and in his heart he can only hope (that phoenix rising in his chest again) that it is lovingly.
“After we fought three years ago, after . . . Sakura and Orochimaru were gone, I had nothing and I went north, looking for Itachi.” says Sasuke, and he swallows heavily, face pressed against your neck. “There was nothing, no sign of the Akatsuki whatsoever, and I figured that if I followed a jinchuuriki, I would find him, so I went looking for you again, Naruto.”
He swallows as well, legs shaking with cold and strain. “I was gone, and I have been gone for three years.”
Three years. He couldn’t recall his own name, much less three years of life.
“None of those idiots in Konoha knew where you were, everyone assumed that the Akatsuki had already gotten you when the hunter nin sent after you came back empty handed. The only person who thought otherwise was Kakashi, and no one listened to him.” Sasuke says quietly, regretfully. “I believed the others too. And with no Itachi and no Orochimaru,” he hesitates for a moment, “and no you, there really wasn’t anything left for me.”
Shuddering, feeling Sasuke’s hand grasp at his bony hips, he sighs.
“I have not seen Itachi.”
Sasuke almost sighs with relief (though you could never understand why) and pulls him in for another consuming kiss while pulling at their clothes. They would have each other there, not so much for a memory (neither of you have ever done this before) so much as to make sure the other is there, flesh, material, and not just another thing lost in their lifetime. He grasps the most desperately of the two, and with each motion, he breathes Sasuke’s name, because it is the only thing he is certain of right now.
Neither care that they are drenched in snow and sweat. There is an understanding, a desperation, and a belief that nothing will stay the same after this.
It horrifies him to realize that this is likely to pass.
- - - - -
This time when he wakes, he wakes first, putting on his flak jacket with careful movements, taking with him everything that he will need except his heart.
That may stay next to the fire, with Sasuke.
- - - - -
The road is not as redundant as before, always moving up and winding around bends of rocks and trees, growing steadily smaller as the mountains tower over him, cathedrals in the sky and at their peak, heaven.
Sasuke has not followed him, or if he is he is being very discreet about it. He does not stop at night as he might have once, because that familiar sense of oldness is stealing the strength of his body away, rattling his bones. The longer he rests, the less likely he is ever to make it to the summit. There is nothing for him to look forward to other than that.
I will make it, he says, doing the night march, stumbling on loose stones and grabbing at the foliage that he can see as he climbs, the path all but useless. I will make it, and I will see the end of the world and the answer of what is missing. He is not heartened, but all the same, he climbs a step faster than before.
A few hours more, and he is bleeding everywhere, scratches on his face, fingers split and slippery against the vertical climb, chakra almost like raw electricity against the stones. The mountain has been cruel to him, but it will only be a bit more, a bit more and then he can finally sleep.
He slips a little, one piece of rock giving way under his slight weight, and for a moment he hangs by a thread, wondering if he can bring himself back together the way he ought to be.
Looking down, he sees from far below the white haori of Sasuke, following at a respectable distance. He knows that Sasuke will not interfere. (There is understanding between the two of you, a parallel that perhaps you can both see. He has made his journey, and now you make yours, and you will only find the answers if you walk the path.)
Above him, snow and stone glint faintly in the thin night air. There is nothing to suggest that he will make it, but his feet grow a little surer in step, and he reaches for another ledge.
He is reassured, knowing Sasuke will catch him if he falls.
- - - - -
The sun has not risen yet when he reaches the summit, and it is unspeakably cold, his teeth rattling in his head and his heart skipping beats at every blow of the wind. He tries to redistribute his chakra to warm him, but it doesn’t do much.
Behind him, Sasuke stands, waiting for something.
The sun is rising in the east, and it paints the sky rose and yellow, reflecting off of the sterile blue of the snow and flowing into the valleys behind him. Before him, he expects something of an ending, a great hole in the earth perhaps that he might be able to throw himself in. He expects a blackness, something that is actually nothing.
Behind him, he can feel Sasuke smile thinly, wanly.
In the north, there is a valley beyond the mountains, and more mountains further still, white and gleaming in the sunlight. Chimney fires rise up, billowing like sails against the wind, and beyond the mountains he sees the ocean, blue and crested with ice.
He smiles too, only his is wider and sunnier.
There is more, he thinks, there is more to it than a drastic ending, some stop to everything. There is an endless blue sky, there are people, there is a world beyond what he thought there to be. Against his predisposition for years, he feels optimism spring up in him.
He had more to do with his life now, didn’t he?
“Oi, Sasuke, you coming over here or what?” he called, and turned to look at his pale friend with a wide smile. Sasuke, shaking with cold as well, smiles in his reserved fashion, lifting the corners of his mouth and walking with careful steps toward him.
“I take it that you’re done moping now?”
He smiles, and Naruto turns fully toward the valley, able to call himself by his name again. “Of course, Sasuke-teme!” He says, a little more reserved but still bright with contentment. “We’ve got to see what manner of people would live this far north. It’s freezing!”
To illustrate the point, he shakes frost from his brighter hair.
Sasuke just nods his head, mutters’ some along the lines of ‘dobe’, and begins walking down with measured steps with Naruto.
Neither is certain if time will allow this to last. But, Naruto thinks defiantly, we sure as hell are going to try. Time frequently slips between fingers and verbs, but it’s going to have a much harder time passing by him now that he knows he has it.
- - - - -
“Our love in a ball of yarn
he’ll never return it
so when you come back
we’ll have to make new love.”
- - - - -
- - - - -
A/N: I feel like I’ve just run a marathon with my hands. So in total, there is about 12 hours of love in this baby, stopping perhaps every three hours to eat and/or go to the bathroom. This, my friends, is what I call taking my time.
So the point: This is placed long after chapter 308, because I felt I needed to try distancing myself from the main plot every once in a while. So I tried three years after the time jump. Our poor Naruto has been wandering around looking for himself and Sasuke. I don’t think Naruto will ever have peace of mind so long as Sasuke is gone, and because of it, he forgets everything else that is important.
Yes, I did kill Sakura.
So who’s to blame for this one? Well, mostly Joni Mitchell’s “Passion Play” and Bjork’s “Unravel”. I will also blame The Engine Driver again, mostly because she returned fire. (See? See? SOMEDAY I had to let Naruto be happy at the end! But he ANGSTED like we like for the first 5500 words.)
As always critique and comments are encouraged.