Current mood:	happy
Entry tags:	fanfic, house falls down, narusasu, naruto: fic

Naruto fic again
I am constantly warring with myself in that a) I like a show enough to write fanfic for it (yay), and b) that show is Naruto (facepalm). But the fic bug has so, so bitten.

Title: When the house falls down (2/?)
Author:sowell
Rating: R, for language; not sure yet if I'll be going to the NC-17 place
Warnings: Teenage ninja swear a lot. Also, spoilers up through the latest issue of the manga. (418)
Genre: Action, adventure, friendship, romance, aaaaaaaaaaaangst
Wordcount: 3,011
Summary: When the house falls down, all that's left is to rebuild. Naruto/Sasuke friendship with subtext-y goodness.
Disclaimer: They belong to Kishimoto-san. I apologize for my extreme western-izing of them.
Author's Note:1) I like to be as canon as possible, but since there's a crapload of plot threads sort of hovering in the manga at the moment, I'm largely ignoring the ones that haven't been resolved (i.e. Pain's stay in Konoha, what sage!Naruto is like in battle, etc). If they GET resolved as I'm writing this, I'll probably try and work them into the fic. Because I'm OCD like that. 2) I continue to be too lazy to use betas. Apologies. 3) Original notes found back at the first chapter.

Previous chapters:

Chapter 1

X-posted to chuunin and sasuxnaru

Chapter 2; in which Sasuke is a baby chick

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Itachi says, rolling his head to the side to look at Sasuke.

“Go away,” Sasuke tells him. “You’re dead.”

“I remember,” Itachi says wryly. “And whose fault is that, anyway?”

The hill they’re sprawled out on is endlessly soft and green. Every once in a while, the same breeze pushing the clouds across the sky sweeps over the grass down below, cooling them both.

Sasuke feels a spurt of the same helpless anger he lived with all those years in Konoha. Powerlessness. Even now, it haunts him. “You wanted me to kill you,” he says. “Madara told me everything.”

“Madara,” Itachi sniffs. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“Then what?” Sasuke asks, frustrated. “You made me think that the massacre – everything – was your fault.”

“And you fell right for it,” Itachi says pointedly. “What kind of shinobi are you?”

Fuck. Sasuke realizes there are tears stinging his eyes. “If you didn’t want to die, then why didn’t you just kill me?”

“I made you strong, didn’t I?”

Sasuke’s fists curl into the grass. “You made me hate you.”

Itachi’s not looking at him anymore. He’s staring straight up at the sky. “You never hated me. You loved me, just like I loved you, little brother.”

Sasuke curls on his side, turning away from Itachi. “Go away,” he says again.

It’s no use. Itachi’s face appears in front of him again, smiling lightly. “Hey, it’s your subconscious,” he says. “I’m dead, remember?”

Sasuke closes his eyes and buries his face against his arm, tuning out the vision.

“About Naruto,” Itachi’s voice comes from the darkness.

“Naruto nothing,” Sasuke mumbles. “Shut up.”

“He’s still in danger, you know.”

Sasuke’s eyes open at that. “What does that mean?”

Itachi’s ghost is indolently chewing on a piece of grass, and Sasuke’s relieved his subconscious got at least a few details wrong. Itachi would never do something as frivolous and undignified as chew grass.

As though reading his mind, Itachi spits out the grass and grimaces apologetically. “What kind of trouble do you think he’ll be in if Madara gets his hands on him?”

Itachi definitely has his attention now. “Why would Madara care about Naruto? He wants the fox. That’s all.”

“And what do you think happens to the host? You didn’t think Madara was planning to keep Naruto alive, did you?”

His sudden comprehension is reflected in his older brother’s eyes. Sasuke’s teeth click together. “I don’t care,” he lies.

“Really?” Itachi says, surprised. “With the fox under your control, you could flatten Konoha easily. That’s what you want, right?”

“What I want, right now, is for you to go away,” Sasuke says coldly.

Itachi shrugs. “Well, you know what you have to do.” He presses a kunai into Sasuke’s hand, and Sasuke stares down at it. Where had that come from?

Itachi spreads his arms, gently, openly. “C’mon Sasuke.”

The knife glints dully in his palm. Sasuke looks up at Itachi’s waiting figure. He takes a deep breath, then jams the weapon into his brother’s chest. The world disintegrates around him, and he’s falling.

*

Sasuke jerks awake. He fights back the disorientation of the nightmare, trying to get a grip on his surroundings. The light never changes in this monotonous little room, but his instincts and his stomach tell him it’s evening.

Sakura is in the corner, sharpening a kunai by hand. The metallic scrape is a constant echo in the small space, like acid on his eardrums. It’s been three days since he was captured, and no sign of his team. He wonders briefly if they’re dead. The lethargy hasn’t receded from his body, and Sasuke figures Sakura’s keeping him drugged via his food and water. There’s not much he can do if he doesn’t want to starve to death.

At least he’s been re-tied every time he wakes up. The constant change in his positioning keeps the circulation moving through his body. Sasuke wonders if Sakura’s doing it because of her medic training, or simply out of some misplaced sense of compassion. Then he realizes that he shouldn’t care either way, and he ruthlessly flattens the curiosity. The longer he’s around Naruto and Sakura, the harder it is to keep thinking of them as enemies.

It’s not that he’s begun to think of them as friends, exactly. It’s just a little hard to hate a group of people so utterly clueless. They chatter and bicker like they’re students on an academy field trip instead of active shinobi warriors. Especially Naruto. After the last three days, Sasuke’s convinced he thinks of nothing but girls, ramen, and beating Sasuke in battle.

Not much has changed in three years.

Naruto is standing over Sakura now, hands on his hips. “Please,” he says.

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Sakura-chan,” he whines.

Sakura stops sharpening her knife long enough to glare at Naruto. “Quit being annoying. Kakashi-sensei said no.”

“Just five minutes,” Naruto cajoles.

Sakura swipes her kunai at Naruto’s legs, and Naruto barely manages to evade it. “Jeez,” he mutters.

Sai pushes the door to Sasuke’s prison open, bearing two brown paper boxes. He frowns when he sees Naruto in the room in addition to Sakura and Sasuke.

“Naruto-kun,” he says in disapproval. “If you keep pestering Sakura-san she’ll have no choice but to beat you senseless again.” Naruto scowls in response.

Sai’s arm is still in a sling from the wound Sasuke inflicted on him. The painter glances uneasily in Sasuke’s direction, and Sasuke lets his Sharingan fall into a lazy, warning spin. Sai’s mouth turns down, and he looks away.

Sakura looks from the packaged meals, to Sasuke, to Naruto, and then back to Sai. Her mouth curls in a slow smile that has Sasuke remembering his own split lip and broken ribs.

“You know what?” she says. “I changed my mind.”

Naruto blinks at her. “Really?”

“Sure. In fact, you can take over right now,” Sakura says in a sweet tone that Sasuke doesn’t trust one bit. Naruto whoops. He does a garish little victory dance that looks like nothing so much as a frightened chicken, and Sasuke feels a headache start to form right between his eyes.

“Sakura-chan, you’re the best! I owe you two – no, three bowls of ramen. When we get back, I’ll - ” Then he stops short as Sakura’s full intent sinks in.

“No,” he says flatly.

Sakura shrugs nonchalantly. “Suit yourself. Of course, if you manage this without screwing up, Kakashi might actually let you take your own shift instead of standing here and bugging me all the time…”

Naruto looks like he swallowed something particularly sour. He glances briefly at Sasuke’s face, and Sasuke returns his gaze impassively.

He sighs, shoulders drooping. “Fine. Give it to me.” He holds out his hand with dubious enthusiasm.

“This is not a good – ” Sai begins, troubled.

Naruto cuts him off by snatching the field meal from him. “I said I’d do it,” he snaps.

Sakura smiles again – a real one this time. “Good,” she says, satisfied. Naruto’s staring morosely down at the meal in his hands. Sakura heads for the exit, but she stops briefly by the door before leaving the room. Her back is to Naruto, and Sasuke can see the edge of apprehension in her face. Her voice, however, is bright when she speaks. “We’ll be right outside. If anything happens, you know we’ll be here in a second.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Naruto retorts.

Sai still hasn’t moved. “I disagree with this plan,” he tries again. “It’s not – ”

“Come on.” Sakura forcibly yanks the painter’s reluctant figure through the door. “He needs this,” Sasuke hears her say quietly, before the door closes firmly behind them.

Naruto approaches him like he would a coiled rattlesnake, and Sasuke watches the blonde ninja just as warily. He seats himself a few feet from Sasuke and opens the box.

“Don’t even think about it,” Sasuke says, before he can stop himself.

Naruto’s cheeks are pink. “I have to,” he grates. He holds out a rice ball to Sasuke without looking. “Just…take it okay?”

Sasuke keeps his mouth firmly shut. Letting Sakura feed him was one thing. She’d managed to be fast and impersonal about it, and if she blushed a few times, well...she got over it quickly enough to avoid any discomfort.

But Naruto’s a different matter altogether. Sasuke’s pretty sure he’d rather let Kakashi give him a sponge bath than let Naruto feed him like a baby chick.

“I’ll make you,” Naruto threatens.

“Dobe, if you value your fingers, you’ll keep them away from my face,” Sasuke says darkly.

“Damn it,” Naruto seethes. “Why are you so difficult? Just eat.”

“No.”

“Do it!”

“No.”

They both stiffen as a snort of laughter drifts through the closed door.

Naruto’s face gets even redder, but his mouth sets in a determined line that Sasuke knows all too well. “Come on, idiot,” he growls. “If I don’t get you to eat this, they’ll never leave me alone in here again.”

He’s right. Sasuke does a quick mental calculation. He doesn’t want to be alone with Naruto any more than necessary. The ninja has an inexplicable ability to get under his skin. On the other hand, Naruto is undoubtedly the weak link in this current operation. Naruto’s sheer emotionality is more likely to present a chance to escape than any of his other captors.

Moreover, the thought of escaping from Naruto is somehow even more attractive than the thought of escape in general. He hasn’t lost a fight to Naruto yet – he won’t let himself be outmatched this time either.

Distastefully, Sasuke opens his mouth the tiniest crack.

“Good boy,” Naruto says, before shoving the whole rice ball down his throat without warning. Sasuke immediately coughs up half the grainy stuff, glaring at Naruto’s self-satisfied smirk.

“Are you trying to kill me?” he sputters. “No wonder they don’t let you do anything around here.”

Naruto’s eyes narrow at that, and he sticks a finger right in Sasuke’s face. “How would you know what I can and can’t do?” he says accusingly. “You haven’t been around for the last three years.”

“It only took a second to see how pathetically little you’ve improved,” Sasuke says coolly, and Naruto’s eyebrows pull together thunderously.

“Asshole,” he says. “Just wait until we get back to Konoha. As soon as you’re untied I’ll show you what I’ve learned since you left. You’ll be begging me for mercy.”

“Unlikely,” Sasuke says succinctly. “Your whole team was useless last time we met. You alone I could probably take here and now.”

Naruto makes a sound like a snarl in his throat, inching forward, and Sasuke realizes this is going to be even easier than he thought. If Naruto just comes within Sasuke’s range of motion, it will all be over quickly. Just a little closer….

It doesn’t quite happen, though. Naruto takes a breath and relaxes, then lets his mouth fall into a rueful smile. “You’re a bastard, you know?” he says.

“And you’re a moron,” Sasuke snaps back. He doesn’t even realize his Sharingan has kicked up again until Naruto claps a hand over his eyes.

“Forget it,” he hears Naruto say through the darkness. “Don’t pull that freaky eye stuff on me if you don’t want to get blindfolded for real.”

Sasuke bites back his own snarl and forcibly relaxes his shoulders. Very slowly, Naruto removes his hand. Sasuke glares into suspiciously good-humored blue eyes.

“You know, this actually isn’t bad,” Naruto says thoughtfully, feeding him a bit of protein bar. “I’m a little jealous. You get fed by Sakura-chan every day.”

“Feel free to take my place,” Sasuke offers mildly.

“Figures you wouldn’t appreciate it,” Naruto says, sounding discouraged. “Sakura’s never fed me before.”

“Yes, she has,” Sasuke replies without thinking. He groans inwardly as Naruto’s eyes snap to his.

Sasuke knows what he’s remembering: the first day Team 7 was together, the three of them sitting exhausted on the training ground. Sakura had reluctantly, distastefully, offered up some of her lunch to her starving teammate.

“That’s right,” Naruto says softly.

Sasuke doesn’t remember much about that day. His main recollections center around an acute frustration at Kakashi’s superior level of skill and a profound irritation at the weakness of his teammates. But for some reason he can clearly see Sakura holding out her food to Naruto, and Naruto gleefully, dopily accepting it.

Unexpectedly, Sasuke feels something in his stomach clench. Naruto’s face is expressionless, but there’s no hiding the sadness in his transparent eyes. Sasuke looks away.

“I’m done,” he mutters.

Sasuke expects an argument, but he doesn’t get one. Instead of fighting, Naruto merely closes up the box and stands. “Okay,” he says absently.

The door opens almost instantly, and Sasuke sourly hopes Sakura at least enjoyed the show. She doesn’t look much better than Naruto, though.

Naruto hands the box off to her with a slight smile and a “thanks,” and then he’s gone.

Sasuke watches him, barely paying attention as Sakura takes Naruto’s place on the floor in front of him.

“He did it for me, you know,” she says, and Sasuke jerks his head back toward her.

“The first time he went after you,” she continues in a soft voice, “I asked him to do it. I made him promise. I was so in love with you, but I knew I couldn’t make you listen to me.” She looks down at her own hands, twisting the cloth of her shirt into wrinkles. “I think, when I couldn’t stop you that night – that’s when I figured it out. You and he had a bond that was beyond what I shared with either of you. I couldn’t touch it. I knew Naruto was the only one who could convince you to come back.”

Sasuke wishes she’d stop talking. He’s not sure whether the churning in his gut is anger or sadness, but the important thing is that it’s not hate. It’s something else entirely, something that he thought he’d left back in Konoha.

She doesn’t stop. “Then when he came back,” she says, her voice growing slightly stronger, “that’s when I realized he’d almost died. And it would have been my fault. I promised that next time I’d go with him, and I’d help.”

Sasuke desperately searches for something cutting or discouraging to say, just to make her stop already, but he can’t come up with anything. He doesn’t know this Sakura. Her face and her voice are the same, and she still looks at him out of the widest green eyes he’s ever seen, but everything else is different.

“So I’m here,” she says, low and resolute. “But this time I’m doing it for him. And I don’t care what you try. I won’t let you get away, and I won’t let you hurt Naruto again.”

She looks him directly in the eye for the first time. “Since you left, all he’s wanted is to bring you back. There’s nothing I won’t do to make that happen for him.”

Sasuke feels like he's fallen into some sort of fucked-up dream world, where everything is backwards and upside down and nothing does what it’s supposed to do. Maybe he’s still asleep, and any second now Itachi will pop up with more cryptic messages and useless confessions.

“Sakura – ” he starts. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t have anything you want to hear.

“That’s all,” she cuts him off, rising. “I just wanted to say that.”

Sasuke’s left staring wordlessly after her.

*

After that, they leave Naruto on guard duty by himself a few times a day. Sasuke watches and waits for a chance to escape, but he finds himself getting distracted.

Naruto talks, no – Naruto babbles. It’s not nervous babbling. Sasuke doubts Naruto’s ever had a bout of nerves in his life. It’s just a sheer love of hearing his own voice. He hums, he sings, he mumbles, he imparts what Sasuke can only assume is every single detail of the last three years in the leaf village. Sasuke feigns disinterest, but there’s something about Naruto’s steady stream of chatter that’s soothing. He’s missed it, he realizes in dismay. It always annoyed him when he lived in Konoha, but after three years of Orochimaru’s sinuous murmur and Kabuto’s silent smirk, it’s somehow reassuring.

Naruto also fidgets. Ninja are supposed to understand stillness; when Kakashi, Sai, or Sakura guard him, they all pick a spot in the corner, find something productive to do for a few hours, and then stay there. Naruto can’t stop moving. He’s up, he’s down, he’s hurling mini-Rasengan spirals at the walls, arbitrarily creating clones to spar with, hanging from the ceiling, or hovering over Sasuke, depending on his mood.

One time he spends his entire shift hurling grains of rice at Sasuke’s forehead, measuring how accurate he can be. Sasuke temporarily switches his master plan from a simple escape to torturing Naruto for a few hours in slow and creative ways.

Despite Naruto’s idiocy, it’s another two full days before the opportunity for escape presents itself. Sasuke wakes from dozing to hear Sai and Naruto exchanging guard duty. He’s pretty sure it’s still the middle of the night, but he lifts his head anyway as Naruto plops in front of him.

“Rise and shine,” Naruto announces. “I have a present for you.”

He pulls a thermos from his pack, and despite his best efforts, Sasuke feels a flicker of interest. Now what?

“A trick the pervy sage taught me,” he continues with a wide smile. “Best thing to relax in the field.”

“You idiot. Ninja aren’t supposed to relax in the field,” he says, exasperated.

Naruto makes a face “That sounds like an uptight Sound rule,” he says matter-of-factly. “Well, that’s not Naruto’s Way of Ninja.”

Sasuke raises his eyebrows. “What’s your newest brilliant rule?”

Naruto twists open the top of the thermos, and the fumes of alcohol fill the room. Black whiskers curve into a grin. “Sake.” 
 

Chapter 3