It’s the statement that freezes anyone’s blood, regardless of how strong and impervious they believe themselves to be. Even Naruto, who finds a solution or something good in almost everything, can feel his heart stutter to a stop upon hearing those dreaded words. It’s such an unassuming night; a cool winter’s evening, like countless others he’d spent with Sasuke. Back when they hated each other, to when they were friends, to hopelessly head over heels in love. It was…kind of gross, actually, how much Naruto loved Sasuke. Their friends always said so whenever Naruto would get too overt with his PDA. Four years into their relationship and none of it had died down much, so Naruto always secretly judges those who are put off by his affection for Sasuke. He bets they’re jealous.
So, when Sasuke comes home from a late shift at his practice and says those six simple words, Naruto can’t imagine what’s gone wrong. Does Sasuke suddenly not love him anymore? Or was it not sudden at all, and Naruto’s been blind to it? Has Sasuke not been happy? But he seemed so! He was just fine this morning, when Naruto kissed him goodbye! Oh god, what if Sasuke wanted to break up? Was it his family, had his father finally broken him down and convinced Sasuke that Naruto wasn’t prestigious enough, wasn’t good enough? “Uh,” Naruto starts, trying to force words around the panic in his chest, “y–yeah, of course!” Naruto sets the dishtowel down after drying his hands and turns to look at Sasuke, who’s leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, completely collected and calm. If he was about to break Naruto’s heart wearing an expression like that, it might actually kill the blond.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sasuke begins, and Naruto has to lean back against the counter for support. Sasuke always thinks, he’s a notorious over-thinker, over-analyzing and panicking and the exact stuff Naruto’s doing right now. Everything he’s ever done wrong comes to mind, and he suddenly wants to drop to his knees and apologize for it all. “I know we’re both getting busy, what with work and school, it’s hard,” Sasuke says, and he goes on, but Naruto’s fading out a little. Is he not spending enough time with Sasuke, is that it? Or has Sasuke decided he’s too busy for a relationship and wants to focus all his energy into graduating and finishing his internship? They’ve been busy for what feels like six years straight, can’t they find time to make it work?
“And I know it’s sudden and a tough decision, but…” Sasuke looks up towards Naruto, his eyes big and round and his bottom lip caught between his teeth in that way he does when he’s nervous, and Naruto swears he has a heart attack right then and there.
“I want to adopt a cat.”
“Sasuke, baby, please, I promise—you what?!” Naruto doesn’t mean to shout, but once Sasuke’s words process in his head, he can’t believe them. “That’s all this was about?!”
Sasuke, to this day, doesn’t understand why Naruto tackles and kisses him.
That’s what Sasuke tells himself every day he wakes up in a room that doesn’t belong to him, in a home that’s not his own. It feels like a prison as much as it feels like trespassing, and Sasuke cannot bear to be the captive as much as he can’t bear to be the burden. The council had decided it, they’d told him, the Hokage had signed off on it and declared it all but law. For how long, she hadn’t specified, perhaps until Sasuke was no longer as sought after or so feared and mistrusted. That would be a long time, even Sasuke knew. Still, it’s only temporary.
He suspects Naruto was behind it all. It had been Naruto who stood in Sasuke’s cell, who had freed Sasuke from those awful binds, and Naruto who had been the first thing Sasuke had seen in several weeks. Perhaps it had been months, who’s Sasuke to say? His perception of time has been a bit skewed, lately. Now, though, he seems painfully aware of it. He can do little else but live inside Naruto’s home; bigger than the one Sasuke remembers from childhood. Naruto does take Sasuke out, but it feels…wrong. People stare, they whisper, they accuse, and they judge. If it were all for him, Sasuke wouldn’t mind (he would) but it’s for Naruto, too.
Still, Sasuke goes, though he tries to coerce the times so that they go later at night, when less are around. Things are still skittish, still slow, but they’re moving. Moving forward, actually. Sasuke has to remind himself of that when he’s feeling stuck or trapped in the past. He’s begun training again, learning his body after losing an arm, healing the damage done while imprisoned. Healing the damage done from years of abandoning people who were once his friends. The only ones Sasuke sees for now are Kakashi, Sakura, Naruto, and occasionally that other boy who joined Team Seven in Sasuke’s absence. He’s seen Hinata a handful of times, though he has no true kinship with her, she’s polite and encouraging enough, and Sasuke suspects Sakura has a certain fondness.
It’s all overwhelming, at times. That’s why Sasuke likes to come to hide every now and again. He won’t call it hiding, but when he goes off on his own in the house, finds a place to lurk away and breathe, what else can it be? Today is a good day for “hiding” a little. Last night had been…progressive, if stressful, but that meant Sasuke needed time to unwind and process the changes. Naruto had gotten home only a little while ago, and Sasuke had heard the shower running upstairs for several minutes. It’s quiet, now, a good enough time to come out.
“Mow?” Sasuke cuts his eyes towards the small white cat that’s come up to him, meowing. She’s always meowing, rubbing against him, jumping up on him to sleep. She meows like she believes he somehow understands her. Once, Naruto had said it was because she thought Sasuke was another cat. He’d laughed about it, but Sasuke had never quite caught on.
“What?” he asks her, playing along for the sake of knowing she wouldn’t stop if he didn’t. Yeah, that was why. The cat (Ama) meows again, and Sasuke notices what’s wrong. Ama usually carries around a small, fish-shaped toy with her, a habit from when she was tiny. It’s missing now, though. Sometimes Naruto hides it so that she’ll find it, but clearly she’s given up. Ama meows again, and Sasuke rolls his eyes. “All right, all right, hang on,” he says, holding his hand up as he backs away towards the stairs.
Ama sits and waits, mollified as Sasuke heads upstairs. He grumbles all the way, curious as to when a small cat became the boss of him. Outside Naruto’s bedroom, where the door is open, Sasuke speaks up. “Dobe, have you seen the…oh.” Sasuke trails off, stopping just inside the doorway.
Inside, Naruto stands toweling off his hair, faced away from Sasuke. Sweatpants hang low on his hips, but he’s foregone a shirt. The muscles in Naruto’s back, skin dark from countless hours out in the sun, ripple as he moves his arms. Broad shoulders roll as Naruto pulls the towel down away from his head to settle it around his neck, and he turns to face Sasuke. Warmth rushes to Sasuke’s face, and he feels like he’s walked in on something meant not for him at all, he’s intruded, invaded. Still, he can’t tear his eyes away for a moment. Naruto was always such a scrawny kid, but he’d grown, filled out into someone so…
Sasuke swallows, guilty. He’s just walked in on Naruto and still had the audacity to stare, but…it was so hard to look away. But, look away he did, when Naruto said his name and snapped him out of it. Chagrined, Sasuke’s eyes cut to the floor, and he murmurs something vague; an apology, perhaps, or maybe a dismissal of whatever he’d come asking about in the first place, and leaves the room. He hears Naruto say his name again, louder, but Sasuke doesn’t acknowledge it. He has to…he needs to…clear his head.
To pretend to ignore that when he’d seen, he’d wanted nothing more than to touch.
“You fainted…straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my attention you didn’t have to go to such extremes.”
Heat surrounds the landscape long after the flames have subsided, called back to Sasuke and retreating like he can absorb the fire. There’s still a crackling in his fingertips, his blood hot and muscles coiled tight, too tight. It’s hard for him to control his magic; it’s too reckless, too destructive, and too ravenous. Fire is dangerous and uncontrollable, it’s not to be leashed, but to be allied with, and that is the talent and grace of a fire mage. Fire magic is one of the rarest gifts a mage is blessed with, children born with an affinity for it are few and far between. It is also one of the deadliest, second only to electricity. While it is powerful and serves its wielder well, it takes its toll, and the price is hefty.
Sucking in a breath, Sasuke can taste ash at the back of his throat, as if the fire still burns inside him. The smoke inside seems to make its way to his head, fogging his mind and making everything around him morph into fuzzy fields of greens, blues, and browns. Through the haze he can hear a distant shout, then orange blurs into his swimming vision. “That was cool as hell! I didn’t know you could do that, I’ve never seen fire magic up close before!” the shouting has lowered into a somewhat less jarring exclamation as the voice continues babbling, but Sasuke’s ears stop keeping up. Everything in him is shutting down, having fed so much of his energy into his magic. Fire magic, like fire does in nature, consumes near everything it can. With its mage, it takes all of what they can give, and then it steals a little more. Sasuke has put too much of himself into this battle, too much of himself into his magic, but he didn’t have time to worry about it. He didn’t.
Sasuke can feel his senses shutting down, one by one, and he sways on his feet when it all snaps into sudden darkness. It lasts all of a few seconds, hardly enough time to be worth the embarrassment, before Sasuke’s consciousness claws back to the surface. He expects to wake up with his body sore and his mouth full of dirt. Pleasantly, (or not, he isn’t sure) he finds himself still relatively upright, his cheek cushioned by softness, and his body supported by a strong…something. Startled, Sasuke rights himself, still unsteady. Everything is slightly less blurry now, including the very surprised, wide blue eyes he’s faced with. Distantly, he remembers Naruto had been talking, but Sasuke can’t remember what happened after. “What—what happened?” Sasuke asks, everything in him throbbing, and the confusion isn’t helping. His partner, though it had been quite a reluctant partnership at first, grins broadly. It doesn’t help Sasuke at all.
“You fainted…straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my attention you didn’t have to go to such extremes.” Naruto chuckles, winking at Sasuke with all the smug mischief of a thieving dragon-cat. “I thought elves were more, yanno, conservative about that.” That makes red bloom onto Sasuke’s face. He stumbles away from the annoying warrior, hoping he looks more composed than he feels. Sasuke needs to rest, to let his body heal, but that’s unfathomable to him. He wants to keep going, there might be more enemies stationed nearby.
“Get off me,” he mutters, lacking the commanding regality his kind is so known for. “We need to move, there may be more danger.” Sasuke brings a hand to his forehead as he talks, painfully aware with every word of how dry his throat is. Ahead of him, he can hear Naruto snort. He doesn’t look up, not until he feels the strong hands that were just holding him up wrap around his waist. Sasuke starts to pull his hand away and demand Naruto do as he’s told for once, only to let out an undignified sound as he gets hefted up off the ground. The entire world shifts and Sasuke’s stomach drops as Naruto lifts him with all the ease of a sack of flower. What do they feed their men in that village? “Unhand me, you animal!” Sasuke snaps, entirely too worn to put up a real fight.
Naruto scoffs, blowing air against one of Sasuke’s pointed ears and watching it twitch. “Fat chance,” the blond says, “you’re practically dead on your feet! I’ll find us a haven for the night, you need to rest.”
Sasuke started off this war leaving home to protect his kingdom, how did he end up with someone protecting him?
