Work Text
Sasuke’s policy when it comes to high school is simple:
Leave well enough alone
. Chubby kid who sits next to him needs to copy the homework? Don’t think so. Overenthusiastic lab partner invites him out to lunch? No thanks. Pink-haired girl leaves notes in his locker with hearts doodled on them? Please. Sasuke just needs to get through school, keep moving, get into college, graduate and take over as the head of his family’s business company. Be the son his parents deserve, not the shitty one they ended up with.
And for the first year and a half of high school, it seems to work. Nobody talks to Sasuke between classes, nobody whispers jokes to him when the teacher can’t get the Smartboard working, nobody shares their lunch when Sasuke forgets his at home. Which is fine. You don’t get perfect grades by messing around with friends -- and Sasuke has never earned lower than an A.
So really, there should be no exception for the girl in the fourth floor alcove, who is curled into herself, face buried in her hands, making little whimpering noises.
Sasuke shifts his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. This is where he usually eats lunch -- nobody wants to sit in the drafty alcove, or climb the four flights of stairs to get there. But this kid obviously wants privacy.
Well, too bad. Sasuke discovered this place first. She can go have her emotional meltdown elsewhere. Sasuke clears his throat. “A-
hem
.”
Startled, the girl’s head shoots up. Sasuke’s dark eyes meet milky-white, and --
Fuck.
If Sasuke had been able to see from the front, he would have been able to tell right away that this was a
he
, not a
she
. Long, mahogany-brown hair flows over the boy’s shoulders, swept back from his face by a nondescript black headband. Although red and blotchy from crying, his face is still regal -- a jutting chin, arching eyebrows and
those pale eyes
-- Sasuke briefly wonders if he’s blind.
The boy blinks rapidly, like he’s trying to hide the evidence of his tears. “What are you doing?” he rasps, in a trying-to-sound-righteously-angry-but-failing voice.
Sasuke is so shocked by the realization that this is a
boy
, and a good-looking one at that, that he forgets his resolve to speak first. Faced by the boy’s scowl, his previously planned “Look, this is my spot, so get over yourself and leave” speech flies out the window.
“Um. Are you okay?”
As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Sasuke wants to kick himself. It shouldn’t matter why this boy is crying. He shouldn’t
care
.
But the boy shuts his eyes, slowly (his eyelashes are long, almost like a girl’s) and tilts his head back with a sigh. “Why does it matter to you?”
It doesn’t
, thinks Sasuke, but he doesn’t say it, maybe because he is still a little bit shocked that this is a boy in front of him, and maybe because those eyelashes are so long, and maybe because Sasuke wants to see him open his eyes again and look right at him because he seemed to
see
Sasuke in a way no one really has, not since high school started -- maybe not even since Itachi. And so he shrugs off his backpack and slides down the wall until he’s sitting next to the boy, close enough to touch him if he reached out a little.
The boy’s eyes are still closed, but he’s frowning. “Who are you?”
Sasuke finds his voice. “Who are
you
? Why are you sitting here?”
The boy opens his eyes, and a little thrill goes through Sasuke when his gaze shifts over to him. “You don’t know who I am?”
That irks Sasuke a little. “You’re so important?”
The boy laughs. It’s a dry noise, and it surprises both of them. “No, I’m not. My uncle is.”
“Oh.” Sasuke is silent for a moment. “And people usually know who you are because of your family.”
It’s not a question, but the boy nods anyway. “His name is Hyuga,” he says guardedly, and Sasuke suddenly
does
know who he is, because Hiashi Hyuga is not only the president of Hyuga Industries, one of the largest big-business corporate firms in Japan, but he’s also the ex-trading partner of Sasuke’s father. “That sonofabitch Hyuga -- “ Fugaku would begin halfway through his second glass after dinner, and Sasuke’s mother would put her hand on his arm. “Dear…”
But suddenly, Sasuke can’t bring himself to care. His father is his father, and he’s not talking to a ruthless businessman right now but to this boy with long, dark hair and pale, slender hands that he keeps clenching and unclenching as he waits for Sasuke’s reaction.
“I didn’t ask your uncle’s name. What’s
your
name?”
The boy is not expecting this, and maybe that’s why he answers. “Neji.”
Sasuke nods. “Sasuke.” There is a silence, and Sasuke finds himself wondering if he should have extended his hand for this boy to shake, the way his father does when he meets someone in a business suit. “Why are you sitting here by yourself?”
Neji looks over at him, and again Sasuke feels that thrill. “I was crying,” he says slowly, like he’s explaining the obvious. “And I didn’t want anyone to see me.”
Sasuke nods. “Okay, but why?”
Neji blinks, and for a moment, Sasuke thinks he’s gone too far. But then Neji sighs, blowing back some stray hairs that have escaped his headband. “Today is the anniversary of my father’s death.”
That is
not
what Sasuke expected him to say, and he is surprised. “Why are you telling me this?”
Neji clenches his jaw and looks away, and Sasuke gets the feeling he’s said the wrong thing. For some reason, he wants this boy to look at him again the way he did before -- like Sasuke is a puzzle that he is studying, deciding where to place the next piece. So he quickly adds, “I mean, I’m just a stranger. What about your friends? Why aren’t they --”
“They don’t know.” Neji’s voice is low, angry and gruff.
This is what he usually sounds like
, thinks Sasuke with some surprise.
I caught him off-guard before.
“Why not? You don’t trust them?” Sasuke isn’t trying to provoke Neji; he’s genuinely curious, and Neji seems to recognize that. He slowly unclenches his hands
“No.” Neji clears his throat and tucks a lock of hair behind his ear. “I don’t want their sympathy, or their pity. I don’t want yours either,” he adds, glancing over at Sasuke with a small frown.
Sasuke shrugs. “Good. I don’t pity you.”
Neji sits up a little straighter. “You don’t?”
“No.” Sasuke looks down at his hands. “I know people who are worse off than you.”
Neji scoffs. “Who? You?”
Sasuke allows a small smile to tug up the corner of his lips. “Maybe.”
Neji arches his eyebrows and crosses his legs. “Are you an orphan?”
Sasuke picks at the corner of a floor tile, not meeting Neji’s gaze. “Are you an only child, Neji?”
Neji raises his eyebrows even higher, but lets his question slide. “Yes. But I live with my cousins. Why, are you?”
Sasuke lifts his chin, but doesn’t meet Neji’s gaze. “Yeah. Do you,” he exhales, “have any snacks?”
“What?” Neji blinks in surprise, and Sasuke feels the smile tugging at his lips again at the look on his face. “Why?”
“I’m hungry.” Sasuke kicks at his backpack. “And I forgot my lunch.”
Neji studies him for a second, as if he’s trying to gauge whether or not Sasuke is serious. “Fine,” he says finally, and reaching into his pockets, he produces a granola bar. “I only have one, though. Hold on.” With a swift and sudden movement, Neji brings it down over his knee, and Sasuke winces at the loud
crack
.
Neji struggles briefly with the wrapper. “They must make these out of duct tape -- I swear to God --”
“Here, let me.” Sasuke reaches out and tugs the granola bar out of Neji’s hands. For a moment, their fingers brush. Neji’s hands are soft and smooth to the touch.
He must moisturize
, thinks Sasuke, and then immediately wants to kick himself for thinking something so strange and creepy. Not looking at Neji, he jerks the wrapper off and hands the boy half. “Thanks.”
Neji accepts his half, and for a few seconds the alcove is filled only with the sounds of their crunching.
The long-haired boy is the one to break the silence. “Why are you here? Are you avoiding whoever stole your lunch?”
“Hmf.” Sasuke coughs on a bit of granola. “Nobody stole my lunch.” He glances over at Neji, expression guarded. “Why would you think that?”
“I was kidding.” A small smile plays over Neji’s lips, and Sasuke feels like there must be a large chunk of granola stuck in his throat because all of a sudden it’s hard to breathe.
He looks different when he smiles
.
“Well, in that case…” Sasuke knocks into Neji with his shoulder. Neji stiffens for a moment, and Sasuke thinks
I shouldn’t have done that
but then Neji is elbowing him back.
“Shut up and eat your granola bar.”
Sasuke snorts, nearly inhaling what remains of his granola. “Yes sir.” Silence once again fills the hallway, but this time it’s companionable. It’s on the tip of Sasuke’s tongue to ask why it is that Neji assumes his friends will pity him if he tells them about his father, when he hears an echoing voice bouncing down the hall.
“N… Neji? Are you there?”
Neji stiffens again next to Sasuke, but this time, instead of relaxing, he pushes himself to his feet. “I have to go.”
“What? Why?” Sasuke struggles to his feet as well. “Who --”
Neji rolls his eyes. “My cousin. She probably --”
“Neji?” The voice is getting louder; it’s a girl’s voice, gentle and unsure. Neji takes a step in the direction of the exit.
“Wait!” Sasuke’s hand flies out, and catches Neji’s sleeve. He doesn’t have anything to say, but suddenly, he doesn’t want this boy to leave.
Neji’s eyebrows fly up, but he doesn’t move away. “Yes?”
Sasuke feels like an idiot. “I… I’ll see you around.”
Nejin looks like Sasuke like he’s a crazy person. “Okay.” He turns to go, but Sasuke doesn’t let go of his sleeve.
“You’re not your uncle, you know.” Sasuke has no idea what he’s saying, only that he needs to say it. “You don’t have to be just your last name.”
Neji looks at Sasuke again, and again, Sasuke feels something stir within him. “I know.”
“Do you?” Sasuke forces himself to stare directly at Neji, right into his moon-bright eyes. “Do you really?”
“Neji!” Both Sasuke and Neji turn to see a timid girl standing at the end of the hall. She’s practically burrowed into her coat collar, and she looks like she might faint any moment. “I found you -- Tenten and Lee --”
“I’m coming, Hinata,” Neji answers dismissively. “Can’t I be on my own for five minutes before those two send a search party after me?” He turns back to Sasuke, who has released his sleeve, and regards him for a moment, expressionless. “Thank you,” he says at last. “Goodbye, Sasuke.”
Sasuke nods and watches Neji walk down the hallway to meet his cousin, not turning back, and wonders why that simple goodbye felt so final. Why, even though Sasuke had just met him, watching Neji walk away feels like forgetting something important that he once knew.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sasuke doesn’t see Neji again for a solid week and a half, which shouldn’t be extraordinary given the size of the student body at Konoha High, but still is extraordinary given the fact that Sasuke now pays attention to who he passes in the halls, and to who is in his classes. After the first week, when Neji doesn’t return to the alcove, Sasuke decides he might try eating in the cafeteria after all.
But Neji must be one of those kids who eats out every day -- his family is pretty rich -- because Sasuke never finds him. What he
does
find is a slowly-growing group of pests.
It starts on his second day in the cafeteria. Sasuke had counted on his trademark glare to keep unwanted visitors away -- his elementary school teachers had always said he could freeze the blood in your veins with a single look -- and for the first day, despite the overpacked and unruly crowd, Sasuke has the whole table to himself.
But on the second day, as he is halfway through his lunch, someone sits down next to him. “Hi!”
Sasuke doesn’t look up. He continues chewing, surveying the intruder from the side of his eye. All he gets is a vague orange blur, so he swallows and turns to face the figure.
It’s a boy. Not
the
boy -- no, this boy is something else entirely. Dressed head to toe in orange and black, blonde hair sticking up in wild spikes, and -- are those
whiskers
on his cheeks? Sasuke stares.
The intruder seems not to notice. He’s slurping down a cup of Instant Ramen like his life depends on it. When he notices Sasuke looking at him, he sits up and swallows. “Hi! I’m Uzumaki Naruto. Who’re you?”
Sasuke looks away. “Get lost.” He returns to eating, not looking at the blond boy. A healthy dose of rudeness is enough to fend off most intruders.
But not this one, apparently. Instead, Naruto scowls and jabs Sasuke in the ribs. “You don’t need to be
mean
. I came over here ‘cause you were eating
alone
.”
“I know.” Sasuke grits his teeth and scoots further away from Naruto and his pointy elbows. “I like it that way.”
Naruto studies him for a moment. “No, you don’t.”
Sasuke can feel his face flush with anger. “How do you know?”
“Because!” Naruto smiles, his face wide and open and sunny. “Everyone wants a friend.”
Sasuke fights down the urge to laugh in his face. “Not me.”
Naruto considers this for a moment. “Okay. I’ll be your rival, then.” He scoots over along the bench, until he’s closer to Sasuke than before.
Sasuke has nowhere else to move -- he’s at the end of the bench. “What are you doing?”
“Gotta know your enemy.” Naruto slurps up another mouthful of ramen, soup dribbling down his chin. Sasuke looks away in disgust, scanning the cafeteria for somewhere,
anywhere
else to sit -- but every other bench is taken. So he eats his lunch in stony silence, listening to Naruto chatter on with his mouth full about his math homework and the cute girls in his class and his
asshole
gym teacher who made him run three extra laps for insulting his face mask.
Sasuke can’t wait for lunch to be over. But the next day, he returns to the cafeteria, because maybe Neji will be there today, and Naruto will probably have forgotten all about him.
As soon as he sets foot on the linoleum tiling, Naruto is standing up and flailing his arms. “Sasuke! Hey, Sasuke! Over here!”
And Sasuke swears,
every
single head in the
entire
cafeteria turns in his direction. He would look like an asshole if he just turned around and left. Not that Sasuke particularly cares what anyone else in the school thinks of him, it’s just that maybe Neji is in the crowd, watching him to see what he’ll do. So Sasuke walks over to where Naruto is and sits down at the table.
“What’s up?” Naruto is grinning from ear to ear, like he didn’t just embarrass both of them in front of the rest of the school. Sasuke glares daggers at him.
“How do you know my name?”
Naruto shrugs, his grin not losing one bit of its wattage. “Sakura told me.”
“Who’s --” And then Sasuke catches sight of the pink-haired girl sitting next to Naruto. “Oh. You.” She is definitely in a few of his classes, though Sasuke’s drawing a blank as to which ones.
The girl -- Sakura -- smiles, a little shy. “Um, hi.”
Sasuke scratches the back of his neck, awkward. “Hey.” She probably doesn’t know that he uncovered the identity of the secret admirer leaving notes in his locker a few months ago. She wasn’t terribly subtle in her letters, but Sasuke doubts she expects him to know that the same person who wrote terrible, sappy love poetry to him is also the girl sitting across from him now.
Girls having crushes on him is nothing new. Sasuke remembers the first day a girl gave him chocolates in junior high, her pigtails bobbing eagerly as she blushed and shoved the shiny red package into his hands before rushing away, giggling. He had asked his brother about it that afternoon, both of them sitting at the dining room table doing their work (math homework for Sasuke, tax returns for Itachi). “Nii-san,” he’d said, “a girl gave me chocolates today.”
“Hmn.” Itachi hadn’t looked up. “I knew it would happen eventually.”
Sasuke frowned. “What do you mean?”
Itachi looked up, then, and seeing Sasuke’s frown, had smiled. “We’re the loner types, you and I,” he’d said, and Sasuke had felt proud, for a moment, to be in the same category as his brother. “Girls like that for some reason.”
“Oh.” Sasuke thought that over. “I don’t like her. She’s annoying.”
Itachi shrugged. “You don’t have to like her.”
Sasuke kicked the table leg. “What should I do when I see her next? Should I pretend I’m happy she gave me the chocolates?”
Itachi shook his head. “Don’t give her false hope, Sasuke,” he’d said. And so the next time Sasuke saw her in the hallway, he looked away and kept walking. It wasn’t outright rejection, he reasoned, and he wasn’t tricking her in any way. He ignored the way her face fell when he walked past without a second glance.
Since then, there had been a long parade of starry-eyed girls, crushes and confessions. And Sasuke had never felt much more than vague annoyance for these girls.
Why,
he wondered irritatedly,
do they insist on throwing themselves at me? Why don’t they try to keep a shred of dignity?
And now, here is one more. Sasuke tries his best not to notice the way she goggles at him as he pulls out his lunch. Naruto is chattering on again. In an attempt to distract himself from the girl and her rather large forehead, Sasuke tunes into his words.
“ -- told her you were all alone and I agreed to be your rival and all, and Sakura was kinda bored eating lunch with Ino and her friends because they all have these inside jokes because they take Latin and apparently the Latin classes all have, like a secret cult or something, and usually I eat lunch with them or with the teachers in the Teacher’s Lounge even though Iruka-sensei says I’m not supposed to but he lets me anyway because he feels bad for me and also the other teachers don’t like him ‘cause he got Mizuki-sensei fired for, like, doing drugs or something and the teachers think he’ll rat them out too one day, but sometimes Iruka-sensei makes me eat vegetables and won’t let me have ramen so then I like to eat lunch either with Sakura and Ino or with Lee and his friends in the park --” Naruto stops to take a breath, and Sasuke grabs his arm to stop him from continuing.
“Wait. Did you say ‘Lee’?”
Naruto freezes. “What? Yeah, Rock Lee. You’ve probably seen him before. In the morning, he does, like, laps around the school --”
Sasuke’s mind was racing furiously. What had Neji’s cousin said? “Lee and Tenten were looking for you.” Would Neji be with this Lee person, then? “Where do they usually eat lunch?”
“Um.” Naruto is giving him a strange look. “The park? Like, in the clearing?” He slurps up another mouthful of ramen. “They hang out there in the afternoon, too. We could take you there, if you like.”
And so that’s how Sasuke found himself agreeing to meet Naruto and Sakura after school in the park.
Not friends
, he told himself.
Means to an end
. What the end was, Sasuke was a little unsure. Keep an eye on the Hyuga boy, right? Make sure he’s not lying about his friends. About not wanting pity. And maybe if Sasuke sees him again, Neji will look at him with those eyes that make Sasuke feel like not much else matters besides the two of them.
Or something.
Sasuke waits outside the school entrance for a good twenty minutes, rocking impatiently on the balls of his feet, before Naruto and Sakura emerge from the school. They’re laughing and talking, but Sasuke has no qualms about interrupting them. They made him wait, after all. “What took you so --” Sasuke breaks off, realizing that he is talking to not two, but three people.
Naruto glances up and catches Sasuke’s eye. “Sasuke! Oh yeah, this is Gaara.” He gestures to the moody redhead standing next to him. “He’s gonna come with us, ‘kay?” Without waiting for an answer, Naruto grabs Sasuke’s arm with one hand, Gaara’s hand with another and yanks them both forward, down the street.Sasuke tries at first to yank his arm away, and when Naruto’s grip is revealed to be similar to that of a steel clamp, Sasuke resigns himself to being dragged along. He takes the opportunity to size Gaara up.
The boy is around their age, but he has a strange expression -- it reminds Sasuke of photos he’d seen of tigers, crouching in the long savannah grass. (Do tigers live on savannahs? Gaara looks like he’d belong in one.) His hair, which Sasuke had assumed was styled messily on purpose, appears, on closer inspection, to be simply unkempt, like he’d just rolled out of bed and doesn’t care who knows. What to Sasuke had originally appeared to be eyeliner rimming his pale blue eyes was actually dark bags. All in all, the boy looks like he hadn’t slept in a year.
Maybe he’s one of those paranoid kids who spends every free moment studying,
Sasuke muses. That didn’t explain why he was friends with Naruto.
The pink-haired girl -- Sakura, Sasuke recalls -- is watching him curiously. When Naruto releases Sasuke’s arm to turn and say something to Gaara, she steps up next to him.
“He has a huge crush on Lee,” she says in a low voice, and it takes Sasuke a moment to realize she is talking about Gaara. “Naruto’s trying to set the two of them up. He’s a good friend.”
Sasuke glances over at the boys. Naruto is laughing about something, and a small smile is dancing over Gaara’s lips. “Huh,” says Sasuke, “He doesn’t look gay,” and instantly regrets the words as soon as they come out of his mouth.
Sakura is glaring. “What, he has to
look
gay?”
“No -- that’s not what I meant.” Sasuke can feel heat rushing to his cheeks. “I just--”
“Whatever.” Sakura huffs and crosses her arms. “I don’t get it. Why does Naruto even want to be your friend?”
Probably for the same reason you decided to leave love letters in my locker,
Sasuke thinks, but instead, he shuts his mouth and turns away, feeling a hot wash of shame. In the past, he could get away with saying just about anything to a girl who liked him; she must be pretty defensive about her friend.
Or she doesn’t like you enough to let you say something homophobic, asshole.
“C’mon!” Naruto is galloping across the street now, dragging a helpless Gaara by the wrist behind him. Sasuke and Sakura have no choice but to follow him, over the white stripes of the crosswalk and into the park.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sasuke hears their voices first. Through the trees, above the rustling of the leaves, someone is yelling. Naruto quickens his pace, forcing the rest of the group to break into a trot to keep up. “HEY, LEE!”
The yelling stops. “HELLO?? WHO IS THERE? DID I DISTURB YOUR YOGA AGAIN WITH MY LOUD ENCOURAGEMENT??”
Sasuke is already regretting his decision to follow Naruto here, but Naruto is grinning from ear to ear. “NO, IT’S ME!” he hollers. “HOLD ON, WE’RE COMING TO MEET YOU!” He takes off into the trees, leaving everyone else to scramble after him.
Sasuke barrels after Naruto, intent on not losing him, and winds up with a mouthful of leaves. Sputtering and coughing, eyes squeezed shut, he stumbles into what must be the clearing (he can feel sunlight on his face). It isn’t until the chatter of voices breaks off that he opens his eyes -- and finds himself staring directly into Neji’s cool, milky-white gaze.
“Who’s this?” Sasuke is vaguely aware of the girl reclining in the grass on the periphery of his vision. There might be another person too --a blurry green figure off to hs left -- but it’s hard to focus on anything more than the fact that
Goddamnit
, freaking
Neji
who Sasuke has been looking for for the past week and a half is
right in front of him
. He looks different than he did the first time they met, Sasuke is sure -- his gaze is cooler. He’s more composed. No stray hairs escaping his headband. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground, a book in his lap. Sasuke’s eyes flick down to it for a moment, long enough to make out what looks like stage directions, before Neji snaps it shut.
“This is Sasuke!” Naruto says cheerfully, oblivious to the fact that Sasuke has suddenly developed the inability to breathe. “We met in the cafeteria. We’re rivals now.”
The girl laughs, and Sasuke manages to tear his eyes away from Neji and glance over at her. Her hair is tied up in two Mickey-Mouse buns on her head, and she’s idly fiddling with some sort of hair clip. She’s pretty, in the way Sakura is pretty -- she doesn’t catch your eye the way someone with startlingly pale eyes might, but she isn’t too bad to look at. Her eyes skip over Naruto and land on Sasuke, catching him staring, and Sasuke looks away, embarrassed.
“Rival?” Sasuke only now notices the boy behind Neji. His bowl-cut gleams in the sunlight, he’s dressed from head to toe in a green jumpsuit, and -- were those leg warmers? At first Sasuke thinks he’s also reclining, but it takes a moment to realize the boy is actually doing pushups. Catching Sasuke’s eye, the boy grins, all shiny teeth. “I, too, have a rival! Neji and I are locked in a constant battle for dominance!”
Neji rolls his eyes, and Sasuke’s attention is drawn back to him. “We’re not rivals, Lee,” he drawls. “You just challenge me to a contest whenever you decide you need practice.”
“Oh, God.” The girl throws her arm across her forehead dramatically. “Here they go again. Sorry they’re so weird, Sasuke. Wake me up when you two grow up.”
Neji scoffs. (
I know that scoff,
thinks Sasuke.) “It’s not me, Tenten.” He moves over to her side and lies down, and Tenten rolls over and buries her face in Neji’s stomach.
“
Uhggg
,” she groans, her voice muffled. “I was up ‘til two last night studying for the stupid math test. Don’t move, okay? You’re warm.”
Neji shifts, but doesn’t move away. “You’re heavy.” he says, a small smile playing over his lips.
Tenten smacks him on the shoulder. “Shut up. I hate you.” But the smile in her voice belies her words.
Naruto laughs and joins the two of them on the grass. Sasuke doesn’t move. He’s having a hard time swallowing. Why did he think that girl was pretty? She’s obviously hideous. He can’t believe he didn’t realize it before.
There’s a rustling behind him, and he turns, grateful for the distraction. Sakura and Gaara emerge from a small path hidden between the trees, and Sasuke instantly feels like an idiot. Why did he have to go plunging through the bushes after Naruto?
Sakura huffs in annoyance. “You could
wait
for us, you know,” she says to Naruto. “Oh, hi, Tenten. How was your math test?”
Tenten rolls over, eyeing Sakura. “We do not speak of such things on a beautiful day,” she proclaims, and flops onto her back. “Hey, Gaara.”
Gaara doesn’t answer. He’s staring down at his ratty sneakers, and Sasuke feels a sudden wave of empathy for the boy. The two of them are both outsiders in this group of close-knit friends (even though Sasuke has the feeling Naruto could make friends with a brick wall if he wanted to) and from his lack of eye contact, Sasuke is pretty sure Gaara isn’t as outgoing as the blond boy.
“Gaara!” Lee springs to his feet and skips -- actually
skips
-- over to the redhead. Instead of greeting him, like Sasuke expects, the shiny-haired boy swoops Gaara up in a bone-crushing hug (he’s stronger than his twiggy limbs would suggest).
Gaara’s feet have hardly touched the ground when Lee is firing off a rapid stream of questions. “Whydontyouevercomeoutheretoseeus? Howareyourangermanagementclassesgoing? Gaisenseiwantsyoutocomeoverfordinnersometimesowhenareyoufree? Didyougetanewhaircutordidyourhairalwaysdothatthingwhereitsticksupintheback? Wannahaveapushupcontestdidyouknowmynewrecordistwothousandtwentyseven?”
Tenten is laughing. “Give him a break, Lee! Let him catch his breath at least before you start interrogating him.” She and Sakura are playing with Neji’s hair, now, Sasuke realizes -- braiding it and twisting it into small buns -- and although Neji is making small irritated noises when they tug too hard, he seems to be enjoying the attention.
Sasuke kind of feels like he wants to puke.
Naruto is sprawled out on the ground like a housecat soaking up the sun. “We brought Sasuke out here to meet you guys. And Gaara decided to tag along.” He drops an extremely unsubtle wink in Gaara’s direction, and the redhead turns the color of his hair.
Lee seems to be oblivious. “It is very nice to meet you, Sasuke!” he cries, bowing so low his bangs brush the tips of his toes. “I apologize. I did not introduce myself properly.” He bobs to attention, flashing those blinding teeth again. “I am Rock Lee.”
“Oh.” Sasuke isn’t sure what to say. “Um, nice to meet you too.” Lee is studying him in a very disconcerting way. “Is… something wrong?”
Lee stares at him for a moment. “You are powerful,” he proclaims. “I challenge you!” He drops to the floor. “Pushup contest!”
Sasuke isn’t really the social type, but he’s pretty sure that most people don’t usually challenge someone they have just met to a pushup contest. “What?”
“Lee, relax,” calls Tenten. “S’okay, Sasuke, you don’t have to listen to him.” She stretches her arms above her head in a luxurious yawn and pushes herself to her feet. “I need coffee. Who’s with me?”
“Oooh,
me
.” Sakura stands. “Naruto, come on.”
Naruto opens his eyes, smiling lazily. “I’m good.” There is a long pause. Sakura is giving him a
look
, and Naruto blinks once, slowly, before the message hits him. He leaps to his feet, eyes wide. “I mean, yeah! I’m coming!” He flicks Neji’s shoulder and grabs Sasuke’s arm. “Let’s go! We’ll bring back a cake pop for you, Lee!” Without waiting for a response, Naruto takes off into the shrubbery, dragging Sasuke.
It isn’t until the five of them are well out of the park that Sasuke stops spitting out leaves. “What was that?” he manages.
Tenten and Sakura roll their eyes in unison. “You guys are pretty dense, huh?” Tenten says. “Now they can be
alone
.”
Is everyone in on this?
Sasuke wonders, but one glance at Neji’s raised eyebrows tells him that the Hyuga is in the dark, just like him. “So, are we really going to buy coffee?”
Tenten yawns, covering her mouth. “You bet.” She looks over to Sakura. “Oh, Sakura,
omigod,
did you hear about what happened to Kiba? About the party?”
As the girls (and Naruto) begin an enthusiastic conversation about some sort of gossipy tidbit involving a game of truth or dare and a dog, Sasuke drops back to walk beside Neji. After a few moments, he sneaks a peek at Neji out of the corner of his eye. The boy is staring straight ahead, ignoring Sasuke.
Should I say something?
Sasuke wonders, but before he does, Neji breaks their silence.
“What happened in the hall -- forget it.” Sasuke stares, but Neji doesn’t look at him. “It was stupid. I was being stupid.”
“No you weren’t.” Sasuke says before he has time to think. “You were sad. It’s acceptable.”
“No it
isn’t
.” Neji turns a fierce look on Sasuke, but when Sasuke winces, he quickly looks away. “Sorry. It’s…” Neji exhales, puffing out his cheeks and blowing back a stray strand of hair. “I can’t just lose it like that. It was ridiculous. Childish. If my uncle had seen me --”
“Why do you care what your uncle thinks?” Sasuke’s words come out louder than he means, and Sakura glances over.
“You two all right?”
Neji gives her a single-shoulder shrug. Sasuke says nothing, but when Sakura turns back to Tenten’s story, he looks over at Neji -- only to find the Hyuga boy scowling at him.
“You know nothing about me,” he hisses. “We’re strangers. All I know about you is that you’re a loser who Naruto took pity on.”
This stings Sasuke far more than it should, and the realization that Neji has this kind of power over him -- that Sasuke has
let
Neji have this kind of power -- is what moves his tongue. “And all I know about
you
is that you’re a whiny uncle’s boy who thinks he’s a girl.” he shoots back. “So
shut up
. I was trying to be
nice
to you and you’re acting like a
brat
.”
Neji’s face goes as red as Gaara’s hair in less time than it takes to say “androgynous.” He opens his mouth to say something, seems to think better of it and closes it again. He shoots a venom-filled glare at Sasuke and quickens his pace to join Naruto and the girls, leaving Sasuke alone at the rear of the group, half triumphant and half sickened with himself.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
That night, lying in bed, Sasuke replays his words in his head.
I’m an idiot
, he thinks, and rolls over, smothering his face in the pillow.
What would Itachi say?
This is an old game. Sasuke burrows under the covers with his pillow, curling up into a ball next to it. “Itachi,” he whispers, “what should I have said?” He squeezes his eyes shut.
“Easy,” says Itachi -- in the darkness and heat beneath his blankets, Sasuke can almost hear him, hear the smile in his voice -- “you should have told him you like his eyes.”
Even though Sasuke knows Itachi isn’t really there, isn’t really saying these things, he still feels the heat rise to his cheeks. “
What?
”
“And his hair,” Itachi continues, “and that it looks better not in a stupid bun or a braid. And
that’s
how you make someone shut their mouth.”
Sasuke punches his pillow. “
You
shut your mouth.”
Itachi is laughing. “Don’t be stupid. There are better ways to get a guy to blush than calling him a girl.”
Sasuke’s face is on fire. “Like what?”
“Ah, little brother,” Itachi sighs. “One day you’ll understand.”
“I
hate you
.” Sasuke rips the blanket off his head, hurls the pillow across the room and swings his feet out of bed. Stomping into the bathroom, he splashes water on his face to cool his burning cheeks. He takes a moment to stare at himself in the mirror. Bed-head black hair long enough to fall in his eyes, sticking out in every direction. Thin, angry mouth. Dark circles beneath his eyes. Sasuke splashes more water on his face to remove the last traces of pinkness and grabs a towel to dry himself off. Fuck it. He’s going for a walk.
. . .
It’s chilly outside in the dark, but Sasuke doesn’t turn back -- he just pulls his collar higher up by his ears and keeps moving. The wind feels cleansing, as does the silence. The only sound is the rustling of the trees.
Sasuke doesn’t pay attention to where he’s going -- he just lets his feet lead him, as his mind wanders. Fragments of conversations, images and songs drift through his mind. A crow caws from somewhere in the inky night, and a memory comes, unbidden and whole, into his mind.
Sasuke is seven. He and Itachi are sitting on the front step, early summer. Dusk is slowly overtaking the city. The telephone wires are silhouetted against the sky, and as Sasuke watches them, a black bird flutters over and lands on them.
“Itachi.” Sasuke tugs at his brother’s sleeve, wants him to see, too. “Itachi, look.”
His big brother does. Sasuke can remember him perfectly; his long, dark hair is drawn back in a ponytail, and his eyes are bright and black. There are deep lines etched beneath his gaze, and even though he can’t be more than twelve, Sasuke sees him as fully grown, a man like their father.
“Oh.” Itachi inhales softly. “A crow, Sasuke.”
“I know.” Sasuke kicks his legs, proud he spotted the bird first. “You like crows, right?”
There is a moment of silence, and then Itachi speaks, in a voice so quiet Sasuke almost doesn’t hear. “Soft! We are the harbingers of night./ Our quills drink in the light like ink./ Our jagged darkness portends daylight’s flight./ And into cold caress the light must sink.”
His words are so beautiful, Sasuke does not want to breathe for fear of shattering them. The two of them sit in silence for a few moment, watching the color drain out of the sky, before they are interrupted by a call from their mother to come inside to dinner (Sasuke cannot remember her words, only the sound they made in the dusk).
Itachi stands, slowly, not taking his eyes off the crow. “Come, Sasuke,” he says quietly. “We should go inside.”
Reluctantly, Sasuke gets to his feet. “Nii-san,” he says softly, “whose words were those? They were perfect.”
Itachi tears his eyes away from the telephone wire and looks at Sasuke for a moment. Then he smiles. “They were mine,” he says, and steps through the door.
The memory ends there. Sasuke is dimly aware that he is shivering, and he’s not sure if it’s because of the cold. He glances up to see if he recognizes the street, and his eyes fall on a dark figure on the rooftop of a nearby building.
Sasuke has a strange moment of
déjà vu. But he is not seven, and Itachi is not here, and this figure is far too large to be a crow. So he squints up, trying to figure out who would be awake at this time aside from him. The only thing he can make out is a rusty fire escape. Sasuke contemplates it for a moment, and then crosses the street, grasps the bottom rung and begins to climb.
That thing better not be a gargoyle
, he thinks as the ladder creaks ominously beneath his weight.
As he sets his foot on the last step, a sudden wave of fear hits Sasuke. What if the figure is a creepy murderer, waiting for a victim to walk by? Or worse, what if there’s no one up here? But as he steps forward, his eyes still adjusting to the dark, the figure rises to its feet.
Sasuke holds up his hands. “Hey, I’m not here to attack you or anything. Just wondering what someone else is doing awake at this time of night.”
There is a long pause, and Sasuke briefly revisits the “psycho murderer” possibility in his mind. But then the figure speaks --
“Sasuke?”
Sasuke freezes. “W-
what
?”
The figure steps closer. “It’s me.” And then Sasuke’s eyes adjust --
Oh God --
No freaking way --
It’s Neji.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sasuke’s first thought is, “What
on earth
is
Neji
doing here in the middle of the night?”
Actually, Sasuke’s first thought is, “I’m wearing my pajamas. In front of freaking
Neji Hyuga
.
Fuck
.” And his second thought is, “Thank
God
I put on sweatpants over my boxers.” And his third thought is, “What the hell did Itachi mean by ‘his hair looks better not in a bun’? It looks pretty good up in a ponytail like that.” But by the time his fourth thought, about
why
, exactly, it is that Neji is on this random roof, rolls around, Neji has already spoken first.
“This is the back quarter of the Hyuga compound.” Neji’s voice sounds different in the dark -- more flat, but more open somehow. Sasuke kind of gets hung up on the strangely melodious tone of his voice, so he almost misses the question that follows Neji’s statement -- “Why are
you
awake at this time of night?”
“Uh.” Sasuke freezes. “I didn’t know this was your house. Sorry -- I’ll leave --”
“Wait.” Sasuke looks down, and there is another wave of
déjà vu, because Neji is grasping his sleeve. For a moment, Sasuke is back in the hall, words on his tongue that he needs to say, even if he doesn’t quite know what they are. Then Neji pulls away, shuffling his feet awkwardly and oh -- he’s wearing
slippers
. Sasuke had no idea that anyone who was not a grandma even
wore
slippers.
“I-it’s okay,” Neji says gruffly. “There’s plenty of room up here. I was just…” He makes a vague gesture with his hands. “Sitting.”
“Oh.” Sasuke
knows
his eyes must still be adjusting to the dark, because from where he’s standing, it almost looks like Neji is blushing. “Well… I could join you. If your uncle wouldn’t kill me or anything for trespassing.”
Sasuke is kidding, but at the mention of his uncle, Neji tenses. “Right,” he says stiffly. “I’m sure it will be fine with him.” Turning, he leads Sasuke to the edge of the roof, where Sasuke is delighted to find a blanket spread out.
“Wow,” he says, plopping down. “You must come out here a lot. You seem prepared.”
Neji is still standing. “I guess so.” He scratches his neck. “I feel like I should offer you something -- this is my house --”
Sasuke bites his lip to keep from laughing. Neji is suddenly so self-conscious -- a total opposite from the cool and composed boy in the clearing this afternoon. “I’m fine. Your company’s enough.” As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Sasuke wants to smack himself.
I really need to think before I speak. Neji already thinks I’m a jerk -- now he’ll think I’m a creep, too.
But Neji only gives him a small smile before kneeling next to him on the blanket. The two of them sit in silence for a moment, gazing out over the streets, before Neji speaks again.
“Why
are
you awake? Insomnia?”
Sasuke can feel the boy’s gaze, but he doesn’t turn to face him. “Not exactly,” he admits. “I just… couldn’t sleep.”
“Yeah. Me neither.” Neji looks off into the distance, and Sasuke finds his eyes drawn to the boy’s face. His skin is pale, though not as pale as his eyes -- they remind Sasuke of the Milky Way, and suddenly, he is caught up in memories of stargazing on the lawn with Itachi, Itachi pointing out the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt, and the two of them laughing, those warm summer nights when there was just the two of them and they were invincible and Sasuke’s eyes are stinging and he is grateful for the dark, to hide the way he suddenly needs to bury his face in his arm and blink hard and fast to stop the tears from coming.
“Sasuke?” Neji’s hand is on his arm, then, and if Sasuke wasn’t suddenly choking on the lump in his throat he might have been hyperaware of the touch of the boy’s skin against his, of the heat of Neji’s fingers against his bicep. But all Sasuke wants is for this stupid, raw sadness rising in his throat to settle down to the usual dull ache in his stomach.
“Sasuke,
breathe
.” Neji’s hands are on his shirt, and he’s rubbing soothing circles into Sasuke’s back. Sasuke didn’t even realize he wasn’t breathing until Neji tells him to, but suddenly his lungs are screaming for oxygen and he’s drawing in a wet, ragged gasp of night air.
“It’s okay.” Neji’s voice is quieter than Sasuke thought it would be, softer and kinder, and then every emotion that has been building in his chest since he doesn’t even know how long is bursting out of him, like those two words gave Sasuke permission to break the dam holding them back.
Sasuke isn’t sure how long he cries for, isn’t sure of anything besides the tidal wave sweeping through him and the warmth of Neji’s hands against his back like a life preserver bobbing on the stormy sea of his emotions.
First Neji, now me,
he thinks grimly,
now it’s my turn to have a breakdown,
and even though this is nothing like Neji’s quiet sobs on that day, Sasuke suddenly feels the urge to laugh at the similarity. A jagged, painful sound claws its way out of his throat, and Sasuke can feel the heaving of his chest slow, can feel the churning sorrow in his stomach receding as the storm of emotions passes.
His heartbeat slowly returns to normal, and Sasuke wipes his runny nose on his sleeve, past caring what Neji thinks. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I didn’t mean… I’m sorry.”
Neji’s hands are still rubbing his back. “You were sad. It’s acceptable,” he says, so sternly that it takes a moment for Sasuke to recognize his own words. “Don’t apologize for your emotions. You were right, you know.”
Sasuke blinks. “About what?”
“About… what you said this afternoon.” Neji leans forward a little, his pale eyes serious and intent on Sasuke’s face. “About not caring what my uncle thinks. You’re right. I’m not my uncle.” He sighs. A lock of hair slips free of his ponytail and dangles in his face, and Sasuke is suddenly filled with the irrational urge to reach forward and tuck it behind Neji’s ear.
“No, I think you were right.” Sasuke’s voice is raspy, and it startles the both of them. “I don’t know you. I shouldn’t tell you what to do.”
Neji looks at him for a long moment, and Sasuke realizes that his hand has not moved away from his back. But the voice in Sasuke’s head protesting that this is far too long to be making eye contact with someone, far too long to be touching a boy who is practically a stranger, is drowned out by the sound of their breathing, the only sound in the whole silent city.
“My brother.” Sasuke’s words are so soft, he can barely hear them. “My brother always told me -- I’m not my father. No one should ever be defined by their family.”
Neji is quiet for a moment. “I thought you said you were an only child.”
Sasuke’s nails dig into his palm. He looks away, blinking hard, even though he feels like he’s cried his tear ducts dry. “I am, now.”
There is a long silence. Neji draws away from him -- to give him his space, Sasuke thinks. After what must be a solid two minutes, he breaks the silence.
“My father and my uncle were twins,” Neji says, and Sasuke is shocked by the hot anger spilling over the boy’s words. “My uncle got involved with the wrong people. They,” he draws in a shaky breath, “killed my father, thinking he was him.” Neji shuts his eyes and a tear, silver in the darkness, rolls down his cheek. “It isn’t fair,” he whispers. “Nothing is fucking fair in this world.”
Sasuke has no idea what he’s doing, no idea what he wants to be doing, but it’s as though his hand is moving of its own accord, reaching out and brushing the tear off Neji’s cheek. Neji’s eyes fly open, and his milky eyes catch Sasuke’s starry black ones, and Sasuke can hear the boy catch his breath in the silence between them, and suddenly he is lurching backward, falling hard on his elbows and panting, pushing himself to his feet. “I have to go,” he says hurriedly, because this is too much, everything is too much and too fast and
maybe
, just
maybe
, for half a second he might have wondered what it would be like to --
Neji is staring up at him with those Milky Way eyes and Sasuke feels a strange kind of tug in his chest that makes him pause. “It’s not you,” he says, but his words feel empty and hollow because
of course
it’s Neji,
of course
it’s this strange and wonderful boy before him, and maybe that’s what makes him say quietly, before he loses his nerve, “Could I maybe come back tomorrow night?”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sasuke is in a daze for the rest of the night, and by the time the sun peeks over the horizon, he is certain he hasn’t slept a wink. School is a hazy blur at first, the only defining moment being during his fourth period Lit class when the teacher announces they need to find a partner to work on their oral poetry assignments. Sasuke is still while the room erupts into chaos, everyone scrambling to find their friends. Sasuke is used to being matched with the leftovers, used to doing all the work himself, so he’s startled when a boy slides into the chair next to him.
“Oh.” Sasuke blinks. “Um, Gaara, right?”
The redhead nods. “You need a partner, don’t you?” he says in a surprisingly husky voice, and Sasuke realizes that he has never heard this boy speak before.
“Yeah. I mean, are you… ” Sasuke isn’t sure what to say, but Gaara offers him a small smile.
“People tend to avoid me. I had some… anger issues in freshman year.” His voice is flat and unemotional. Sasuke can’t tell if he’s kidding or not. He opens his mouth to ask just
what
, exactly, he means by “issues,” but the teacher interrupts him.
“All right! For tomorrow, please look over a few examples of oral poetry and bring in a theme or two you’d like to deal with. Class dismissed!” The tidal wave of students that rushes towards the door nearly knocks Sasuke off his chair as he struggles to shove his notes in his backpack.
“Hey.” Sasuke glances up at Gaara, who is now standing beside him. “Would you like to come over to my house after school? We could work there. That is,” he bites his lip, “if you don’t mind getting the third degree from my stupid siblings.”
Sasuke is about to say no, just like he has every other time this year, but then -- for whatever reason -- he pictures Naruto’s face, open and grinning, and Neji’s eyes, somehow endless and yet full of life -- and he nods, once. “Sure. That would be cool.”
Gaara smiles again, this time more easily. “Great. I’ll see you later, then.”
Funny, thinks Sasuke as he strolls to his next class. It’s been a while since he looked forward to the end of the school day.
. . .
Lunch is its usual hectic affair: Naruto and Sakura have gotten into some argument by the time Sasuke arrives, and they are shouting at each other, oblivious to the stares they are receiving from the rest of the cafeteria, while Gaara quietly does his math homework at the end of the table.
“Don’t be
stupid
!” Naruto yells. “He has the
Kamehameha
. He would
destroy
anyone in his way, given the proper motivation!”
Sakura slams her fists down on the table hard enough that Gaara’s pencil snaps. “
You’re
the idiot,” she thunders. “Saitama can literally
not lose
. If he manages to punch Goku even
once
--”
“A-HA!” Naruto leaps up. “Goku is too fast for him! He’ll never land a hit!”
Sakura scoffs in disbelief. “Are you
kidding
? One Punch Man traveled from the moon to earth in like,
five seconds
. That’s almost as fast as the
freaking speed of light
!”
Naruto reciprocated her scoff. “Goku can punch at Mach 30. That’s fast enough to kill Koro-sensei.”
“Um.” Sasuke slides into a seat next to Gaara. “What are they talking about?”
Gaara rolls his eyes. “The same thing as always. Some heated fictional debate.” He erases a smudge on his paper. “Now, if they were talking about Yuri on Ice…”
Sasuke glances over at Sakura and Naruto, who are both red in the face. “Will they be okay, or…?”
Gaara shrugs. “Yeah. This will probably end the same way it always does.” He slides his homework into his bag, and gives Sasuke a once-over. “Hope you don’t like that shirt too much.”
Sasuke frowns, and is about to ask what on earth he’s talking about, when a
splash
comes from the direction of the debaters. Sasuke whirls around, and his mouth drops open.
Naruto has upended a carton of milk over Sakura’s head. Milk trickles down her pink hairdo, over her eyelashes, and drips onto her shirt. She is frozen in shock.
Naruto’s victory grin is slowly sliding off his face. “Ha, Sakura… you should see the look on your…” he trails off as slowly, deliberately, Sakura reaches over, picks up his half-eaten cup of ramen, and throws it in his face.
“FOOD FIGHT!” someone yells, and suddenly the air is filled with flying projectiles in the form of various lunch components. Sasuke gets pegged with a ham sandwich, a plate of lasagna and two tomatoes before someone drags him to safety under the table.
“What the…” Sasuke can’t think of anything else to say. Whoever rescued him is laughing. Sasuke wipes enough tomato gunk out of his eyes to catch a flash of whiskered cheeks and spiky blonde hair.
“Have you ever been in a food fight, Sasuke?” Sasuke feels a sudden, hot flash of irritation.
“No,” he snaps, “and I never intended to.” He swipes away the last few chunks, and find himself staring at Naruto’s shining blue eyes, crinkled with laughter.
Naruto is sopping wet -- from the ramen, Sasuke supposes -- and there are pieces of what looks like pickle in his hair. Something green and relish-y stains the front of his shirt. And he’s laughing. Hard. The kind of laugh that makes other people want to laugh too. Sasuke can feel his anger dissipating, a smile stretching his mouth up, and then a laugh escapes his own lips. Naruto’s eyes widen, and the two of them stare at each other for a moment, grinning like crazy people.
And then -- for the first time in a long, long while -- Sasuke begins to laugh. Naruto joins in, the two of them cracking up so hard Sasuke could swear he felt abs forming. Tears prick his eyes, wildly different than the tears of last night, and Sasuke is gasping for air in a way that feels less like drowning and far more like the first breath of clean air after a long darkness, and Naruto’s hand is on his arm. “This is
living
, Sasuke,” he gasps, and Sasuke has never agreed with anything more in his whole life.
. . .
Sasuke is expecting the walk home from school with Gaara to be awkward, but he is surprised when Naruto follows them down the street, waving goodbye to Sakura over his shoulder. “Hey guys! Gaara, what kind of snacks do you have at your house?”
Gaara notices Sasuke’s surprise. “He also has to do his oral poetry assignment, but --
“-- But Kabuto is a
dick
and always does all the work himself without telling his partners,” interjects Naruto. “I’m not complaining or anything, but I might as well prepare something extra in case he doesn’t come through.” Then he grins. “Besides -- Gaara’s siblings are
cute
.”
Gaara’s face goes red. “Don’t say anything to get them riled up,” he warns. “They’ll pounce, and we’ll never get any work done.”
Sasuke feels the strong urge to ask what, exactly, would he say to rile them up, but Naruto has already moved on to the next topic of conversation. “So you know how Ebisu-sensei is like, a secret pervert? Well, today, Konohamaru caught him reading
porn
magazines in the teacher’s lounge…”
As Naruto chatters, Sasuke glances around at the passing scenery. Something about this route looks a little familiar. The similarity hits him when Gaara leads them up the front steps of a large brown house, with a bright purple door.
This is Neji’s neighborhood
. Sasuke is so startled that he misses the beginning of Gaara’s next words.
“.-- was Kankuro’s idea. I hate the color purple.” Gaara takes a deep breath. “Here we go. Remember, don’t indulge them.” He pulls out a set of keys and lets the three of them in.
At first, all Sasuke can do is stare. Wow -- Gaara is
rich
. His house is well-decorated and tastefully furnished. His eyes sweep over the expensive couches and land on the two figures in the center of the living room floor, and now he is
really
staring, because there is a boy kneeling there over a giant wooden doll.
“Ah. Gaara. Good.” The boy doesn’t look up as the door swings shut. He raises his hand up, and Sasuke can see it is splotched with purple paint. “Can you hand me the varnish on the counter?”
Gaara brushes past him without answering, something Sasuke gets a feeling he is used to doing. The boy scowls and looks up from his work. “Thanks a lot, dic--” he catches sight of Sasuke and Naruto, and his face goes through an extremely rapid change from pissed off to overjoyed. “No. No
way. Gaara
, you didn’t say you were bringing your
boyfriends
.”
“Piss off.” Gaara looks annoyed, now, standing in the kitchen entrance clutching a bag of chips. “For real. Go screw your puppet or whatever. We’re going upstairs.”
Sasuke is surprised by this outburst from Gaara -- he has been largely timid and polite so far -- but this boy seems not to hear him. He crosses the rug, abandoning his project, to scrutinize the visitors, and up close Sasuke sees he is older than he originally thought -- maybe seventeen or eighteen. And he’s wearing purple eyeshadow.
This must be Kankuro,
he thinks, remembering the door.
“
Temari!
” Kankuro hollers. “Come see who Gaara brought home!” He leans forward, and Sasuke catches a whiff of sawdust. “What might your name be?” Kankuro bats his eyelashes, and Sasuke is at a loss for words. Luckily, Naruto jumps in before Sasuke begins his awkward sputtering.
“Hey, Kankuro!” He bats his eyelashes right back. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember
me
.”
Kankuro stares for a moment, and then throws his head back and laughs. “I remember
you
, of
course
!” He reaches out and pinches Naruto’s whiskered cheek. “
Temari
! Come downstairs!”
“I’m in my
underwear
!” comes the indignant response from someone upstairs. “Can you not have a
conniption
??”
Kankuro rolls his eyes. “Gaara brought visitors!”
There is the sound of thumping upstairs, followed by the skidding sound of someone sliding over wooden floors. The next thing Sasuke knows, a girl with poofy puffballs of blonde hair exploding in every direction is barrelling down the stairs towards him, wearing nothing but a black bra, underwear, fishnet stockings and a pair of fuzzy socks.
“
Gaara
!” she squeals, slamming into Sasuke and Naruto in a very squishy, painful hug. “They’re so
cute
!”
“Oh my
God
!” From Sasuke’s positioning (right in the girl’s cleavage), he can’t see Gaara, but he can hear his exasperated shout. “Let them
go
, Temari, you
animal
. Jesus!”
The girl releases Sasuke long enough to squish his cheeks between her hands. “Aww,” she coos. “You have such
nice
eyes.” She boops him on the nose. “And a lovely complexion!”
Sasuke is sure his face is bright red, judging by the way Naruto is smirking. “What about me?” he asks Temari, all wide-eyed innocence.
Temari studies Naruto for a moment. “The whiskers ruin it,” she says dismissively. “The hair, too. How much hair gel can one boy need?”
Naruto visibly deflates. “It’s bedhead,” he says moodily, and glares when Kankuro rustles his hair.
“Leave.
NOW.
” Gaara’s face has crossed over from tomato to danger warning-sign red, and his hands are clenched in fists. “I’m
not kidding
.”
Sasuke resists the urge to flinch.
Reminder: do NOT make Gaara angry
. The redhead looks ready to kill someone, so Sasuke cannot believe when Kankuro gives Temari a look, and all at once, they charge over and sweep a shocked Gaara up into a hug.
“Let --
go
--” Gaara is obviously struggling, but his siblings are both older (and taller) than he is. Sasuke hears a snort from behind him. and he glances over to see Naruto doubled over with laughter. The sight makes Sasuke grin. Poor Gaara.
“
Put me down
!” thunders Gaara, and for a moment, it seems like they will -- and then Temari begins to tickle him.
. . .
It’s a good twenty minutes before Naruto and Sasuke can rescue Gaara from the grasp of his siblings. Gaara alternately looks like he’s going to pass out from laughter and like he’s going to murder his brother and sister in cold blood, and it isn’t until they haul him up the stairs to his room (Naruto knows where it is) and slam the door that he stops fighting to go back downstairs and decapitate them.
“Sorry about that,” Gaara mumbles as soon as the door is shut and he’s has a few moments to take a deep breath. “They’re
idiots
.” He shoots a look at Naruto, who is doubled over still, weak from laughing, and scowls, a flush spreading across his nose and cheeks. “It’s not
that
funny.”
“Yes it is,” gasps Naruto. “Your face when you were being tickled -- I didn’t even know you were
ticklish
--” he dissolves into another fit of laughter, and Sasuke can’t help but grin.
Gaara is busying himself with his backpack, his ears still bright red. “Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles. “Laugh it up, only child.” He pulls an enormous binder out of his strangely-shaped backpack -- it almost looks like a gourd, Sasuke thinks -- and plops it on his bed. “Now, we’ve got work to do.”
As Naruto tries (and fails) to calm down and Gaara flips through his notes, Sasuke takes a moment to look around the room. Gaara’s room is surprisingly empty, like his. The walls are painted sand-dune yellow, and the carpet is a dull beige. Aside from a row of bookshelves filled with various colorful books, a bed and a small desk, the room is empty. Some might call it ugly, but Sasuke appreciates the simplicity.
“Uggggg.” Sasuke’s attention is drawn back to the bed, where Naruto and Gaara are poring over Gaara’s notes. Well, Gaara is poring over them. Naruto has draped himself across the bed dramatically and is dangling upside-down off the side. “Homework sucksssss,” he groans. “Kill me now.”
“As you command.” Gaara snatches up a pillow and smacks Naruto with it. “Be quiet.
Some
of us --” he shoots Sasuke a smile “-- want to get our work done.” He turns back to his notes. “So, for a theme, how about…” he slides out a piece of paper. “Oh, here’s a good one.” He clears his throat. “‘Loss is not / a heavy, cold thing / but a lone blackbird / who refuses to sing.’” He lowers the paper. “Loss might be good.”
Naruto sits up. “Teachers love that angsty stuff, like you’re opening up to them.”
Gaara shrugs. “What do you think, Sasuke?”
Sasuke curls his legs into his chest, suddenly cold. “I don’t know,” he mumbles. The mention of loss, of a black bird, has suddenly sent his thoughts down the inevitable spiral to Itachi.
Gaara looks at him for a moment -- Sasuke
feels
his gaze -- before turning back to his paper. “We could always do something else,” he offers, and Sasuke nods, grateful.
Naruto reaches over Gaara’s shoulder and picks up another paper. “Ooh, what about this one? ‘Your little death was not / a quiet story’s ending / but rather / the first pages rustling.’” He grins at the boys, proud. “That’s like the opposite of loss.”
Gaara shakes his head. “That’s about an orgasm, Naruto.”
“
What?
” Naruto lets the paper slip from his fingers. “No it’s not! It says ‘death’!”
Gaara bites his lip -- out of embarrassment, Sasuke thinks, until he sees the boy’s shoulders shake as he tries to hold back laughter. “An orgasm is known as a little death,’” he explains.
Naruto howls in frustration and dives for Gaara’s laptop. “No way!” As he frantically Googles, Gaara goes back to searching through the papers.
“Ah. What about this? ‘Day begets day / as night begets dawn / the softest beginnings / are the most smiled upon.’” He holds the paper out to Sasuke. “New beginnings?”
Sasuke looks, then, at this red-haired boy before him, offering him a fresh start -- a new beginning. This boy, like Neji, seems to look right at him and
see
him, down to the core -- see everything Sasuke is and does not want to be, and still accepts him for it. So Sasuke smiles and reaches out to take the paper. “Sure. New beginnings. That sounds pretty good.”
Gaara smiles back, and opens his mouth to say something -- but the moment is interrupted by a horrible, anguished wail from Naruto, hunched over the computer. “You’re
right
!” he moans. “It
was
about an orgasm!”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The boys (read: Gaara and Sasuke) spend the afternoon and a good chunk of the evening looking through oral poetry examples they pull from Gaara’s extensive notes (Sasuke is pretty sure his first diagnosis of Gaara as an obsessive studier was correct). Naruto spends his time poking through the books on Gaara’s shelf, and then, when he is disappointed by the lack of “substantial reading material” (meaning comic books), he goes to forage for snacks downstairs.
As the door clicks shut behind him, Gaara glances up. “Okay, Sasuke, I think this is good for now. The actual poem isn’t due for two weeks.”
“Right.” Sasuke sighs and sets down the stack of papers he is sorting through. “Are we going to have to… perform this?”
Gaara exhales in a shaky laugh. “Probably. Shizune-sensei loves that kind of stuff.”
“Oh.” Sasuke is quiet for a moment. When the silence stretches out longer than he expects, he glances over and finds Gaara watching him with a small, secretive smile.
Sasuke feels self-conscious all of a sudden. “What?”
Gaara looks away, and begins shuffling papers back into his binder. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
Sasuke frowns, because that smile was most certainly not
nothing
, but before he can press the issue, the door flies open and Naruto all but tumbles in and slams the door behind him so hard, Sasuke can feel the bed frame vibrate. “Ah,” he gasps, “I’m
alive
.”
Gaara rolls his eyes. “What did they do to you?”
Naruto flops onto the bed, clutching a pack of cookies to his chest. “Unspeakable things,” he groans. “Things with
lipstick
.” He rubs at a fuschia mark on his cheek. “But here --” he chucks the cookies towards Sasuke, who barely manages to catch it before it smacks him in the forehead “-- the fruits of my labor.”
Gaara is putting his books away, sliding his binders into his backpack. “Don’t eat those. It’s six-thirty. We’re going to have dinner.” He glances up at the two boys. “You’re welcome to stay.”
Sasuke is about to refuse, but then he remembers what’s waiting for him back at home. A cold, dark apartment. Some sort of microwaveable meal. Another sleepless night -- and then he remembers.
Neji
. Neji will be waiting for him, somewhere not far from here, and that very thought is enough to give Sasuke goosebumps.
And so that’s how Sasuke finds himself eating dinner with Naruto, Gaara and his two extremely flirtatious siblings.
“Soooo...” Temari flicks Sasuke’s ear, grinning at the way he flinches and leans further forward over his dinner plate. “How did you three meet?” She glances up and Sasuke catches the slow smile she shares with Kankuro across the table.
Naruto is cramming mashed potatoes into his mouth, the vegetables on his plate still noticeably untouched. “I’ wa’ fo’ a pro’et,” he answers, and Sasuke looks away in disgust at the half-chewed mouthful he displays to the table.
Gaara is glaring at his siblings in a way that makes Sasuke think he has not quite forgiven them for earlier. “We were doing
homework
,” he hisses, stabbing the green beans on his plate for emphasis.
Temari and Kankuro exchange looks once again. “Is that so.” Kankuro skewers a piece of pot roast without meeting his brother’s stink-eye. “Then why was someone shouting ‘orgasm’ at the top of their lungs?”
Temari and Naruto simultaneously choke on their dinner. “It was a
poem
!” Gaara shouts as Temari tries to drink from her water glass in the midst of hysterics and Naruto attempts to sputter out a response around the lump of meat caught in his throat.
Sasuke tries to exhale and hold his breath to keep from laughing, but one look at Naruto’s bright red face and the way Temari’s shoulders hitch with every silent guffaw, and he begins to giggle.
Every pair of eyes turns towards him. Kankuro’s mouth hangs open in disbelief. “Is the silent one… laughing?”
Sasuke wishes he could stop, but the image of Gaara’s outrage while being tickled bubbles up in his brain, and then he is wheezing, doubled over, almost sliding beneath the table, and he can hear everyone else cracking up around him, and that only makes him laugh harder because this is so weird, them all sitting around the dining room table in a house he’s never been in before, surrounded by the first friends -- yes, friends -- he’s had since elementary school, and it’s as though the food fight during lunch unlocked some secret fountain of hilarity that has been welling up in him all these long months, or maybe he’s tired, or maybe he’s giddy with his own laughter and happiness, just the possibility that he can be happy in this way after everything that’s happened, and it’s been a long, long time since he’s really and truly allowed himself to just be right here, be who he is in the moment and nothing more.
. . .
After dinner is over, after everyone has recovered, after Temari and Kankuro produce a giant tub of ice cream from the freezer for dessert (“Cherry-flavored,” Kankuro says with a wink, “like Gaara,”) Sasuke and Naruto leave Gaara standing in his brightly-lit doorway, waving farewell, and head off into the night.
“Whew!” Naruto scratches the back of his neck, elbows in the air as he grins up into the dark. “What a day.”
Sasuke rolls his eyes, but can’t keep a smile off his face. “That was certainly interesting,” he admits.
Naruto smirks. “Hey, Sasuke, if you had to choose between Kankuro and Temari, which would it be?”
Sasuke is grateful for the darkness hiding his expression. “
What
.”
Naruto shrugs. “You know.”
“No,” says Sasuke, who has the terrible feeling that he
does
know what the blond boy is talking about. “I have no clue.”
Naruto shoves his shoulder. “You
know
. Who would you…” he waggles his eyebrows.
Sasuke huffs and buries his face in his collar. “I’m not going to talk to you if you don’t make any sense.” He picks up his pace, leaving Naruto scrambling after him.
“Fine,” he pants, “I’ve got a better question for you.” He pauses for dramatic effect, and Sasuke turns to look at him. “What’s your best memory?”
The question is so unexpected, it catches Sasuke off guard. “Huh?”
Naruto crosses his arms. “Well?”
Sasuke is at a loss for words. Both the question and the suddenness of it surprise him. “What’s
your
best memory?” he finally says -- a weak response, but Naruto answers without hesitating.
“When I was little, every time I did well on a test or tried especially hard in class, Iruka-sensei -- he used to teach elementary school, before he became the history teacher at the high school -- he would take me out to get ramen, at like, a real restaurant. And I would tell him about my week, and he would tell me funny stories, and the guys at the restaurant knew me and everything, and I just felt like…” he exhales, not looking at Sasuke. “... I had a place where I was just
right
. Where I
belonged
.”
A long silence follows. Sasuke realizes dimly that they’ve both stopped walking. What is his best memory? All he can think of is Itachi, his father yelling and throwing a flowerpot, Itachi, his mother crying and cleaning up the shards,
Itachi
, Sasuke’s fingers -- there is blood on them -- Itachi bandaging his hand, Itachi whispering poetry to him as he falls asleep, Itachi waving to Sasuke from the driveway as he leaves with those friends of his, Itachi’s eyes, Sasuke’s eyes, everything blending, and then he is speaking.
“When I was nine,” he says slowly, “my brother took me walking in the woods.” As he speaks, he can see it, as vividly as if he were there -- the crackly autumn smell in the air, the colorful leaves crunching beneath the rubber boots Itachi had insisted he wear. “It was beautiful. The trees -- they arched up above, and I could see snatches of the sky in between the branches. Clouds would pass overhead, and the woods would be dark with shadow one moment, and glowing with light the next.” The words are falling out of Sasuke in a rush now, like the dam inside of him that broke during dinner is suddenly churning out all of these hidden words and details of his memories. “And he was walking next to me -- walking and every now and then writing something down in this little notebook he carried with him. I never found out what happened to that notebook. He was writing things down, and every now and then he would call me over and point something out -- ‘Look, Sasuke, there’s a blue jay’ -- ‘look, that’s a ginkgo, you can tell because of the leaves’ -- ‘look, this kind of mushroom glows in the dark’ -- and I was kicking my boots through the leaves. And then I ducked around a tree while he was writing something down, and then I was standing in front of a river. I remember -- the river --” his voice is cracking, his throat closing up, but Sasuke has to finish this story, has to tell Naruto what happened next “ -- and it was clear and blue, in the way water is in photos but never in real life, and then Itachi came around behind me and his eyes are sparkling and he says, ‘Sasuke, let’s swim,’ with just this recklessness. Like nothing in that moment mattered besides the river, and me. And us. And --” Sasuke’s chest is heaving, but he is not going to cry, the way he did in front of Neji. Neji. His head shoots up. “W here are we?”
“Huh?” Naruto blinks rapidly, as though he’s coming out of a trance, and Sasuke realizes he’s been staring at him. “Uh, I’m not… did you?”
“Did I what?” Sasuke is scanning the rooftops, because this street looks familiar, and if he’s right --
“Swim.” Naruto steps a little closer. “Did you? Just jump in?”
It takes Sasuke a moment to realize what he’s talking about. “Oh. I don’t remember.”
“Oh.” Naruto looks so sad, for a moment, that Sasuke almost regrets lying to him.
“Look,” he says hurriedly, because he suddenly doesn’t want to stand here and watch the sorrow in Naruto’s eyes, “I have to go -- my house is near here.” That’s twice he lied.
Naruto glances up at him. “I can walk you to your --”
“No.” Sasuke cuts him off. “It’s fine. I’m okay to go on my own.” He brushes past Naruto, trying to ignore the hurt look on the boy’s face. “See you tomorrow.”
Naruto says something in response, but Sasuke rounds the corner before he hears what it is, and exhales. A small twinge of guilt twangs in his stomach, but he quickly pushes it down.
Neji
, he remind himself, and he can feel his heart speed up a little. Which is stupid, but Sasuke can’t seem to make it slow down.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
When Sasuke finds the house -- he recognizes it by the fire escape, still rusty and dangerous-looking -- there is no shape on the roof.
No
, he thinks, and his body seems to move of its own accord. No, he told Neji he was coming back, maybe the boy thought he meant Sasuke would come there by himself, maybe he had actually told his uncle this time. maybe his uncle had forbidden him from --
“Sasuke.” Neji sits up from where he’d been lying on the blanket as soon as Sasuke steps over the last ledge. His hair is less than perfect now -- a little mussed, falling in his eyes, and while Neji tries to brush it out of his face, Sasuke takes the opportunity to pretend to cough into his sleeve to hide the enormous smile spreading across his face.
“Neji,” he answers as soon as he’s regained his composure. “May I…” he gestures towards the blanket.
Neji waves dismissively. “You don’t need to ask. Come sit.” He eases himself back down, and Sasuke joins him on the blanket.
“What are you doing up here? Besides waiting for me, I mean.” Sasuke winces internally.
Wow, that sounded idiotic. Like he’s only here for you.
But Neji doesn’t roll his eyes. Instead, he gestures upwards. “Look.”
And so Sasuke does. And --
There have never been so many stars. How could he have missed them?
“It’s so peaceful,” Neji’s voice is barely a whisper. “Up here. In the dark.”
Sasuke cannot speak. It is so beautiful, unspeakably so. He hasn’t looked at the stars since… come to think of it, when was the last time he looked up?
Neji inhales, barely audible over the thudding of Sasuke’s own heartbeat in his ears. “
Comets, importing change of times and states, / brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.” he whispers, and Sasuke is suddenly dizzy with the familiarity of the words. He sits up, head spinning, because this is almost too much again -- the proximity, the poetry, the stars that are endless and yet somehow also dancing in Neji’s eyes as he sits up to face Sasuke. “Are you all right?”
Sasuke has no clue if he’s all right or not. “Did you write that?” he asks in a small voice, so tiny against the universe and the infinitum of memory and time that feels as though it is suddenly descending on him.
“Um.” Neji bites his lip a little, and -- there is no mistaking it, his cheeks are growing darker -- “No, I, um,” he clears his throat. “I read it. In a book.”
“Oh.” Sasuke is gripping the blanket, but he still feels unanchored somehow. Like at any moment he could float away into the vast night sky and be lost. He needs someone to hold him down, something to bring him back to earth, but at the same time, he desperately doesn’t want Neji to know what’s happening to him.
I thought I left this behind when I started high school.
“What book?” he asks, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
Neji seems oblivious to Sasuke’s struggle. “Um… it was a play, actually. Henry VI.”
Sasuke needs something to anchor him. He needs something -- anything -- “Do you like plays?”
“Well, I… like reading them…” Neji’s face is pretty, up close, Sasuke thinks almost dreamily. His skin is smooth, unblemished, and his nose turns up at the end a little in a way that makes Sasuke think of Temari.
Boop
.
“Uh, Sasuke…?” Neji’s eyes are darting nervously back and forth over Sasuke’s face, and Sasuke realizes then that he is leaning forward, leaning way too close, and his hand is drifting up a little because Neji’s skin looks
so soft
and Sasuke needs to touch something, needs to hold onto something and --
WHAT IS HE DOING???
It hits him like a freight train, and Sasuke
throws
himself back so violently his teeth snap together. “AAAIMSOSORRYAAAAIDIDNT--”
“
Sasuke
!” Neji is lunging at him, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and yanking him forward and Sasuke’s face collides with someone’s chest for the second time within a span of four hours, but this time with enough force to make a white hot burst of pain explode in his nose. The two of them tumble back across the roof, and Sasuke comes to rest on a (thankfully) soft part of the blanket and lies there for a moment, eyes squeezed shut.
“Owww…” It takes Sasuke a moment to realize he isn’t the one groaning. Slowly, he opens his eyes, and realizes that the “soft blanket” is actually a certain Hyuga boy, looking extremely pissed off.
Oh. Their faces are inches apart.
Their faces are inches apart.
Sasuke barely manages to restrain himself from flying backwards again. He shoves himself away from Neji, hands shaking. “S-- Sorry --- I didn’t -- I ---”
Neji sits up, rubbing his head and scowling. “You were about to fall off
the roof
.” He glares at Sasuke, but his anger quickly turns to concern. “Is your nose okay?”
Sasuke’s hand flies up to touch his nose, and comes away covered with blood. The sight makes him suddenly dizzy. “Uhhh…”
Neji sees the way the blood drains from Sasuke’s face. “I think you should come inside,” he says quickly, and before Sasuke can argue, he has a firm grip on his elbow and is leading him down a small set of stairs, half-hidden in the shadows.
Sasuke wants to argue, to pull away from Neji’s grip, but the simple act of standing suddenly makes the rooftop lurch under his feet, and only by seizing Neji’s arm is he able to stay upright.
Right
, he thinks as small white pops of light flicker across his vision.
The dizziness, the nausea, and the disorientation. I really should have gotten more sleep last night.
Sasuke is dimly aware of entering a room, of low ceilings and a bed, and then he is flat on his back and has no idea how he got there. Someone is yelling, somewhere, and the noise is making his head ache. A strange but not unfamiliar buzzing in his ears. The white lights again, but this time so dazzling that Sasuke has to close his eyes, only they’re behind his eyelids too, and then, he hears Neji’s voice, at a volume he’s never heard it at before.
“
Because he was alone! That’s why!
”
And then darkness takes Sasuke like a swooping fall, and he is grateful.
. . .
When he wakes up, his first impression is that the bed is soft.
Extremely
soft. Soft enough to make Sasuke double-check he isn’t dreaming about a giant marshmallow by rolling over and licking the pillow.
“Sasuke? What are you doing?”
The suddenness of the voice startles Sasuke so badly he flips over and chucks the pillow halfway across the room, because the last time he checked,
he is the only one living in his house
.
There is a long silence, as Sasuke tries to catch his breath, and Neji stares at him from across the room, where he is perched in an armchair. The pillow lies on the floor, a good two feet off target.
“Um. Ahem.” Sasuke clears his throat. “Where am I?” It’s a perfectly valid question, he thinks, but Neji is staring at him, disbelieving.
“You’re in my room.”
It takes a moment for Sasuke to process that.
In his room. I’m in Neji’s room. In his house. In his bed. Wait. In his
bed…
And then he remembers. The rooftop. Neji grabbing him. Nosebleed. Dizziness, the return of that feeling in his stomach, that feeling from right after --
And then he ended up here.
Oh God,
Sasuke thinks, feeling a hot flush of shame spread to his cheeks.
I fainted on his arm, like a stupid Southern belle. And now I’m in his room, in the middle of the night
(there’s a window on the far wall, displaying the dark rooftops of the city and the night sky)
. And I --
a second realization is dawning on Sasuke quickly, and a wave of horror sweeps over him --
I’m wearing nothing but my underwear.
Neji is approaching him, now, and stupidly, Sasuke’s first instinct is to yank the blanket up to cover his bare chest. Stupid, because
who do you think undressed you?
whispers a tiny voice at the back of Sasuke’s brain, and if a giant cavernous maw opened up in the floor and swallowed Sasuke whole right about now, it probably wouldn’t be as bad as suddenly remembering that
not only
did he invade Neji’s personal space something like three times over the course of the last two days,
not only
did he pass out in front of Neji,
not only
was he currently lying in Neji’s bed in nothing but his boxers, but Neji Hyuga had
seen him lick his pillow to make sure it wasn’t a marshmallow
.
Sasuke likes to think he isn’t embarrassed easily. After all, wasn’t he the only one to sit through the fifth grade sex talk with a straight face (notwithstanding the fact that Itachi had already explained to him where babies came from)? Isn’t he the one who handles, with a stoic face, the ongoing stream of girls who gush and flirt with him? Then why does Neji, and the concerned way he’s looking at Sasuke, suddenly make him feel like his entire body is on fire?
He probably has a fever.
“Here.” Neji is holding out a glass of water, and Sasuke accepts and guzzles it, grateful for a reason to avoid eye contact with him. But he still happens to glance over at Neji and then he is choking, coughing hard enough that Neji asks, with some alarm, “Are you all right?”
Sasuke is trying hard not to look at him. “I’m fine,” he wheezes out, because how do you tell someone that you’re choking to death because they are wearing a
nightgown
?
Neji tugs self-consciously on the hem of his pajamas. “It’s my cousin’s,” he mumbles, which really does not explain anything, but Sasuke nods and acts like he understands why Neji is wearing his cousin’s too-big pink t-shirt (up close, he sees it actually isn’t a nightgown).
“Ahem.” Now it’s Neji’s turn to clear his throat, and Sasuke notices that his cheeks are slowly turning a shade that rivals his outfit. “So. Are you feeling okay?”
“Um. Yeah.” Sasuke scratches his head. “What happened, exactly?”
Neji sits down on the edge of the bed, and Sasuke flinches but forces himself not to scoot away --
He’s just sitting down
he tells himself,
relax
.
“Well.” Neji crosses his arms. “You were acting a little strangely. And then you stumbled back, and I caught you before you fell off the roof, but then I um,” he looks embarrassed, “accidentally gave you a nosebleed. A bad one, I think, and when I suggested we go inside so I could help clean you up you kind of looked pale, and then we barely got inside when you, uh, fainted. So I,” (it’s definitely not Sasuke’s imagination -- Neji is full-on blushing now, which is good because he’s not looking at Sasuke so he doesn’t see that Sasuke is also blushing at what he knows is coming next) “I carried you over and lay you down. And there was blood all over your clothes so…” Neji makes a vague gesture. “They’re drying in the bathroom. Um. It’s kind of late… well, early I guess… are you feeling alright?
“Yeah… Thank you…” Sasuke knows his family doesn’t like to be indebted to anyone, and certainly he must owe something to Neji now, but he is suddenly exhausted and the bed is
so soft
, and his parents aren’t here anymore anyway, and Neji’s room is warm and quiet and dark, and suddenly Sasuke can no longer keep his eyes open. “I think I’m gonna… close my eyes…” he mumbles, even though this is
weird
, and the small voice in his head is telling him that he needs to leave because he has
way
overstayed his welcome and he should leave, middle of the night be damned, and besides, Neji is still sitting on the bed, but
God,
it’s been so long since Sasuke felt this
safe
.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
When Sasuke wakes again, it’s to the sound of raised voices. Groggily, he buries his head under his pillow. “Not again,” he groans. When his father and Itachi are fighting, it means slammed doors, his mom crying, and he has to make dinner for himself. He hates days like that.
“I do
not
want to hear it! He is
leaving now,
do you hear me?
Now
!”
Sasuke knows by now. He expects it. Here comes what always happens next: Itachi calls their father a homophobe, Fugaku calls Itachi some words that are worse, the door to Itachi’s room is slammed shut. Sometimes Itachi will barge into Sasuke’s room, dragging his latest boyfriend behind him. “Jeez,” he’d pant, out of breath, “Can we just stay here, Sasuke? For a few minutes until Father calms down?” A sideways glance at the boy next to him. “Be warned, we might have to go out the window.”
And Sasuke would never say no. Not even if it meant his father wouldn’t speak to him for a week, not even if it meant doing his homework at the library so Itachi and his boyfriend could have some privacy. Because he loved his brother -- his big brother, his amazing, funny, smart big brother who caught the eye of every girl and every guy who walked by, his brother who would tickle him and tell him stories late into the night, his brother who whispered to him, once, in the dark, “It’s difficult, Sasuke.”
Sasuke had been half asleep. “What is?” he’d mumbled.
“Everything.” There had been a long silence, so long Sasuke had nearly fallen asleep, and then Itachi had spoken again. “I hate him.”
Sasuke had been awake then. “Who?”
“Father. I hate him. I hate him, Sasuke. This fucking --” Itachi’s voice had become muffled by the pillow, and Sasuke realized with cold horror that his brother was crying. “This shitty life -- it’s too fucking
hard
--”
“Nii-san,” Sasuke was worried, then, and he rolled over to hug his brother. “Nii-san. Please. Don’t cry.”
Itachi had caught his breath, wiping at his face roughly, almost angrily. “It’s so
stupid
,” he spat. “Why does it matter? Why does it ever matter?”
Sasuke had felt a creeping dread crawl into his stomach. “What is it? What doesn’t matter?”
Itachi buried his face in Sasuke’s hair. “Me. Who I am. Who I like. What I like. Poetry, and guys, and singing, and just being
happy
.”
Sasuke had felt the sting of tears rising in his eyes. “It
doesn’t
matter,” he whispered fiercely. “I don’t
care
if you like boys, or anything else. It doesn’t change anything.”
Itachi said nothing for a moment, and then he shuffled to the side, brushing Sasuke’s hair out of his eyes. “Sasuke, look at me.”
Sasuke complied. Itachi’s eyes were usually dark and shining, just like his, he knew, but now they almost looked red in the darkness of his bedroom -- from crying, Sasuke thought, but that wasn’t it -- there was something there that he’d never seen before. A kind of desperateness, almost anger. “Yes…?”
Itachi studied him, intently, for a moment, and Sasuke had the strange feeling that his brother was looking at his very soul. “Don’t ever let them make you someone you’re not,” he whispered, and somehow, Sasuke had known, with every fiber of his being, that he would remember the moment for the rest of his life. That Itachi's words were somehow dividing his life into before and after.
How he wished he hadn’t been right.
But Sasuke’s flashback is suddenly interrupted by an angry retort from outside the door. “He could have
died
, on our roof, you know, and
then
where would you be? Not such a
perfect
family after all, huh?”
The sound of a slap rings out, and Sasuke stiffens. He’s not at home; this is Neji’s house. Neji’s room. Neji yelling, in the other room. Sasuke is not supposed to be here. He is not supposed to hear these things. He tumbles out of bed, wincing at a tender spot on the back of his head.
Fuck
. His
clothes
.
The door begins to slide open, and Sasuke freezes, thoughts too scattered to jump back into bed and pretend to be asleep.
Neji steps in, carrying Sasuke’s clothes and clutching his cheek. When he sees Sasuke, wearing nothing but his boxers, standing in the middle of the room, he also freezes. “Sasuke.”
“N-Neji.” Sasuke stands up straighter, trying to pretend that standing mostly naked in someone else’s room is totally natural. “Are those my clothes?”
“Yes.” Neji drops them on the bed, and Sasuke is grateful to see that there are no bloodstains on his shirt or pants. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to leave you --”
“No, it’s fine.” Sasuke tries not to stare at the bright red hand-shaped mark on Neji’s cheek. “I should get going.”
Neji doesn’t meet his eyes, but he lets his hair fall over the mark on his cheek. “No, if you feel unwell you should lie down --”
“I feel better,” Sasuke interrupts, yanking on his shirt, wishing Neji’s voice didn’t sound like that -- meek and quiet, like he’s trying not to be seen. He wants Neji from the roof last night, whispering beautiful words about the stars, or even the smug Neji from the clearing. Anything except this timid Neji who wants to disappear. “I should probably get home. I… have homework.” Sasuke wants to kick himself. Who does homework on a Saturday?
But Neji seems to understand, and nods, looking relieved. “Right. I can walk you home.”
“I’m okay.” Now Sasuke is really avoiding Neji’s eyes, because
no one
is allowed to come to his house. “I can get there on my own without passing out, thanks.”
Sasuke catches Neji’s frown out of the corner of his eye, but before the Hyuga boy can argue, the door slides open once more and a man enters.
Sasuke has never actually seen Hiashi Hyuga in person. Once or twice he’s seen him in pictures, but now, in person, Sasuke is struck by how much he looks like Neji. They both have long, flowing hair that falls to their waists, and those same milky eyes, but while Neji’s face is smooth and young, Hiashi’s countenance is lined and rigid. Sasuke can’t imagine this man ever smiling in the sudden, unexpected way Neji does sometimes.
“Uncle.” Neji shifts to face the man frowning in the doorway, and Sasuke realizes that Neji has moved in front of him in an almost protective stance. “I was just going to escort him out.”
Hiashi’s frown deepens. “Good. In the future, kindly refrain from making any such rash decisions.” Sasuke is aware of the way Neji tenses up at the sound of his uncle’s voice, and a stab of sympathy shoots through him. What right does this man have to speak to him this way?
“It was my fault.” Sasuke’s voice rings out, startling Neji and himself, and Hiashi pauses, halfway out the door. “I was acting stupidly. I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, and it had been a long day…” Sasuke know he’s babbling, but he seems to have Hiashi’s attention. “So I really shouldn’t have disturbed you. Thank you for taking me in,” he finishes weakly, because Hiashi’s gaze is now burning into him.
“Boy. You’re Fugaku’s son.” The words are so unexpected, Sasuke is left dumbstruck. Hiashi narrows his eyes. “Why were you on my roof in the first place?”
Sasuke swallows, but he’s saved any sort of explanation by Neji, who leaps in. “I invited him,” he says quickly. “We were working on a school project. I know you don’t like strangers in the house, Uncle, so we were on the roof at first…” Neji shoots Sasuke a pleading look, and Sasuke nods.
“Yes, it’s a poetry project. We have this poetry unit in our Literature class…” he trails off, suddenly realizing that he has no idea of Neji takes the same classes he does. But the frown on Hiashi’s face has softened a little.
“Well,” he says gruffly, “I suppose you can come over and work here. But please understand, we are a private family. If you intend to come in, let me know ahead of time.”
Neji exhales -- softly, but enough to reassure Sasuke that whatever tension there was between Hiashi and him has diffused. “Thank you, Uncle. We will. Now, we should get going.” He grabs Sasuke’s hand and pulls him through the door, past Hiashi, but before the two of them can make their escape down the hall, the man places his hand on Sasuke’s shoulder, halting them.
“Hold on, Neji.” Hiashi bends next to Sasuke. “Boy,” he says quietly, “I’m terribly sorry about what happened to your family.”
It’s suddenly hard for Sasuke to breathe. “It’s okay,” he chokes out. “I’m fine.”
Hiashi looks sad, for a moment. “If your father --”
Sasuke interrupts him. “I need to go.” He doesn’t care if it’s rude. He needs to leave, right away. He can’t stand here, listening to yet another person offering stilted condolences. The walls are pressing in. The air is too thick. He needs to get outside.
Hiashi nods, once. “Go ahead.”
Sasuke doesn’t need any more encouragement. He doesn’t look back as he and Neji take off down the hall, and it isn’t until the two of them are outside that Sasuke realizes that Neji is still holding his hand.
“Um.” Neji seems to realize it at the same time as Sasuke, and quickly pulls away, leaving Sasuke’s hand strangely cold. “Sorry. I don’t have to walk you home. I just wanted to get out of there.”
“Right. It’s fine.” Sasuke scuffs his feet on the sidewalk, kicking a loose pebble over the curb. “I was kind of rude before. Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry my uncle was so rude.” Neji frowns down at his hands and Sasuke is shocked, suddenly -- when he makes an expression like that, Neji looks just like Hiashi. “You can still come over, you know.”
“Yeah.” Sasuke fidgets, hoping Neji isn’t just saying that to be polite. “I don’t want to cause you any more trouble --”
“No!” Neji says suddenly, jerking his head up. “No, it’s fine. You can come over anytime. Really.”
Sasuke gets a sick feeling in his stomach. “Neji, did you hear what your uncle said to me in the hallway?” This is too familiar. The sudden magnanimity. The lack of eye contact.
He pities me
.
But Neji looks puzzled now. “No. What did he say?”
Sasuke studies Neji for a moment. He doesn’t appear to be lying. Is it possible that he doesn’t know about Sasuke’s family…? “Nothing,” he says finally. “It was just about not getting lost on the way back.”
Neji raises his eyebrows, and Sasuke gets the feeling that he doesn’t quite believe him, but he lets it drop. “Okay. Well, are you sure you don’t want any company on the way home?”
“Um. Yeah.” Sasuke bites his lip. “I’ll… see you later, I guess.” He turns, about to set off for home, but Neji touches him on the shoulder.
“Wait.” Sasuke turns back, and it’s his turn to raise his eyebrows. Neji’s cheeks are a light pink (thankfully, he’s changed into his normal cargo pants and t-shirt combination since last night) and he’s still not meeting Sasuke’s eyes.
Here it comes
, Sasuke thinks, and braces himself for the inevitable.
He knows, and he feels sorry for me.
“You could come over again tomorrow, if you like.” Neji toes the sidewalk cracks with his shoe. “I mean, if you’re not busy.”
“Right. Sure.” Sasuke can feel his own face growing hot. “Okay. That sounds good.”
“Really?” Neji’s head shoots up. “G-Good. Yes. Okay.” He nods, once, and drops his gaze. “Okay. See you tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah.” Sasuke nods, even though Neji isn’t looking at him. “I’ll come up the fire escape.”
“No, I can meet you at the door.” Neji smiles a little. “You don’t have to sneak, if you don’t want to.”
Sasuke cracks a grin. “All right. See you then.” He turns and strolls away down the street, trying to hide the way his heart is pounding so hard he feels like it’s going to crack a rib, and an enormous smile is stretching across his face.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
For the rest of the day, Sasuke tries to do the things he normally does -- homework, tidying up, chores, et cetera. But it’s difficult to focus when Neji’s words are playing through his head, his uncle’s sad look when he said ‘your family,’ the way Neji smiled at him when Sasuke agreed to come over, Neji in a pink nightgown, Gaara’s secretive smile, the slight upturn of Neji’s nose, Kankuro’s purple eyeshadow, the red mark on Neji’s face, Naruto’s eyes dancing with laughter, the impossible endlessness of the night sky reflected in Neji’s eyes, in his words, in the sky above their heads.
Sasuke needs to take a break. He needs some advice.
Curling up under his blanket, even though it’s the middle of the day, Sasuke shuts his eyes. “Itachi,” he whispers, and his brother, who has been in the forefront of his mind during these turbulent two weeks, is suddenly so close he can almost hear him.
“Sasuke.” His low voice, traces of a smile lingering in his tone. “Did I ever tell you about my first boyfriend?”
Sasuke huffs, wants to say that he doesn’t care about this kind of lovey-dovey stuff, but he’s never passed up a story from his older brother. “Of course you have. Tell it again.”
“If you insist.” Sasuke grinds his teeth but is quiet as Itachi begins. “He was younger than me. I was around your age, you know. Maybe a little younger. Certainly more mature.”
With a growl, Sasuke thumps his pillow. “Be quiet.”
Itachi laughs. “Right, right. So anyway. I was taking this art elective at school, because I thought it’d be an easy A.”
Liar
, thought Sasuke. Itachi could get an easy A in any subject. He was probably taking it to be more well-rounded or something, for college.
“So the first day, I walked in and sat down next to this one kid who was sitting alone. I felt kind of sorry for them -- pretty much every other kid was sitting with their friends. Shisui was taking music classes so I was alone too,” Shisui was Itachi’s best friend. Sasuke couldn’t count the number of times he’d woken up in the middle of the night because the two of them were laughing too loud. “so I figured I might as well strike up a conversation with this person and make a new friend. I sat down and said, just as politely as you please, ‘Hello there.’” Itachi pauses, and Sasuke knows what comes next. “Do you know what he said to me?”
In the darkness, Sasuke grins. “Tell me.”
Itachi laughs, a short, lilting sound. “He said, without even looking up from the ball of clay he was fiddling with, ‘Fuck off, Uchiha.’”
Sasuke shifted under the blankets, letting in a little more fresh air. “He knew who you were?”
“That’s what I said. ‘You know who I am?’ And he looked up at me from under the ridiculously long mop of hair flopping in his eyes -- to be honest, I hadn’t been sure if he was a boy or not up until that point -- and says, slowly and clearly, ‘You’re the kid who thinks he knows everything.’” Itachi is giggling, and Sasuke is too, a little. “So I said, ‘That’s me.’ And he ignored me for the rest of the day. But then, the next day, I sat down next to him again. If looks could kill, Sasuke, I would have been obliterated.”
Sasuke bites his lip. “So then how did you end up together?”
Itachi sighs. “Slowly. Very slowly. Small things -- ‘That’s nice shading, for a know-it-all.’ ‘Well, that’s a pretty good sculpture for someone who likes to blow things up.’” He chuckled. “He would forget to put air pockets in his sculptures, and they would explode in the kiln. I think he did it on purpose, honestly. And then one day, as I was leaving the classroom, he called me over. ‘Look at this,’ he said, and it was a flower pot he’d made out of clay. And it was growing one single flower, a tiny red one that must’ve bloomed that day. ‘For you,’ he said, really gruff, not looking at me, and I touched him --”
“
Touched
him!” Sasuke can’t resist teasing.
“On his
shoulder
, you little pervert! I touched his shoulder and said, ‘Thank you.’ Or I would’ve, but then he was looking at me with those blue eyes and he had this
cute
timidity, like he was afraid I wouldn’t like it, and,” Itachi drew in a shaky breath. “I kissed him instead.”
Sasuke wrinkles his nose, but is secretly happy with the sweetness of the story. “Gross.”
“And he kissed me back.” Itachi taps Sasuke’s forehead lightly. “Now it’s time for bed.”
It was. Sasuke hadn’t noticed how much time had passed.
One night closer to tomorrow
, he thinks, and despite his blushing, he’s sure he can almost hear Itachi laughing as he prepares for bed.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
When Sasuke wakes up, his first thought is,
I’m going to Neji’s today.
His second thought is,
I feel like crap.
This is familiar, the aches and pains. He is used to a breakdown taking its toll on his body, but it’s been so long -- three or four years -- that he’s forgotten. With a groan, Sasuke rolls out of bed and shuffles into the kitchen. Breakfast of tea and toast -- the only things he can stomach right now.
When high school started, he had vowed to leave this behind. This
weakness
. Sasuke had shut himself off from thoughts that might lead to this, thrown himself into his schoolwork, hadn’t even bothered to go through the boxes left moldering in the basement -- boxes holding things that no longer belonged to anyone, but were too valuable to get rid of. And now, despite all his best efforts, somehow Sasuke’s dam of emotions had been cracked. Over the past few days, he’d cried more tears than he had his entire two years in high school.
The tea kettle begins to whistle. Sasuke sighs and tips the steaming contents into a chipped red and white mug. True, he hadn’t cried so much in years, but he hadn’t laughed so hard either.
Is it worth it?
he wonders absentmindedly as he slides two slices of bread into the toaster. Is opening up to others worth the pain that accompanies the memories?
Snuggling into a blanket, Sasuke settles himself at the table with his breakfast and a notebook. Might as well work on his poetry assignment, if he’s going to be in this philosophical mood all morning.
. . .
An hour and a half later, surrounded by eraser shavings and crumpled papers, he finally surrenders. “
Stupid
poetry,” Sasuke growls, slamming down his pencil and rubbing his throbbing temples. “Stupid rhyme scheme. Stupid Shizune-sensei. Stupid assignment. Stupid
new beginnings
.” His head feels hot and wooly, like someone’s stuffed it with cotton. His stomach is churning, his eyes ache, and all he’s managed to come up with is a bunch of words that rhyme with “dawn.” “I need a break.”
Sasuke wonders what Neji is doing right about now. Probably not stupid homework. Maybe he’s reading a play. Or watching the clouds, like that one kid in Sasuke’s gym class who refused to run laps because he was “studying the weather patterns.”
Or maybe he’s wondering what Sasuke is doing right now. Sasuke stands and makes his way into his bedroom. Neji didn’t say specifically what time Sasuke should come over -- maybe they could do homework together.
. . .
Sasuke regrets his decision as soon as he knocks on the door.
Nope,
he thinks,
this is a bad idea
. He turns around to leave, but before he can, the door swings open.
Sasuke winces and quickly spins around. “Hey N--”
There is a girl standing in the doorway. She can’t be much older than twelve. Her hair, like Neji’s and Hiashi’s, falls to her waist, and her milky eyes match theirs as well. What’s different about her is the air of utter indifference that she exudes.
The girl raises an eyebrow, and Sasuke is strongly reminded of Neji. “Who’re you?” She pops a pink gum bubble, and Sasuke tries not to flinch.
“I’m here to talk to Neji. We’re, um, working on a project?” Sasuke tries to act confident, but the scrutiny of the girl’s gaze is intimidating.
Why does everyone have such strange siblings?
he wonders.
“Oh.” The girl pops another bubble and crosses her arms. “
You’re
the one who passed out on the roof.”
Sasuke can feel his cheeks warming. “Yes. I wasn’t feeling well.”
“Mm-hm.” The girl gives him a slow once-over, and Sasuke tries not to fidget.
Who is this girl and why is she so judgemental?
“You can come in,” she says finally, and he lets out a small sigh of relief as he follows her inside.
If Gaara’s house is nice, Neji’s is like a museum. Everything is quiet, untouched and some sort of expensive-looking mahogany. “Take off your shoes,” the girl says over her shoulder, and Sasuke complies.
“You have a lovely house,” he remarks, trying to be polite, and the girl turns to stare at him, narrowing her eyes.
“Don’t touch anything,” she warns. “Daddy will lose his shit.”
“Um.” Sasuke blinks.
Daddy?
“Are you Neji’s cousin?”
“Duh.” The girl pops another bubble. “Are you his boyfriend?”
Sasuke gapes at her. “I --”
“Please.” The girl rolls her eyes. “It’s no secret he’s got a thing for guys.” She leans forward, a mischievous gleam in her eye. “The closed doors, the porn --”
“Hanabi!” Neji is standing in the doorway, glaring at the girl. “What are you telling him?”
“Nothing.” The girl -- Hanabi -- shoots Sasuke a look. “Have fun, you two,” she trills and sweeps out of the room, leaving a frowning Neji and a bright-red Sasuke in her wake.
Neji scowls after her. “Troublemaker,” he mutters. “Sorry about that, Sasuke. She likes to torment guests.”
“Oh.” Sasuke wonders how many guests Neji regularly has over. “It’s fine.”
Neji shrugs. “We could go to my room, now that my uncle knows you’re coming over.” Sasuke hesitates, remembering the low ceilings and thin walls, and Neji must notice his reluctance, because he quickly adds, “Or we could go up to the roof again. It’ll probably be warmer in the daytime.”
So they end up on the roof once more, reclining across a blanket. Sasuke thinks, for a moment, that maybe this is too informal -- and then Neji, eyes closed, smiles. “Mmmm. Peaceful,” he murmurs, and Sasuke stretches out next to him and grins. The sun is warm and Sasuke’s eyelids are heavy. He’s maybe starting to drift off a little when Neji says abruptly, like he’s just thought of it, “Oh. What did Hanabi say to you that made your ears turn bright red?”
“Huh?” Sasuke’s eyes fly open and his startled gaze meets Neji’s curious one. “Uhm… nothing. It was stupid -- nothing.” She hadn’t been telling the truth, right? Of course not. That was ridiculous -- Neji was regal and proud. He would never… Sasuke could feel the blush creeping back up his cheeks. No. He wouldn’t do… that stuff.
Neji’s eyes narrow at Sasuke’s sudden blush. “Was it about the play?”
“No.” Sasuke is slightly relieved, but his curiosity is piqued. “What play?”
“Nothing,” Neji says -- too quickly. Sasuke props himself up on his arm and raises his eyebrows, and Neji looks away, busying himself with smoothing out a wrinkled section of the blanket.
“Does this have anything to do with what you said about the stars yesterday?” Sasuke pushes himself to a sitting position and crosses his legs. “That was Shakespeare, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Neji still isn’t looking at him. “Henry VI.”
Sasuke has a sudden flashback to the clearing. The book Neji was reading then -- “You really like theater, huh?”
Neji’s head snaps up, and an outraged flush spreads across his face. “I didn’t --!”
Sasuke can’t hold back a smile. “That’s really cool. Are you good at acting?”
Neji scowls and looks away. “Of course,” he mutters. “Nobody can play Hamlet like me.” He glances at Sasuke out of the corner of eye, as if gauging his reaction.
Sasuke is biting his lip so hard he thinks it might be bleeding. Unbidden, the image of Neji dressed in Shakespearean clothing popped into his head, and trying to keep a straight face is torture.
Neji is now looking around nervously, even though the two of them are alone on the roof. “Listen,” he hisses in an urgent whisper. “You cannot tell my uncle about this. He would be
beyond
angry if he knew I was ‘wasting my time on that theater stuff.’” His angry air quotations show that he’s obviously parroting his uncle’s words. “He thinks I go to study groups after school, not play rehearsal with Lee and Tenten.”
“Lee and…” Sasuke understands now. “That’s how you three became friends?”
Neji sighs and sags back against the blanket. “Oh, God. Yeah. It was freshman year. I was looking for the Quiz Bowl practice and I accidentally stumbled on the tech crew interest meeting.”
“Accidentally?” Sasuke can’t help himself. “Does the Quiz Bowl team meet in the auditorium?”
“Be quiet.” Neji smacks Sasuke’s arm, not enough to leave a mark but enough to sting. “I’m telling a story here.”
“Right. Sorry, Hamlet.” Sasuke ducks the next slap and shuffles out of range of Neji’s slaps. “Keep going.”
Neji huffs and blows a stray lock of hair out of his eyes, but he’s smiling. “So I walk in, and there’s around ten other kids there. Sitting on the desks, and passing around a bag of potato chips and laughing. And when I walk in they all fall silent, and then one girl--”
“Let me guess. She had Mickey-Mouse hair.”
Neji stares at Sasuke for a second and then starts laughing, hard enough to make his face pink. “I thought that too! Tenten smiled at me and she said, ‘Are you here for the theater interest meeting?’ And I was going to say no, but she was so welcoming...” Neji breaks off, smiling to himself, lost in his memory, and Sasuke feels a strange twinge in his chest. Jealousy? No. That makes no sense. Why would he be jealous? “...so I didn’t say anything. And then Lee jumped up, ran over and grabbed my hands, and then he begged me -- actually,
literally
begged me -- to join them. With tears in his eyes.” Neji shakes his head, grinning. “So what could I do? I sat down, and from then on, three days a week, we meet after school to ‘practice.’” This time, Neji’s air quotes are accompanied by a snicker. “By practice, I mean two seniors and I run our lines and everyone else plays some sort of theater game and eats snacks. Honestly, I have no idea what we’re going to do when it comes time to actually
perform
.” Neji looks so happy, and Sasuke can’t help but mirror his expression.
“What play are you practicing?”
Neji rolls his eyes. “It’s a dumb musical. But there aren’t too many roles, so everyone can be a lead --”
“Musical?” Sasuke’s mouth drops open. “Neji. You can sing?”
Neji stops dead. There is a long moment of silence, and then he says through clenched teeth, “You will not say a word. Not
one word
. To anyone else. Including Naruto.”
Sasuke is silently cracking up. Neji’s face is the color of a tomato. “I’m not kidding. I’ll kill you,” he threatens, and for a moment, the anger in his face reminds Sasuke of Gaara. This only sends him into further hysterics, collapsing onto the blanket, at the image of Neji and Gaara dueting onstage.
“I can’t believe it,” he gasps. “You’re really a
theater nerd
. Wow. My brother once dated a theater nerd. He wore a beret and referred to everything as
tres chic
.”
“I’ve never said that
in my life
,” snaps Neji, but his angry tone cracks and his face softens at the sight of Sasuke’s hysterical fit. “Really, though. Don’t tell anyone about the acting. No one knows except the other theater kids, the drama teacher Gai-sensei, and --” he frowns “-- my cousins. Hinata and Hanabi stopped by the auditorium after school, once, to surprise me. I’m sure it was Hanabi’s idea. And when they saw me in the middle of a really intense game of Bippity Bippity Bop, they were…” Neji exhales, puffing out his cheeks in a way that he probably thinks looks dramatic, but actually reminds Sasuke of a baby chipmunk “... surprised. To say the least. I had to pay Hanabi off to keep her quiet.”
Sasuke shrugs. “Why does your uncle think acting is such a big waste of time anyway? Why would he care?”
Neji flops onto his back. “It’s all about the ‘family image.’ He loves that phrase. ‘You’ve got to maintain the family image, Neji. That’s why you can’t invite friends over on the weekends. That’s why you have to study every spare moment. That’s why you can’t join any clubs I don’t pre-approve.’” Neji covers his face with his hands. “It’s
ridiculous
.”
Sasuke flops down next to him, trying not to let the pity he feels show on his face. “What about your cousins? Don’t they have the same pressures?”
“I guess Hinata does.” Neji brushes his hair out of his face. “She’s never allowed out on weekends, or any other time. I honestly don’t know if she has any friends. She has these two guy friends at school -- admirers, or something, who kind of drag her along after them, but --” Neji’s shoulder is so close that Sasuke can feel his shrug, “I don’t know if she likes them or hates the attention. She’s so quiet. She never really talks to me, or her sister.”
The two of them are silent for a moment. Sasuke is thinking about being alone at school, what it means to have friends, whether he and the timid girl from the hallway that day are more alike than he thought.
“Hey,” says Neji, suddenly. “Would you want to come see the play? I know it’s not for a while, for like two months or whenever Gai-sensei decides we’re ‘ready,’ whatever that means, but it might be cool if you could come see it. If you want to, I mean. Just if you wanted to see it.”
Sasuke is frozen, his heart suddenly beating wildly for no reason. He can feel Neji roll over, presumably to judge his reaction, and his hair brushes over Sasuke’s wrist.
Why me?
he thinks, skin prickling at the light contact.
Why would you want to let me into your life like this? Why not Naruto? Why not anyone else, anyone less screwed up?
Neji fidgets a little, wrinkling the blanket. “Never mind,” he mumbles, “it was a stupid idea. I didn’t mean it.” He moves to stand up. “You’re probably busy, and don’t have time --”
“No!” Sasuke sits bolt upright, and grabs Neji’s forearm before the Hyuga can pull away further. Neji blinks in surprise at the sudden motion, but doesn’t pull away.
“No?” His quizzical stare forces Sasuke to break eye contact and look away, heat creeping up into his cheeks.
“I meant. Um. No. I want to go.” Sasuke becomes suddenly aware of the warmth of Neji’s arm beneath his palm, and quickly lets go. “If you don’t mind, that is.” He sneaks a peek of Neji’s expression out of the corner of his eye, and is surprised to find the boy looking at him wide-eyed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Neji sits back on his heels and aggressively tucks his hair behind his ears. “No, I’m okay. Yes. That would be nice. If you could come.”
“Okay.” Sasuke can feel a grin spreading across his face.
“Okay.” A hopeful smile tugs at the corners of Neji’s mouth, and Sasuke can feel his heartbeat speed up even more.
What?
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you actually going to
sing?
”
“Shut up.”
“Do you have a solo? The audience throws roses on the stage after, right?”
“Shut
up
.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Monday morning, for the first time Sasuke can remember in a long time, he wakes up smiling. There had been something hopeful in his dreams, something that makes him hum over cooking breakfast, something that makes him look up at the sky on the walk to school instead of at the pavement.
It isn’t until he reaches the locker hall that his good mood is disturbed.
No love notes today,
he notes as he slides his math textbook out. Usually he spots them right away: notebook paper folded into the shape of a heart (cliche) and on the inside, some sappy couplet or limerick (cheesy). This isn’t the first time he’s been on the receiving end of such notes, but it is the first time the sender has been so persistent -- twice a week or so a paper heart will flutter out of Sasuke’s locker when he opens it. In the past, simply ignoring the notes was effective enough to make them stop, so Sasuke never reacts when he reads them -- more often, he tosses them in the recycling without bothering to open them. But his “secret admirer” has been quite persistent this time -- “secret” in quotes because a couple of weeks ago, Sasuke happened to be rounding the corner in time to see pink-haired Sakura sliding a note through the door.
She’s nice enough, Sasuke supposes, in a bland kind of way. A lot like every other girl. He’s sick of it, honestly. Unlike seemingly every other guy, Sasuke has never drooled over a girl. They’ve never interested him, and that’s just the way it’s always been.
Sasuke closes the door to his locker, allowing his thoughts to drift back to Neji and the play. Neji had adamantly refused to accept Sasuke’s apology for sneaking up to his roof. “You did nothing wrong.” he insisted. “And besides, my uncle seems not to mind if I say you’re coming over for homework reasons.” Sasuke is wondering whether it would be too pushy to sneak up that night to see Neji, when he’s unexpectedly cornered.
“
You
.” Sakura is bristling, and Sasuke thinks for a moment that she’s mad at him for throwing out the love letters. “You -- you --” her face is bright red, and she’s breathing hard like she ran from one end of the school to the other to get to the lockers.
“Yes…?” Sasuke doesn’t have any time to argue with her for whatever misdemeanor she believes he has committed. He makes a move to step forward. “I have to get to math class --”
Sakura’s eyebrows dive lower and with one swift move, she grasps the front of his shirt and pushes him up against the lockers. Shock hits Sasuke as pain blooms at the tender spot on the back of his head, where he bumped it on Neji’s roof.
What the -- is she going to kiss me?
For a moment, Sakura’s eyes flick to his mouth and her tongue darts out, wetting her lips.
Crap,
thinks Sasuke, as she leans forward.
“Do you have
any
idea what you’ve
done
?” The shaking anger in Sakura’s voice, right in his ear, stuns Sasuke. “You
jerk
-- you must be
blind
--”
“What?” Sasuke is beyond confused. “Are you confusing me with someone else?”
Sakura is practically foaming at the mouth, and she’s close enough for Sasuke to smell her shampoo (cherry blossoms -- really?). “Are you a good actor or just oblivious?” she hisses, with enough venom that Sasuke has to bring his hand up to wipe away her spittle. “You’re so focused on yourself you forget everyone else!”
Oh. Sasuke sighs. “Is this about the love letters?” His hunch is proven correct when Sakura steps back, her eyes wide. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’m just not interested --”
Sakura’s fist shoots out and she punches the lockers right next to Sasuke’s head, with enough force to dent the metal.
Holy shit
, thinks Sasuke.
This girl’s a psychopath
.
“So you knew.” It’s not a question. Sakura’s voice is strained, like she’s trying to hold back tears, and if he hadn’t been worried she was about to pulverize him right then and there in the hallway, Sasuke probably would have tried to ask her why she was so concerned with this -- why did she even like him in the first place, anyway? “You knew all along…?”
“Um… yeah.” Sasuke scratches the back of his head. “Sorry.”
“No. It’s okay.” Sakura isn’t looking at him. “I thought it was a bad idea, but…” she shrugs and tries to smile, but Sasuke can see the sadness in her eyes. “Worth a shot, I guess. Just…” she exhales through her mouth and passes a hand over her eyes, “consider it, okay? The door’s still open.”
“Right.” Sasuke has no intention of ever remotely considering the possibility of reciprocating her feelings, but he nods and ducks away from her, speed-walking down the hall.
I hope lunch isn’t too awkward.
. . .
As soon as Sasuke steps into the cafeteria, all thoughts of Sakura fly right out of his head. Because sitting there, smack-dab in the middle of his lunch table, eating his lunch like he belongs there, is Neji.
“Sasuke!” Naruto is waving from next to Gaara on the bench. “Lee and his friends wanted to eat in the cafeteria because it’s too cold outside today. Come sit down!”
Sasuke moves as if in slow motion towards the table. Neji hasn’t looked up at him, though Tenten and Lee have noticed his approach.
“Hello!” Lee says cheerfully, beaming at Sasuke. “It’s nice to see you again!”
“Mm.” Tenten is giving Sasuke a dirty look. “Right. What a privilege to be in your company again.”
“Uh. Hi.” Sasuke might’ve paid more attention to the hatred in her tone if he hadn’t been distracted by Neji, who made eye contact and quickly looked away.
“So, Naruto said you two went over to Gaara’s house on Friday to work on some project?” The ice in Tenten’s voice makes Sasuke glance up. She’s frowning at Naruto, who is seemingly oblivious, but when Sasuke raises his head she cuts her glare back to him. Sasuke has no clue what to say.
Did I somehow piss off every girl in the school?
“That’s right.” Gaara speaks up from the end of the bench, where he’s a little squished between Naruto and Lee. “I invited them over to work on the oral poetry project for Literature class.”
“Oh.” Tenten’s stink eye lessens, and she offers Sasuke a conciliatory smile. “We three don’t take that class until next semester. What’s it like?”
“It’s okay.” Sasuke glances at Neji, who’s still studying his food as though it has the secret to the universe written on it. “Poetry isn’t too interesting on its own, but it’s really the
performance
that makes it better.” He watches Neji for a reaction, but despite a small flicker in his eyes, the long-haired boy doesn’t even acknowledge that Sasuke is sitting across from him.
“Oh, Tenten, would you, Lee, and Neji like to come over to hear us practice sometime?” Gaara pushed his food around absentmindedly. “Maybe, say Friday? We should all have a first draft by then and be ready to try performing.” He shoots an inquisitive look at Sasuke, checking to make sure it’s all right.
Sasuke hesitates. Performing poetry? In front of an audience of people? He’s about to tell Gaara he’s busy that day when Neji speaks up.
“That would be really interesting.” Neji is speaking to Gaara, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Sasuke. “I would want to see that.” His mouth turns up at the corners, slightly. “We don’t have to bring roses, do we?”
As the rest of the table laughs, Sasuke can feel warmth spreading out in his stomach. Neji isn’t looking away, hasn’t stopped smiling that tiny smile, and Sasuke feels like his heart is doing a little cartwheel, because that smile is for him, and only him, and Sasuke knows it.
“Hey, Tenten.” The surprise in Gaara’s voice draws Sasuke’s attention. “You went to Sand Dune Drama Camp?”
“Huh?” Tenten glances over at Gaara. “What made you -- oh, right. My keychain.” Dangling off Tenten’s schoolbag is a beaming sun keychain, with the words ‘Sand Dune! Where the heat is on!’ emblazoned on it.
“Wow.” Gaara’s lips quirk upward in a smile. “I thought only my siblings were that dorky.”
“What?” Tenten’s eyebrows shoot up. “No way. Your siblings also went to Sand Dune?”
Neji rolls his eyes, and Sasuke bites his lip to hide a grin. “Mind cluing us into this conversation?”
“Oh!” Tenten turns to Neji, eyes shining. “Remember how I went to that summer drama program that had, like,
terrible
costume but great tech theater and set design? And we did
Grease
and Sandy forgot her lines halfway through? And the lake had a weird fungi --”
“Yes.” Neji cuts her off. “So Gaara’s brother went there too?”
“Well, brother and sister.” Gaara nods. “Temari is a bit older than us, so you probably didn’t --”
“WHAT?” Tenten is well out of her seat, and her yell draws the stares of a good chunk of the cafeteria. “No
way
! Temari Subaku is your
sister
??”
Gaara’s surprise seems almost forced. “What? No way…”
Tenten is too caught up in her excitement to notice. “That’s
crazy
! Neji, Lee, did you
hear
him? Gaara, you have to be kidding me. No freaking
way
.”
“Um…” Lee blinks up at her, confused. “Who is this Temari?”
“
You
remember.” Tenten is suddenly very interested in a spot on the table. “The
girl
. The one I told you about.”
Is it Sasuke’s imagination, or is she… blushing?
“Oh.” Neji shoots Sasuke a look, and Sasuke gets the feeling that there’s more to the situation than Tenten is saying, but Gaara interrupts his speculations with a question.
“What’s
Subaku
?”
Tenten grins, suddenly cheery again. “That was her nickname. ‘Cause she was... so tan.”
Again, Sasuke gets the feeling there’s more that Tenten isn’t saying, but he lets it drop. Lee, however, apparently does not have the social tact that everyone else at the table does. “I don’t remember you telling us that, Tenten,” he says with a frown. “You told us that her nickname was “Of the Sand” because she had a reputation for -- Is there something wrong with your eyebrows, Neji?”
Neji had been frantically wiggling his eyebrows at Lee, but when the gaze of the table is suddenly turned on him, he freezes. “What? Um, no, nothing. I just… had an itch.” He makes a big show of scratching at his omnipresent headband.
“
Well
.” Gaara clears his throat. “This has been a fascinating conversation about the wonders of drama camp. Now, if you all don’t mind, could one of you --” he shoots a pointed look at Lee, “explain why there is a man with a very shiny bowl cut and a very scary smile heading this way?”
Before anyone can answer, a cry rings out over the din of the cafeteria: “CHILDREN!” A green blur hurdles across the room and suddenly, Lee, Neji and Tenten are swept out of their seats as a man who looks like a carbon copy of Lee embraces them from behind. “I am so happy you’ve all found new friends! The power of YOUTH truly is extraordinary!”
Sasuke’s mouth has dropped open, and one look at the others reveals them to have a similar reaction.
Who the heck is this guy?
Neji’s face is bright red -- whether from asphyxiation or embarrassment, it’s unclear -- but Lee seems to be enjoying the attention immensely. “Gai-sensei!” he cries. “We are so glad you came to see us!”
Gai-sensei squeezes the three of them one last time and releases them. “Of course, Lee!” he booms, flashing a blinding smile. “Please introduce me!” Before Lee can even open his mouth, he extends a hand to Sasuke. “I’m Maito Gai, the drama teacher. It is lovely to meet you all!”
Gingerly, Sasuke shakes his hand. “Um, hello. I’m Sasuke.” Gai is wearing a green jumpsuit very much like Lee’s, and their bowl cuts and bushy eyebrows seem identical.
Is this his father?
“Ah! Sasuke! It is wonderful to make your acquaintance!” Gai bellows. “And you --” he points to Naruto “-- what is your name?”
“Naruto.” Naruto is staring unabashedly, wide-eyed. “
Jeez
, your hair’s shiny --”
“Why thank you!” Gai turns to Gaara. “What about you?”
“Um, I’m Gaara. Nice to meet you.” Gaara bobs his head, a little awkwardly. There is a pause, as Gai blinks very rapidly at Gaara. “...Are you okay--”
“LEE!” Gai swoons backwards towards an unprepared Tenten, who barely manages to leap out of her seat before he crashes down. “This boy is the one you have told me about! The one whose spirit fills you with youthful energy, the one whose smouldering gaze --”
“Gai-sensei!” Lee squeaks, his face the same brilliant red as a stop sign. “I d-d-don’t think you need to -- I mean, it doesn’t matter --”
“OF COURSE it matters!” Gai thunders. “The first blossomings of young --”
“I just remembered!” Lee blurts out, almost leaping in front of the enthusiastic sensei. “Weren’t you planning to have a full-costume rehearsal today after school, Gai-sensei? We should invite them!”
Gai’s incredibly large eyebrows (rivalled only by Lee’s) shoot up his forehead like tadpoles darting away from the blinding gleam in his eye. “That is a brilliant idea, young Lee!” He leaps out of his seat. “You three!” he barks at Naruto, Sasuke and Gaara. “You must come see the show tonight! It is a masterpiece! My pupils, of course, will be playing three of the leading roles!” He flashes his smile again and Sasuke winces.
He should warn people before attempting to blind them like that
. “All of the actors are talented, of course, and the play -- written by my co-director and eternal rival, Kakashi-sensei, you may know him -- is a masterpiece!”
“Tonight? Are you sure, sensei?” Tenten is anxiously fiddling with some stray hairs that have escaped her buns. “I mean, are we ready to have a real audience?”
“I believe we are, Tenten!” Gai claps a hand on her shoulder. “Absolutely! True theater is taking risks!”
Neji’s mouth is hanging partly open. “Gai-sensei -- we can’t --”
“So then! We will see you in the auditorium at four o’clock, exactly!” Gai strikes a pose. “Not a minute later! I look forward to seeing you!” With a whoop, he skips --actually
skips
-- out of the cafeteria.
There is a silence that lasts at least ten seconds.
“Oh my god,” Tenten mumbles, and stands up. “We have to
warn
everybody. Gai-sensei is going to invite every teacher in the school. Lee, Neji, come on.
Nobody
is ready for this. Crap. Let’s
go.
”
At the edge in her voice, Neji and Lee scramble to their feet. “See you later!” Lee cries to the three bewildered onlookers, and they take off -- Neji spares Sasuke a second glance, and something in his eyes makes Sasuke’s mouth go dry.
Gaara clears his throat. “Does… anyone understand what exactly just happened?”
Naruto sighs and snatches a pickled plum out of Gaara’s lunch. “I think we’re going to see a play,” he says, and pops it into his mouth.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sasuke is embarrassed to admit he doesn’t know
exactly
where the auditorium is, so Naruto offers to meet him at the lockers. Still, at the end of the day Sasuke is surprised to find Naruto leaning against his locker, engaged in an animated conversation with a bored-looking boy with a ponytail.
“And there was, like,
no
way it was gonna end well, so Kiba said ‘Oh yeah? Bet
your
bugs couldn’t --’ Oh hey! Sasuke!” Naruto waves frantically. “Sasuke! Do you know Shikamaru?”
“Yeah, I know him.” The ponytailed boy rolls his eyes. “He’s in my science class. And my Lit class. And my gym class.”
“Right.” Sasuke nods in what he hopes is a casual way. He has absolutely no clue who this boy is.
Maybe I really should start to pay more attention.
“Hello.”
The boy -- Shikamaru -- crosses his arms. “See you later, Naruto.” He turns to leave, but pauses. “Sasuke.” He narrows his eyes for a moment, and Sasuke gets the strange feeling that Shikamaru is trying to tell him something -- and then the moment passes, and he’s gone.
“He’s a nice guy, huh?” Naruto is smiling, oblivious to whatever just passed between Sasuke and Shikamaru. “He’s the smartest person in the whole school. Honestly, if his mom didn’t bug him, I don’t think Shikamaru would even come to school. Anyway --” Naruto grabs Sasuke’s hand “Let’s go! Gaara’s waiting for us.”
Naruto seems to know his way around the school, which is a relief. Sasuke made sure to memorize the location of his classrooms, the bathrooms, the main office and the exits, but he never bothered with the rest of the building. He had thought it would be a waste of time.
“That’s the teacher’s lounge,” Naruto points out as they pass. “Over there is the art classroom -- hey Sai! -- and that’s the tutoring center and the vending machines with the good snacks, and there’s the band practice room and that’s the Latin class with the water stain on the ceiling that looks like a tiger, and over there --” Naruto knows these places, the classrooms and the people, and greetings fly after him as he and Sasuke race down the hall. His charisma, his willing smile, his profuse enthusiasm all seem to shine out at everyone --
not just me
, thinks Sasuke.
He wasn’t taking pity on me the day we met in the cafeteria -- just being his usual outgoing self.
“Gaara!” Naruto skids into the auditorium. “We’re here and ready to -- mmph!”
“Shhh!” Gaara practically sprints to meet them and presses his hand over Naruto’s mouth. “You have to be quiet. They’re doing sound checks.”
The auditorium is mostly empty, but still manages to be chaotic. Kids are swarming over the stage in bizarre clothing, tapping mikes, and the stage lights are flashing on and off crazily like there’s some sort of strobe light dance party going on. Right in the middle of it all is Gai, wearing a black beret tipped dramatically over one eye and holding a megaphone in one hand -- unnecessarily, because even at the back of the auditorium, Sasuke can hear him without it.
“Karin, your costume change will take place
after
-- I said,
immediately after
-- the big ensemble number -- no, no, you do
not
put your microphone on like that! Under your shirt -- the tape needs to --
TENTEN!
Excellent, you’re in position, but you
must
be careful with your skirt, you nearly knocked over Suigetsu --he wasn’t looking down your dress, he’s a gentleman trying to help you with your microphone --”
“This looks like chaos,” Sasuke says with a frown, and Gaara snorts in agreement.
“Oh, absolutely. From what I’ve heard, they’re nowhere near ready. This is going to be a really rough dress rehearsal.”
“Oh, dear. And Gai promised me they’d all worked so hard, too.” Sasuke whirls around at the sound of the unfamiliar voice and finds himself face-to-face with a slouching, masked man, a shock of brilliant white hair sticking up on his head.
“Kakashi-sensei!” Naruto beams. “Why are you here? Do you want to watch the play?”
Kakashi’s one visible eye curves up in a smile. “I would hope so. I wrote it.”
Naruto’s eyes grow big. “Really?” he gasps. “I had no idea you were a writer!”
“I’m not, really. Gai challenged me to write a play for his drama students, and I agreed, mostly to get him to leave me alone during my free periods. So now…” he gestures to the stage. “These students have been roped into performing
Icha Icha the Musical
.”
“Huh?” Naruto scowles. “A play about those pervy books you’re always reading?”
“A
musical adaptation
,” corrects Kakashi. “And unless I’m mistaken, I think it’s time to sit down.” The house lights were beginning to dim.
Gaara gestures to three seats close to the front and Sasuke slides into place next to Naruto. “Who was that man?”
“Just my gym teacher.” Naruto shrugs. “He’s always hanging around with Iruka-sensei. He’s weird, but he can be okay sometimes.”
Sasuke nods, but something else is bothering him. “What did you mean by pervy --”
“Shhh!” Gaara shushes him as the curtain begins to rise. “It’s starting!”
A single spotlight lights up the stage. Standing there, wearing a ridiculously bright, low-cut dress, is Tenten. Her hair is loose down her back, and she’s fluttering a fan in front of her face.
“Dang,” whispers Naruto. “Tenten is actually
hot
.”
Sasuke scowls. He hears a soft intake of breath from Gaara’s seat, and his scowl deepens.
Figures. Even Gaara is attracted to her.
He glances over at the redhead, expecting him to be gazing admiringly at Tenten, but is startled by the look on Gaara’s face. He looks… sad.
“Shou! Where are you?” Tenten’s cry startles Sasuke out of his thoughts. “I’ve been waiting for half an hour!”
“Sorry, Nanami.” A tall, spiky orange-haired boy steps out onstage, wearing a suit and carrying a bouquet of fake flowers. “I’ve been… busy.”
“I know you’ve been busy!” Tenten slaps him with her fan, in an obviously fake pantomime of violence (the boy takes a moment to react). “You’ve been spending your days with every girl in the village. Well, I’m sick of it!” She strikes a pose, and the music begins.
Sasuke doesn’t know what exactly is
supposed
to happen after that, but this is what he sees on the stage: Tenten -- or Nanami, Sasuke reminds himself -- sidling up to the orange-haired boy, dancing around him and singing about love and betrayal and obsession. After a couple minutes of sickly sweet lines about things like the thorns of roses and poisonous love, the song finally ends with Tenten… for lack of a better word,
launching
herself at the boy. He catches her with an
oomph,
and lifts her up, starting to twirl her in the air - but the sharp edge of Tenten’s heels catch on the lower button of his suit, causing him to flinch back from the offending stilettos.
The boy drops Tenten, and she falls to the floor with a
thump
. She skids backwards across the floor, heels making a sharp screeching noise against the stage. Sasuke might not like Tenten, (or really even know her), but he can’t stop himself from wincing in sympathy.
The room holds its breath. Then -- “We’re o-
ver
!” Tenten ends the song with a flourish, throwing her arms out, even as she topples awkwardly to the side.
There’s a beat of silence, then the auditorium erupts in thunderous applause. Sasuke feels… a grin, tugging at the edge of his lips, and claps along bemusedly.
The next scene begins with
Neji
, in ripped jeans and a gray hoodie, slouching on the side of the stage. Neji looks up, and his demeanor is casual, confident -- his hair is tied back, and even though Sasuke’s just a simple member of the audience watching Neji, he feels like he could trace the lines of his cheekbones through the air. Neji’s eyes speak of endless horizons, of the bottomless ocean, but still glitter like stars in the sky, unreachable and beautiful. Sasuke feels close enough to Neji to brush the remaining strands of hair from the sides of his face that escaped from his ponytail, to try to reach for those moonlit eyes --
Sasuke shakes himself. Tenten is posturing on the other side of her stage, bemoaning her lost love -- the orange-haired boy… Shou? -- and sighing grandly. Sasuke’s eyes are inevitably drawn back to Neji, a moth to a flame, when he steps forward. Tenten falls silent, and Sasuke knows it’s because Neji
commands
attention -- every eye in the room is drawn to him, every person holds their breath. He speaks, and his voice is smooth and musical, the low baritone sending shivers down Sasuke’s spine. Neji as a person is closed off and quietly kind in his own way; Neji as an actor takes his buried qualities and flings them to the air like confetti, falling over awestruck audience members in multicolored flashing pieces.
Sasuke blinks his way back to the play. Tenten is fluttering her eyelashes coyly, twirling her hair around her fingers as she giggles at something Neji is saying.
“You are as beautiful as the orange-hued sunset sparkling over the waves,” The boy recites stiffly, mouth twisting in a near-grimace. A stifled laugh ripples through the crowd. Sasuke doesn’t
think
that that’s
exactly
how the line is supposed to be delivered, but this play so far seems like romantic satire, anyway. Sasuke hopes that Kakashi had written the play with the intention of making it a parody.
“Oh, you are too blind -- kind, I mean,” Tenten replies coquettishly. “Oh, how the miraculous rays of sunlight from… um... heaven...” A pause. Tenten flicks her fan in front of her face, “...do shine upon me tonight! My heart, my love!” She snaps her fan shut with a click.
Neji steps closer to her, his pale hand fluttering up to settle on her cheek. “I...” he says quietly. There’s a stretch of loaded silence, heavy and charged, before Neji brings his head down --
Neji’s and Tenten’s kiss is searing. It scorches Sasuke’s insides, cutting open his abdomen like a blade of fire. Tenten’s hands lock themselves around Neji’s neck. Their kiss is something sharp and stinging; Sasuke feels hot all over for a second, like he’s been hit by a bolt of lightning that withers into little volts of charged electricity dancing on his skin. Sasuke can’t look away -- then Tenten breaks away, and Sasuke can suddenly breathe again.
Tenten leans her forehead against Neji’s, and Sasuke doesn’t feel hot all over anymore -- instead, he just feels cold, like he’s been dunked in ice cold water and is coming up, dripping wet and shivering. His hands are clammy. He grips his forearms so hard that he leaves white finger-shaped marks on them.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sasuke sees Gaara turn his head, giving him a questioning look. Sasuke shakes his head mutely.
I’m fine,
he tries to communicate. Gaara gives him a long stare, obviously not satisfied, but then turns back to the play.
After the kiss, Sasuke watches the play with a sort of disconnected, clinical view -- he can’t look anymore at Neji without seeing Tenten kissing those pale lips and threading her fingers through that long hair, and he can’t look at Tenten without seeing Neji leaning down, fingers caressing her cheek --
He settles for staring at a spot in the back, on the wall, where he can only see Neji and Tenten as blurs in his peripheral vision. Sasuke detachedly notes the (lackluster) plot - Neji and Tenten meet up for passionate rendezvous a couple more times (Sasuke averts his eyes, but they don’t end up kissing again) and there’s a conflict with a jealous ex-lover, etc. -- Tenten forgets her lines a couple more times -- but Sasuke doesn’t really pay much attention. When it’s time for the cast to take their bows, Sasuke claps halfheartedly with the rest of the audience. Naruto is whooping loudly next to him, and when he notices Sasuke looking at him, he turns and gives him a blinding grin. The corners of Sasuke’s mouth tweak up a little at that. Naruto’s enthusiasm for life is infectious, and even though Sasuke feels like he’s been dragged through cold slippery mud, he can’t help but be drawn into the boy’s warmth.
Naruto grabs Sasuke’s arm and pulls him towards the stage. “Come on, Sasuke, let’s go congratulate them! Gaara, you too, come on, I know you want to talk to Lee --”
Sasuke feels like he’s underwater, Naruto’s words flowing around him in slow-motion, and slipping away into the depths before he can grab at them. He doesn’t register the rest of what Naruto says, just briefly notices Naruto letting go of his arm to pull Gaara to the stage, the rest of the meager crowd dispersing and heading to the exits behind him. He looks up, and the first thing he sees is Neji, strands of hair coming loose from his ponytail, milky eyes meeting Sasuke’s. Neji’s eyes brighten, and he starts walking towards him -- but Sasuke only gets an anxious, skittering feeling down his body.
He doesn’t want to talk to Neji -- no, he
can’t
talk to Neji, he can barely look at him without getting an indecipherable sinking feeling, weighing him down like a stone, in the pit of his stomach. He subconsciously takes a step back, creates distance, and Neji stops suddenly. “Sasuke?” Sasuke hears him say, as if from a great distance, as if Neji is calling for Sasuke above the water, but he is only sinking further.
Sasuke swallows heavily. “I-- I have to go,” he says stiffly, forcing his legs to move, to carry him away from Neji, out of the suffocating auditorium, out of his own murky subconscious. “Sorry,” he adds quietly, because the air is stifling, and he feels like it needs to be said. To whom, he doesn’t know. “Sorry.”
Neji doesn’t move as Sasuke brushes past him, and Sasuke doesn’t stop and look back until the front doors of the school swing closed behind him. The cool night air feels cleansing, in a way, and Sasuke breathes in deeply, closing his eyes.
There are a few quiet moments where Sasuke is by himself. He can hear the night winds rustling the leaves, the soft buzzing of the lights in the buildings around him. It’s soft, and it’s peaceful. Sasuke feels the tension of the day leaving him, feels his muscles relax into the crisp air --
The door bangs open violently. Sasuke spins around, startled, and finds that Tenten, no longer in costume but with her hair still loose over her shoulders, is stomping angrily down the steps leading to the pavement.
“
No,
I’m not
overreacting,
” she spits into the night, and it takes Sasuke a moment to realize she’s not talking to him -- there’s a glowing cellphone pressed to her ear -- and another moment to realize that she hasn’t even seen him, standing out in the darkness. “No -- I don’t --
what?
Are you serious? Am
I --
okay, well, what do
you
think? In your
expert
opinion, please tell me,
why
am I confused? Huh? Maybe it’s my fucking
dysfunctional family life
.”
Sasuke is inching towards the door. Clearly he’s not supposed to be here, not supposed to be hearing these things -- he is briefly reminded of Neji’s house and its thin walls -- and then Tenten yanks the phone away from her ear. “
I HATE YOU!!
” she screams at the device, hurls it into the bushes, and plops down on the steps.
Okay. Definitely time for Sasuke to leave.
But as soon as he reaches the door, his fingers closing around the handle, he hears it. Soft sobs, coming from the hunched-over form of Tenten, curled into herself in the dark.
Again, Sasuke is reminded of Neji and the day they first met, and the thought of those quiet, hoping-not-to-be-heard tears is what makes him release the handle and turn around.
“Are you okay?”
Tenten jerks up. “Oh my god.”
Sasuke kneels, holding his hands up to show he means no harm. “It’s fine. I’m just… I just want to help.” He hesitates. “But if you’d rather be alone, then --”
“No.” Tenten shuffles her feet -- normal sandals, no longer her awkward heels -- and draws in a shaky breath. “I -- can I just say something to you?” She tilts her head, and Sasuke catches the reflection of the lights in the trails of tears on her face.
“S-Sure.” Sasuke swallows, audible in the silence. “If you don’t mind -- me being a stranger, I mean --”
“It’s actually better this way.” Tenten smiles sadly into the night. “If you were someone I knew, it would be awkward.” She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a whoosh.
Sasuke stays quiet. Whatever she’s about to say is obviously important to her.
“So -- my parents are
assholes
.” Tenten’s voice doesn’t crack, but it does wobble a little. “They’re probably the least accepting people you’ve ever -- okay, that’s unfair. But they’re pretty close-minded. About everything. We’ve been going to the same
barber
shop for, like six generations.” She laughs, but it’s not a humorous laugh. “And when I told them --” she catches her breath. “When I -- I told them I’m -- I like girls --”
“Girls?” Sasuke should not be interrupting, he knows, but he’s not sure he heard her right. “As in,
like-
like --”
“As in I’m gay, okay?” Tenten blows the bangs out of her eyes with a huff, and looks him right in the eye. “I like girls. As in
like
-like. Like, for
real
.”
“Oh.” Sasuke has no idea how he’s supposed to be reacting to this, but the first thing that pops into his head is the image of her rolling over and burying her face in Neji’s stomach, of her braiding Neji’s hair, of her
kissing
him onstage --
So they’re not dating.
“And I told my parents, like…” Tenten rolls her shoulders back. “A month ago? And they were, well,
less
than enthusiastic. ‘It’s just a phase, honey,’ ‘High school can be difficult, we know you’re just trying to figure out who you are,’ ‘Maybe you should talk about this with someone --’ Like I don’t fucking know what
that
means.” She sighs and slumps forward. “I mean, they didn’t kick me out of the house. They didn’t send me away to a freaking boarding school for nuns, or anything. I just wish they’d be more… supportive. Like today. I told my parents we were having a dress rehearsal today, and they practically fell over themselves to come up with excuses. So… I don’t know. I called my dad to ask why he’s been avoiding me lately, and I kinda, um, lost it.” She laughs again, only this time it sounds more like a sob. “I don’t know what’s going on, okay? My friends don’t even know. I didn't tell them. I wanted my family to know first, and now I just --” she breaks off, her shoulders shaking as she’s wracked with sobs. “What if they react like that? Like they don’t even know me? I don’t think --” Tenten’s wiping furiously at the tears streaming down her cheeks, but they aren’t stopping, “ -- I don’t think I can handle that. Just everyone I care about just fucking
disappearing
.”
And Sasuke isn’t thinking -- he’s just moving, reaching out, wrapping his arms around Tenten, and she leans into him gratefully, even though they’re practically strangers, even though this is weird and the pavement is digging into Sasuke’s thigh and Tenten smells like cardboard and theater makeup and she was kissing Neji less than an hour ago and Sasuke’s older brother is no longer there, is not there to hold him the way he is holding Tenten right now, and maybe Sasuke is crying a little bit too.
They stay like that for a long time, two kids more alone and more alike than anyone else might think, and Tenten is the first to pull away, sniffing and wiping at her nose. “Sorry. I don’t usually just… like, dump all that on random strangers, you know.” She laughs a little in the darkness, but this time, there’s more humor in it. Sasuke gives her a half-hearted smile and quickly brushes away his own tears.
“It’s okay. I kind of get it. Not everything, I mean, I have no idea what you’ve had to go through, but… yeah. I’m sorry. It’s not fair.” He bites his lip. “It really isn’t.”
“I know.” Tenten is quiet for a moment. “Anyway, thank you. For just… listening.”
Sasuke shrugs. “It’s the least I could do.”
A pause. Then:
“I’m glad you were here, Sasuke. It’s Sasuke, right?”
“Yeah... Tenten.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“So… I’ll see you, I guess. At school.”
“Oh. Right. We have school tomorrow.”
Tenten laughs at Sasuke’s dismayed expression. “Cheer up. At least you have your friends.”
Oh. Sasuke blinks at her. How strange, to think that two weeks ago, he
didn’t
really have friends.
“I mean -- I’m your friend!” Tenten quickly adds, misinterpreting his sudden change in expression. “And Neji, and Naruto, and Gaara, and Lee, too -- though he’s kind of friends with everyone --”
“No, no, I’m fine, that’s not it.” Sasuke holds up his hands in mock surrender, trying to hide his smile. “It’s just that… you’re right. It’s really nice to have friends.”
Tenten looks at him for a moment and then grins. “See you around, Sasuke,” she says, and leans forward. Her lips brush his ear. “Thank you,” she whispers, so softly that Sasuke doesn’t hear it so much as feel the vibrations across his skin, and then Tenten pulls back just far enough to plant a kiss on his cheek --
and the door flies open. “Hey, Tenten, are you out h--”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sasuke jerks back, almost tumbling off the stairs backwards, and flinches away from the figure in the doorway, silhouetted against the light spilling out. For a frozen moment, while Sasuke’s eyes adjust to the sudden brightness, nobody moves. And then the figure speaks.
“Tenten. Gai wants to see you.” Neji’s voice sends ice water coursing through Sasuke’s veins. “Something about your props.” His tone is frosty, to say the least. He sounds
furious
.
Tenten hears it too. “I’m coming, hold on.” She scrambles to her feet, shoves her hair behind her ear, snatches her phone out of the bush, and pauses to stretch out a hand to Sasuke. “Come on.”
Sasuke gratefully accepts her proffered hand, glad to have something to focus on besides Neji, whose gaze is boring a hole into his forehead. “Thanks.”
“I gotta go.” Tenten jerks her head towards Neji. “Bye.”
“Bye.” Tenten is looking at him expectantly, and for a moment Sasuke blanches.
Does she want me to kiss her back…?
“Um. Can I have my hand back, please?” Tenten raises her eyebrows, and Sasuke realizes that he’s still gripping her hand.
“Oh. Sorry.” He quickly releases her hand and blushes. Good thing it’s dark. He turns away into the darkness as Tenten’s footsteps recede and the door clicks shut, and only when he’s sure she’s gone does he release the breath he’s been holding since Neji had opened the door.
“Sasuke.” Sasuke nearly leaps out of his skin. Neji’s soft footfalls in the darkness had been hidden by his own heartbeat roaring in his ears, and now the Hyuga boy is standing right next to him. “Just what, exactly, were you doing out here?”
“Um, what?” Neji is so close to Sasuke he’s practically on top of him. Weirded out, Sasuke takes a step back. “Did I… do something wrong?”
Neji is scowling. No, scratch that, he’s
glowering
. “Nothing at all,” he spits, and flicks his hair over his shoulder, somehow managing to make the simple gesture look menacing. “Whoever Tenten chooses to hook up with is none of
my
business.”
It takes Sasuke a moment to process that. Then it takes him another moment to reprocess it. “Wh-- you-- I j-- I di-- wh--
what?
”
“Forget it. Forget all of it.” Neji turns away slightly. “I don’t care if Tenten -- just forget it. It doesn’t matter.” He draws in a deep, shuddering breath, and Sasuke sees his hands clench. And then -- only then, seeing the taunt strain of muscles in the pale inside of his wrist, standing there in the dark next to this boy --
then
he realizes.
Sasuke is an
idiot
.
“Neji,” he says hurriedly, and reaches out to touch the boy’s shoulder. Neji flinches away, and Sasuke shrinks back in response but keeps talking. “I’m sorry -- I think there was a misunderstanding. I don’t -- I mean, Tenten and I -- we’re not dating.” Neji’s hiss of breath is audible, but Sasuke plows forward. “I wouldn’t do that. I --” his breath catches in his throat, and his voice cracks a little, for some reason “-- I know you care for her. I know you, um, know her better than I ever could. She deserves someone like you. I wouldn’t want to get in the way between you two.”
A silence ensues, one that rivals the silence of the vacuum of space. Sasuke is pretty sure Neji isn’t breathing.
Should I not have said it like that?
he wonders.
Should I have not told him that -- that I understand he likes Tenten? Should I have told him that she’s a lesbian?
“Sasuke.” Neji’s voice is ragged and raw, like he’s been screaming. “Please. Leave.”
Sasuke blinks and takes a step back as the words and his accompanying emotions hit him. “Oh. Okay.” His heart feels like it’s being wrung out in his chest.
Stop it
, he tells himself.
He just needs to be alone right now
. Sasuke takes another step back and reaches for the door, but pauses. “Sorry,” he says in a small voice, for the third time that night, and steps back inside, leaving Neji standing like a statue and staring off into the dark.
. . .
The next morning, Sasuke finds a singular note in his locker. He’s exhausted, half-asleep on his feet after a long night spent lying awake in bed, replaying his conversations with Neji and Tenten over and over in his head, and he almost tosses it in the trash like every other note he’s received, but the memory of his conversation with Sakura the day before makes him pause.
The note is small and folded into a square, unlike the usual elaborate heart origami they usually arrive in. For a moment Sasuke wonders if it’s from Neji.
Yeah, right,
he thinks, and unfolds it.
I doubt you’ve been reading all of these notes,
the note says, in carefully loopy cursive.
but this is the last one. I’ll explain that you’re not interested. You don’t deserve him, anyway.
Sasuke reads the note over three times, but he’s still puzzled. Sakura certainly must’ve left this in his locker, but he can’t make head nor tail of it. Who was she explaining to? Who was this “he?”
With a sigh, Sasuke crumples the note and tosses it in the trash bin at the end of the hall. It’s probably just some stupid miscommunication.
If Sakura decides to confront me again, I’ll just explain that she’s mixed up.
With this decision, Sasuke marches off to class, and succeeds in shoving the strange case of the notes out of his mind altogether.
. . .
That afternoon, Sasuke automatically migrates to the table in the cafeteria where he’s been sitting with Naruto. Only when he’s sitting, and Naruto is going into details about the test he failed during third period (“It was like she made the questions on purpose to trick us! And we didn’t even, like,
learn
half that stuff!”), does Sasuke realize what he’s done. When did he stop wanting to be alone? What happened to lunch in the hallway, avoiding everyone else?
“Hey.” Gaara slides into the seat next to Naruto and begins to unpack his lunch. “Are you two still coming over after school today to work?”
“Yeah, sure.” Naruto slurps up a noodle. “Are you coming, Sasuke?”
“I guess.” Sasuke is distracted by the bobbing Mickey-Mouse buns he’s suddenly spotted in the cafeteria’s crowd.
“Oh yeah.” Naruto frowns. “Sakura’s been acting weird lately. I’m not sure where she’s been eating lunch. Did either of you two seen her today?”
Before either of them can respond, Tenten plunks down next to Sasuke, and Lee slides into the seat next to Gaara (Sasuke doesn’t miss the way his ears go red as he sits).
“Hey guys, thanks for showing up to the rehearsal yesterday.” Tenten grins at each of the boys in turn, but her eyes linger a little longer on Sasuke, and -- is it his imagination? -- her cheeks are a soft pink. “That was really nice of you.”
“It was no problem.” Naruto has a strange look on his face as he answers Tenten, almost like he’s frowning at her. “You were all, um, pretty good.”
“That is kind of you to say, but,” Lee sighs deeply, “we still have much to work on. Though my marvelous friends Tenten and Neji were quite magnificent. Would you like to attend our next practice?” He brightens visibly at the prospect, and glances shyly at Gaara.
Sasuke grips the edge of the table and tries to swallow around the sudden lump in his throat. “Where’s Neji? You two aren’t eating lunch with him?” He tries to sound casual, but his voice comes out a little hoarse.
Tenten rolls her eyes. “He’s been avoiding us all day, for some reason. Well, avoiding
me
.” She shoots an accusing look at Lee. “You two were chatting it up outside Chem class, but when I showed up, Neji took off like he’d seen a ghost.” She cuts her gaze to Sasuke. “What did you guys talk about last night?” she asks, softly, in a way that makes Sasuke think she doesn’t want to know the answer.
“Nothing.” Sasuke looks down at the table and focuses on his lunch. He can feel Tenten’s gaze, but he stays silent. He can’t tell her that Neji has a crush on her. It would ruin their friendship -- and break Neji’s heart.
Break his heart.
Sasuke clenches his hands into fists and tries not to grit his teeth in anger. This is so
stupid
. Why’d Neji have to go and fall for
her?
“Ahem.” Gaara interrupts the silence by clearing his throat. “Lee. I’d love to go to your practices. Maybe sometime next week? We have to work on a writing project this week after school.”
“Yes!” Lee grins and scoots a little closer to Gaara. “That would be wonderful! Right, Tenten? I’m certain that you and Neji will put aside your problems to give the musical one hundred and ten percent!” He pumps his fist and nods vigorously.
Naruto slurps up a mouthful of noodles. “How do you have the time to do all this stuff, Bushy Brows? The musical and all that random training after school and your homework too?”
“Simple! I do my homework in the bathroom between classes!”
“Seriously? Why don’t you just do it at night?”
“A good night’s sleep is vital to a healthy body and mind!”
As the two of them begin an argument about the amount of sleep necessary for a day of school, Sasuke glances up and catches Tenten’s eye. She quirks an eyebrow at him.
Can I talk to you alone?
she mouths.
Sasuke shrugs. She squints at him, and he sighs.
Later,
he mouths back.
When?
Tenten holds up her hands, palms up.
After school. By the library.
Sasuke gestures, and Tenten nods. With a sigh of relief, he glances at the others to see if they noticed the nonverbal conversation, and finds Gaara staring at him. The redhead quickly looks away, but Sasuke sees the way he bites his lip and flicks his eyes to Tenten.
Sasuke huffs and returns to his food, tuning into Naruto and Lee’s conversation (which is now, inexplicably, about pork cutlet bowls). This is too much drama to deal with. No wonder he usually eats alone.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Sasuke manages to evade Gaara and Naruto after school by heading to the library, with a hurried promise to meet them outside the school. Gaara gives him a look, but says nothing, and Sasuke expresses his gratitude with a nod.
He’s barely set foot in the library when Tenten corners him. “Come on.” Grabbing him by the arm in a grip that rivals Naruto’s steel clamp, she drags him over to the reference section (completely deserted, like it is every day except finals week).
“Listen.” Even though the library is mostly devoid of people, Tenten still glances around nervously and leans in close. “Neji said something strange to me this morning. About you.”
“M-me?” Sasuke is caught completely off-guard. “What?”
“He said that you and I, and I quote, ‘shouldn’t worry about him.’” Tenten draws air quotes with her fingers. “What were you talking about last night after I left? He seemed pretty upset when he left the theater, and now this?”
“Um.” Sasuke swallows. “What exactly did he mean by ‘don’t worry’? He didn’t say anything else?”
Tenten grits her teeth. “If I knew what it meant, you think I’d be asking you? I’d interrogate Neji if I could find him, but he must’ve left school early or something. So spill.” She prods him in the chest. “What were you talking about?”
Sasuke is pretty sure this is what is known as a
dilemma
. On one hand, Neji will probably be furious with Sasuke for telling Tenten about how he feels. About how he’s in love with her. On the other hand, Tenten might know the best way to turn him down gently, and explain why she’s not interested. But if he tells Tenten the truth, Neji might never want to talk to him again. But Tenten might keep her source of information a secret. But then again, she might not, and Neji might be suspicious of him anyway. Sasuke’s thoughts are darting back and forth like crazy, the way they do when he’s trying to solve a math problem or figure out a riddle -- only this time there’s no right answer.
“Well?”
But there might be a wrong one that will work just as well.
“Neji said that he thought I had a crush on you,” Sasuke finally answers. “And… that I shouldn’t get my hopes up, because I don’t really know you, and you… don’t seem interested in me.”
Tenten’s eyes go wide and she backs up. “Seriously? He thinks
you’re
in love with
me
?”
Sasuke feels mildly insulted. “Um, yeah. What’s wrong?”
She’s laughing, one hand covering her mouth. “Nothing, nothing, it’s just… I didn’t think Neji was so
dense
.”
Sasuke feels slightly more insulted, even though Tenten isn’t criticizing him. “Well, it’s not impossible, is it?” he defends.
Tenten freezes. “Wait. Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Think you have a
crush
on--”
“No! Of course not!”
“
Good.
Oh jeez, you really scared me there for a second.”
Sasuke huffs, momentarily blowing his bangs away from his face. “Like you didn’t
just
tell me you’re a -- mmph!”
“Shut
up
,” Tenten hisses, pressing her hand over his mouth. “Nobody knows yet, okay?”
Sasuke’s eyes widen. “Mnnbdhy?”
“What?” She releases him.
“Nobody? You mean, nobody at this school? Only your parents, and -- and me?”
“Uh, yeah.” Tenten’s cheeks are a light pink. “So, can you, like, not tell anybody? I mean
anybody at all
?”
Sasuke blinks in surprise. “O-of course. I won’t say anything.”
“Not to Naruto? Or Gaara? Or whoever else you’re friends with?” Tenten presses.
“Nobody, I swear.” Sasuke pauses. “I don’t… know too many people anyway.”
“What?” Tenten gives him an extremely skeptical look. “After, what, two years, your only friends are the friendliest guy in school and his sidekick who wears too much eyeliner?”
Sasuke coughs a little. “It’s not eyeliner, it’s just bags under his eyes --”
“Whatever!” Tenten fires back. “That’s ridiculous, Sasuke. No, worse -- it’s pathetic.” She studies him for a moment and then sighs. “Great. Just great. Thanks a lot for telling me that. You just made my life a lot more complicated.”
“What? Why?”
“Because.” Tenten flashes a blinding grin. “Now I’m going to have to be your friend. M’kay?” Without waiting for an answer, she hooks her arm through Sasuke’s and tows him out the door to the library. “And that means I’m going to walk you home.”
“Um--” Sasuke struggles to free himself. “Wait-- hold on -- I’m not --”
“Sasuke!” Naruto is standing in the lobby next to Gaara, beaming at him. “That took you forever --” he catches sight of Tenten and the wattage of his smile is lessened slightly. “What’re you doing?”
“Oh!” Tenten smiles and tugs Sasuke a little closer. “I’m walking him home -- but are you three going somewhere?”
“Yeah. Gaara’s house.” Naruto jabs a thumb towards the redhead standing passively beside him. “And we need to work on a project, it’s kinda important --”
“You can come.” Gaara’s voice startles all three of them. He toes the floor, avoiding Naruto’s shocked look. “I wouldn’t mind. And my siblings might be happy to see you.” He glances up at Tenten. “You know Temari, right?”
Tenten squeezes Sasuke’s arm a little harder and he winces in pain. “Yep!” she squeaks in a too-high voice. “I know her!”
“Great.” Gaara turns and heads for the doors. “Let’s go, then.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Gaara’s house is… louder than Sasuke remembers. Maybe it’s due to the shouting match in the living room.
“It says
right in the manual
that you need to attach strings to the metacarpophalangeal joint!” shouts Kankuro, whose purple eyeshadow blends beautifully with the way his face is flushed bright red with anger. “It’s just how you
do
it, if you don’t want shitty control mechanics!”
“I have never, not once in my entire life, needed to pilot the metacarpophalangeal joints of my puppet.” Kankuro’s redheaded opponent is calm and composed, entirely occupied with picking the lint off his black-and-red jacket. “The distal interphalangeal joint is fine. Perfect motor skills aren’t worth the hassle of untangling the individual joint strings.” Casually, he nudges at the wooden puppet sprawled in the center of the room with a sandaled foot. “Not that there’s much that can salvage this hopeless mess.”
“Okay, first of all --” Kankuro begins, and then catches a glimpse of the awkward group standing in the doorway -- stone-faced Gaara, Naruto bouncing on his toes, Tenten squeezing Sasuke’s arm and looking around the fancy living room goggle-eyed, and Sasuke, trying to make himself as small as possible and failing miserably. He fidgets under Kankuro’s wide-eyed stare, and Tenten jabs him painfully in the ribs -- intentionally or not, he can’t tell.
The redhead boy notices them next. “Friends of yours, Kankuro?” he drawls in a lazy way that makes Sasuke want to punch him.
Kankuro ignores him. “Gaara, holy shit. You brought a
lady
!” He crosses the room, having snapped instantly back into the flirty big brother role that Sasuke is all-too-familiar with, and takes Tenten’s hand in his own. “You are far too pretty to be hanging out with my weirdo brother.” He makes to plant a kiss on the back of her hand. “What’s your name, lovely madame?”
Tenten’s expression is like… well, Sasuke wouldn’t be too surprised if she were to stage-slap Kankuro right here and now. Instead, she yanks her hand away from him and gives him a glare of death. “My
name
,” she says icily, “is none of your business,
Kankuro
.”
Kankuro is surprised, at first, and then recognition slowly dawns across his face. “I know you!” he cries, tossing his hands up. “From Sand Dune! You did that thing in the talent show with the knives --”
“A-
hem
.” Gaara’s annoyed cough interrupts him. “Perhaps you could continue this reunion another time? We have a project to work on.”
Kankuro winks exaggeratedly at Gaara. “Riiight. Gaara, you
dog
. Every day it’s someone new, huh?” He reaches over and ruffles Gaara’s hair, to his brother’s obvious annoyance. “Don’t mind us, we won’t get in the way. Right, Sasori?” Kankuro grins at the redhead boy kneeling over the puppet, who responds with a half-hearted shrug.
“Be quiet.” Gaara shoves Kankuro’s hand away and tries in vain to fix his hair. “Come on, guys. Pay no attention to the idiot in the living room.” He pushes past his brother and heads for the stairs, and Tenten quickly makes pace to follow him.
“Oof, harsh, little bro.” laughs Kankuro. “I mean, Sasori can’t
help
it.” Sasori rolls his eyes as Kankuro, chuckling, plops down next to him on the rug.
Sasuke tags along after Gaara, heading towards the stairs, but something makes him pause and glance back at Sasori. There’s something strangely familiar about the redheaded boy…
As if sensing his lingering gaze, Sasori looks up and catches Sasuke’s eye. The two of them stare at each other for a moment, and then Sasori’s gray eyes widen in some silent recognition. “Hey --”
“Sasuke, come
on
!” Tenten is tugging Sasuke’s arm, and Sasuke quickly breaks eye contact and follows Tenten up the stairs. But he can still feel Sasori’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his neck as he climbs.
. . .
“If you’re going to stay here, could you
please
be quiet?” cries Gaara exasperatedly the third time Naruto interrupts him and Sasuke to ask about snacks. “Please. Both of you.”
“What did I do?” Tenten protests. She’s sprawled across the floor with her notebook, working on something that looks suspiciously like doodling.
“You’re humming.” Gaara sighs, slides his notebook over into Sasuke’s lap, and stands up. “Look, I’ll go make some snacks, okay? We all need a break.”
As soon as the door clicks closed, Naruto is practically on top of Sasuke, trying to read the papers in his lap. “What’cha working on? Did you write the poem thing? Can I read it? Pleeeeassseee??”
“Get off.” Sasuke elbows him out of the way. “We didn’t get far, because you keep interrupting. We only have a couple lines.”
“Oh, you have Shizune?” Tenten sits up. “Is the class hard? I heard you have to write and perform a slam poem.”
Sasuke shrugs. “I don’t like public speaking, but the class is fine.”
“What’s your poem about?” Tenten climbs onto the bed and peers over Sasuke’s shoulder. “‘New beginnings’ -- that’s nice.”
“Yeah.” Sasuke is suddenly embarrassed, but Tenten snatches the paper before he has a chance to hide it.
“‘New Beginnings,’”she reads, and clears her throat. “The dawn, your heart, silence is broken. Small parts of the unspoken gone, they depart -- at the first sign of violence, it’s through.
Always the worst line to draw in the sand: between the old and the new.”
There is a long pause. Sasuke’s face is burning. He somehow feels naked, hearing the words out loud.
Tenten lowers the paper, face glowing. “Did you write that? Really?”
“Well, me and Gaara.” Sasuke snatches the paper back. “It - it’s just a first draft.”
“It’s
good
!” hoots Naruto, and Tenten nods vigorously. “What inspired you?”
“Um. The assignment?” Sasuke is shuffling papers around, anything to keep from looking at the two of them. “I don’t know, I mean, Gaara helped a lot --”
“I’m back.” Gaara is standing in the doorway, holding a tray of veggies. “What did I miss?”
“We were admiring your poem.” Tenten grins.
“Snacks! Yes!” Naruto jumps for the tray, only to cry out in disgust. “What is
this
? Where are the cookies?”
Gaara dodges Naruto and steals his place on the bed. “Not everyone eats junk food twenty-four seven, you know.”
Naruto pouts and settles on the ground, muttering to himself about herbivores, and Sasuke hands the papers back to Gaara. “Should we continue?”
“In a bit.” Gaara tucks his feet under him and crunches down on a carrot. “We have time. All of this week, until Friday.”
Tenten munches on a stick of celery. “Hey, wanna play a game?”
“Move over, I want some room on the bed.” Naruto shoves Tenten to the side and smushes himself between her and Sasuke, ignoring Tenten’s
oof
as he knees her in the stomach. “What kind of game?” He waggles his eyebrows at Sasuke. “Truth or dare?”
“I was thinking Monopoly, but sure.” Tenten clutches her stomach and scoots further down the bed until she has enough space to lean back and slide her feet into Sasuke’s lap. “Okay. Hit me with one, Nart.”
Naruto goes brilliant red. “
Don’t
call me that. And get your feet out of Sasuke’s lap.”
“Why? If it was bothering him, he’d say something.” Tenten raises his head. “Are you okay, Sasuke?”
Sasuke has never, in all his life, had a girl’s feet in his lap, and he isn’t sure how to react. Is this flirting? Doesn’t she like girls? “Um. It’s fine.”
“See?” Tenten sticks her tongue out at Naruto. “So give me a truth or dare,
Nards
.”
For a moment, it seems like Naruto is going to really and truly lose it. Tenten is saved from his wrath by Gaara, who pipes up. “Tenten, truth or dare?”
“Dare.” Tenten wiggles her toes. “Bring it on.”
Gaara is contemplative for a moment. “I dare you to go into Temari’s room and ask for a scrunchie.”
“WHAT!?” Tenten nearly falls off the bed. “Are you crazy?”
Gaara shrugs, a tiny smile on his lips. “What’s wrong? I thought you knew Temari.”
“But - but I don’t - I’m not -” Tenten struggles for words. “I can’t just do that! I haven’t seen her in, like, half a year! It’d be weird!”
Naruto crosses his arms and leans back. “Sounds to me like you’re just a chicken,
Twenty
.”
Tenten’s mouth drops open. “What did you just call me?”
“A chicken.”
“No, after that.”
“Oh, Twenty?” Naruto is smirking. “That’s your new nickname. Because ten plus ten --”
“
I’m gonna kill you!”
Suffix it to say, no more work got done for the rest of the afternoon. Instead, a very vicious pillow fight ensued, and only ended when Kankuro stuck his head in to tell them to “keep the orgy down to a dull roar”.
. . .
Not until the sun has finally set does Gaara kick them out of his house, and the walk home is the longest Sasuke has ever endured. Tenten has decided to latch onto him determinedly, most likely (Sasuke muses) in an attempt to annoy Naruto, who seems to be bothered by each and every thing she does.
“Stop it,” Naruto gripes as Tenten reaches up to tuck a lock of hair back into her bun. “That has to be the fiftieth time you’ve done that in the last five minutes.”
“Why does it annoy you?” Tenten retorts, tugging the offending lock of hair loose again. “Just stop watching me.”
“If your hair is bothering you, just
redo your bun!
” Naruto snaps. “You’re trying to drive me crazy!”
“You two are the ones driving
me
crazy!” cries Sasuke in exasperation. “This is the dumbest argument I’ve ever heard.”
Naruto glares at him. “How am
I
driving you crazy? Your
girlfriend
is the one climbing all over you!”
Tenten puffs out a breath, blowing her bangs back. “Wow, okay, jealous much?”
“We’re not dating.” Sasuke cuts Naruto off before the blond boy can murder Tenten in cold blood. “Okay? We’re just friends.”
“
Good
friends.” Tenten grins, showing all her teeth to Naruto, and makes a show of draping her arm around Sasuke’s shoulders, which Sasuke immediately shrugs off in annoyance.
Naruto’s eyes are narrowed. “You two didn’t even know each other until, like, yesterday.”
“What, you keep tabs on everything Sasuke does?” Tenten shoots back.
“Stop!” Sasuke presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and grinds his teeth. “Please, stop. Can’t you two just get along?”
There is an embarrassed silence. “Sure,” Tenten mutters. “I can get along with him just fine. He’s the one who can’t get along with me.” But when Sasuke turns to give her a look of disbelief, he finds her grinning.
Naruto groans. “Honestly, how does Lee deal with --”
“Oh look. That’s my house.” Sasuke cuts him off before he can provoke Tenten, grateful he lives not too far from Gaara’s house. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”
“Hold on!” Tenten reaches up to her hair bun, and Sasuke thinks for a moment that she’s going to adjust it again, but she does something even stranger -- she pulls a pen out of her hair and then, in a sudden movement, snatches his hand.
“What the --” Tenten’s grip is iron. Sasuke winces. “What are you doing?”
Tenten scribbles something on the back of his hand and releases it with a flourish. “There. You have a phone, don’t you?”
Sasuke feels his ears burn as he lifts his hand to read what is written there -- her phone number. “Uh, yeah.” he mumbles, and he glances up in time to see Naruto give Tenten a look that plainly says he wouldn’t mind if something very large and very heavy happened to hit her on the head.
Tenten twirls the pen, seemingly oblivious. “Good night!” she calls cheerfully, and heads off down the road with a backwards wave. Naruto lingers a moment longer, scuffing his heels, but when Sasuke starts to turn toward the door, he clears his throat.
“Ahem. See ya, Sasuke.”
Sasuke pauses. “Yeah. See you tomorrow.” When it becomes clear, after a few moments of awkward silence, that Naruto isn’t going to say anything else, Sasuke turns back to the door -- but Naruto’s hand on his shoulder stops him.
“I -- uh --” Naruto fumbles for words, and Sasuke bites his lip and tries very hard not to lash out at the blond boy. It’s been a long day, and he’s tired. All he really wants is to collapse in bed and be unconscious for a few hours, trying not to think about how Neji avoided him all day, and how it took an extra ten minutes and a conscious effort to take a route home that didn’t lead him past the Hyuga house --
“I could give you my phone number tomorrow.” Naruto’s gaze is stubbornly fixed to the ground. “I just realized -- I mean, when Tenten -- well -- I figured we should -- if we’re friends and all --”
“Sure,” Sasuke interrupts, massaging his temples. He’s going to have a massive headache in the morning, he just knows it. “That’s fine. Bye.” He pointedly turns back to the door, and he’s halfway inside when he hears Naruto’s tiny “bye” in response, which, for some stupid reason, makes him feel like a jerk.
With a groan, Sasuke collapses on the couch to pull off his shoes, and his attention is drawn back to the ink on his hand. After a moment of contemplation, he gropes for a piece of paper and a pencil and copies the number down. Whatever strange reason Tenten has for befriending him, he can’t sense any bad intentions behind her actions.
In any case, it might be a good idea to find out more about her and her relationship with Neji
. What? Sasuke shakes his head and stands, heading into the kitchen. He really needs to get some sleep.
Watching the ink-darkened water swirl down the sink drain, Sasuke lets his thoughts stray back to the boy in Gaara’s living room.
Could that have been…?
No, he decides. It might have been his imagination. He needs to sleep. Sasuke stumbles into his bedroom without bothering to even strip off his clothes from the day and sinks into unconsciousness the moment his head hits the mattress.