Work Text:
Sometimes, when there’s too many papers around him to concentrate properly, Naruto’s eyes drift away from the organized chaos on his desk. Towering stacks hemming him in, forms and treaties and other important documents begging for his attention; he’s had weeks, months even, to familiarize himself with it all, and yet. Sometimes he’ll dislodge a sheet and it’ll all come tumbling down, a cascade of words blurring into inky smears. Sometimes he’ll leave his pen drying atop the modest pile right before him and the nib, left uncapped and exposed, bleeds itself out and destroys the pulp beneath.
Most times, though, Naruto finds himself, the self that isn’t grounded in a chair and elaborately robed, drifting from his corporeal form. In the silence of his office, under the watchful eyes of long-dead heroes, he indulges in his memories and the things he rarely speaks of anymore.
Then there are those moments when Naruto sets aside his job for other forms of writing. Words form painstakingly on the page, one at a time; occasionally, he manages a paragraph or three, and one miraculous break had seen him fill half a page. His thoughts always come haltingly then, for there is no way to bluster through the depths of his heart. He dithers and deliberates and then…
Naruto turns away from the outpourings of his soul and goes back to work, burying it all beneath an avalanche of responsibility. In time, they will erase themselves and disappear from view.
He hopes that, in time, the ghosts of his past will erase themselves and disappear too.
“What do you mean, you can’t bring him back? You promised me you would. You promised me!”
Sakura jabs him in the chest and, whilst he has impressive reserves of chakra, Naruto has never quite had the strength his former team-mate possesses. Once, it would’ve made a smile curl on his lips, knowing that the object of his affections was touching him, but now it makes him frown as he reels back, staggering against his will. Tsunade’s influence is clear in her monstrous strength, her harsh gaze and the unyielding rigidity of her stance.
He wonders, sometimes, whether Jiraiya would’ve looked at him like Tsunade does at Sakura. He wonders if his eyes would soften, whether his lips would stretch into something small and fond rather than something large and lecherous.
It’s easy to forget that Jiraiya’s years dead and that Sakura hasn’t changed at all, sometimes. It’s easier still to pretend he’s in the same boat as Sakura and raise his hands, smile wide and stance placating.
“He said he’d see you soon, didn’t he?” Naruto forces a laugh, shifting to stand a little steadier. “Look, I know he’s a bastard and all, but he’ll be back before you know it—”
“It’s been three months, Naruto,” Sakura hisses, advancing towards him with deliberate steps. “Three months of waiting, watching, hoping– you know he hasn’t sent letters to me at all, right? What sort of business does he have when the war is over and done with? We’ve buried our dead, everyone’s returned to their lives; what more does he need?!”
“You know how he is,” Naruto responds, smile dimming and straining with every step she takes, “with all his broodiness and deep thoughts. And besides, he came back for a bit, didn’t he?”
“He didn’t even stay for long enough to get his prosthetic,” Sakura snaps. “Tsunade worked hard on that, even though she was tired out from all the fighting, and he… he just…”
“I’m sorry,” Naruto murmurs softly, when Sakura lowers her head and her arms tremble by her side. “I thought he’d be back for good too, y’know? That there was nothing more for him to chase anymore.”
“And yet, here we are,” Sakura says, low and faintly dark. “Here we are in Konoha, and there’s nothing but ghosts in the Uchiha compound.”
There’s nothing much Naruto can say, really; he walked through there, once, a few days after Sasuke had taken his old hitai-ate and hiked off to goodness knew where. Some doors are still stained with blood and others lie half-rotten, consumed by the elements. Not even Sasuke’s family home had stood the test of time when he’d gotten there, the faint smell of mildew and decay sweet and pungent in all those empty rooms.
Even the remnants Sasuke had left in the village were like the compound, old and decaying. Naruto can’t even remember the last time he’d caught Kakashi reading his lurid porn or Sakura flushing red and hot. The last time he looked in a mirror, shadowed eyes had stared back from a gaunt face.
One thing Naruto can remember, though, is the way Kakashi’s shoulders had slumped when Sasuke had turned away and left for the last time (or what he hopes is the last time). Another is the way Sakura’s smile had swam in tears and yet her eyes had been alight– but with what? And what about him; what had he looked like when he’d been left behind, again?
Are his old team like him now, eyes full of hope but soul screaming in sadness? Naruto squints through the soft rain washing over them, but all he can see are a thousand beads glittering in Sakura’s hair. He can’t even feel the strength to reach forward and pat her, awkward and unwanted that may be.
So the only proper response he can give, really, is a lame and feeble, “here we are.”
Judging from the way Sakura’s head snaps up and her eyes narrow dangerously, it’s the wrong response to give.
(but wasn’t it always wrong, whenever he did anything for her?)
“You can fix that, though.” She pushes herself into his personal space and glares up at him, looming despite the handful of inches Naruto has over her. “Didn’t you say you never go back on your word?”
Was it intentional, the way Sakura had jabbed at the unhealed and festering wound in his heart? Naruto can feel the blood draining from his face and his pretence at a smile flickering and dying, much like the thoughts in his head, but her gaze is unwavering and her body, even less so.
“Did you know that he thanked me, before he left?” Sakura’s stare bores holes into him, but Naruto doesn’t respond and so she forges on. “I’ve never really understood why he said that, right after he turned down my offer to join him. He thanked me and then he left, but you know what I remember the most?
“He never smiled at me.” Naruto opens his mouth, ready to protest at what Sakura remembers, but she curls her hands into fists and talks over him. “He never smiled at me, he never smiled at Kakashi, but he smiled for you. You have the power to bring him back—”
“I don’t, really,” Naruto admit, quiet but steely. “Sakura, I’ve been chasing after him ever since we became genin; hell, I probably started when we were still in the Academy. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that he won’t do anything if it’s not on his own terms.”
“So you’re telling me that you’re giving up?” Sakura shakes her head, mirthless laughter spilling out of her lips, and takes a step back. “After everything you’ve said about your ninja creed and your promise to me… that’s it?”
It’s the hardest two words he’s ever had to force out of his lips, but Naruto says, “that’s it.”
Even when Sakura breathes shakily through her nose, Naruto squares his shoulders and adds, “Please, Sakura, I’ve done all I could. I know I fought against you when you told me to stop, but… now it’s my turn. I… I can’t do it anymore.”
“What do you mean, you can’t do it anymore?” The words are choked, flaking around the edges, and Naruto sees the exact moment Sakura crumbles with them. “You’ve chased after him for years—”
“And what makes you think he’ll come back if I do the same?” Naruto spits out. “If I’ve learnt anything about the bastard, it’s that he’s even more stubborn than me, Sakura.”
“You don’t understand,” Sakura hisses, advancing upon Naruto and fisting her hand in his collar. “I’ve wanted to be with him since I was in the Academy; even when he put me under a genjutsu and kept killing me, I never gave up on him!”
“He’s already tried to kill me in real life,” Naruto flatly utters. “Twice, if not more. What makes you think I have any less of a reason to chase after him?”
“Because you’re giving up!” Sakura yells, shaking him back and forth. “I love him, but I can’t do a thing for him because all he cares about is you!”
“AND I LOVE HIM TOO, SAKURA!” Naruto shouts, shoving her away and panting as she stumbles back. “I love him so much it hurts to see him and it hurts even more when I don’t, but I love him enough to let him go! What you feel for him is obsessive possessiveness if all you want is his ghost by your side!”
He already knows where this will go, when his last words drown in the sudden deluge. He reaches out for Sakura’s finely trembling form, but her gaze snaps up and she jerks back, almost falling with the suddenness of her movement. For a moment, he looks at her and sees a shadow of the girl who cried all those years ago and made him promise to bring Sasuke home, but then…
A beat of silence, another shuddered breath, and then Sakura pulls herself to her full height.
“Uzumaki Naruto,” she says, whisper-soft and full of hate, “don’t ever speak to me again.”
When Sakura draws her fist back and leans into her punch, Naruto shuts her eyes and lets her. When it collides with his face like a veritable freight train, he flies across the ground and hits a brick wall, skull rattling with the impact.
When she turns to leave, knuckles already reddening from the impact, Naruto cracks an eye open and watches her go. Amongst the fat droplets smacking on the ground and over his broken body, he smiles and leans back, letting his blood run hot and sticky over his nape.
For a moment, he entertains the thought of throwing a Rasengan at her back.
(and the worst part of it all was that, given that moment again– he might’ve done just that)
It was raining like this too, when Sasuke had first abandoned him. At the Valley of the End, beneath the towering figures of Konoha’s forefathers, the spray from the waterfall and the fat droplets of rain had soaked into his skin and settled in his bones. Fragile and frigid they may’ve been, but his soul was more fragile and colder still.
What could one expect from him when he was fighting to keep his best friend by his side, though? Naruto had begged, pleaded for Sasuke to stay through thick and thin, when Itachi had returned to traumatize him further and when Orochimaru had sunk his fangs into his neck. Yet it had come down to two boys on opposite ends of a river, four fists that flew with reckless abandon. It had come down to techniques that aimed to kill and moves that were made to do the same.
Logically speaking, Naruto had already known how things would end; for all Sasuke’s snark, there was a grain of truth behind his moniker of ‘dead last’. There was no place for a disloyal ninja by the future Hokage’s side, no place for a dunce in a personal, rage-fuelled revenge. They had only shared the same path through twisted fate and pure coincidence; nothing more, nothing less. Logically speaking, it was not a case of who killed who, but when one would kill the other.
And yet.
Kakashi had told Naruto he was unconscious, when Pakkun sniffed him out. There was a jacket stuffed in the back of his closet; it’s several sizes too small, shows signs of being severely waterlogged at some stage of its life and bears a fist-shaped hole on the left breast. All the hospital staff had known him by name and he’d known all theirs, when he’d been discharged.
And yet.
For all the evidence that points to the contrary, for all the adults who call him delusional, Naruto still remembers harsh breaths, about five feet in front of his face. He remembers the harsh slide of cloth on cloth and the dull thunk of a forehead protector, dented and scratched, an inch or more from his left ear. He knows he felt a presence hover an inch from his nose; maybe less, maybe more.
He heard Sasuke, that time. Heard him whisper, “Naruto. I…”
Sasuke couldn’t have known that Naruto hadn’t been unconscious that time.
And yet.
(I…)
Standing beneath a cherry blossom tree in full bloom, Naruto stares at the flower perched delicately in her hair. Another floats lazily by and settles on his shoulder; he brushes it aside, missing it the first four times his fingers swipe, and continues to stare.
They call her the princess of the Hyuugas, an heiress worthy of bearing their legacy and wielding one of the three great eye dojutsus. Underneath the cherry blossoms, with the faint dustings of a blush on her cheeks, Naruto can see why Hyuuga Hinata is held in such high regards by his peers, the adults, the children. Like this, soft and shy, she has no rival to her beauty.
Yet Naruto stares into her eyes and only sees Neji’s battered body, devoid of life.
He knows what this is, why Hinata called him out and invited him to a picnic made specifically for two, the day after Kakashi had named his successor. Her fingers aren’t nervously twisting or pressing against one another because they’re clutching a letter, the whites of her fingertips almost fading into the white of the envelope. Now that everyone knows he is a son worthy of his father’s name, now that he walks in his esteemed father’s footsteps, he is no longer damaged goods.
Not that it had ever stopped Hinata or her gaze from following him around, but this…
“N-Naruto,” Hinata stutters, face flushing redder beneath his gaze, “p-please accept my feelings.”
All he can see in her lavender gaze is a comrade he could not save, another marked grave left to moulder in a grassy field.
It’s not his fault that Neji died. Naruto’s heard the song and dance enough to feel the words imprinted in his soul: you were not at fault, he wouldn’t have wanted to see you suffer for him, he died with his fate in his hands. He had stood by Hinata’s side when they had commemorated his memory, placing flowers by the headstone as words of comfort and mourning had been exchanged. He had wrapped his arms around her shaking shoulders when they had lowered his coffin into his final resting place, forehead smooth and unmarked by the curse he’d borne all his life.
He knew it would’ve come down to this. After the years he’d spent aware of her nervous stutter and heavy flushes, of stolen glances and crippling silences, Naruto had still walked her home when it was dark and joked with her when he felt particularly light-hearted. Could he blame her for looking into his friendliness and mustering her courage for this one moment?
Naruto lets his gaze drop to the envelope in her hand, and feels his heart constrict at the sight.
Sasuke had always brushed off the girls who crowded to his side, trying to slip letters in his hand like they stood a chance of him taking them. Sasuke had glared down his nose at those girls and Naruto had snarled, when he’d spied on him, because those girls were rabid fangirls but they were human beings with hearts. Nobody had ever taken a second look at him and he’d vowed, back then, that he wouldn’t be so cruel.
(but what was crueller: snuffing all hope, or falsely spurring it on?)
“I…” His voice trails off when Hinata looks up at him with wide eyes, and Naruto chokes.
One day, there will be someone who will caress her cheek and whisper sweet nothings in her ear. There will be someone who treasures Hinata for who she is, the deadly force with a fragile heart, and she will find the love she so craves with them. Not once, in any of his thoughts, has Naruto ever seen her dream partner with blonde hair and blue eyes. Not once has he seen himself with anyone other than his original team members.
They call her the princess of the Hyuugas, and he’s just a foot soldier by comparison. For all the trimmings that come after the war, he is still the boy that stared sullenly from a swing, goggles low over his eyes to shield himself from poisonous glares.
He takes in a deep breath, lets it out through his nose in increments, and finds the composure to say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
There are no sweet words of comfort that Naruto can whisper to her, in a time like this. He watches the way Hinata almost folds in on herself, the light in her eyes dimming so rapidly that he can barely remember when they were alight with happiness, with hope, with love. Another cherry blossom settles in her hair, but he finds he cannot reach forward and brush it gently out of her hair.
In the silence, he utters, “I’m in love with someone else.”
Hinata bows her head and Naruto pretends he can’t see her tears splashing on the ground. He finds the strength to reach forward and rub her shoulder, then. For a moment, he lets it rest it against the fall of her hair, but she shifts and he lets go.
“She’s very lucky,” Hinata whispers, and it’s almost enough to undo him.
Yet all he says in response is, “he probably doesn’t even care,” and turns to walk away.
He does not look back to see if Hinata’s watching him leave, or if she’ll eat the lunch she’d packed for them. He suspects that she will do one but not the other, but doesn’t want to think of which one it might be.
He doesn’t have a right to know, after what he’s just done to her.
It’s a little sad that he can’t remember if his mother or father had kissed him, the day they sacrificed themselves to seal Kurama in him. Naruto would like to think they did, that they hugged him tightly at least once in his life, but all he remembers are the hostile glares from Konoha citizens and whispers in the playground, cold and biting and pitched just loud enough for him to hear. Sometimes, he returned to his apartment and trashed it, only to clean up the whole mess.
Alone. Always, always alone.
Could he really be blamed for thinking about his first kiss every now and again, then? Sure, he gets enough attention these days as the hero of Konoha, the one who single-handedly saved the world (Sasuke is never included in the equation, and Naruto knows enough not to force it) and is slated to become the Seventh. Sure, the stares he gets are not those bordering on glares, bitter and hateful, but are filled with appreciation and not a little interest. Sure, he gets offers for drinks, offers to dance, offers to have someone to share his bed for the night– but it’s not the same.
Even then, it wasn’t really a kiss. It had been more like one false move that had caused a staring (or, rather, glaring) contest to cut itself short, and Naruto had barely felt Sasuke’s lips against his own before he ripped himself away. He remembered yelling about his mouth rotting while death threats had flung themselves at him, and then Sakura had punched his lights out for smooching her beloved dream husband.
Sometimes, Naruto found himself laughing at the recollection. For fate to have made him share his first kiss with a broody bastard… what had been the odds of that happening? For him to chase that same broody bastard, first for recognition and then for a promise… when was the joke going to end?
Still, because first kisses were said to stay with someone forever, Naruto caught himself thinking about it at odd moments.
(if he dwells on the way Sasuke’s lips had felt and wished it’d happened again… well, nobody has to know)
“Naruto,” Shikamaru says, “the Kazekage’s here to meet you now.”
Naruto starts, blinks himself back to life and stares at the paper towers scattered across his desk and all over the floor. He catches his advisor’s wry smile, scratches the back of his head with a sheepish laugh, and pushes himself away from his desk with a grin, snatching up his Hokage hat with a flourish.
“Let’s go see what Gaara wants then, shall we?” Naruto asks, and gets a nod in response.
The smell of paper and ink and unforgotten memories cling to him as he leaves.
Outside, the skies rumble, and the heavens sigh out a rainstorm.
In the distance, Sasuke closes his eyes and draws in a breath of water and earth and bitter regret.