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“You want me to find you a date?” Sasuke hissed, trying to maintain his demeanor. Naruto complaining about his lack of dates was barely any news. “Are you out of your mind?”
Naruto frowned at him, as if Sasuke was the dumb half of their weird pair. “Listen, it’s clear that I can’t do it alone,” Naruto paused, looking up at the sky with a conflicted expression. “I don’t like to admit it, because I’m gorgeous, if you ask me, but…”
Naruto stopped mid-sentence, expecting Sasuke to contradict his self-proclaimed beauty statement. Normally, that would have happened. Today, Sasuke might betray himself and blurt out that Naruto was gorgeous, but that would not comply with his plan.
“Anyway, you’re popular, you should help a friend out.” Naruto continued, unperturbed. What Naruto was not acknowledging was his own growing popularity, of which Sasuke was accustomed to, but not happy about. It was not that he wanted Naruto to be alone, nor that he would ever be because they would have been together. Sasuke stopped to deny that truth some time ago when he realised that somehow Naruto had become his best friend. It was right after they beat each other out at the Taijutsu club in middle school.
However, Naruto used to have no friends. He was a loud prankster nurturing a hero’s complex since kindergarten. He meddled where he shouldn’t, he talked until you had to listen to his point, and he used to sport an obnoxious orange suit any other non-school day. When it was a school day, he would just wear the orange sports jacket on top of his shirt and get admonished for it by Iruka sensei on a regular basis.
This changed during middle school, where Naruto managed to befriend the whole school while Sasuke was not looking. It happened whenever he was at the archery club, or when he was attending after school prep-courses to pass the entrance exam to Akatsuki. The school had a national famous taijutsu club, and a partnership with Tokyo University––where Itachi was studying.
When Naruto found out, he had to talk Sasuke out of it, telling him that Sasuke could get in any university anyway. That if he had to, Naruto would have crammed his way into Sasuke’s prestigious High school just to prove him wrong. That he would become better than him at Taijutsu, so he could have someone he wanted to fight and get better than Itachi. Eventually, Naruto never won against him. Their matches usually ended with a tie.
And now, every time Sasuke was not looking, someone was with Naruto. Sasuke had to go to him (unheard of) for lunch, to find that dumbass eating with some other guys. This meant that Naruto was not as free as he used to be, and the only time they were actually alone was on the way back home. Therefore, he didn’t want to waste any time over Naruto’s lack of self-awareness, and the fact that he had grown tall, and girls whispered behind his back, blushing.
After calling him ugly during the whole middle school years. Sasuke wasn’t amused.
Life was too short to listen to Naruto’s bullshit, so Sasuke decided to walk away, and let Naruto chase him like they were twelve again. That stupid idea would die in a couple of days anyway.
Except that, of course, it didn’t. Sasuke should have known him better. Naruto was not easily deterred and would pursue each one of his dumb ideas.
“You made her cry,” Naruto blabbered, hiding his face in his hands. “It was just a double date. Was it necessary?”
Sasuke tsked, folding his arms. They were sitting in a karaoke room, left half empty after the two girls they were with had run away in tears. “I didn’t.”
“You totally did. Was it necessary to tell her you wouldn’t have been attracted to her even if you weren’t gay ?”
These had not been his exact words, and Sasuke didn’t plan to come out like that at all. “Did you have to lie like that? I mean, usually, you go for sorry, but I need to go home soon, my mum wants me back for dinner.” Naruto’s face was now buried in his hands, and he bumped his shoulder on Sasuke’s to annoy him. “That was not a good lie.”
“Since when are you such an expert on dating?”
“Shut up.” Naruto nudged him again, this time opening his fingers so that Sasuke could meet his desperate expression. “Be a good friend next time.”
Sasuke had been a good friend the whole fucking time. He had been tricked into that karaoke room, and he was restraining himself from banging his head against Naruto’s in the hope that it would activate one of his remaining brain cells. “There won’t be a next time.”
Sasuke was wrong, which was a once-in-a-lifetime event. He was trying to sip his milk and focus on some calculus when it happened again. Naruto grabbed a chair and placed it next to his desk, which happened to be placed behind Sakura Haruno’s. “Sakura, go out with me.”
Sasuke handwriting faltered, leaving an uneven line on the page. Naruto didn’t notice, and Sakura sighed. “Again, Naruto?”
“Please?” He put his hands together, rubbing them. “I can’t graduate high school without having dated even once.”
So that was his concern. Obviously. “Geez, ask one of your secret fans.”
Naruto put an elbow on Sasuke’s notebook, disrupting his calculus homework completely. “I’m not Sasuke, you know.”
He was not. Sasuke had a creepy Fanclub that sold his pictures and tried to ask him out every second of his existence. Naruto had a normal Fanclub. They still sold pictures in a weird version of a scholastic black-market, but they did not have a twisted image of him, unlike his own Fanclub. Or his own father.
“Is Ino still part of Sasuke’s Fanclub, anyway?”
Sakura shrugged. She had been a fervent member in the past. “She’s the club president.”
Naruto side glanced at Sasuke with the usual annoyed Sasuke-is-not-that-cool look. “Isn’t she into girls?”
Sakura shrugged again. Ino was into girls; to be precise, she was into Sakura. Not that she had noticed yet, because she was selectively thick when romantic feelings were in the way. Maybe that was why she and Naruto had become a close-knit pair, bonding over being completely oblivious.
“Anyway, don’t be stupid. You have options” Sakura sighed “Didn’t a guy confess to you last year?”
That happened. People talked. He got rejected, but he wasn’t surprised. At that, Naruto scratched his cheek, mumbling.
“Forget the guy. What about Hinata?” Sakura was as amused as Sasuke, which meant she was probably retraining herself from kicking him back to his desk. Kakashi had Naruto sat on the opposite side of the class from Sakura and Sasuke. It hadn’t been like that at the start of the year, where the lottery for desk numbers put them all together. According to Kakashi, they were a handful when assembled as a trio.
Naruto had complained, because “What am I supposed to do without Sasuke?” and that had been yet another one of his Sasuke related behaviours that everyone in the class wisely ignored.
“Hinata?” Naruto didn’t seem convinced.
Sasuke wasted a whole minute on deciding that, probably, he had never met this girl. “She’s been crushing on you since middle school.” Sakura continued, because she was not immune from gossiping.
Naruto frowned. “Who?”
“Geez, we’ve been in the same school forever. She was class president with Sasuke last year.”
Sasuke squinted his eyes, trying to remember this person’s face.
Naruto’s frown deepened. “Is she… the cute girl who doesn’t speak?”
Sakura nodded, resigned by Naruto’s dumbness.
Sasuke put down his pen, and Naruto interpreted the movement as a signal to invade Sasuke’s personal space and peek over the notebook. “What the fuck is that?”
“Our homework for next week.”
“Geez,” Naruto peeked closer, breathing on his cheek and leaning on his back “What a nerd.”
“You know.” Sakura had given up on her own homework. She was looking at them with a hand under her chin, “Sasuke’s why you don’t have a girlfriend, Naruto.”
The bell rang before Naruto could process her words, and Kakashi––weirdly on time––threw a chalkboard duster at him to point him back at his desk. Sasuke pretended not to still feel Naruto’s breath on his skin.
Naruto’s dating problem was all in his head. What was more stupid was his determination in just dating anyone.
“Thinking of it, it is your fault,” Naruto had no conception on stuff such as the right place and time to continue a conversation.
Sasuke dodged Naruto’s last two punches, getting an “aeeewww” from a crowd that should not be allowed into their club. “I mean,” he continued, unimpressed by Sasuke’s next punch. “I don’t even know what I do in my free time when I’m not with you.”
It was not true. They had the taijutsu club and had to stay late on Mondays as class presidents.
Naruto panted, ducking under Sasuke’s kick. The more he talked, the more Sasuke felt the need to pin him to the ground and let him beg for air. “Well, I think you should take some fucking responsibilities.”
Sasuke opened his mouth. He wanted to say that he did not make Naruto befriend him. He did not ask him to get into the same club in middle school. He was not the one to proclaim himself his rival, he was not the one always fussing about Sasuke, he was not the one who begged him to stay. And like that, as his brain tried to connect the words shut up with his tongue, Naruto twisted him and slammed him into the ground, pinning him from behind, his knee in the middle of his back and his arm twisted and immobilised.
Sasuke blinked.
Naruto was fucking beaming. The crowd went wild. Kakashi stared at them for so long that Sasuke thought he had mistaken them for one of his new erotic novels. Gai was vigorously clapping his hands, proud of his students’ display of youthful energy.
Naruto was panting, and for the first time since they knew each other, he let go of him without saying a word. Without celebrating. A couple of girls got to him as he sat on the tatami of their karate club, still baffled.
He… lost?
Naruto’s weird silence prolonged through the locker room, from the shower into changing, and nothing changed as they approached the road. He was tense. Sasuke would usually have paid to enjoy that kind of silence, but today it was making him uncomfortable.
“Why are you not being insufferable?”
Naruto had tried to win a match against him since he enrolled in the karate club when they were twelve. He should be beaming and being louder than usual. “Nch.”
“That’s my catchphrase.”
“Shut up.”
Sasuke raised his eyebrows; Naruto made a face, realising that he was sounding like Sasuke, and then looked down, avoiding his eyes. “Why did you let me win?” he articulated, at the end.
Sasuke stopped in the middle of the road. During club days they finished around dinner time, and the street was deserted apart from the local fat stray ginger cat that Naruto named Kurama. Once he had tried to pick him up and adopt him, and the cat had scratched his face and left Naruto with whiskers scars for a month. “What?”
“You let me win,” Naruto spelt out as if Sasuke was not paying attention. “You made me look cool on purpose.” He continued, not moving. Sasuke was utterly lost.
“You should say sorry, ” Naruto prompted, but not in an annoying Naruto way. “It was fucking disrespectful.”
“What?”
“Geez. I don’t want to win because you let me win, okay? I’ve been training for years, I want to win because I win, and if you’re that dumb to believe you’re actually helping me by…”
Sasuke was confused enough that Naruto had to stop talking on his own accord. “I didn’t let you win.” Sasuke retorted, frowning. “Why would you think that... ?”
Naruto’s face is suddenly getting a shade darker. “You were unfocused.” He explained. “And when I put you down, I saw Hinata in the crowd, and I…”
“Again?”
Naruto nodded in an attempt to look angry again, but his face was a mess and he could not hide an emotion if his life was depending on it. “That’s not how you are a good friend, okay?”
“I was not trying to set you up with…”
“Hinata,” Naruto completed, catching Sasuke’s attempt to remember her name.
Sasuke felt bile up in his mouth. “I don’t fucking care.”
Naruto looked offended. That was not the kind of conversation they should have had in the middle of the street. “You could have pretended. I don’t…” Naruto stopped as if he was trying to choose his words. “Listen, as much as I want to date…”
“Whomever,” Sasuke spilled out, sternly. “You don’t fucking care who it is, you just like…”
“Shut up.” Naruto, this time, actually raised his voice. Kurama hissed, baring its teeth. “I won’t… all I care about is you, Sasuke. I would rather be undateable forever, than have you let me win. It’s an insult. You know it is, you train as hard as me, you…”
“I didn’t let you win.”
“We both know that…” you’re stronger than me, that was what Naruto was going to say. “The reason why I’m not dating is you, okay? I convinced the girls to go out with us just because you were there. And I don’t care. I’d rather be with you.”
Sasuke’s heart was fucked and wanted to believe in what was obviously not in Naruto’s mind. “You’re dumb.” and blind, because how could he not have noticed how he was the popular one, between the two of them. How people gravitated to him and trusted him and wanted to be with him, and Sasuke hated them all because he knew how to be pathetic and because Naruto had always been his and not of public domain. Not of some people that were reminded of his existence yesterday.
“What?”
“I was unfocused because of this dumb dating farce of yours.” He put a hand onwards before Naruto could twist this sentence in his mind. “Not to help you, but because it’s annoying.”
Sasuke believed he could cut this conversation right there and continue with his life. “Tch. I would never let you win.”
Finally, Naruto cracked a grin that made Sasuke feel dumber than his friend. “Let’s have a rematch, then.”
They ended up at Sasuke’s because it was the nearest place, and because his parents were not home. They thought that Minato and Kushina, albeit accustomed to Naruto and Sasuke’s weirdness, would have been rather worried about seeing them fighting in their garden.
“Yeah, Sasuke forgot his English textbook this morning,” Naruto lied, getting rid of the school uniform’s jacket and losing his tie. “We’ll grab it and be there in a bit. Love ya.”
That was the weakest lie Naruto had ever said. He doubted Kushina was buying it, especially because another fight would have taken some of their time. In the garden, they stayed silent for a while, before starting dancing around each other.
Naruto still had a whole bag of energy to consume, and his fighting style usually reflected his long stamina. Sasuke was trying to understand how to put him and this whole conversation down without wasting any more time. They had to study for a test. He could not afford Naruto having to take summer classes.
“This is exactly what I meant with taking your responsibilities.”
This time Sasuke was not distracted and dodged Naruto’s move. “Let it go, Naruto.” Then, he caught an opening. “You’re slow.”
Naruto was almost taken by surprise yet managed to avoid Sasuke and jump to one side. “Nah, talking distracts you. It’s a strategy.”
Sasuke’s eyes widened. After lecturing him about training. “That’s cheating, moron.”
“That’s getting my best friend to talk.”
“I’m always talking.”
“You’re not.”
“Well, maybe next time don’t invite over any girls, and I’ll be more talkative.”
“Why are you so bothered by girls?”
“Why do you want to date that badly?”
“Why don’t you?”
Sasuke hesitated. “If you’re that desperate, I’ll date you,”
With that, Naruto faltered and tripped over his feet. Sasuke tried to prevent him from falling yet managed to fall in the dirt with him. They remained still on the ground, breathing heavily. Sasuke couldn’t believe he’d said that.
“You what.” Naruto was alarmed, and his hands erratically moved to tackle his sleeve.
“I’ll date you.”
“Shut your mouth, I won’t fall for it.”
Sasuke turned his head to glance at Naruto, unfazed. Naruto opened and closed his mouth, his eyes getting bigger and bigger under the faint light of the Uchiha’s garden lamps. “Wait, were you serious?”
“Geez, you are dumb.”
Naruto was still trying to figure out the next thing to say. He couldn’t retort against Sasuke, because in that precise moment in time, Naruto had reached his peak in dumbness. “But… why… I won’t date you Sasuke.”
Sasuke’s heart stopped working.
“I won’t, I can’t .”
He’d rather date a random girl whose name Sasuke couldn’t remember. Sasuke closed his eyes, trying to breathe calmly. He had had a plan. The summer festival was next week. They would have been off school; he would have invited Naruto and he would have kissed him under the fireworks. He’d spent three years on that, contemplating how to tell Naruto that he was more than his one and only friend.
Sasuke would have not confessed without a coherent strategy. He asked Itachi about it, and he suggested an unnecessarily complicated scheme involving crows. Googling how to know if your best friend is in love with you when he’s confessing his love all the time to the whole school in dumb ways didn’t help. So he resolved to shoujo manga, silly as it was.
Sasuke had spent an unhealthy amount of time deciphering Naruto’s loud proclamations. They sounded like confessions every time.
“Sasuke?”
He felt Naruto shifting next to him, getting closer, warmer against his arm. Why would anyone be that cruel. “Why?”
Naruto was not letting him go. “I don’t want you to date me to shut me up, or because you feel like you have to.”
Sasuke opened his eyes again, irritation subsiding the burning pain that was creeping up his throat. “I have never done anything because I had to.”
“Well, you almost enrolled in the Akatsuki because you had to be better than Itachi.”
“ Almost,” Sasuke breathed, feeling Naruto’s grip getting stronger, tugging his sleeve like a desperate child. Naruto was looking at him like he always did, like Sasuke was the only thing he thought about in the fucking world. Nor that Sasuke was under any illusion that that was real, and not just a side effect of having your brain over-producing endorphins.
“ Shit, ” Naruto muttered, slightly panicking, realisation hitting his face like he was the one crushing on Sasuke for the past three years. “Shit, you can’t say stuff like that, making it sound like you stayed for me.”
Sasuke was fucking tired. He grabbed Naruto by the shoulder and pulled him into a kiss.
It wasn’t effortless. It was the first time Sasuke was kissing someone, therefore he was not expecting it to be good, nor did he expect to find himself to be as desperate as he was, trembling as if he was going to be rejected at any moment. When he opened his eyes, catching his breath, he found Naruto looking at him with a reverence that shook him to his core.
It wasn’t a new look on him, but the context was.
Among all the moments that was the one Naruto chose to stay speechless. Then he moved his hands, reaching to Sasuke’s, interlocking fingers like it was the only thing he could do.
***
The next day, Sakura didn’t comment on Naruto and Sasuke holding hands. Nobody did, which Naruto found offensive. “Like, I managed to snatch you, and nobody cares?”
Sasuke looked at him. “Why do you care?”
Naruto gestured towards him, trying to hold together a thought. In the middle of the morning break, the class was really not paying attention to their usual bickering. Exams were on. Before Naruto could finally find his words, Kakashi entered the class, thirty minutes late.
“I mean,” Naruto continued, unbothered by the start of the class. “I don’t know, I just want to…”
Sasuke raised an eyebrow. Naruto caught a chalkboard's duster mid-air.
“Sensei, can you stop? Isn’t that child abuse?”
“I think having you as a student is teacher abuse.” Kakashi yawned. “Would you please go to your desk, or are you going to share your conversation with us?”
Oh, shit. Naruto grinned, and Sasuke stood up before Naruto could bring any more disgrace upon his name. “We’re dating,” he said, and then he sat down again, unperturbed.
The whole class didn’t even flinch. Naruto almost hurt himself in his confusion. “This is hardly any news.” Kakashi deadpanned. “Either go back to your desk or leave my class, Naruto.”