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The waves were rather loud as they crashed against the shore. The sound could have soothed Naruto to sleep under the night sky. The sand was cool underneath his body, the grains sticking between his toes and fingers, clinging to his clothes. He never really found himself by the beach often, but Sasuke had said he knew a secluded spot that had a spectacular view.
He was right.
There was a full moon that shone upon their skin. There was a pleasant breeze that sang through their hair. Then there was the vast, vast ocean, stretching further than he could’ve ever hoped to see. It was menacing, but so dangerously enticing.
Though his eyes kept drifting to Sasuke who sat a few feet in front of him, his hair and cape flowing behind him. It was rather dramatic. Naruto thought it was fitting for him.
Naruto inhaled the strong scent of salt and sea, sighing wistfully. It was a delightful night. He’d spent the day walking the streets of this tiny village with Sasuke, ecstatic to spend time with him after two years of not seeing him. They’d never spent time together that wasn’t rooted in some sort of violence. He didn’t think he’d ever had more fun, and his weekends back in Konoha usually involved plenty of friends and admirers.
“Naruto.” Sasuke’s quiet voice cut through the peace. He didn’t turn around.
“Yeah?”
“I’m cutting my ties to Konoha.”
Naruto’s heart promptly sank. His throat tightened. Years of grief and longing flooded his memories and his breath stuttered at the very thought of experiencing that again. Even now, Sasuke’s absence after the war had been hard, but he found peace in knowing that Sasuke wasn’t endangering himself. The longing for Sasuke never once stopped, but at least they wrote. He still held out naïve hope that Sasuke would come back home, but he knew it was nothing but delusion.
He still clung.
“I received a letter from Kakashi. He requested that I use my visual prowess to track down any evidence of Kaguya and all her offspring and destroy it. He said I’d not only be protecting Konoha, but the entirety of mankind as well. I considered it. In all honesty, I’m rather aimless out here. I wander from village to village, from nation to nation, learning the lives of people far removed from Konoha, or the life of shinobi in general. I’d be lying if I said I felt at peace. I will never feel at peace. But this is the least miserable I have felt in many years. I am not Itachi. I cannot forgive the village for what they did to him, to my clan, to me. To you.”
Naruto’s heart was bleeding.
“I won’t destroy it. I won’t cause any more harm. But I won’t serve it. I can’t. It’d break me and I’ve been broken before. I’m the worst when I’m broken.”
Naruto understood. He understood wholeheartedly that he felt ashamed for being so upset. So hurt. He chased Sasuke for so long and he still kept slipping out of his grasp. He ached so badly for Sasuke. He wanted Sasuke by his side. He wanted to fix the village with Sasuke. But most importantly, he wanted Sasuke to stop hurting. He wished he could take away the pain that was permanently etched into his heart.
Still, Naruto couldn’t help but be selfish. “What does this mean for us?”
Sasuke turned. The moonlight made his fair skin glimmer. “What do you mean? You and I are here, aren’t we?”
Naruto’s heart constricted. He couldn’t look at Sasuke. It hurt too badly. The weight of his love was going to crush his lungs. “I can’t lose you again, Sasuke.”
Sasuke got up to sit in front of Naruto. His knees dug into the sand. His rinnegan glowed a faint purple. He was absurdly beautiful. “Who said you have to? I’m cutting my ties with the village. You are not Konoha.”
“These days, I practically am.”
“What are you first? Konoha’s war hero or my one and only?”
“Sasuke…” My one and only.
“I think about how that village treated you all the time. How they kept you in the dark and let you suffer. You were a child. We both were. Think about all the tears we’ve cried. And now they worship you because you fought tooth and nail for their acceptance.” His hand found Naruto’s knee. He squeezed. “I’m not asking you to despise the village. I have enough hate in my heart for the both of us and then some. But I am asking you: come with me. Explore with me. Experience new cultures with me. Live life with me.”
“But Kakashi and…” Naruto trailed off, the protest sounding weak even in his own ears. There was a giddiness rising up within him, creating nervous energy that needed a release. His heartbeat was thunderous under Sasuke’s intense gaze and there was nowhere else he would have rather been. Traveling with Sasuke sounded amazing. Doing anything with Sasuke sounded amazing.
Back in the village, he had responsibilities up the ass; he loved being needed, having his abilities be appreciated, but ever since the war, it’d been nonstop. Climbing the ranks the right way, shadowing Kakashi in his Hokage duties, helping out at the Academy. He could have used a break. A proper break. A break with Sasuke, no less. Yet for some reason, desiring a break from it all made him feel like he was trashing his hard work.
He worked so hard to get in good graces with the village and now here he was, revered. He didn’t think it had gotten to his head, but he couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t nice, even if it got a little bothersome at times.
Sasuke leaned between Naruto’s knees. The proximity set a fire under Naruto’s skin. “You saved the world, and you saved that village many times over. That Hokage position will forever be yours, no matter where you go. I’m not asking for forever.”
“I’d give you forever.”
Sasuke smiled a gentle, intimate smile. “Because we’re friends, huh?”
Naruto inhaled deeply, tilting his head back as if to inspect the sky. My one and only. It rang in his head when Sasuke said it the first time years ago. It was ringing in his head now. Out of all the people in the world, Sasuke looked at Naruto as his one and only. But his one and only what? Friend? To Naruto, Sasuke was his one and only as well, but Naruto had plenty of friends.
“Whenever I think of how I feel for you, my brain starts hurting,” Naruto said with a chuckle. “I never know how to make sense of it. I have other friends, but you…”
“Look at me, Naruto.”
Naruto looked at him. He enjoyed looking at him and enjoyed being looked at by him. Those eyes could see deep into his soul, and it never felt invasive. Sasuke lifted his fingers to hook them underneath Naruto’s headband, pulling it off and letting it drop to the sand. He then ran his fingers through Naruto’s short, choppy hair; it took everything within Naruto not to let his eyes flutter shut at the pleasant, calming sensation.
“I’m going to kiss you,” Sasuke said. “Can you handle that?”
Naruto short-circuited. Blood flooded his face in a scalding rush. He parted his lips then closed them again.
“Use your words, loser,” Sasuke teased with a small smirk. That same provocative smirk he used as a weapon their entire childhood. That same smirk that always made Naruto burn with frustration and a need to one-up him, to prove himself to him, to finally get acknowledged by him. On that beach, that smirk had a different type of burn rushing through his veins. It was a burn accompanied with hunger and desire, pure heat that felt like nothing but need.
Naruto nodded, a jerky, awkward motion. Then he stammered, “Kiss me, bastard.”
Sasuke leaned forward and kissed him, his fingers curled around the back of Naruto’s head. Naruto felt hot and cold at the same time, like he’d been dunked in scorching hot water to the point his nerves couldn’t tell what they were feeling. He felt light, like he was floating among the clouds, carelessly, happily. The soft and gentle contact felt extraordinarily right that he almost couldn’t believe they’d never done that sooner.
Sasuke lingered. Pulled his lips back after the initial kiss, but not far away at all, immediately pecking Naruto’s yielding lips again. The tiny smack of their kiss flustered Naruto, his hand coming to scratch at the back of his neck as he giggled. Sasuke broke out into a small smile.
All Naruto could think was pretty. There was a gentle flush on Sasuke’s cheeks. But his dark eyes were filled with nothing but mirth and confidence. A type of self-assuredness that even Naruto hadn’t mastered the art of faking.
Sasuke continued to scratch at his scalp, playing with the short strands of hair. “I’m not forward often enough, am I? At least, not when it matters. Not when it paints me as vulnerable, because all my visible issues made me vulnerable enough.” Sasuke took a deep breath. “All those years ago while we fought in the Valley, I felt like I was tearing off part of myself and leaving it with you. It was fucking agonizing. I could hardly even understand why I was feeling so much pain in my heart when the worst thing possible had already happened to me.”
There was a new lump in Naruto’s throat. So much time had passed between now and then and yet Naruto could still recall exactly how Sasuke attempting to sever their bond by killing him made him feel. It was a wound so deep he always woke up shocked that he wasn’t bleeding out. All of the pain he’d faced in his childhood seemed miniscule when he thought of the bloodlust in Sasuke’s eyes that day, when he woke up and Sasuke was nowhere to be found.
Naruto realized it a long time after. Not only was it betrayal, the disgracing of their bond, but it was pure and raw heartbreak. He hadn’t even realized how intensely he clung to his bond with Sasuke until Sasuke admitted they were friends and then tried to Chidori their relationship out of existence. It was abandonment. Naruto finally had someone who understood him and then he left. For a snake who wanted his body.
There was finally someone who Naruto loved. Someone who made Naruto feel human. Someone who Naruto strived to be like. And he lost him. His little heart couldn’t take it and no one seemed to understand the raw pain he was in.
“During my entire time with Orochimaru, I had this nightmare. I was in Itachi’s Tsukuyomi and instead of seeing my parents get slain like usual, I saw…you.” His eyebrows pinched and he looked down at the sand between them. “Over and over again, for days on end, I had to watch you get killed by me. It felt as real as his genjutsu did. Every time I woke up screaming, I punished myself with harsh training. Thought I was weak for being so affected by a nightmare. By you. If I couldn’t handle that, then how could I have ever hoped to defeat my brother?”
There was the familiar sting of tears in Naruto’s eyes. He tried his hardest to hold them back. He lifted a hand and gently cupped Sasuke’s cheek, stroking underneath his rinnegan with his thumb. “I’m right here, Sasuke. And you’ve never been weak.”
“It’s so difficult—” Sasuke’s voice broke. He grimaced. “Everything is unbearable. Sometimes it’s so difficult to even just live. If I’m not in so much pain, then I feel so empty and hollow. Weightless with no relief. Sometimes I just never know what to do and the thought of no longer being here sounds ideal.”
“Sasuke—”
Sasuke laughed, no doubt at the urgency in Naruto’s voice. “I’m not going to kill myself, idiot, don’t worry. I don’t want to cause you any more pain. I want to apologize to you—”
“No need. You already have.”
Sasuke shook his head. “You’ve breathed life into me. You’ve brought warmth back to my heart. I want to give you life in return. It’s the least I could do. There’s much of the world that you haven’t seen that you’d absolutely adore. I want to show it to you. And frankly, that nightmare has been coming back. I need you in my sight.”
Naruto sat stunned for a moment, astonished by Sasuke’s transparency and how much he related to the sentiment of needing him in his sight. Naruto always had a distant worry that Sasuke would disappear without a word. And then he broke into a giddy grin. “You love me, don’t you?”
Sasuke frowned. “Duh, idiot. I already proved I’d die for you when we were kids, but now look at me. Doing the ultimate difficult task for you. Living.”
It was a dark insinuation, but Sasuke and Naruto were no strangers to storm clouds that blotted out the sky and robbed them of any taste of light. There was a lightness in Naruto’s chest that only came with the warmth of connection, of love, a feeling that he craved relentlessly.
Naruto tilted forward to capture Sasuke’s lips in a kiss. He kept pressing onward until Sasuke had no choice but to lean back until he was lying in the sand underneath Naruto’s body. Their lips moved languidly, softly, gently, not led by experience but by passion and years of confusion finally resulting in something. Naruto pinned Sasuke’s sole hand to the ground and interlaced their fingers. Sasuke squeezed. Naruto squeezed back.
“I love you,” Naruto breathed on Sasuke’s lips.
“I love you,” Sasuke said back.
“You saved me.”
“We’re playing telephone?”
Naruto chuckled, nuzzling Sasuke’s cheek. It would’ve been a soft glide but they were both covered in sand, their faces included. Still, he pressed his lips to Sasuke’s sandy cheek. It felt insanely good to be this affectionate and close to Sasuke. Sasuke had always made Naruto want to be tender and touchy; it had been hard suppressing it for so long.
Sasuke tilted his head for a proper kiss. Naruto indulged him happily. They were simple kisses and yet he still felt so high, so elated, so overjoyed that it didn’t seem like there was something he could possibly want more than this moment.
“What’s your answer, Naruto?” Sasuke was slightly breathless. It had heat tugging at the pit of Naruto’s abdomen.
“Are you kidding? I’m coming with you, obviously.”
And Sasuke blessed him with the most gorgeous smile that even the moon couldn't rival.