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𖤓
Shinobi learn the basics of first aid early. They have to. How to right dislocated and broken bones; how to regularize pulses, breathing; how to cauterize a wound. How objects that impale the body should stay there, should stay inside, especially if they’re buried deep, lest their removal cause someone to bleed out before they could properly heal.
So what, then, was Naruto expected to do when Sasuke had escaped Konoha, when he had ripped himself away, only a week after they had met at the Valley of the End? Only a week after Naruto had thought he finally got what he wanted? What he thought they both had wanted?
And what was he expected to do when he hadn’t seen or heard from Sasuke in the five years since?
The loss is just as physically apparent as the aftermath of being wounded in battle. Naruto’s face is gaunt, his tan skin paled, once-rounded cheeks now carved in with angular edges, the bright blue of his eyes eroded to a withered gray, and they hang over the sunken circles underneath the sockets, dark enough to be mistaken for bruises.
This time was different from all the times Sasuke had gone away before. He was always running towards something, then. He had something he needed to do. And despite how much it had hurt to be apart, Naruto knows what it’s like to have promises to yourself that you need to keep. He understood Sasuke, better than anyone else. Maybe even better than he understood himself.
But how could Naruto even hope to understand the place they’d ended up in now? It didn’t make any sense. There was nowhere Sasuke needed to be, nothing that he needed to do. Naruto knows Sasuke is still out there, though. He has to be.
Yet even if Sasuke had felt compelled toward something this time, how could it have taken him five years to go and do it? To go away and never come back, never reach out, not even once?
Naruto has ruminated over the rationale each and every day, just like he does now. His back digs against a tree in the forest, the same area he’d been in for almost a month now on this specific search, as he sits for a moment of reprieve. His body hunches over itself like that will protect the proverbial exposed hole in his chest, the still-weeping wound of Sasuke’s absence.
He’s gone over the possibilities in his head hundreds of thousands of times. And the longer they’ve been apart, and the more Sasuke’s been shaped by the contours of his memory instead of reality, the stronger and bolder a creeping doubt in the margins of Naruto’s mind has grown.
The idea that, maybe, Naruto doesn’t know Sasuke as well as he thought he did. That maybe he doesn’t know him at all. Maybe they haven’t always wanted the same thing. Because if Sasuke did want what Naruto wanted, what he still wants more than anything, then why wouldn’t he be here?
Why wouldn’t they be together?
⏾
Sasuke has spent his whole life running. An existence defined by distance, by absence. His silent footfalls onto the earth have long been the only proof of his corporeality he’ll allow himself to think about.
And he’s still running. But now, there’s no more footsteps left to follow. No more Itachi, no more long-prepared plans laid by others, ill-fated as they were, no further wills passed down through generations. No, now the target of his attention is no longer in front of him.
A twig snaps as he winds through the trees, and he curses to himself at the noise. Careless. A novice’s error, the likes of which he’s been making more and more frequently recently. It seems as if these five years alone have only deadened his reflexes, his concentration, instead of sharpening them.
Sasuke pauses, surveying the area around him to ensure he’s gone unnoticed. Like there would be anything or anyone out here in this self-induced desolation that could possibly notice him. His right eye twitches as he glances back and forth.
He’d become increasingly reluctant to use his sharingan since he left Konoha. The perfectly preserved memories that it holds are no longer an advantage, but instead a blistering, unequivocal reminder that the only thing, the only person, that matters in his life is behind him.
The inversion of objectives is ironic, of course. Although Sasuke supposes if he could manage to wring one fucking ounce of forethought out of his worthless excuses for analytical judgment, he would have recognized much, much sooner that he is no stranger to upended worldviews.
So it should have come as no surprise to him that his insistence on cutting off the bond between him and Naruto would one day be for Naruto’s sake, instead of his own. After all, for the whole of Sasuke’s life, he’d been trained as a weapon, a severing blade. What else was he meant to do but hurt?
That day he left Konoha, Naruto had held his old headband out to him with the same ruthless optimism in his eyes that Sasuke always saw there. He knew Naruto thought that things finally could be how they always should’ve been. The two of them, building something worth holding onto, worth fighting for. Together.
His reflection in Naruto’s gaze was not the self he was then, but the self he could become. The image there was warm, welcoming. Attainable.
Sasuke couldn’t stomach it. Not after everything he had done to him. He didn’t deserve warmth, didn’t deserve a choice. A chance.
It all became too much, and Sasuke had fled. He turned his back before he could see Naruto’s face warp with confusion, and he fell back into his old ways the same way he pulled on his battle-worn cloak.
Now, Sasuke is tired, the physical exhaustion just as apparent as the psychological. Digging two fingers into his temple, Sasuke tries to stifle the ache. As much as he is loath to admit it, the scars of living someone else’s lie are nothing compared to the razor-sharp reality of living your own. And five years untethered is a long time, even for someone who’d been forced to drown themselves in the well of patience many times over.
Sasuke feels different than when he had first left, different still from the times he had left Naruto before. At the beginning, there had been no unsteady footfalls, no lapses in focus.
Now, his goal seems so abstract, so tenuous and intangible, that he can’t help but unconsciously be drawn back to the one thing that’s never failed to ground him, the outstretched hand that refuses to lower, the person who uncompromisingly, unyieldingly insists on their unity.
He sucks in a sharp inhale, shaking his head to settle his body and mind, and allows himself to move again. He zeroes in on the steady beat of his feet beneath him, but for once, he doesn’t have any idea where they’re going to manage to take him.
𖤓
The disk of the moon hangs low in the sky, cushioned by the pale blue and rose of the morning light, and Naruto opens his eyes again to find the diffuse glow of dawn meandering its way through the autumn leaves.
These days, each sleep is equally as restless as the last, the bark of the tree against his back providing just as little solace as his own mattress would. The tree might be more comforting, actually. Whenever he’d been in Konoha, the vacancy in the sheets on one side of his bed had been blinding, grueling in its conspiciousness. At least out here – amongst the forest, the water, the sand, everywhere he’d looked over the past five years – it was easier for Naruto to convince himself that he was making progress. That Sasuke really could be there, right around the next corner. But until then, the specters of possibility were better company than a half-empty bedroom.
For a while now, Naruto has preferred to travel under cover of darkness, those specters and the moon as his guide; last night had been an exception. And he’d forfeit a sane explanation for that behavior even longer ago. The crescent seal tattooed across Sasuke’s palm during their fight against Kaguya might as well have also been imprinted onto the backs of Naruto’s eyelids.
Truthfully, he couldn’t think of a time when he had ever not been looking at Sasuke. Every annoyed huff, every head tilt, each hitch of his breath. Sasuke was expressive in the way that the change in the tide was: subtle, and often dwarfed by the urgency of each breaking wave, each target of his focus. But anyone who watches the ocean for long enough will come to know its intricate rhythms, the patterned ebbs and flows. Naruto just hopes all these years away from the sea won’t have hollowed out its core. Won’t have altered Sasuke at his core.
Still, Naruto can’t help but imagine the changes in the periphery: Does Sasuke still wear his hair long? Is his rinnegan now perpetually obscured by the shadow of his bangs? Is the crease between his eyebrows deeper? Does it unfurl itself just as easily when he smiles?
If they saw each other today, would Sasuke look at Naruto with the same expression he always had upon their reunions, with that brittle smugness and tension that could never truly veil the cracks of his relief? The same expression that always convinced him that Sasuke could see into his very soul?
And if Sasuke could still see that, the splayed-out exposition of Naruto’s heart, would he still see in Naruto what Naruto saw in him?
⏾
Unthinkingly, still allowing his body to move on its own, Sasuke climbs a tree to the top of its branches, where his view of the sky is uninterrupted.
The soft pinks of the early morning sky give way to whorls of orange, blooming into a golden brightness, and Sasuke holds his breath until the sun finally crests over the horizon.
Sasuke’s never missed the sunrise. Not once in five years.
The hues are always just as jarring and vivid as the day he first saw them. When he first saw Naruto. Today, the sun’s rays burst over the trees as if they wanted to greet him personally, and he tightens his hand in a fist to keep it from reaching out for them. Eyes watering but never faltering from the horizon, he faces the sun fully as he watches it climb higher.
The moment will end, Sasuke knows that all too well. His days are spent shrouded in guilt, his nights spent in mental flagellation. But in these brief moments lit by the rising sun, it almost feels like other paths are illuminated for him. Like all of this could be different.
He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to keep the vision of the light in his mind for as long as he can, and when he opens them again, his gaze catches on familiar terrain.
Of course he is here.
He almost has to laugh. He almost feels relieved.
Because Sasuke is always here, whether or not the chasm of the valley is stretched out in front of him, or only in his mind. This is one place he never truly left, not really.
He descends through the leaves, swathed in the same colors the sky had just been. With his heart in his throat, he begins to make his way towards something again.
𖤓
Deep down, Naruto knew it wouldn’t do him any good to come here.
The weariness of disappointment wraps itself around his bones, and each step feels heavier than the last. Still, he is drawn to it, a muscle memory that is as much his own as it is some primordial urge, passed down by those before him. This is sacred ground.
Naruto comes here every single time a lead fizzles out, as they always do. This was where his and Sasuke’s story intersected, intertwined. How could this not be where it continued?
He looks around, taking in the sight before him, casting his mind back to the last time he saw Sasuke here. Though they had both been fractured, emptying their blood onto the ground, Naruto had felt so full he might’ve burst. He had never felt more alive.
Naruto had always been on Sasuke’s side, and laying next to him then, it felt like Sasuke finally understood that. But now, standing here alone, with the past crumbled to dust just like it feels the future is doing, he wonders how he’d managed to fail so obscenely again.
What did he do all of that for, if Sasuke was just going to leave again? Why was it that nothing Naruto did was ever enough to make him stay?
Naruto’s eyes drift upwards, focusing on the pale outline of the moon, still visible long after it should have been at this time of day.
Did Sasuke know all along? That he would leave then?
Why didn’t he say anything?
⏾
Chest heaving with exertion, Sasuke finally comes to a stop, some unspoken gravitational force having compelled him to sprint the entire way to the nadir of the valley. And yet somehow, he still feels like he’s running behind.
Maybe it’s for the same reason that a pit drops in his stomach when he steps onto the field, the same reason his sharingan unconsciously begins to burn, his eyes otherwise unable to process what he sees in front of him.
There’s someone clothed in the bursting orange from the sunrise, solar flares of gold clinging to their neck. But the fabric hangs loose over this person’s lithe form, and dirt mottles their hair, a jaded shell of who they once were.
Sasuke’s mouth parts without anything to say, his breath staying caught in his lungs as he stares.
𖤓
Despite it being almost midday, the moon hurries impossibly closer to the sun, like it's sprinting towards it. And the air is different. Charged, somehow. Crackling with anticipation.
Naruto sees something in his peripheral vision and whips around to meet it. He’s been chasing ghosts and dead ends for so long that he fully expects nothing to be there, but his head turns anyway.
Sasuke is there. Standing across the field. As if five years had evaporated into a singularity. As if he had seen him just yesterday. As if no time had passed at all.
For a moment, they simply look at each other. The moon dips into the halo around the sun, casting half-shadows onto the ground between them.
“Sasuke?” Naruto whispers, his name carried on the wind until it meets its mark. He watches as Sasuke sucks in a breath.
Blanketed in a serene darkness, the world is suspended in time, and the distance between Naruto and Sasuke vaporizes just like the years apart did. Before his knees can hit the ground, Naruto is in Sasuke’s arms, hauled up close to his chest, lined up directly with his heart. Naruto wraps his arms around his shoulders and clings, unable to help the strangled sob that comes out of his mouth.
Above them, the moon passes over the center of the sun, slipping softly into its warm embrace.
A ring of light crowns around the moon, effortlessly encircling the entirety of it, like the sun was always meant to hold it, like they were always meant to be one entity. Naruto cradles Sasuke in his arms, gripping him fiercely, hard enough to bruise.
As the moon begins to escape the sun’s halo once more, Naruto throws his entire body weight onto Sasuke before the latter can pull away. Because Naruto is not letting go. He is never letting go ever again.
Sasuke staggers back against the rock face behind them, bracing himself so they don't topple over. Tucking his cheek into Sasuke’s shoulder, tears follow well-worn streams down Naruto’s face.
“Please,” he chokes out, voice thick with long-repressed truths, with all he’s wanted to say for five years.
Sasuke tilts his head, but Naruto squeezes his eyes shut and moves to grind his forehead into Sasuke’s, as if he needs to enter his mind and see himself from his perspective to know this is real.
The world is quiet, and the sound of their heartbeats echo throughout the hills. “Please just… stay,” Naruto breathes. “Stay with me, this time.”
Sasuke's entire body tenses, but in the sky, the moon no longer shrinks behind the clouds, hiding in half-obscured crescents. It glows softly even in the daylight, its relief in being seen shining bright enough to illuminate the valley.
Wrapping his arms tight around Naruto, Sasuke clings back.