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Sakura and Sasuke make dinner for him.
Dusk splays its deep watery blues over the world, its feathers breaching even the windows of Naruto's old, small, dingy apartment. The one he's lived in for more years than this body he's in has been alive. The one with the dingy yellow lighting, the poor excuse of a living room, cluttered beside the dining room and the kitchen like a small animal.
He's fourteen. Allegedly. Since yesterday.
Allegedly, so is Sakura, measuring seasonings, mixing them into a small bowl, and allegedly, so is Sasuke, cutting meat into cubes dutifully, mouth curved in a focused frown, eyes sharp.
Naruto's hands feel vaguely sweaty, but only in the way that he knows they should be, yet aren't.
He stares down at the wood grain of his dining table.
Kakashi sits beside him, lazy and reading, his eyes dragging across words he's read before. Two, maybe five times over. It's never stopped him before.
The metal measuring tools click. The knife drags along the wooden cutting board. Naruto, despite himself, salivates. Kurama growls in the right atrium of his heart, the sound curling in the pleased way.
Some part of him still doesn't like this. He doesn't like this. He still doesn't.
He wonders if he'll ever feel at ease in this apartment anymore. If staying over at Sakura's or Sasuke's is the fate he's subjected to for his sins.
Sasuke takes the meat cubes in his clean, bare hands, massaging them into Sakura's marinade. He coats each piece of pristine, fresh meat in it, careful to catch every side of every morsel.
When he is done, Sakura wraps the bowl's lid in fabric, covering the raw food, full of blood, to rest in the fridge.
Kakashi chuckles at something in his book, quiet and full of mirth.
Sasuke turns the faucet with an elbow, washing his hands.
He can't help but admit to himself that, if it were his punishment, to stay with his beloved team, he can't bring himself to hate it.
That meat. It used to be a boy. A civilian boy. An innocent one.
But, there is cause for celebration.
That boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been. Saw something he couldn't have seen.
Kakashi and his hounds are not domestic house pets. They know how to go hunting.
They'd lived their lives. Gone through things. Waded in thick, dark pits of misery and pain. Clawed their way out. Thrashed through the war. Made it out on the other side.
Sasuke had lost. Naruto hadn't been able to believe that he'd won. Sakura and Kakashi had been grateful for it. Sasuke had been grateful for it. Naruto needed time to comprehend it.
They'd been born, and then they'd lived, and then they'd died, and then they'd lived again.
And then the sun had spun in reverse, flown back, and back, and back.
They'd woken on the day of their graduation. Twelve and leggy, young and misguided. Remembering everything. Thinking they hadn't.
Kakashi had been a corpse staring at the wall of his bedroom. The others were similar. Naruto was similar. He remembers like it's happening to him again.
They'd found each other, and they'd all known, and they'd all known how much the people around them meant, and they'd all known what had happened, what no one else knew.
They didn't know how.
They still don't.
Or, they do, however.
They're still here.
That matters the most out of anything.
Naruto doesn't know who the bad influence is; Sasuke and his raw meat or himself and his hunger.
Both are evil. But strength has always been costly, has always taken from those who'd posses it.
They hold each other, hand in hand, waist in waist, as they dance on the water, swaying to the song of the record player, on the coast of the lake like a beached fish, wailing its death.
Sakura says it's a miracle they haven't gotten sick, but she's never been one to back down. Kakashi has always indulged his students, someway and somehow.
They eat with them. They eat their detestable craving, the insatiable need. They don't complain for it.
Naruto wants to call them out on it, but he can't. That their hunger is not his. That it never will be. The words die in his throat. He has no defense.
Sakura and Kakashi dance near them, footsteps sending ripples which exacerbate themselves, exceptional wounds.
The sun is bright. The day is cool.
The song winds down to an end, shuttering into great quiet, and the birds chirp mirthlessly about.
Sakura pulls away from her dance partner, skips with speed to the record player, changes the song.
The trees don't ever stop their rustling.
When she returns, Sasuke and Naruto have separated and her hands come clasp in Naruto's, Sasuke adjusting his stance with Kakashi.
They don't deserve it. Any of it. But they have it.
They are strong.
And the day is good.
When Sasuke had been retrieved, brought back into the warm embrace of Konoha's clutches under Naruto's de facto rule, he'd lounged in the apartment Naruto had given to him and eaten nothing but raw cooking material. Pink ground beef, ripe peach, grains of rice.
He wouldn't eat at restaurants. He'd turn down home cooked meals.
He ate a little like something that had been a snake once yet was one no longer, yet stubbornly kept a feral, unrefined palate.
Naruto, when he'd released Kurama from his shackles, had been deeply ashamed of his bestial wants. His cravings. His needs.
In the end, all Sasuke had needed to do to convince him that he was right was to hold his jaw and press red, bloody meat past his lips.
The second Naruto tasted it, actually tasted it, everything was over for him.
He was ruined. He was what he was meant to be.
It had been Sakura and Kakashi who'd suggested they might be craving people. Sakura who insisted this meat be cooked.
When time decided take-backsies was an order, they had to start hiding it.
They think they've done a good job.
They are stared at oddly sometimes, but no one can tell what happens in their kitchen just by looking them in the eyes.
They are still children, and Sasuke has never defected, and everything is standard.
But they are forcing themselves to grow stronger.
And they will be.
The night is dark, gritty between the teeth.
The sun is a sword. It doesn't care about sin. It reveals all.
There is blood in the dirt.
But there is no body anymore.