Work Text:
They spent another week more in the Land of the Waves. While the bridge was built. While Kakashi and Sasuke recovered from their injuries enough to be able to travel. Sasuke had remained completely bedridden for two days following the battle. During the next six his ability to talk and walk increased in steady increments, but the rural doctor that had patched him up ordered him not to move too much, or else risk straining himself and setting back his healing. Naruto knew this mostly because Sakura told him.
Despite his efforts to bury them, the memories kept resurfacing. The shadow of Sasuke's back as the senbon that had been directed at Naruto pierced his neck. The sensation of his breath petering out while his head lay on Naruto's lap. The sight of him standing up to wave at them and show that he was still alive, only to crumble like a badly constructed toothpick tower right afterward. Naruto avoided searing into his retinas the image of this Sasuke too — weak, nearly voiceless, careful with his movements so as not to set his puncture wounds bleeding through the bandages — by barely seeing him. He spent all day running around, his small army of clones doubling the village’s workforce: carrying materials, running errands, doing small menial tasks. He left Tazuna’s house in the morning before Sasuke got up and returned after he had gone to sleep for the night, slipping in and out of his futon, set next to Sasuke’s, with as little of a fuss as he was able, although he noticed that Sasuke wasn’t actually asleep every time. The construction of the bridge carried on far more swiftly than it could ever have before.
Sakura would come out at noon to whack him upside-down on the head and remind him to eat his lunch before he wore himself out. It would be a hassle if they ended up having to drag his sorry chakra-exhausted body back to Konoha, she said. She would stay for a few hours to help out if it was needed, or to seat by Naruto’s side as he took a break, breathing in the salty ocean air that was so different from Konoha’s. Afterwards, she would return to Sasuke’s bedside, an anxiousness to her eye, like she had to make sure that nobody had died while she wasn’t looking.
Naruto had wondered, after their first fight with Zabuza, when Kakashi had needed crutches to get by day after day, but it didn’t fully sink how long it took — normal — people to heal until he felt Sasuke’s striking absence while he saw this cursed C-rank to its conclusion. The thought flitted back and forth like an annoying fly: the heat that he had started feeling eating him from the inside sometimes, the itch of a wound closing itself up in minutes and his resulting unmarred skin, the shape of his canines against his tongue. He felt nauseous if his mind lingered too long on the reason behind it. Like he had been carved out of the embrace of normalcy and was being dangled helplessly in the air while he kept trying to walk among and alongside people.
So he strained his muscles and his chakra to the degree that Kakashi would allow instead of following that train of thought.
He didn’t think about how he had broken out of Haku’s ice-mirror prison. He didn’t think about what had happened before that. He didn’t talk to Sasuke because he didn’t know what to say, how to look at him. It worked well, it wasn’t difficult to keep the distance, since Sasuke always turned to look at the window or the wall if Naruto happened to enter any room that he was in.
Once, towards the end of the week, when Sasuke was well enough to move about, to walk without his knees trembling after a few minutes, he came out with Sakura and Kakashi for lunch and the four of them had eaten it sitting by the docks, away from the dust of the construction site. If it had been any other day, Naruto would have been talking everyone’s ears off, Sakura would either laugh or groan in annoyance and shove him whenever he said something particularly stupid, Sasuke’s eyebrow would twitch, and he would act uninterested, but he would occasionally make a comment in his dry-pan humour, or he would genuinely engage in the conversation if the topic interested him enough.
It wasn’t any other day, however. Sakura talked, a nervous undercurrent to her voice that betrayed how rattled she felt with the weird atmosphere, and Naruto answered in between shoveling rice into his mouth as fast as possible. Sasuke, surprisingly, hadn’t sat too far away from them, but he averted his gaze, uncharacteristically picking at his food. Kakashi observed them over his book.
Before Naruto could finish his bento box in record time, a clone skidded to a halt before them. “Boss, a couple of us fell and popped and we need more hands, everybody else is busy.”
“Ah, alright, hold on.”
As he put down his chopsticks and made the handsign to create two more clones, Sakura interceded, “You didn’t notice your clones disappearing?”
The three clones ran off. Naruto scratched his cheek. “There’s, like, twenty of them, I don’t really keep track.”
“Twenty?” Sakura squawked, like she hadn’t seen them running around every day. Maybe she hadn’t counted them, it wasn’t like anyone but Naruto could tell them apart and they were all over the place. “All morning?”
He would have answered with a confident fox-grin that twenty clones were nothing, he could do a much more awesome number, but suddenly, Naruto noticed that Sasuke was staring at him for the first time in six days — frowning, baffled. Their eyes met for a second, and then they looked elsewhere.
“Yeah, just about,” he answered Sakura, weirdly subdued for himself — he knew, he noticed himself out of balance.
Snapping his book closed, Kakashi was suddenly by his side. “Are you pacing yourself?”
“I’m fine, I don’t feel tired at all.”
Kakashi hummed. “Even so. Cut it back to ten.”
Naruto groaned in protest. “Sensei. But this way it goes so much faster and we can go back to Konoha sooner! Doesn’t this count as training, also?”
“Don’t overexert yourself, idiot,” came Sasuke’s raspy voice from across their group.
He startled and his eyes fixed upon Sasuke’s face, who had gone back to eating his food, although his shoulders were tense, his movements mechanical and devoid of their usual sleek grace. It was the first time that Naruto had heard him talk since he had passed out from Haku’s senbon. His throat was mostly healed, but his voice still had a croaky, breathy quality to it. Naruto disliked it. He disliked even more not knowing how to respond, when interacting with Sasuke wasn’t a thing that he ever gave a second thought to usually. He felt like he was seven years old again and watching Sasuke's lonely figure from across the playground, unable to break through the wall of unnamed and tangled feelings that kept him from just reaching out.
His eyes skittered away and he rubbed the back of his neck to assuage the need to do something with his hands.
The discomfort was palpable. Kakashi tried to cut through it, “Sasuke’s right, Naruto. If you want to practice while doing this, concentrate on a more precise use of chakra with your clones, not on creating more.”
Naruto finished his food, and with a hurried, “Alright, sensei,” he was off towards the bridge.
Sakura was weirded-out by their walking on eggshells around each other like this, while Kakashi’s eye crinkled with something that Naruto could only describe as nostalgic constipation. Naruto simply couldn’t help the awkwardness. Sasuke clearly would have preferred breaking his knee than be the one to break the tension.
So Naruto kept busy for the entire week, until the bridge was finished and everyone was healthy enough to walk all the way to Konoha. He spent his entire time running, and the night before they were to set out on the trek back home, perhaps because the end to the hecticness lulled him into his first deep sleep in eight days, the events of the battle against Haku and Zabuza finally caught up to him in his dreams.
When he woke up, he didn’t remember much of it. A maelstrom of movement, blood, ice, flesh, needles. A sorrow so sudden yet so profound that it could only burst forth as undiluted rage, chakra that felt like acid dissolving him from the inside out, a cocoon of unfathomable power spurring him to kill kill kill. Take revenge. He clawed his way through the violence, after-images of Haku’s angelic face after ripping his throat out with his teeth blurring into an undefined landscape of flames, debris, and corpses strewn about — vague memories that weren’t his own. And in the eye of that typhoon, a fallen teammate that would never rise again despite the monster that lived in Naruto’s veins going on a rampage for him.
He sprung up from his futon with his throat hurting from a silent scream and his eyes wet. He looked down at his hands, uncomprehending when he didn’t see his nails elongated into bloodied claws. And then his heart lurched with urgency and he turned to look at Sasuke, to check that his chest still rose and fell and the bandages around his neck remained white.
He found Sasuke already looking at him, propped up on his elbow, a hand reaching out, and his eye-brows furrowed. Naruto blinked his tears away and Sasuke’s hand went back to his futon, his expression neutral again, like a mirage dissipating.
They stared at each other in the darkness, and as Naruto’s heart calmed down and his brain processed that Sasuke was alive in the waking world, embarrassment overcame him. He was not completely certain of what his face was doing, but he guessed that he must have looked really stupid: cheeks wet, panting slack-jawed while he looked at Sasuke like he was drinking in the face of god.
He turned away and rubbed his tear-tracks away with his sleeves, muttering, “Sorry.” Saliva lingered in his throat as he struggled to swallow. “I, uhm…” he trailed off.
The quiet between them that he had previously been thankful for felt suffocating then. He considered murmuring a good-night and laying down again, but it didn’t feel right.
Finally, Sasuke spoke, whisper-soft like neither of them ever were, “Nightmare?”
“Yeah.”
“Hm.”
Naruto threw a look at the other two futons on the other side of the room. Sakura seemed to be soundly asleep. Kakashi might not have been, the bastard, but he hadn’t risen either.
“Did I wake you?”
“You were gasping and moving,” Sasuke answered. His voice was mostly back to normal, although it was hard to tell when he whispered. “But you do that every night. Would it kill you to be quiet for once?”
Naruto acknowledged the jab for what it was — a lame, clumsy attempt at returning to normalcy — but he was feeling too raw to fall into their old routines. He just cringed.
At the lack of a whiny rebuttal from him, he sensed a growing air of discomfort from Sasuke, even without looking at him. There was a quiet rustle as Sasuke lied on his back fully again.
In the manga that he had read and the movies that he had watched, this would be the part where he was asked if he wanted to talk about his bad dream. He couldn’t picture Sasuke doing it, and Sasuke didn’t do it, so he guessed that his impression of his character was fairly accurate.
Well.
Except for the part where Sasuke almost died for Naruto a week ago. That was not something that he would have ever seen coming. Teammates were supposed to watch each other’s backs, but Naruto struggled to understand that Sasuke would go to such lengths for him. He had asked then, why me? why someone like me? someone who hadn’t been worth anything to anyone before a month ago?, and Sasuke had answered then too, but it hadn’t been a very good answer.
The blankets were rough in his tight fists. Naruto shrunk into his shoulders as he asked, “Why did you do it?”
Sasuke replied after a beat, “I told you already.” He didn’t pretend not to know what Naruto was talking about. He probably suspected what the nightmare had been about, too. “I…” he began. Paused. Naruto looked at him; Sasuke was frowning up at the ceiling. “I just saw the senbon coming for you and I… had to stop them.”
He spoke slowly, even haltingly. An echo of Sasuke’s last words before he lost consciousness came to him. That he had sworn not to die before he killed his brother — and yet he had forsaken that oath with a last plea for Naruto not to die too. Even if he had done it on impulse, it had to mean something. Maybe Sasuke was realizing that too.
Naruto thought of Iruka taking a shuriken to the back to protect him. He wondered if that was what having people truly meant. Blood and pain and sacrifice for those that he would call his own. Haku had said something like that.
Perhaps it was the night, the undefined lines of Sasuke’s figure in the blue-dark of this borrowed room kilometres away from Konoha, their third teammate and their sensei oblivious to them, that made it feel like he could voice the next question.
“Would you take it back?”
His fists trembled slightly in his lap, but his gaze didn’t stray from Sasuke’s face. He hadn’t realized how much he anticipated the answer until he had sought it. Sasuke looked at him, his eyes so black when they had been so red while he lay on Naruto’s hands and knees a week ago, and then he turned his head away.
Perhaps it was the night for him too, the unreality of this dream of a moment away from the daylight, that allowed him to say, “No.”
Something heavy grew in Naruto’s chest. He didn’t know how to name that emotion. He only knew that — if there was a world in which Sasuke died from an attack that he could have taken in his stead, that wasn’t a world where Naruto would want to keep living. Even if that was the only world where he became Hokage.
He moved to kneel facing Sasuke.
“Then,” he started, a forceful whisper that was too loud for the hour, but Naruto was too loud always, “I won’t die if you don’t.”
Sasuke turned his head back towards him with a jerk, eyes widened ever so slightly. “You…”
“And you won’t die if I don’t,” Naruto finished.
Sasuke blinked at him, at his posture in an uncommonly good seiza, shoulders straight, hands on his knees. Gazed into his eyes, that Naruto made sure didn’t waver.
“And if one of us does die?”
“We won’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“We won’t, I won’t allow it.”
Sasuke huffed and looked away. One corner of his mouth twitched up nevertheless. “You idiot. That’s not the way of the shinobi.”
“I’m Uzumaki Naruto,” he announced, and Sasuke rolled his eyes and shushed him. “And I’ll forge my own way.”
The way Sasuke looked at him then was annoyed, but he was also smiling slightly. Almost — and Naruto couldn’t believe that the thought crossed his mind — fond. “You’re such a moron,” he muttered, even though Naruto was being completely serious.
For the first time in a week, Naruto began to feel the hot prickle of frustration Sasuke always arose in him. But before he could complain, his teammate continued, “There may be forces that neither of us can beat, though.”
No traces of humour left. Sasuke’s eyes somehow gleamed in the dark. His mouth was a soft blurry line, set firmly. Naruto suddenly felt very unequal looking down at him. Sasuke must have felt the same, because he sat up, the blankets pooling on his lap, the white of the bandages on his arms stark with the moonlight coming in from the window.
“You really can’t control who lives or dies,” he said, somber, a knowing weight. “But,” he added, “if I die, you live.”
Part of Naruto wanted to argue back that he would beat any impossible odds. A larger, wiser part knew that it wasn’t an argument that he wanted to start with a Sasuke who looked at him like he did then.
“Then if I die, you live,” he promised as well.
That night, they made a pledge to each other. The next morning, Sasuke ditched the dressings on his wounds, no longer necessary. Team 7 made offerings to Haku and Zabuza’s anonymous burial and then started the journey back to Konoha. Naruto goofing off, Sakura telling him off for it, Sasuke ignoring them, Kakashi reading his cheap erotica. The sun shined. Naruto looked at Sasuke when he knew he wouldn’t look back, and felt Sasuke’s eyes on his face when Naruto’s were elsewhere in turn. They didn’t talk about it ever again, but the memory of that night stayed.