The Truth About Sasuke's Shippuuden Tomfoolery
Title: These People I Can’t Stand
Rating: T
Warnings: Sasuke, drugs including but not limited to fanfiction crack, no real Gaara/Naruto interaction in this chapter, but much treacly waff in later ones
Setting: AU, present day Japan (though the fact that it's specifically Japan isn't too important, I just had trouble imagining all their names in any other country)
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three
Chapter Four: Timeskip
“Sasuke, you have got to be kidding!”
“Of course I am, don’t I look it?”
“You know, you actually do. You were born without any smiling-muscles, right? So that must be what you look like when you’re telling a joke.”
“Naruto!”
“What? You know I’m right, Sakura-chan.”
The beginning of the summer vacation had not been intended to be the Breaking of the Fellowship it turned out to be, but it couldn’t be helped. Gaara was already gone anyway, and Naruto’s plans for spending the month traveling with his adoptive parents had been made ages ago, but apparently only Sakura remaining in Konoha was one defection too many for things to go peacefully.
What was their problem? Couldn’t they see that he had to do this, and that nobody else could do it?
Sakura gave Naruto a glare Gaara had probably helped her perfect, and then turned to Sasuke without it. “You don’t even know where to start looking for Itachi! If the police or the private detectives your uncle hired can’t find him-“
“They don’t know him like I do. Nobody does.” And this was so true it would have been incriminating to elaborate. Sasuke was by no means a stalker, he just had a knack for gathering intel, and it wasn’t like Itachi had even written in that diary all that much.
“At least don’t go alone!” There were those tears of hers again. He tried to tell himself they were a trick to persuade him.
“Yeah, you’re just gonna get lost and mugged without us strong men to protect you. This is by far your stupidest idea ev-”
As usual, Sakura saved him from having to come up with a retort to Naruto’s comments, this time by punching the blond idiot for calling her a man.
In the end he said he would rethink his plan, ask Kakashi for advice on how to deal with school at the same time if he did end up getting involved in tracking down and dragging back his older brother, and that he would definitely have a long talk with Obito about whether it was necessary at all. Because a couple of parental figures reassuring that he was needed here and that it was only a matter of days before Itachi came back on his own was all he would need.
Who lies to his friends’ angry, weeping faces, runs away from home in the night without as much as a note, and drops out from any kind of formal education at thirteen to prove his delinquent brother that he is the opposite of boring? Sasuke Uchiha does.
He was doing things the way that was for their own good, of course. He knew Sakura had meant every word of offering to go with him, and that underneath the insults Naruto had agreed with her. He couldn’t let them ruin their lives, too. He was protecting them.
It made perfect sense.
In the following period of vagrancy that ended up taking three years instead of months, he picked up allies, made enemies, and followed every clue he could sniff out to the dead end they all seemed to lead. He got into fights, got his ass kicked, and kicked a wide variety of buttocks himself. It was the biggest adventure of his life.
Which is why you are hearing about it in such rich detail.
Allright, so maybe he was so high on something he didn’t know where he was most of the time, but that’s just a guess. At least judging from the things that went on around him and how much he remembered about them, he decided that he must have been. All the same, finally he did find Itachi, and corner him for an epic showdown.
And according to that hobo who had seen the whole thing rather sober in comparison, ‘epic’ was quite right.
They had started with shouting incomprehensible nonsense at each other -something about seeing things, and kaleidoscopes and lights. Then they had thrown punches in each other’s general direction, hitting air every time and looking around confused when the other wasn’t where he had seemed to be. At some point Itachi had told Sasuke to stop turning into snakes.
When they had seemingly concluded they couldn’t hit each other with fists, they had started throwing stuff. Pebbles, garbage from the dumpsters on the alley they were in, and anything they got their hands on. Their witness said he might have seen a knife, but from the way it had been thrown neither of them had probably realized it was one. They had stumbled around, finally making contact -probably accidentally- and Sasuke had gotten poked in the eye. While he had been doubling over holding his face, Itachi had done the same, apparently out of dizziness and headache.
Somewhere in the midst of it they had started a fire.
Cue some more weird talk about snakes, their speech now so impaired it had been hard to make out any other words. Itachi had puked and passed out, Sasuke collapsing soon after. That was how they had been found, but it wasn’t the police that had gotten to them first.
No, that might have saved him some dignity.
Before he opened his eyes, he could hear their voices, and they were too loud to be hallucinatory. They were familiar, too. A man and a woman. He vaguely registered having missed those two voices and wondered why.
“-shouting, we’re in a hospital!”
“Well I don’t care, once he’s out of here I’ll beat him up so bad he ends up back here again!”
“That’s a given, me too. But quiet down, will you.”
Why indeed. Better pretend to be in a coma or something a while longer.
“He is awake,” a third voice calmly announced, and Sasuke screamed a few selected curses at the guy inside his head. The other two voices shut up immediately, and then-
“SASUKE!!”
-he was being hugged to death by a monster that looked like a blur of pink and yellow. And it was crying to his chest, which kind of hurt because he had a few cuts there. Naruto looked up at him first.
“You've got some nerve, you bastard! Where the hell have you been for three years?” The voice was a little deeper than he remembered, and the pudgy, round face had gained some angles, but yes, that had to be Naruto.
“Don’t you ever dare to do something like that again!” And that was Sakura. Much less begging and much more demanding than the last time he had seen her. “Do you realize how hard you were to track down? If we had gotten to you minutes later you could have had choked on your own vomit or burned to death! We were worried sick about you!”
They had tracked him down? They had been looking for him? Again, what the hell was their problem?
“They love you. What the hell is your problem?”
Oh, right, the third voice. Sasuke strained his neck to look up at the boy who could read his mind and talk down to him like he was discussing the weather, even if he had always been half a head shorter. He didn’t have to, to know who it was, though.
“I-Ita… chi?”
Gaara made the slightest smirk. “Yes, he is one. Though not anymore.” He took a deliberate, stretched pause like some quiz show host from hell. “No, he isn’t dead. He is in the room next to yours. Your uncle is with him right now.”
“What are you doing here?” His throat hurt when he talked, and for some reason he was wasting breaths on asking why Gaara wasn’t in Suna, playing happy family with his precious siblings.
“Naruto told me they had found you.”
Figures. It wasn’t that he had expected Gaara to be looking for him, he had never been clingy towards him like Naruto and Sakura apparently still were. Of course it took Naruto to drag his scrawny ass to even his hospital room.
“...so I met up with them at the nearest train station, and we ran to where you had been spotted and carried you and your brother to the hospital. I stayed with you while Sakura called your uncle and Naruto lied to the police to make things as easy for you two as possible. I would have preferred to go help him, but you were crying, and raving rather loudly about how you couldn't decide whether you were an eagle or a hawk, so I let you hold my hand because it made you shut up. And you owe me a shirt."
Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Rating: T
Warnings: Sasuke, drugs including but not limited to fanfiction crack, no real Gaara/Naruto interaction in this chapter, but much treacly waff in later ones
Setting: AU, present day Japan (though the fact that it's specifically Japan isn't too important, I just had trouble imagining all their names in any other country)
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three
Chapter Four: Timeskip
“Sasuke, you have got to be kidding!”
“Of course I am, don’t I look it?”
“You know, you actually do. You were born without any smiling-muscles, right? So that must be what you look like when you’re telling a joke.”
“Naruto!”
“What? You know I’m right, Sakura-chan.”
The beginning of the summer vacation had not been intended to be the Breaking of the Fellowship it turned out to be, but it couldn’t be helped. Gaara was already gone anyway, and Naruto’s plans for spending the month traveling with his adoptive parents had been made ages ago, but apparently only Sakura remaining in Konoha was one defection too many for things to go peacefully.
What was their problem? Couldn’t they see that he had to do this, and that nobody else could do it?
Sakura gave Naruto a glare Gaara had probably helped her perfect, and then turned to Sasuke without it. “You don’t even know where to start looking for Itachi! If the police or the private detectives your uncle hired can’t find him-“
“They don’t know him like I do. Nobody does.” And this was so true it would have been incriminating to elaborate. Sasuke was by no means a stalker, he just had a knack for gathering intel, and it wasn’t like Itachi had even written in that diary all that much.
“At least don’t go alone!” There were those tears of hers again. He tried to tell himself they were a trick to persuade him.
“Yeah, you’re just gonna get lost and mugged without us strong men to protect you. This is by far your stupidest idea ev-”
As usual, Sakura saved him from having to come up with a retort to Naruto’s comments, this time by punching the blond idiot for calling her a man.
In the end he said he would rethink his plan, ask Kakashi for advice on how to deal with school at the same time if he did end up getting involved in tracking down and dragging back his older brother, and that he would definitely have a long talk with Obito about whether it was necessary at all. Because a couple of parental figures reassuring that he was needed here and that it was only a matter of days before Itachi came back on his own was all he would need.
Who lies to his friends’ angry, weeping faces, runs away from home in the night without as much as a note, and drops out from any kind of formal education at thirteen to prove his delinquent brother that he is the opposite of boring? Sasuke Uchiha does.
He was doing things the way that was for their own good, of course. He knew Sakura had meant every word of offering to go with him, and that underneath the insults Naruto had agreed with her. He couldn’t let them ruin their lives, too. He was protecting them.
It made perfect sense.
In the following period of vagrancy that ended up taking three years instead of months, he picked up allies, made enemies, and followed every clue he could sniff out to the dead end they all seemed to lead. He got into fights, got his ass kicked, and kicked a wide variety of buttocks himself. It was the biggest adventure of his life.
Which is why you are hearing about it in such rich detail.
Allright, so maybe he was so high on something he didn’t know where he was most of the time, but that’s just a guess. At least judging from the things that went on around him and how much he remembered about them, he decided that he must have been. All the same, finally he did find Itachi, and corner him for an epic showdown.
And according to that hobo who had seen the whole thing rather sober in comparison, ‘epic’ was quite right.
They had started with shouting incomprehensible nonsense at each other -something about seeing things, and kaleidoscopes and lights. Then they had thrown punches in each other’s general direction, hitting air every time and looking around confused when the other wasn’t where he had seemed to be. At some point Itachi had told Sasuke to stop turning into snakes.
When they had seemingly concluded they couldn’t hit each other with fists, they had started throwing stuff. Pebbles, garbage from the dumpsters on the alley they were in, and anything they got their hands on. Their witness said he might have seen a knife, but from the way it had been thrown neither of them had probably realized it was one. They had stumbled around, finally making contact -probably accidentally- and Sasuke had gotten poked in the eye. While he had been doubling over holding his face, Itachi had done the same, apparently out of dizziness and headache.
Somewhere in the midst of it they had started a fire.
Cue some more weird talk about snakes, their speech now so impaired it had been hard to make out any other words. Itachi had puked and passed out, Sasuke collapsing soon after. That was how they had been found, but it wasn’t the police that had gotten to them first.
No, that might have saved him some dignity.
Before he opened his eyes, he could hear their voices, and they were too loud to be hallucinatory. They were familiar, too. A man and a woman. He vaguely registered having missed those two voices and wondered why.
“-shouting, we’re in a hospital!”
“Well I don’t care, once he’s out of here I’ll beat him up so bad he ends up back here again!”
“That’s a given, me too. But quiet down, will you.”
Why indeed. Better pretend to be in a coma or something a while longer.
“He is awake,” a third voice calmly announced, and Sasuke screamed a few selected curses at the guy inside his head. The other two voices shut up immediately, and then-
“SASUKE!!”
-he was being hugged to death by a monster that looked like a blur of pink and yellow. And it was crying to his chest, which kind of hurt because he had a few cuts there. Naruto looked up at him first.
“You've got some nerve, you bastard! Where the hell have you been for three years?” The voice was a little deeper than he remembered, and the pudgy, round face had gained some angles, but yes, that had to be Naruto.
“Don’t you ever dare to do something like that again!” And that was Sakura. Much less begging and much more demanding than the last time he had seen her. “Do you realize how hard you were to track down? If we had gotten to you minutes later you could have had choked on your own vomit or burned to death! We were worried sick about you!”
They had tracked him down? They had been looking for him? Again, what the hell was their problem?
“They love you. What the hell is your problem?”
Oh, right, the third voice. Sasuke strained his neck to look up at the boy who could read his mind and talk down to him like he was discussing the weather, even if he had always been half a head shorter. He didn’t have to, to know who it was, though.
“I-Ita… chi?”
Gaara made the slightest smirk. “Yes, he is one. Though not anymore.” He took a deliberate, stretched pause like some quiz show host from hell. “No, he isn’t dead. He is in the room next to yours. Your uncle is with him right now.”
“What are you doing here?” His throat hurt when he talked, and for some reason he was wasting breaths on asking why Gaara wasn’t in Suna, playing happy family with his precious siblings.
“Naruto told me they had found you.”
Figures. It wasn’t that he had expected Gaara to be looking for him, he had never been clingy towards him like Naruto and Sakura apparently still were. Of course it took Naruto to drag his scrawny ass to even his hospital room.
“...so I met up with them at the nearest train station, and we ran to where you had been spotted and carried you and your brother to the hospital. I stayed with you while Sakura called your uncle and Naruto lied to the police to make things as easy for you two as possible. I would have preferred to go help him, but you were crying, and raving rather loudly about how you couldn't decide whether you were an eagle or a hawk, so I let you hold my hand because it made you shut up. And you owe me a shirt."
Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight