Declaration, ch. 8
Title: Declaration
Summary: The Uchiha have always been known for their unfaltering perception. But Sasuke never completed his training with other Uchihas and anyway, with Naruto saying "I love you" left and right, he can surely be forgiven for misunderstanding... right?
Chapter: 8/? -Abnegation
Chapter Seven: Preparation
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Chapter Eight: Abnegation
"What," Naruto said, sounding as though he couldn't decide whether he wanted the word to be a question or a statement.
Sasuke was fairly certain that he had mixed up the order of his words and delivered his message in the worst possible way. Naruto had very blue eyes. He didn't know what to do. "Well, it's not that I don't, but. I… don't."
Naruto had yet to blink. His eyes were very blue and they had widened a bit at Sasuke's words, and had not moved since. Sasuke was very aware of those eyes, more so than he was aware of anything else in the world. Though the heat spreading like fire under his skin was a close second. His face was probably the color of Sakura's hair. He felt very small. What had Iruka said?
"I'm saying this wrong. I meant to say - I …value you as a teammate." Sasuke paused. Naruto's eyes worked some kind of kage-level truth and shame jutsu on him, and he added, "And as a friend."
The stare continued. "My b-best friend," Sasuke admitted, and cleared his throat. The admittance didn't seem to make any difference; his fingers longed to grip a kunai. What else had Iruka said?
"I don't want to jeopardize that relationship," Sasuke remembered and spoke simultaneously, then in a fit of what was either bravery, fear, or idiocy, added: "So I want you to stop telling me that you love me."
And that was it. Sasuke had exhausted his supply of words. Not only did he have nothing more to say, his throat seemed to have closed up and he wasn't sure if he could speak should he try. He wanted desperately to look away, to leave altogether, but Naruto's wide blue eyes were deadlier than any Sharingan.
A long, long, agonizingly, heart-stoppingly long pause: then Naruto took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.
Without changing expression in the slightest, yet also without adding any emotion into his voice whatsoever, he said, "Oi, bastard. Just tell me the news - about the seal."
Somewhere in-between the moment Naruto's eyes closed, and the moment Naruto said 'seal', Sasuke died several deaths. They were small, hot, painful deaths, and he completely deserved them.
-But he was still Sasuke, so he sucked in a breath, averted his gaze to stare at the potted plant across the room once more, and forced normality into his voice. "That's nothing to worry about. I talked to Jiraiya…"
Sasuke automatically paused to allow Naruto to rudely ask who this Jiraiya person was, and his eyes instinctively darted over to his teammate upon hearing the distinct lack of noise. He shivered a little. He'd wished for a silent Naruto so many times… but it was just creepy.
"Jiraiya," Sasuke determinedly carried on, flinching away from the sight of Naruto holding himself so very very still, hit by such an unexpected blow (but how could he have known, it wasn't his fault), "is a fuinjutsu master Iruka told me about. He said that the seal was acting to filter out your chakra from the… from it's chakra so that it didn't hurt you. So probably the seal should appear whenever you channel chakra, not just during tree-walking, I guess."
"You told him?" Naruto's head snapped up, and his voice actually cracked under the words.
Sasuke felt stupider than words. "No, no! He already knew! Actually, he was acting like he knew you personally…"
The sheer betrayal faded from Naruto's body language, but reluctantly, leaving Naruto slumped in its wake, elbows clunking to support him on the table as he caught his face in his hands. Sasuke suddenly remembered that he was still standing. His feet seemed glued in place.
"…That's great," Naruto mumbled to the tabletop. "That it's nothing bad," he then clarified, and, starting to sound marginally like himself again, added, "But I don't know anyone named Jiraiya."
"He's one of the legendary Sannin," Sasuke's mouth said. Sasuke himself was focused on the way he could see the back of Naruto's neck and how far away it seemed.
"What! No fair, how come you get to meet all the cool people?" Naruto asked. His voice sounded perfectly normal by now, and if Sasuke hadn't been looking he would have been completely fooled. As it was, he could feel his Sharingan spinning into life, recording and analyzing the minute twitches in the muscles of Naruto's back, the way his hands were clenching.
"He wasn't cool. He was peeping on the women's baths when I found him," Sasuke's mouth said. And then, eyes still latched on the tiniest evidences of Naruto's well-hidden breakdown, Sasuke did something he would never have done for anyone else. He knowingly made himself the butt of a joke. "And then he abandoned me in the middle of the red-light district. After dark."
Absurd as this statement was, it startled a genuine laugh out of Naruto, who lifted his head up in disbelief. Sasuke quickly forced down the Sharingan. "He did not."
"He did," Sasuke asserted, and felt altogether light and dizzy at the snort this provoked out of Naruto. "I had to henge into an old man to get home."
"No way," Naruto snickered, "that's awesome," and Sasuke drank it up like water, like air, like forgiveness for being such an unimaginable asshole -
He hardly recognized his own voice. It was buzzing with a strange sort of wild, juvenile excitement that exaggerated his own mortifications just to see Naruto laugh that tiniest bit more, that made it all worth it and more, what had he done: "And then, I nearly bumped into this stripper…"
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The next morning at the bridge, Sakura was less animated than usual during the half-hour or so she and Sasuke typically spent alone together waiting for the rest of their team, and eventually it dawned on Sasuke that she was still upset about being left out the day before. Thinking back on the past several months, he and Naruto had been spending a lot of time together, or if they weren't physically together Sasuke had been occupied thinking about Naruto. He hadn't paid any real attention to Sakura in a long time, and even Naruto had been interacting with her a lot less ever since Sasuke had found out about the Kyuubi. It was no wonder she was feeling left out, even alienated from her own team.
The quick pang of guilt that shot through him at this epiphany was as powerful as it was unexpected, and before he could think better of it, he'd already opened his mouth.
"Naruto and I have been meeting to practice taijutsu in our spare time," Sasuke said. "Maybe you should come sometime."
Sakura's eyes swung to meet his, wide and just the slightest bit teary. She blinked repeatedly, then quivered her lips up into a smile. "T-thanks, Sasuke-kun," she whispered.
Sakura's tears made him uncomfortable. Sasuke wasn't sure what to do about them, but they didn't affect him to anywhere near the same degree as Naruto's silence had the night before. It felt like that might be kind of mean to Sakura, but really, rather than feeling terribly guilty for making her (almost) cry, Sasuke just felt awkward. He looked away pointedly while Sakura wiped her eyes.
It took her all of thirty seconds to completely regain composure, though, and she actually smiled as she said, "…But no thanks. I'd just be holding you guys back, anyway."
Naruto would have denied that vehemently. Sasuke recognized it as the truth, and merely nodded. "You should catch up, then."
Sakura's, "Un!" seemed strong enough that it wouldn't take very long for that to happen, and Sasuke thought that maybe the time spent being ignored by everyone else had done her a lot of good as a ninja.
He didn't mention that, though. She would probably think it was a love confession and backslide all the way to her Academy behavior.
---
The mental picture of Sasuke trapped in the red-light district, being propositioned by prostitutes and strippers and all the various in-betweens (no matter how exaggerated) seemed to have restored Naruto completely to normal at the time. But Sasuke still had the image of Naruto's clenching fingers locked into his memory by the Sharingan. He still had the recollection of those lightning blue eyes locked blankly to his own for what seemed like forever…
And worst of all, he could recollect Naruto's voice as clearly as if the words were being said again right in front of him: "…tell me the news - about the seal."
Sasuke had never intended his rejection to be so unexpected. He'd thought - well, really he hadn't had any basis for thinking so; Naruto had never explicitly said he wanted an answer. But nonetheless, that last confession in the woods had felt so vivid, so different from all the rest and final somehow; it demanded a reply. Sasuke had panicked and scrambled to produce one, unwilling to make Naruto wait.
…And in doing so he'd sucker-punched Naruto with unanticipated rejection. Great. Good job there, Sasuke. Real well done.
Still, Sasuke knew Naruto well enough by now to realize that however deeply the rejection had affected him, Naruto wasn't going to let Sasuke see. And he didn't. He just acted like he always had, albeit with the occasional added jibe about ladies of the night. Sasuke, feeling horribly guilty, proceeded to put a lot of effort into acting normally right back, and in fact even friendlier than before.
He felt like he had to prove that he was still going to be Naruto's friend, even if it caused him some discomfort and made Kakashi and Sakura give him odd looks occasionally. But he and Naruto were getting back to normal, and that was what was important, because it was working.
Or at least it did seem to be working, until the day Sasuke finally managed to properly pull off that taijutsu move they'd been practicing.
---
It was a breezy day, just enough to take the edge off the summer heat. Naruto was extra fired up, because there was ramen riding on the outcome of today's practice and so far he was winning. Sasuke was teeth-baringly ready for whatever his friend tried to get him with; he always took an extra bit of malevolent pleasure in winning and then making Naruto eat yakiniku instead of ramen on the days they bet dinner on the outcome of their training. It was, he justified, healthier to vary one's diet (the facts that he could get tomatoes at a yakiniku place, and that Naruto looked hilariously dejected every single time, weren't mentioned).
He wasn't even worrying about whether Naruto would consider the excursion some sort of date, as he would have a week ago. It was strangely freeing.
Altogether, Sasuke was enjoying himself more than usual. Despite the deadly missiles and violent taijutsu being thrown around, the sparring today felt almost like playing for some reason. It was clear Naruto felt that way too, by the grin on his face, and as a result even the insults they yelled at each-other were less than vehement.
Of course, the fact that they both knew Naruto was going to attack Sasuke from the side in a certain way eventually could have made the exercise a bit boring, but Naruto always managed to make himself unpredictable somehow.
Still, the attack did eventually come, just as Sasuke was finishing off a trio of kage bunshin in front of him. But this time was different somehow. Even as Sasuke noticed Naruto in his peripheral vision, fist just about to collide with his jaw, his attention was caught by a gust of wind in front of him. It spun through the air, whipping a few leaves in a looping, twisting pattern that moved both vertically and horizontally at once.
Suddenly, after weeks of aggravating practice and scroll study, everything made sense. Sasuke swayed back as he always did - but this time he moved down too, and when he caught Naruto's arm, he twisted his grip and applied the pressure of his own body swaying back upwards at the same time, smoothly yet with significant force.
Naruto's back hit the ground hard. He scowled, and Sasuke, crouching over him with a kunai to his throat, smirked back. Of course, Naruto attempted to get free; but Sasuke had one arm twisted close to the point of breaking, and the other crushed underneath his weight. He'd shifted so one knee was braced between Naruto's own, in such a way as to disallow any attempts at kicking him off - in short, Sasuke had Naruto pinned.
"You," he said, viciously, "are buying me yakiniku."
"You," Naruto positively snarled, "suck."
Sasuke smirked down at Naruto for a few moments longer, basking in his victory. The moment was finally broken when Naruto cleared his throat pointedly. "Gonna let me up, bastard?"
Sasuke jolted. "Oh. Right."
But he waited another moment before pulling back and getting to his feet. Once he was standing, he was forced to jump back and take cover behind the nearest tree, as Naruto immediately tried to enact his revenge, but that had been expected.
What had him frowning as the sparring continued, was the fact that he had been expecting something else in that pause before standing, something he couldn't quite identify, but which had definitely not occurred when it should have.
---
Sasuke always ate more than he really needed to on yakiniku nights. Sometimes it was because he and Naruto had run across Team Ten (or just Shikamaru and Chouji) in the restaurant, and everyone at the table ate more than they ordinarily would have in some half-hearted effort to keep up with Chouji. Sometimes it was because Naruto antagonized him into a very immature eating competition. But the vast majority of the time, Sasuke ate lots of yakiniku whenever it was available because whenever yakiniku was available, that meant Naruto was the one paying. Sasuke thought of it as a sort of revenge for whenever he was forced to buy Naruto twenty bowls of ramen in one sitting. He couldn't eat that much, but yakiniku was more expensive, so it evened out somewhat.
It did cause the unfortunate side-effect of making Sasuke feel sluggish and sleepy that night, but that was a minor drawback. He just read scrolls that night, or went to bed early for once. Team Seven always did enough physical training the next morning that Sasuke didn't have to be concerned for his fitness in any way.
Settled down in bed, rereading a scroll about the Sharingan, Sasuke actually felt quite comfortable. This past week had been almost unnaturally peaceful, now that he'd finally told Naruto how he felt. Sasuke had been worrying about Naruto in some capacity or another for so long now that it felt almost weird not to be. Actually… something during the day had made him concerned for a moment.
Sasuke put the scroll away and turned out the light, laying on his back and looking at the dark ceiling as he tried to figure out exactly what had felt so odd when he'd managed to pin Naruto earlier. His form had been fine, that wasn't it. No, something about Naruto himself had been off. But he'd reacted normally. Insults, violence - and then it hit Sasuke.
He sat up in bed, horrified. Immediately, he tried to deny it to himself, to rationalize it away. But facts were facts, and he recognized just what had been so weird when he'd finally pinned Naruto down.
He'd pinned Naruto down. He'd been on top of Naruto, his face had been just above Naruto's own. They had been completely alone. It was the perfect environment for a hushed, "I love you."
But Naruto had not said the words. In fact, not once in the past week had he confessed to Sasuke, no matter how many opportunities there had been. Which should be just fine - after all, it was exactly what Sasuke had asked for.
…But Sasuke hadn't liked it at all, waiting for the confession that had never come.
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Chapter Nine: Realization