Work Text:
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
-W.S. Merwin, “To the New Year”
―
Monsoon season strands them in Uzushio for a month.
Before that, there were spring festival crowds choking the roads; mudslides in Lightning country; snow in the mountains.
The snow alone has kept them away from Konoha for three winters now. It's become a tradition for Naruto to poke his head outside on the morning of the first snow, groan in disbelief, and say something along the lines of: “I’m no good with this weather stuff, Sasuke.” This always came after spending the cold months insisting that they had plenty of time. That he knew what he was doing because he bought an almanac, or consulted some half-blind old farmer, or saw a lady predict the weather with persimmon seeds―all of which assured him that the first snow was a long way off.
There’s a certain type of cloud that forms before snow: Thick, white, blanketing the sky and blocking out the sun. Sasuke recognizes them, after his winters in the Northern hideout. He's never vocalized this to Naruto, because Naruto hasn't asked. They're usually hundreds of miles from home when the first snow clouds appear, anyways.
The first time he saw snow, Sasuke was thirteen years old; he’s managed to see it every year since. His grandmother told him that it used to snow in their village. There was a photo of her as a little girl to prove it, up to her knees in it in front of the family house, bundled so tightly that only her eyes are visible.
That house is gone now, reduced to a heap of rubble to be sorted through. All of the houses are gone, down to the little shack his widowed auntie lived in. Sasuke spent the year after the war telling himself he’d start digging through the debris tomorrow; but tomorrow always brought Naruto to his doorstep, with takeout containers or his sensei’s disgusting novels or a half-ask half-demand to spar.
You’re the only one who’s a match for me, he’d whine, yanking Sasuke towards the door by his empty sleeve.
Because of this? Sasuke’d ask, with a meaningful nod.
Naruto would scoff, like he wasn’t going to dignify him with a response. Then, halfway down the outside staircase, without releasing him or turning to look at him: It’s ‘cause there’s no one else who’ll actually hurt me.
Even the training fields bore deep scars. Trees older than any hidden village were uprooted, lying on their sides, turned into makeshift picnic tables and jungle gyms.
Naruto says he’ll rebuild the old houses, once he’s Hokage. He'll plant new trees. Once they make it back to Konoha, once Kakashi finally puts that hat on his head, everything will change. There’ll be a statue of Sasuke cast entirely in gold, if he has his way.
But they have to make it back first. Uzushio is a long way from Konoha; and the sheets of sideways rain they’ve been wrapped up in for days make it feel even farther.
It’s Sasuke’s birthday today. He knows this partly because of the calendar in Naruto's pocket almanac, and partly because Naruto crept out at some point this morning and returned hours later, soaking wet, with a sack of gifts. Most of it was practical: A fat bag of black rice; a packet of jerky; a set of three shuriken, shiny enough to show his reflection and sharp enough to draw blood when he tests them on the tip of this thumb.
There's one last thing at the bottom of the bag, so small he nearly misses it. At first glance, it's...a stick. Sharp on one end, though not enough to be a weapon; it gets wider along the other end, fanning out into an intricate carving of a bird. A hawk, maybe.
Naruto has been uncharacteristically quiet since he got back- restless, too. Winding and unwinding the bandages on his hand.
Finally, like he can't stand it any longer, he blurts, "I thought it looked like Garuda. It's for your, uh-" he stops fidgeting long enough to make a swooping gesture around his head- "for your hair. The lady said if I bring you back, she'll show you how to do it."
He already knows how. He'd watched his mother twist hers up with a pencil or a chopstick a hundred times; she did it to itachi sometimes, too, even though he protested.
It'd been her birthday last month, and Itachi's; soon, it’ll be his father’s; and then they’ll blink and it’ll be Naruto’s, and there’ll be a chill in the air. Naruto, with his almanacs and blind farmers that tell him to take a shortcut through the mountains, the one place you can’t come back down from once the snow starts. They only tell him about these shortcuts when Sasuke is out of earshot; Naruto himself never mentions them until they’re already trapped.
Gramps said this was the quick way, damn it. You might as well get back in the tent, I’m freezing.
At least they don’t play coy about that part anymore. The need was real that first winter, stranded in a tent that caved half-in every night from the weight of the snow. Slotting together, letting Naruto cloak them both in his ridiculous excess of chakra, was about survival.
It was difficult, the first―second―time Naruto kissed him. Their teeth were chattering, and they were shaking all over―from the cold or nerves or chakra exhaustion. It was hardly better than the kiss at the academy, the one that left Sasuke with a split lip from Naruto’s canine teeth.
They were so sharp. Even before he knew about kyuubi and the real, proper fangs those teeth could become, Sasuke had always wanted to touch them.
The kissing is much better now. Naruto only bites him with intention, in sparring or otherwise.
He realizes, belatedly, that it'll be much harder to secure the hair pin with one hand.
"Thank you," he says, and Naruto immediately slumps forward with relief. "Help me with this?"
―
After sunset, the rain moves out, though it doesn't go far. Dark clouds are still hovering over the ocean, ready to move back inland with the next gust of wind. They take advantage of the pause by going for a walk with no particular destination, making sure to keep the house at their backs. There’s a stream that wasn’t there the day before, or wasn’t running as high. They follow it for a while, until Naruto unceremoniously plops down, strips off his sandals, and puts his feet into the water. He tugs Sasuke down, by his still-convenient extraneous sleeve, to do the same.
“Ya know,” Naruto starts, when they’ve been sitting for so long that Sasuke’s toes are numb.
There’s enough of a pause after that Sasuke starts to fill in the blanks: Ya know, the rain should let up soon. Ya know, if we hike by night for a few days we could just outrun it. Ya know, let’s get a head start this year.
But then, maybe, there’ll be an earthquake in Suna, or some rogue-nin terrorizing a fishing hamlet. They don’t intervene in an official Leaf Shinobi capacity; but they’d helped raise temporary shelters after the mudslides last spring and dug carrots for the old farmer, whose sons were all hunched and half-blind themselves. There was a mother in one of the flattened Lightning villages who handed them her baby and, without a word, disappeared for the afternoon to search for her missing husband.
Sasuke was never sure if it was a girl or a boy―it was so tiny, a blanket-swaddled lump with bright eyes and a tuft of dark hair poking out.
Sasuke’s mother would’ve called it an easy baby. She'd bragged about what easy babies he and Itachi were to anyone who'd listen. They slept well and ate even better, never cried without reason.
“Y’ever think it’d be nice to have a baby?” Naruto asked, not looking at him head-on.
Sasuke bristled. Things had only evolved between them in the last few snowbound weeks, those mudslides a direct result of the melt.
He had a good idea of what Naruto was saying, without really saying it: When I’m Hokage, I’ll have a wife. I’ll have children. I’ll have a proper, real-
“He looks like you, a little. When he scrunches his face up.” Naruto shoved the baby towards him, for examination. His cheeks were very red. “You used to make that face a lot, at the academy.”
Oh. Well. He'd been wrong before.
“I think he looks more like you,” Sasuke said, eventually. “He’s got that same look in his eyes.”
Naruto leaned into his side, just on the right side of leering. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s that look you get, like you’ve got no clue what’s going on.”
They sparred over that later, at their camp in the woods. Naruto was grinding his face into the dirt for the hundredth time, never tired, hardly sweating.
“I know a lot more than you give me credit for, jackass.” He leaned closer, lips on the shell of Sasuke’s ear. “I know exactly what you want right n-”
With some effort, Sasuke flipped them both. Naruto’s artificial arm gave him leverage; but he wasn’t as sharp, like this. With his mind drifting elsewhere.
“Show me, then. Stop talking, loser, and just show me.”
“Ya know,” Naruto says, again. Mentally, Sasuke has already agreed to whatever he'll propose. He’s cataloging what items are spread throughout the house they’re squatting in, what shirts he’d like to wash in this temporary stream before it dries up and they move on. Naruto takes the cuff of his armless sleeve and rubs the fabric between his bandaged fingers. “If I’d known you were never going to get yours, I wouldn’t have let Granny do mine.”
Sasuke freezes. He'd made it halfway to Suna, in his head. “What?”
“Your arm,” Naruto clarifies, like he needs to. Like he isn’t caressing the place where Sasuke’s should be.
“Yes, but- your arm, idiot. You wouldn’t have taken it?”
“I liked it when we matched. When people could tell we were…” He waves his free hand around, like the words he’s searching for are buzzing around in midair, just out of reach; then pauses, clenches his hand and drops it like he’s caught the right ones. “A pair.”
Sasuke mulls this over. He retraces his steps, moving backwards through the desert and the forest and the little fish market they passed on the way in until he’s here, with his ice-cold feet bumping against Naruto’s in the rushing water.
There was a woman in that market who sold dango and read palms, neither of which Sasuke was interested in. Naruto was elsewhere, following the scent of ramen like a hunting hound and leaving Sasuke to guard their bags.
“What troubles you, eh? Everyone’s got something that troubles them. Even when they’re handsome and young as you.”
Sasuke shrugged; smiled with his mouth closed; shook his head no.
“Money? Love? Health? That’s all in the palm. I can see it plain as day.”
With his back to her, Sasuke did splay his hand out, palm-side up, in his lap. He saw nothing but the calluses, nicks, and scars from years of fights and training.
Naruto came back not long after that, beaming, with a lidded bowl of ramen in each hand. He’d set them down with a flourish, then produced something from his hip pouch: A neatly-wrapped onigiri.
The woman didn’t hassle him, after that.
As they were leaving, Sasuke placed a few ryo on her counter, enough to cover a palm-reading where he’d liked what she had to say. She was shoved into the far corner of the market, and it looked like rain.
She was his mother’s age, or the age she would’ve been. Her birthday had just passed.
“Last chance,” she trilled, sliding the coins from the counter to her apron pocket in one fluid gesture. Her eyes drifted to Naruto, still working out what market goods to put in whose pack. “Though maybe you already have your answers.”
Sasuke leans into Naruto's side. Naruto takes the opportunity to pull him closer, until Sasuke's head is in his lap. The top of Sasuke's body makes a right angle with the lower half; he moves neither. The cold water on his feet and the warm, solid bulk of Naruto under his head are equally grounding.
“People can tell.”
―
It’d been years since he cried on his parents’ birthdays.
Shamefully, he’s started to forget when others fell entirely: His grandmother, cousins, aunties.
But Itachi is fresh. Raw. An open wound where the others are a scar.
The first birthday after the war, he’d barricaded himself in his apartment and sobbed until he retched. Every summer since felt like a death march: One year closer to the age Itachi had been.
Thirteen felt like that, once. Like a sword hanging over his neck. The age Itachi was when he’d ruined everything and left Sasuke behind in the great, gaping crater he alone created.
Maybe thirteen was cursed, for Uchiha. Maybe there was a dormant madness that activated under the right conditions, like the sharingan.
Sasuke only knew for certain that it was the year everything would change, for better or worse. He would kill his brother or he would become like him.
He would finally understand, either way.
They would be together again, either way.
That was his most secret desire. One he never let himself voice, or even think, until Itachi was truly, permanently gone. He wanted desperately to be a little brother again, hoisted onto the shoulders of someone who seemed impossibly tall. He wanted to throw himself at Itachi and bury his head in his shirt as much as bury a kunai in his gut.
As long as Itachi was alive, Sasuke was not truly the last. No matter what the Third said, or Kakashi-sensei. While Itachi existed, he was not alone in the world.
Sasuke isn’t alone tonight, when the tears finally come a month late.
He doesn’t speak, or move. Naruto maneuvers him into place on their shared bedroll, tucks his head into his shoulder and wraps two―and thank the gods, right now, that there are two―sturdy arms around him. Naruto holds him, almost, like a child.
His mother used to hold him, when he had nightmares; his father, once or twice―so seldom that those nights almost felt like part of a dream.
He remembers Itachi's face on the night of the massacre. How small he was. How lost and afraid.
He wonders how much Naruto can sense, feel, see, of what's in his head. There are still sporadic moments of connection between them, the rest of the world whiting out and falling away.
Tonight, Sasuke has his eyes closed. The world is only whatever memories thrash, screaming, to the surface.
Then, Naruto says, “You were a child too, y’know.”
Sasuke sniffles, but doesn’t reply. He doesn’t know if he was ever a child again, after that night. The body that fought Itachi in that hotel hallway, the one he plucked up by the neck like a kitten, had felt a hundred years old.
He creaks, sometimes, when he stands after being still too long. His back goes stiff, forcing him to shuffle around like a hunched old man until it loosens.
By the time he’s truly old―before his hair has even turned gray―he will have outlived all of them.
Naruto smooths one hand through his hair. He’s still listening.
Distantly, Sasuke knows that Naruto will go through the same―his parents were much younger. He’ll surpass them in a year or two; his beloved sensei by fifty, if he hasn’t worked himself to an early grave in the Hokage’s seat by then.
“I won’t,” Naruto whispers. The fingers in Sasuke’s hair tighten just enough to tug. “I- I won’t. Alright?”
The tears have subsided enough for Sasuke to concur out loud. “Alright.”
For all his desire to get ahead of him, read his mind, Sasuke doesn’t poke into Naruto’s head as much. He resists the urge to slip in now, while both of their defenses are down.
Still, he has a vague idea, the same way he can feel Naruto’s chakra approaching from miles off.
Not that they’ve been miles apart recently. Not for years. Once or twice ever, since the night Naruto found him in the woods bordering Wind country and said, simply, I’m tired of chasing you, bastard, so quit making me.
He knows that Naruto wants to wait out the rain a while longer. They’d seen a flier for a toad festival north of here, in September, that sparked his interest. After that, some species of cacti that only blooms every five winters is due to pop up near Suna.
And then there’ll be snow. And somehow, by some horrible miscalculation on his part, they will be hopelessly stranded, far from home. Left with no choice but to crawl back into bed and keep one another warm.
Naruto will say everything that comes into his head, sooner or later. Outside, the rain is starting again.