Work Text:
i’m chewing gum and it’s killing you
the prologue
i’ll pull the trig if i want to
i'll pull the trick and it comes true
i'm chewing gum and it's killing you
we're getting dead and it's the right way to do it
longer break
the beginning
The summer holidays after Year 12 run from mid-October to early March, when the first semester of uni starts.
That is, of course, if you’re going to uni, which Naruto definitely is not.
Yeah, sure, they have exams peppered through October and November so they’re technically not free yet, but when the school bells rings on their last official day of school and he runs out screaming and cheering with his friends in their uniform shirts, covered in Sharpie signatures and well-wishes from classmates he may never see again, it’s as if the doors of life are flying open.
When he reaches the school back gate, the same spot where he’s walked to the bus stop with Sasuke every school day for the last six years, he pauses, wondering: when he steps past those gates, will he feel any different?
“Hurry up, idiot, we’re going to miss the bus,” Sasuke huffs from up ahead. The sun beats down on them, relentless in its heat.
Naruto steps past the gate . . . and feels nothing different.
Why does that make him sad?
He scrubs the sweat off his forehead, shifts the backpack on his left shoulder, heavy with the weight of all the textbooks he cleared out of his locker, of the ‘Nine Tails’ nickname emblazoned on his Year 12 jersey.
He jogs to catch up with Sasuke, bag bouncing hard against his back.
“It’s not even summer yet. Why is it so hot?” he whinges.
Sasuke shrugs, his own shoulder heavy with his messenger bag. He opens his green tin of Eclipse mints, pours one into his mouth. “It’s the holidays now. That’s when summer starts.”
Naruto doesn't know it yet, but this will be the longest summer they will ever have.
He doesn’t know it yet, but this is the most freedom they will ever have.
Later that night though, when they’re parked in the lot of the community centre at the dead of night, from the way Naruto claws at Sasuke's signed school shirt, at the leather seats of Itachi's car, at the edges of the narrative . . . maybe he does know.
“Are we doing this?” Naruto gasps into the humid air between them.
Sasuke’s hand braces against the fogged window, leaving a handprint in the condensation. “Yeah, we are.”
It’s uncomfortable.
i don’t want this to end
It’s sticky.
i don’t want you to leave
It’s hot.
oh god i need—
“Sasuke,” Naruto breathes into his mouth.
Sasuke laughs back, low and warm and it feels like lying in the sun, each touch searing his skin before the warmth seeps into his bones.
They’ve never felt more alive.
They’ve never regretted anything more.
break
Pools are unnaturally blue. That’s what Sasuke always thinks when they’re hanging out at Sakura’s, lounging on plastic deck chairs around the unnatural blue. It doesn’t look real—that electric aquamarine, sparkling where the light catches it. It’s almost hypnotic in its promise of cool relief, of escape from the blistering sun they revel and revere in equal measure.
Sasuke knows it’s just the tiles making the pool appear that colour, that water isn’t really that blue, but when they all hang out there, he can almost believe it is. That it’s something more than an illusion.
Naruto's coined the shade ‘Gatorade blue’, named after the artificial bright blue sports drink they used to get from the vending machines in the school gym.
Maybe parts of the ocean are this shade of blue. Maybe, if he swam out far enough, travelled to the right part of the world, he would find it.
Sasuke scoffs and adjusts his sunglasses, bites down on the gum in his molars.
Yeah right. One, he’s never seen the ocean—Konoha is too far inland.
Two, he sucks at swimming. He’d never make it.
“Ya know, Sas,” Naruto says later, elbows on the side of the pool near where Sasuke is laying on a towel under a beach umbrella. Naruto’s shirtless—all the guys are—and his blond hair is almost brown from the water.
His eyes are Gatorade blue. It’s the same colour as the crystal hanging from his neck.
“What?” Sasuke snaps.
Sakura cannonballs into the water behind them. A swan-shaped pool floatie bounces on the residual waves. The beat of a pop song Sasuke has heard too many times this summer drops into a folksy pre-chorus.
“I could teach you to swim,” Naruto says.
Sasuke rolls his eyes, pushes his gum to the other side of his mouth. Another one of Naruto’s stupid ideas. He really thought he’d left those behind with their school uniforms. “How?” he asks. “You don’t have a pool.”
Naruto’s eyes sharpen—crystallise—and he grins with all his teeth. “Well, breathing’s a big part of it.”
His wet fingers extend, brush a line of liquid along the outside of Sasuke’s leg, just under the hem of his swim shorts.
“And I know how we can practise holding our breath.”
Sasuke feels like he’s drowning.
break
As the page of the novel tears clean out of the book’s spine with a loud and satisfying rip, Naruto follows the way catharsis washes across Sasuke’s face.
“God, that feels good,” Sasuke almost growls, scrunching the loose page in his fist. “I’ve wanted to do that for so fucking long.”
From his spot on the floor across from Sasuke, leaning against the foot of his bed, Naruto sees the way his eyes turn maniacal, the way he claws for another page, another, hungry.
It’s 36 today. It’s hot.
“I hated Jane Eyre,” Naruto agrees, but he doesn’t reach to copy Sasuke’s actions.
“I hated all of Literature,” Sasuke grumbles.
“Not the blackout poetry though, right? You loved that shit.”
Sasuke pauses for a moment. He’s been doing that a lot recently, getting lost somewhere in his head. Naruto shifts, wanting to move closer, to see what’s spinning in his eyes, but then Sasuke just grabs another chunk of the Victorian era bildungsroman (a word that both of them will never be able to forget) and rips it out with violence.
Distantly, as if from the future, Naruto wonders if he should stop Sasuke. What if, one day, he’ll want to read these books again? What if, one day, they’ll be old enough to understand them? Understand the emotional nuances instead of just pretending to for an essay?
No, that’s stupid. They don’t need them anymore! Exams are over! School is over! It’s time for them to move on!
Naruto yanks Jane Eyre out of Sasuke’s hand, rips ten pages in quick succession and throws them in the air like he’s in a high school movie musical. They float above him for a fraction of a second—the movie would freezeframe here, capture his grin through the gaps of the pages. Maybe the credits would even roll and an upbeat pop song would start playing.
But it’s not a movie or a musical and high school is over now so the pages fall down and Naruto is left with Sasuke just . . . looking at him. Not unpleasantly, just differently. He’s been looking at him like that ever since . . . well. Ever since they fucked in Itachi’s car on the last day of school and proceeded to never mention it again.
Rip. Another page. “Whatcha thinking about, Sas?” he asks. Rip.
Sasuke’s bedroom floor is covered in the fragments of a story they never have to worry about reassembling, about dissecting and analysing and piecing back together for an essay. The sight is equal parts unsettling and cathartic.
Sasuke finally replies. “I’m thinking—” He stands and grabs the magazine file on his desk, the one he’d carefully filled with his Maths Methods practice exams. “—that these should go too.”
He tips the last year of his life onto the floor in an avalanche of white stapled paper and calculus. It smells like erasers.
It feels . . . permanent.
For a moment, they both just stare at the pile of paper. And then Sasuke smirks at him—sly, wicked, arrogant—and Naruto can’t blame him. His blood is pumping—from the adrenaline of destruction, of literally tearing apart their stories at the seams, or from the heat—Naruto doesn’t know. What he does know though, is that he keeps looking at Sasuke’s mouth.
“You don’t have gum today,” Naruto comments.
Sasuke holds his gaze. “I forgot it,” he intones.
Naruto bites his lip to contain his grin.
break
Room 46 is a portable classroom on the back lawn behind the PAC. They’re in Mr Hatake’s Literature class in the middle of winter. To Sasuke, the classroom feels like little more than a shipping container, the thin metal walls and their Year 12 jerseys doing nothing to keep out the chill.
Mr Hatake is doing that thing that teachers do where they try to trick you into enjoying the classwork, but Sasuke sees right through him.
They’re doing poetry next—dreadfully boring Romantic poetry—but Mr Hatake is trying to get them interested in the form by looking at something called ‘found texts.' Specifically, they’re looking at blackout poetry, where parts of an existing text are redacted to form a new text with new meaning. In some examples, the page becomes more black than white.
“The negative space can have a meaning too,” Mr Hatake says from where he’s sitting on the desk at the front of the room, a romance novel balanced in his hand. “What got redacted? What shape does the negative space create? How much distance does it put between the words of the story? All things to consider.”
Naruto pulls a face at him from across the room, where he’s sitting with Hinata and Shino. Sasuke rolls his eyes back at him. He’s not going to admit it but Mr Hatake’s manipulation is working.
Five minutes later, the room smells overwhelmingly of permanent marker and they’re all working on their own blackout poetry using a photocopied printout of a scene from a romance novel.
“See if you can change the genre!” Mr Hatake challenges. “Can you make a horror story? A comedy? A tragedy? Let’s see what you come up with.”
Sharpie hovering over the text, Sasuke thinks about the term ‘found text’. It suggests that the story was already there, like it was just waiting to be discovered—not through analysis or expansion but by reducing, redacting.
He locks eyes with Naruto across the room. His eyes hold fascination, playfulness, and other things that Sasuke doesn’t recognise (or doesn’t want to name).
Maybe that’s why they call it ‘blackout drunk’.
break
It’s Hinata’s 18th birthday party. Naruto feels buzzed and loose and tingly, but he doesn’t really know if it’s just placebo. Alcohol doesn’t seem to affect him much. The last two months have been—between exams and studying for his hazards—a parade of gaths and 18ths and while he’s seen Sakura throw up in a teacup and seen Shikamaru completely forget an entire two-hour D&M they had, Naruto’s never done either.
They’re hanging out in Hinata’s giant backyard—there’s no swimming pool but there’s a big gazebo—when Kiba suddenly yells,
“Hey, let’s go to the park!”
So off they go, wobbling as they walk, grabbing each other for balance (or for closeness), sloshing beers and Cruisers, their phone torches cutting through the dark like their raucous laughter cuts through the silence. It’s almost midnight.
The park is familiar to all of them, having grown up in the suburbs of Konoha. A big open rectangle of grass with a playground in the middle and an old basketball court off to the side, half swallowed by some trees. Flanked by houses on two sides, the remaining sides of the park border two suburban streets, forming a shortcut between them.
Naruto used to sit on those swings as a kid, back when he was a sad and lonely kid with no friends.
He sits on them now, his can of vodka premix loose between his fingers as he spins on the seat, twisting the chain around itself, the light from his phone torch flickering over the tanbark, over his friends (because they are friends, they really are).
There’s something poignant about it, ya know? Eighteen years old, sitting on the same swings he sat on ten years ago, except this time intoxicated.
Choji’s lying on the slide telling a joke, and Shikamaru’s laughing, so Naruto laughs too.
Sasuke’s leaning against the side of the climbing frame that leads up to the slide. With his dark hair, his black tank top and running shorts, he would almost disappear into the night if not for the way Sakura drapes herself over him, grabbing his arm to steady her heeled boots in the tanbark as she sways. Sasuke tolerates it because she’s drunk and he’s drunk and that makes it all fine.
Naruto knows she’s only had five (barely alcoholic) jelly shots and a strawberry cider tonight, and he knows Sasuke’s been nursing that Strong Zero all night because it’s the same thing Naruto’s been doing with his guava Cruiser.
But hey, no one’s counting (and if they are, they don’t say anything). You’re drinking and that gives you the pass to be drunk—or at least to act drunk. And you want to be drunk because it gives you an excuse for everything—being loud, being happy, being yourself.
Forgetting the things you don’t want to remember.
Ino’s brought her purple waterproof Bluetooth speaker and she’s setting it up on the play equipment, blasting a pop song they all grew up listening to, before they knew the meaning of the words.
“Naruto!” Hinata yells from the top of the monkey bars. Her freshly home-dyed purple hair is loose around her head. “Come up here!”
He jumps off the swings, faux-stumbles, to sarcastic applause and laughter, then bounds over to join her.
When he looks back, Sasuke is watching him over Sakura’s shoulder, eyes sharp.
Then the chorus hits and they’re singing and waving their phone torches and Naruto can pretend he doesn’t remember.
break
Sasuke’s in the car on his way to school. Itachi’s on uni break; he’s driving Sasuke so he doesn’t have to take the bus. It’s May. They’re only halfway through Term 2 and he’s already dying for the holidays.
“This isn’t the way the bus goes,” Sasuke comments as Itachi turns down a different street.
“I like this drive better,” Itachi replies smoothly.
Along this road, the trees are dry, leaves turning brown, some already wet and paste-like piling up in the gutters.
It’s almost eerie. Not many trees are deciduous here.
Sasuke looks at Itachi in the driver’s seat. He’s always looked old—he’s Sasuke’s older brother so of course he is—but now he looks . . . older. He’s always had those lines on either side of his nose, so that’s not it, but there’s something else about him, some invisible tension around his eyes that Sasuke has never seen before—or perhaps just never noticed.
The trees are aging. The trees are changing.
Itachi is twenty-three now.
longer break
the contention
Sharpie drags on Naruto’s tanned skin, tugging it in the wake of Sasuke’s absentminded drawing. They’re lying on the nature strip by the bus stop because even on the last day of school the bus is fucking late and Sasuke’s been signing vapid messages on his classmates’ shirts and dresses in Sharpie all day so he didn’t even think.
Teachers, parents, Itachi—they always told Sasuke not to use permanent marker on skin. Because it’s permanent.
But Sasuke will know soon that it’s not really.
Wash it under enough water and sweat and sunscreen and it’ll come right off. It comes off in the pool at Sakura’s house.
They’re old enough now to get tattoos for real. And Sasuke’s always wanted one. He dreamed about it when he was thirteen, even drew designs on the inside back cover of his English notebooks.
“Would you ever get a tattoo?” Sasuke asks suddenly.
Naruto looks at the nonsensical scribbles on his arm. “Not of this,” he says with a laugh. “But I dunno. Maybe? Not yet.”
Sasuke keeps drawing. “Hn. Not yet.”
break
“Are we too old for this?” Naruto asks from the top of the slide.
Sasuke’s leaning against the chunky plastic spinning tic-tac-toe blocks. Naruto’s backpack is by his feet, his own messenger bag slung across his body.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” Sasuke deadpans, then swigs his water.
Naruto lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Yes, we get it, you studied.”
“The SAC is next week.”
“I’ll study on the weekend,” Naruto says blithely, waving his hand.
He’s too big for the slide, the same way he’s too big to properly sit on the swings, but he doesn’t want to admit he’s getting older, almost technically an adult, so he wiggles his hips to try and fit, and ends up sliding down with his legs thrown over the side, yellow plastic squealing against the backs of his knees until he gets unceremoniously spat out into the tanbark like a piece of chewing gum.
Sasuke scoffs down at him, but holds out a hand to pull him up.
“Should we start going to the botanical gardens instead?” Naruto asks as he grabs his hand, brushing tanbark off his school uniform.
Sasuke grimaces. “I don’t think we’re old enough for that.”
They’re still holding hands.
“So we can vote, drink, and drive, but we can’t go to the botanical gardens?” Naruto teases.
They’re still holding hands.
“Also, are you gonna let go or . . . ?”
Sasuke looks down at their hands then shakes Naruto off like he burned him, smacking his heavy messenger bag into his side as he turns to walk back towards his house. “I hate you,” he mutters.
As Naruto stumbles from the blow and watches him walk away, something feels strange inside him. It’s orange and stretchy, like bubblegum.
“Hey, Sas! Look at this!” he yells.
Dropping his backpack, he runs, leaps onto the spinning pole equipment, kicking off the tanbark so he spins—fast. Fast enough that the world blurs around him, that the years fall off him like residual tanbark.
When he’s sure Sasuke’s watching him—only when he’s sure of it—he pulls the pole closer, hugs it, grips it, so he spins faster faster faster faster until it’s nothing but smeared ink and candid photos and Sasuke’s voice.
break
The fire pit in Kiba’s backyard flickers with orange, draws them all around its glow. With a marshmallow skewer in one hand and a Jack Daniels premix can in the other, Sasuke sits on a white plastic chair near the fire, watching his friends and classmates weave around him in their signed school shirts, the black Sharpie words against the white shirts and striped dresses like pages torn from a novel, floating around him.
Through the fire and the smoke, he watches Shikamaru toast a marshmallow to a crisp. He sees Hinata with one long pale leg crossed over the other, smiling at Naruto. He eyes Ino and Sakura, sharing the same chair and talking deeply with Kiba, Choji, and Shino. Various others from their Year 12 class mill around, some out by the gazebo, some by the patio, but their group has taken the spot around the fire pit.
Even under the thudding party music from Ino’s Bluetooth speaker and the sound of his own mind roaring, he can hear snippets of their spilled secrets.
“I always thought Mr Hatake was super hot.”
“We first did it at production camp in Year 11.”
“If you had to sleep with anyone in our year, who would it be?”
They spill their secrets like the remnants of their drinks—messily—because it’s safer to vocalise them in the dark, when everyone can pretend they were too drunk to remember, or that it didn’t happen—scribbled out with Sharpie like a permanent marker mistake.
Sasuke rolls his eyes at the clustered conversation. It’s a staple of all their gaths and parties—the quintessential D&M, or ‘deep and meaningful’.
There’s a part of Sasuke that wants to participate. The fire on his tongue licking at its restraints, wanting to join that feverish pit where glory wins against shame and fever beats fear.
But another part of him knows that no one in that conversation is really being honest.
His eyes flick over to Naruto to find he’s already looking at him, eyes still blue even through the orange firelight. As if in slow motion, Sasuke watches Hinata put a hand on Naruto’s bare knee, just below the hem of his grey school shorts, and another on his shoulder, over the Sharpie signatures from their last day of school.
Naruto gently pushes her off and walks around the fire.
Sasuke’s mind roars again, like the wave pool at Konoha Arc, and he shoves his hands into his pockets, feeling for the Sharpie he’s carried around all day, flicking the cap on and off.
“Hey, asshole.”
The fire burns his cheeks.
break
They’re not too old for sparklers—no one’s too old for sparklers. Especially not when Naruto sits on the swing, his elbows on his bare knees and Shikamaru ignites his sparkler with the cool silver lighter he got from Mr Asuma on the last day of Year 12 History Revolutions.
In the darkness of the park, far inset from the road and the streetlights, they’re bright—like handheld stars, or magic wands, or any of the things they used to believe in.
God, they used to believe in so much.
It’s New Years. They’re waiting for the fireworks. Not the big fireworks they set off in the city—they live out in the suburbs after all. No, they’re waiting for some local park or a guy in his backyard to set some off.
Naruto doesn’t remember New Years being this anticlimactic. He wonders if it will always be this anticlimactic. It can’t be, right?
“Want a light?” Shikamaru asks, flicking out another sparkler from the packet like it’s a cigarette.
He has those too, but Naruto doesn’t want one.
At Shikamaru’s flame, his sparkler blossoms to life, dancing.
Ino and Choji and Sakura are standing in the patch of grass in front of the swings, waving their sparklers, writing letters in the air with light—each one quickly fading, leaving only the memory on the insides of Naruto’s eyelids.
Sasuke on top of him, grinding against him, silhouetted by the cabin light in Itachi’s car.
They’re volatile, never still, flaring to assert their light, fending off the surrounding darkness in sparks that look more dangerous than they feel.
He can still hear the sticky popping of Sasuke’s stupid, stupid gum.
“Sakura!” Ino yells, spinning around on the grass, wobbling on her wedge heels, blonde hair flowing. “Catch meeee!”
She falls into Choji instead, and Sakura and Hinata clutch each other, laughing hysterically.
They’re drunk of course, enough to be excused for being themselves at least, their cider cans and Cruiser bottles leaking the last of their sugared liquid into the sunbleached grass.
Naruto would usually be out there running around with them, drunk as well, but not tonight. Tonight he’s on the swings and he’s sober and it’s all Sasuke’s fault.
He looks down at his sparkler. Damn, they burn out quick. Before he can grab another one, Sasuke approaches, his own sparkler in hand.
“Hey asshole,” Naruto greets him.
Sasuke’s face illuminates inconsistently in the flickering light—his expression unreadable.
Naruto waits for him to say something. Anything. He legs twitch so he kicks off idly. Like a pendulum, he swings. Towards Sasuke. Away from Sasuke. Suspended. In-between.
It was hot today, but the night is cold. His legs slice through the night air as he kicks and he feels goosebumps rise on his shins.
Why can’t the weather make up its fucking mind?
Sasuke’s sparkler burns out, leaving them in the dark.
break
Sasuke’s parents call him selfish. They compare him to Itachi, despite the fact it’s Itachi’s sports car that Sasuke rolls home in past 2am, faded red P plates swinging from the melted suction cup.
He doesn’t care. He doesn’t.
Selfish. Selfish.
Is he selfish just for wanting?
For finally fucking wanting?
Take what you want, Sasuke.
Selfish. When will he get to be this selfish ever again?
He reverses out of the driveway with the windows rolled down and the music blasting through the quiet suburban neighbourhood, and all the while he wonders why they always depict fire in orange when it’s at its hottest when it’s blue.
break
Netflix is loading on Sasuke’s laptop at the end of Naruto’s bed. Their copies of Jane Eyre lay forgotten beside the laptop, pages down and spines broken, and loose leaf paper crinkles under their stomachs.
They should be studying. It's October. School ends next week. Then their exams start the week after. And then after that, it’s val and then results come out and then people who are going to uni (like Sasuke) get their offers and then—
Naruto reaches forward and presses play.
It’s some cheesy direct-to-Netflix romcom about young adults falling in love. Naruto’s not so naive to think that high school is the best time of his life. He knows there’s life after high school—that’s why he loves movies like these.
Because one day, he’ll be like those optimistic protagonists. One day he’ll be in those picturesque settings. One day he’ll have his noteworthy moments.
And one day, it’ll feel like summer all the time and he won’t have to ache and yearn and wish and hurt anymore.
An hour later, Sasuke is grumbling, “This is so fucking cheesy, I can’t watch this.” He reaches for the laptop.
“Oi, the movie’s nearly finished, this is the best bit!” Naruto hisses, slapping his hand away and shoving him almost off the bed.
They watch the protagonist stumble through the airport to chase after his lover. They see them celebrate their anniversary under the moonlit sky on the beach while fireworks burst in the background and an Ed Sheeran song plays.
Naruto’s seen this movie before but now . . . there’s something almost painful in its fantasy.
The credits roll with their upbeat pop song.
“Maybe we’ll live by the beach one day,” Naruto blurts, almost absentmindedly.
Sasuke pauses. His face twists into something Naruto can’t read, then settles into a smirk. “Who says I’m living with you?”
Naruto feels his face heat. “No—what—I meant—you fucking ass! I just meant, like, in general. Maybe we’ll live by the beach. Separately. Or nearby! Like . . .” He gestures vaguely at the screen, at the scrapbook-style montage of beach parties and summer romance, tropical destinations and long distance love.
Sasuke rests his chin in his hands. The credits cast pink light across his face. “I . . . I don’t know.”
Then, before Naruto can reply, Sasuke reaches out and slams the laptop shut, abruptly cutting off the upbeat pop credits song, before shoving Naruto onto his back and straddling him, pinning his arms down.
“Hey!” Naruto shouts. They wrestle, slapping skin and crinkling paper.
He can smell Sasuke’s Eclipse mints and it makes his head spin a little.
Sasuke’s panting and flushed.
They’ve never wrestled in Naruto’s bed before.
It feels . . . right.
longer break
the verse
He’s wearing his best outfit. Orange jacket, fishnet shirt, black shorts, orange runners. They came straight from Temari’s birthday. He’s as bright as the traffic cones they sprint past in the parking lot, as bright as 18th birthday candles and the fireworks on New Years and the neon paint in his hands.
It feels good, the concrete pounding up against his heels, being at school at night, in the summer holidays, paint dripping between his fingers.
It’s sticky.
When Konohamaru and his friends graduate in two years, they’ll do this too. This new tradition—sneaking around the back of the staff carpark and leaving their handprints on the shipping container that stores old sport equipment.
The slap of his neon-wet hand against the corrugated metal is satisfying, but the way he peels his hand back to reveal a mark is even more so.
That’s his handprint, in neon yellow at his school.
(A handprint in the condensation of a car window.)
It’s going to be there forever.
(And so no one can forget him.)
His friends roar and whoop behind him—he can pick out Sakura’s high-pitched whistle, Kiba’s howl, Sasuke’s sharp scoff (like he’s too cool for this shit). He knows Ino’s taking photos.
He knows he’ll look at those photos one day with an emotion he doesn’t understand yet.
Naruto throws his hands in the air and yells, up, up, out into the night of the back oval, spinning and spinning like he’s at the park and he’s twisting the swing chains around and around even though Mr Umino always told them not to in primary school.
“Fuck yeah!” he yells.
He feels real. He feels every ache in his body and every sensation on his skin. It feels like a movie, like the moment in the epilogue before the credits roll.
He falls on his ass and it fucking hurts, but he hears laughter and if he concentrates, he can hear Sasuke’s beneath it all.
His friends like him. They really like him.
(They won’t forget him.)
Witness me.
The sky is so far away above him. His friends are so far away.
(What will this look like in the photos?)
He brings a hand to his face, leaves a streak of yellow paint down his cheek.
One day, will he wish to just . . . exist? To live without record or witness?
It seems unfathomable now.
break
It occurs to Sasuke, as he sits on the too-small child swing at the park, that the days won’t always be this long.
The light is orange. Naruto swings back and forth beside him. Sasuke chews his third mint of the evening. They’re fighting. And yet they’re both here. They can’t waste a day of summer.
And Sasuke didn’t really understand why that urgency exists until now.
Back. Forth. Back.
In summer, the days are longer. The axis of the Earth and their rotation on it and the orbit around the Sun and all that shit from primary school geography classes—before they knew the word ‘geography’.
The days will get shorter in winter. Maybe they’ll have to worry about taking out the bins. Or lightbulbs that don’t stay fixed. Or scented candles to cover up the fact they waited too long to take out the bins.
And it won’t be summer anymore. Which means they won’t be young anymore. And if Naruto’s stupid movies are anything to go by, it means there’ll be nothing left that’s worth watching, worth witnessing.
(If no one witnesses it, does it matter? Does it mean anything?)
He remembers leather seats and blurry signatures. Saliva and sweat.
It’s 9pm. The sun is setting.
“Naruto,” he says sharply.
Naruto stops swinging.
Sasuke spits his mint onto the tanbark. Then he grabs the front of Naruto’s faded school production t-shirt and kisses him, falling to his knees on the spongy playground flooring.
There’s no time left. There’s no time left.
“Sasuke,” Naruto breathes between them. It’s soft, almost reverent.
The playground is empty but for them; the grass stretching to the street in front and behind, the darkening sky above and the sponge and the tanbark and the earth and the roots below.
His fingers bite into the skin at Naruto’s waist.
“Please,” he whispers.
break
The beat is synthetic and relentless and Naruto sings louder than usual to be heard over the blasting AC. His arm is burning because the sun’s on his side as they drive to the 7-Eleven.
Sasuke’s red P plate he’s had since June has been slowly fading, melting—it’s really more orange than red at this point. Naruto wonders if the suction cup will ever come off or if its just fused to the windshield. Heh, Itachi probably wouldn’t like that.
When they’re on red Ps, they can only drive one person and since Naruto hasn’t gotten his license yet, Sasuke’s always driving him around. It’s just the two of them.
(It’s always just the two of them.)
But it’s fine! Usually they just meet everyone there. Sakura drives Ino, Kiba drives Shino, it’s all good. And then Sasuke will get his green Ps next June and then they can drive whoever they want so everyone can come!
Sasuke’s hair blows back in the AC and he looks so cool in his Ray-Bans and his cheeks are a little flushed from the heat and a very small and stupid part of him hopes that Sasuke crashes his car or something so then he doesn’t get his green Ps and then they can drive around just the two of them forever.
break
“Race you.”
And Sasuke’s sprinting through the shopping centre undercover carpark, phone gripped in one hand, cold torch light flashing between his fingers like lightning. The air is muggy, it smells like petrol and car exhaust and it suffocates him with every breath but he’s yelling, and Naruto is yelling behind him, their voices echoing off the concrete walls and pillars. He doesn’t even know exactly what they’re racing towards but he knows that Naruto is chasing him—he’s fast but Sasuke’s faster.
Chase me.
The lines of the carpark are faded, but they blur beneath Sasuke’s feet as he runs.
Chase me.
It feels like lightning between his fingers, fire in his lungs.
When they finally reach the automatic doors of the shopping centre at the end and they open with a whoosh of cool air, Naruto tackles him from behind and they sprawl at the foot of the escalators inside, Naruto’s eyes burning blue and his phone screen cracked and Sasuke feels so empty all the time but when his heart thrums like this, it feels like that hollowness has a purpose.
“Caught ya,” Naruto pants, grinning wickedly.
Chase me.
Sasuke grins back, throws him off, and races back into the carpark.
break
Sakura has a pool, so it’s without question that they all hang out there that summer. It’s an excuse for the boys to be shirtless, the girls to wear their bikinis.
“It’s hot,” they’ll say.
“It’s summer,” they’ll say.
Sakura’s parents are there—they bring out frozen green grapes and bottles of Coke (because sure, they all drink, but not in front of Sakura’s parents)—but there’s an unspoken agreement to collectively pretend they’re not.
That they’re old enough not to need them, that they’re old enough for this space to be theirs.
Ino’s purple Bluetooth speaker crackles.
Naruto doesn’t know how Sasuke, sitting on a towel under a beach umbrella next to the pool, can stand this heat without jumping in. Like, yeah, he doesn’t know how to swim, but it’s not like he’s going to drown.
And fuck, maybe almost drowning is better than being in the sun—Naruto’s sweating even though he’s in the water. He sucks in a breath and sinks down.
Instantly, it’s quiet.
It’s a nice kind of pressure. The way the air in his lungs fights the water. The way his body resists the urge to float. He can barely hear the music down here. When he opens his eyes, blinking against the chlorine, his crystal necklace levitates in front of him. In the suspension, it feels endless. As if he could swim and swim and emerge in the ocean.
He can’t breathe.
When he emerges back out of the water with a gasp, the club remix and the sun beat down with bright ruthlessness. Even through the glare, his eyes find Sasuke, propped up nonchalantly on his towel. Even through Sasuke’s Ray-Bans, Naruto knows he’s looking at him.
break
Sasuke remembers getting immunisations at school. The teacher would walk all the kids to the rundown library and have them wait in the quiet reading area while the nurses used the tiny classroom behind the computer lab as the treatment room.
In Year 7, they had to have three different needles. Just a pinprick at the time, barely anything, an opportunity to brag about feeling nothing, only for their arms to ache for days after.
Sasuke remembers lying on the beanbags in the quiet reading area during their requisite fifteen minutes of supervision before they could go to lunch. He remembers the water stains on the ceiling and the peeling laminated covers of the books they were forced to borrow, the pages soft and brown at the edges. The beep of the barcode scanner, the sections of the library they never went to, triangular tables.
Sasuke lies on a deck chair at Sakura’s house, closing his eyes behind his Ray-Bans and gritting his teeth like he’s getting a thousand needles at once.
naruto’s bare chest naruto’s blue eyes he’s never going to be like itachi school is over forever naruto’s wet stomach summer only lasts so long what happens when it ends naruto’s warm lips what happens after what do i do who am i what do i want naruto’s hands i miss winter i don’t know i don’t know naruto
He squeezes his eyes shut but the light still gets through, turns his vision red. His skin is burning under the sun, under the sunscreen, because no matter how SunSmart he is, Konoha UV is known for being brutal. But it’s fine. It’s just like the immunisations in school.
Just a pinprick. And then they’ll be fine. He feels nothing.
He feels nothing.
(He feels everything.)
longer break
the chorus
Everyone wears sunglasses now, Naruto notices. Maybe it’s because most of them have their red Ps now so they’re all driving their parents’ and older siblings’ cars around.
Sasuke has these fucking cool Ray-Bans and Ino’s got these funky cat-eye ones.
He has to admit, it’s a little unsettling sometimes, seeing all the dark shades when they hang out, being unable to see their eyes, see where they’re looking.
They spent all of Year 12 waiting for this summer. The summer of freedom, the end of school forever. They waited and waited through the miserable winter and the indecisive spring and autumn, just hanging on for the promise of summer—of endless sunshine and fun and freedom and beginnings.
Now though, all they do is shield their eyes from it, slather on sunscreen like their lives depend on it (because with this level of UV, they kind of do).
Sometimes Naruto wonders what it would be like to live on the opposite side of the world, where the end of the calendar year welcomes winter instead of summer, where the same school grade still continues into the new year, where the sun doesn’t scream down with such violent ferocity.
He laughs the image away, squeezes his sweaty hands around the burning steering wheel of the second-hand car he’s not even allowed to drive by himself yet.
It’s okay! He loves summer!
It’s so hot that he can barely stand to be outside but it’s fine!
This is what they waited for.
Right?
Even through the SPF50, he can feel the UV eating his cells, biting down, chewing them, one by one.
break
The black tiles are cool against Sasuke’s sweaty back as he lies on the kitchen floor. Naruto is there too, just out of reach, sprawled like a starfish and groaning quietly.
40 degrees today. Fuck.
Usually on a sunny day like this, they’d go to Sakura’s, jump in her pool, make a day of it. But at 40 degrees, it’s too hot to even move.
So they’re here, lying on the relatively cool kitchen tiles under the AC, just trying to survive. In his peripheral vision, the marble countertops seem impossibly tall, the ceiling years away.
Sasuke’s tank top is rucked up in the back and he can feel his sweat glue him to the tiles. The heat presses down on his chest like a physical force, suffocates him, saps the life out of him.
Maybe this is what drowning really feels like.
He should be outside. He should be enjoying this summer.
But this is summer, isn’t it? When they were freezing in the science corridor on winter mornings, isn't this what they dreamed of?
“Sas?” Naruto says weakly.
Sasuke just groans.
“Is it bad to say I hate summer?”
Something aches in his chest. He imagines crisp air, soft blankets, the light of a movie he’s barely watching illuminating Naruto’s face. He’s older.
“No,” Sasuke replies softly. “It’s not.”
The cool air from the AC swings past him, and for a moment, he can breathe.
break
The act of chewing, Naruto realises, as he watches another Eclipse mint disappear between Sasuke’s lips, is a liminal state.
After the bite, but before the swallow. Crushing food into something your body can digest.
Naruto never fucking understood why Sasuke liked gum so much—especially those stupid Eclipse mint tablets that aren’t really a breath mint and aren’t really gum. You just chew and chew and chew and never swallow anything.
He knows what it feels like when Sasuke swallows around him.
The sun beating against his back, Naruto watches Sasuke from across the picnic table snap the dark green tin shut. He watches his jaw work. His lips part briefly and Naruto smells the cool mint, feels his breath against his cheeks.
He can hear the sound of the gum sticking to Sasuke’s teeth, embedding itself in his molars.
It’s too fucking hot outside.
break
When Naruto smiles, Sasuke can see his tongue pressing through the gaps in his crooked teeth.
When Naruto laughs, sometimes he sticks his tongue out, just between his teeth.
When Naruto drinks Slurpees or eats Zooper Doopers they stain his tongue bright blue.
When Naruto straddles Sasuke in his childhood bedroom and it feels like Sasuke can’t breathe—like he’s drowning like he’s endless like he’s finite like he’s real—Naruto traces his tongue along the edge of his teeth.
break
Naruto wants it to hurt sometimes. He wants to feel it gnaw at the edges of himself, chew him up like UV light. He wants to find the shape of himself through the pressure that ebbs around him. In the space between Sasuke’s teeth.
“Fuck off, Naruto.”
He wants to know what Sasuke’s teeth feel like in his skin.
“You’re a fucking idiot!”
He’s self-aware enough to know he’s doing it to himself, throwing himself against Sasuke, asking for a fight, for a bite.
Naruto cracked his head against his bedroom wall the first time Sasuke fucked him. He bruised his knees running through the woods near Ino’s house at her gath.
Sometimes he just stares up at the stars from the swings in the park until it feels like he’ll collapse from the sheer infinity of it all.
Because maybe, if he tests the limits, if he really pushes it, he’ll find out where his physical form begins and where it ends, and maybe if he knows that, then it’ll all feel real.
break
When his sparkler burns out, Sasuke is left with the smoke. He sees the poetry in it—the way the dancing lights distract you from the heat and the haze and the fact there’s no time left.
It smells metallic, different from the density of Shikamaru’s cigarette smoke, and backlit by the others’ lights, it’s clearly visible.
Naruto slows on the swings, lets the smoke from his own sparkler settle. Sasuke waves a hand between them, drags the grey mist between his fingers like water.
Like Naruto’s hair.
Naruto’s eyes narrow. “The fuck do you want?”
There’s a pile of dead sparklers in the tanbark. Shikamaru’s lying on the bottom of the slide behind Naruto, blowing smoke rings up into the sky.
Sasuke’s exhausted and the thin wire of his burned out sparker digs into his palm.
“I want to talk to you,” Sasuke finally grits out.
Naruto’s face changes.
There’s a copse of trees off to the side of the park, between the old basketball court and the back fence of the nearby houses, far enough away that their friends won’t hear them.
The words don’t surge to Sasuke’s tongue like he hoped they would. They don’t come as easily as Naruto’s body in his hands. They don’t magically write themselves like Naruto’s movies implied they would. Sasuke’s throat chokes up like its filling with pool water and he’s back in Year 12 Literature again—trying to regurgitate something he’s been taught but doesn’t understand—not really (not yet).
boom
Naruto looks out and even through the trees, even though the fireworks are probably in someone’s backyard ten blocks away, even though all they can see is a brief sliver of sparkling light, Naruto is awed.
“Fireworks,” he breathes.
Sasuke drowns again. “Naruto, I—”
boom
A faraway glint of purple, just barely visible over the nearby rooftops.
If they were closer to the fireworks, in the city maybe, they would see the colours in detail, watch them burst over their heads like a giant sparkler. The coloured light would play across their faces, blend and flicker, and it would be exactly like all those dumb cheesy romcoms Naruto loves and forced him to watch.
Right now, they’re so far away, they barely hear the boom.
Sasuke claws at his shorts pocket for his gum before he remembers he left it on the playground next to his drink.
His mouth is dry. Naruto is still looking into the distance, hopeful.
Sasuke doesn’t understand, doesn’t know how to say everything in his head:
im scared so fucking scared i want to go back i want to move forward i want you because you are familiar but the way you touch me is foreign and thats the only way i feel like i exist and the sky is so big and the fireworks are so far away and the sparklers die so quickly will we burn out that quickly too—
“Happy New Year, Sas,” Naruto says quietly.
Sasuke clenches his fist around the sparkler wire. The words don’t surge up but something else does. Resolution. Desperation.
“Come over tonight,” he blurts.
I don’t want to be alone.
Surprise blossoms across Naruto’s face like a firework, then hope, then resolution.
They burn out so quickly.
Naruto steps closer, reaches a hand up to lightly grasp Sasuke’s chin, his thumb just barely grazing his lower lip.
“All ya had to do was ask, Sas.”
There’s a sadness to his smile and Sasuke knows it only because he feels it too.
The next firework is blue.
break
“Naruto, you’re literally going to fall,” Sasuke says, like he’s not also sitting on top of the monkey bars.
To be fair, Naruto is standing on top of the monkey bars but he’s got this!
“You do not,” Sasuke chimes in but makes no move to stop him.
It’s rare that they’re here without their friends.
From his vantage point, Naruto can see over most of the nearby houses. If he squints, he even thinks he can see their high school in the distance.
Driven by a force inside him, he stretches his arms out, looks up to the stars they can barely see through the suburban light pollution. It feels like he’s growing, like he’s changing, like the very energy of his body is reaching out into the summer night air, seeking. His laughter bubbles forth, escapes into the night. Naruto’s never been known to be quiet—Mr Umino and Mr Hatake and Mr Ebisu and, well, every teacher he ever had, always told him off for being loud—but here, as he laughs and yells into the sky, the sound simply disappears. Without anything to resonate off, his shouts are simply swallowed, eaten alive by the vastness.
Even as he exercises his freedom, tests his wings against the air, his voice against the emptiness, he feels something anticipatory coil up in his chest.
It’s much less pleasant than when a similar feeling coils in his lower abdomen.
“Gimme your drink,” Naruto demands, balancing and carefully pivoting so Sasuke can hand him a can of . . . something. Naruto doesn’t really care—they all taste bad but he assumes they’ll just taste better one day, the same way he assumes that one day he’ll shout up at the sky and hear something back.
His chest feels slightly warmer but the tense feeling remains.
break
Sasuke’s skin stutters against Naruto’s, drags like the soft-touch plastic wires of old Apple earphones. Their hips catch, Naruto’s tongue slides down the column of Sasuke’s neck, a moan wet in its wake, condensing in the stuffy car.
Sasuke found those earphones tangled in the bottom of his school backpack two weeks into the holidays. He picked at them for hours, trying to untangle the knots and loops.
Naruto parts his lips around him, and Sasuke feels like he’s breaking, shattering from the inside as something larger than himself surges forth.
It was near impossible to separate.
He knows the soft-touch plastic will degrade. The coating will start to ooze its oily chemicals and they’ll cling to his hand when he tries to pull away.
A string of saliva connects Naruto’s lips to Sasuke’s cock, and it glistens in the interior light.
break
It’s always baffling to Naruto how quickly water evaporates off the concrete. They’ll spray it down with a hose—because they’re not in a drought anymore and there’s no one to tell them what to do—and while the water stains the concrete in the shape of their bodies, it feels like as soon as he turns around, it’s gone. Like it never existed.
But over the summer, Naruto learns that water can transform in other ways.
It can condensate, slowly collecting and dripping on the sides of an ice-cold glass.
It can pool, like the wet circles that same glass leaves on the surface of a plastic deck table.
It can melt, dissolve, turn from solid back to liquid, blend with the water until you can’t tell what used to be ice and what was always water.
Naruto feels it slick on the surface of his skin and pooling the hollows of his mouth and wet in the crevices of his fist and wherever his body touches Sasuke’s it feels like he exists, like he’s not just going to evaporate off the concrete into the sun and disappear.
Their bodies are 60% water but he only really understands what that means when he’s having sex and the physicality of his form is asserted. Even as he’s grinding Sasuke into the mattress—as he’s discovering the shape of his own body by the state of the water inside it—he wonders if it only feels this way in contrast to the heat of the summer, fighting to evaporate all the water that he is.
longer break
the climax
What am I waiting for?
Sasuke is staring at Naruto from across Room 46. It’s almost summer, it’s getting warmer, the portable classroom no longer cold enough to keep their Year 12 jerseys on. The faint stripes on Naruto’s white school shirt stretch taut across his shoulders.
What am I waiting for?
He’s on his third Eclipse mint of the hour and Mr Hatake is going on and on about the history of the bildungsroman and he’s trying to make some reference to The Hunger Games but he’s failing and there’s this feeling in Sasuke’s jaw that he assumes is just weakness so if he keeps chewing, he can train it out of him.
Chew. Chew. Chew. Chew. Chew.
He’s fidgeting, scoring a deep black line with his pen into the spine of his book—back, forth, back, forth.
Why does he love these fucking mints so much? Why does he chew gum like his life depends on it, even as his jaw aches and burns and his teeth stick and grind?
He should spit it out. He should swallow it whole.
Naruto’s gaze shifts and locks with his. There’s something hot in it, impatient.
Sasuke chokes—coughs his gum back out of his throat and onto his tongue so he can chew again, breathe again.
He needs to decide.
Just decide.
Chew.
Chew.
Chew.
Chew.
Chew.
No. He can’t.
He wants it.
Not yet. He’s not ready.
He wants it.
Naruto looks at him like he wants to kill him.
He wants it more than fucking anything.
break
you have gotten your chewing gum stuck in your hair
do you:
A) rip it out along with a chunk of your scalp
B) cut off the mess with scissors
C) painstakingly dislodge each individual strand
until you're free
or
D) live with it
and live your life
break
It’s thunderstorming tonight. Naruto is lying in his bed.
He can’t sleep. His body is used to it being hot, but now it’s kinda cold but also hot and he’s uncomfortable.
Lightning flashes on the edges of his curtains.
For a moment, he wishes it was winter. He closes his eyes and sees a rainy afternoon, grey light, soft blankets, movies on his laptop. He tastes ramen broth on his tongue and then looks up at those fancy hanging lights in his future kitchen. The sky is watering his pot plants. He wants everyday struggles and no one to witness them except the light bulb that never stops flickering.
No heat. No pressure.
And then he thinks back to last winter, sitting on the freezing linoleum of the science corridor, making a countdown on his phone for summer, for swimming pools and parties and heat and freedom.
Another flash and some small part of him that’s still just a kid, no matter how much he pretends not to be, flinches in primitive terror.
He kicks the blanket off again, tosses and turns in his sweaty sheets.
He misses winter. Or maybe he misses the idea of it.
Will it ever live up to his idea of it?
Thunder booms, warbling and ominous.
break
Naruto’s movies talk a lot about it ‘feeling right.' It’s always some cheesy line about a relationship, about knowing they’re ‘the one’ and shit like that.
Sasuke’s been thinking a lot. About ‘right.' About ‘good.'
He blames Naruto entirely for it. And not just because of the movies.
What is ‘right’ if not a red pen tick next to a correct answer?
What is ‘good’ if not an A+?
Right. Good. Right. Good.
Are they not the same thing?
Sasuke gasps, piercing into the dark car—he almost sees it levitate from his lips like a plume of smoke from a snuffed candle.
Right. Good.
Are they not the same thing?
They can’t be.
Because as Naruto swallows him whole, licks up the underside of his cock and then closes his lips around him, Sasuke watches the concept of ‘good’ disintegrate in real time. He likes it. It feels good (it feels so fucking good).
So how come it’s not right?
break
It’s been a while since they ran. Like, really went running. Naruto feels it with every step—the heat taking, taking, and yet he still runs.
They dropped PE in favour of Psychology. They started being too cool to race home from school.
Why did they stop? Why did he leave?
Where did he go?
Sasuke.
The ground shifts from cracked footpath to slippery sand, from gymnasium hardwood to airport linoleum. Naruto’s never been to an airport, never been on a flight, never left Konoha, and yet he’s running through the airport terminal as it extends ever further in front of him, the sound of planes white noise in his ears. Which gate? Which terminal? Which country? Where is he? Where’s the door?
Where is he running to?
(Who is he running to?)
He collides with a hardwood front door inlaid with red stained glass and finally breathes. He knocks. Waits. Knocks harder—louder. His feet still move in place, like he’s still running. He can feel the lactic acid buildup in his calves, can feel the sweat dripping down the back of his neck from his hairline, wetting the collar of his t-shirt.
He’s bracing against the door, faceted glass indenting his palm, the other hand gripped over his chest, as if he could reach in and close around his heart—make it stop, make it stop, make it—
The door swings open, and Naruto basically falls onto Sasuke.
Sasuke grunts, shifts back to take Naruto’s weight, leans him against the closed door. The sunlight through the stained glass leaves splotches of red on the foyer floor.
“Naruto!” Sasuke’s shaking him, gripping his shoulders. “Naruto, what’s wrong?”
He sounds panicked. But Sasuke never sounds panicked. Not even when he forgot the date of their Literature SAC because Itachi had been fighting with his parents. Not even when he fell off the flying fox at Year 8 camp and sprained his ankle.
“Sa—Sasuke . . .” Naruto gasps out.
“Look at me. Naruto, look at me.”
He tears his eyes away from the blood on the floor, stills his feet, lets go of his own heart. The planes land.
He meets Sasuke’s gaze and something pulls taut like telephone wire, like yarn between paper cups in a Year 7 Science experiment.
Sound waves. Resonance.
The tide crashes down, and he crumples into Sasuke’s arms.
break
It’s raining.
It’s summer and it’s raining and Sasuke’s standing by the kitchen window, watching it cover the backyard, blotting out the sun with grey and dusty purple.
Sasuke almost forgot that it could rain in summer.
“It’s the cool change,” Itachi says from behind him, like Sasuke can’t feel it, like he can’t feel the air changing.
Even inside the house, the humidity is oppressive. The air feels liquid, like he’s drowning in it, water pressing on his chest.
This is not the summer they were promised.
The rain bleeds down the window and the Sharpie melts away, impermanent as the rest of them.
Sasuke is nine years old, in the lamplight of Itachi’s bedroom, playing Scattergories at 7pm before he has to go to bed, the sound of cheap pencils on paper sheets and the tick tick tick of the plastic timer soft and persistent. Itachi always beats him, but it’s still fun.
Sasuke is sixteen years old, and he’s in Year 10, lying on tables in the music room because they have a substitute teacher and he’s just watching the ceiling fans spin, and spin, and spin. He feels dizzy, but he’s laughing.
Sasuke is eighteen years old, and he’s fucking terrified all the time but Naruto’s got his fingers inside him and his mouth around him and there’s this good, rich pressure growing from inside, growing more familiar along with the shape of Naruto’s body, and something about it feels right, right in a way he can’t formulate in a Literature essay, can’t identify like a theme or a poetic device, distill down into an eight-word quote.
The rain drums rhythmically against the veranda roof. It sounds like crackling sparklers, distant fireworks, like the click of a Sharpie cap and the smack of chewing gum.
Sasuke can keep running. He can keep running and running like he’s running away from everything, but that won’t change the fact what he’s doing is chasing.
When will it end?
He doesn’t realise he’s said it aloud until Itachi replies simply, “When the cool change is over.”
Scattergories in the lamp light. Ceiling fans. That brief fleeting moment where he knows—he’s certain—it’s going to be okay.
It’s the trick question in the exam they don’t prepare you for:
When does it feel like that all the time?
break
They’re not stupid, really. They’re also not really eighteen.
They’re old enough that they’ve forgotten the finer details of this time. After all, they only ever recall it in weather-based metaphors and forced symbolism, in iPhone photos and old Snapchats. They don’t remember what it’s really like to be young. They’ve long since made the trade—the searing break for the constant ache, the prismatic vibrance for the gentle glow.
And they like it. They do. But it doesn’t stop them from looking back through the frosted glass of time, from softening and tenderising it through persistent reminiscence, chewing and chewing on memories like pieces of gum, unable to swallow them because their parents said if they swallowed gum it would stay in their stomachs forever.
They think of these versions of themselves like . . . this. Rich and expansive, saturated in significance—when instead they held a violence so volatile it’s difficult to express. Everything resonated only because they were so hollow, and that same emptiness was what they fought to fill, gluttony fueled by terror. For not only were they void, they existed within one.
Is it any wonder then that they sought physical resonance? That they ached for sensations that stimulated the flesh, reminded them that they were corporeal, that there was pleasure in the physical and not just—pain?
It used to be so beautiful. Not in the same way as the romcom movie or the sweeping bildungsroman, but beautiful in the sense that everything was so important.
maybe i just want it to feel important again. not like how emails are urgent and errands can’t be put off anymore. but important in the sense that i was important.
i miss feeling like i had so much to choose from. i miss feeling like whatever i chose was right and important and significant because i was defining the edges of myself. now i feel like i am fighting just to stay myself and not be absorbed into the bed on which i lie and the roads on which i drive.
it used to hurt so much. so much. i forget how much it hurt. how much i cried myself to sleep.
it doesn’t hurt like that anymore. but it also isn’t quite as bright as it used to be.
They don’t have a good conclusion for this one. But even in a Literature essay, those didn’t really matter, did they?
break
The sheets are sticking to Naruto’s skin as he lies in his king single bed, closing and opening their group chat.
They always hang out as a group and Naruto knows it's stupid to be happy about that, but he still is. He's technically an adult now, has been since he turned eighteen in October, but growing up doesn't mean losing your friends—he believes that.
He had been afraid that, after the school bell rung on that final day, after exams were over and valedictory was over and school was over, that their group would fracture, fall fate to what he heard happened to the graduating class before them.
But it’s January, val was two months ago, and they're still together. Their group chat, ‘The Rookie 9,’ is still active. Kiba sends them dog memes and funny videos at least every couple days. Ino keeps inviting them to go places—usually to Sakura's because she has a swimming pool and it's summer and it's hot as shit and where else would they go?
Naruto, Sakura, Shikamaru, Choji, Ino, Hinata, Kiba, Shino.
And Sasuke. But, to Naruto, Sasuke is . . . different.
Because when he really thinks about it, when he’s alone, lying on his king single bed, staring up at his glow-in-the-dark stars, he knows that most of them were—and maybe still are—only friends by proximity. By school forcing them into closeness until they believed it was true compatibility.
He sees a DM from Sasuke, and he’s at the bottom of Sakura’s swimming pool. The water is a weight on his chest and it’s quiet and it’s cool and it’s pretty but he can’t breathe and he wants to leave.
Naruto knows he’s a stupid kid. But he took swimming lessons until he was sixteen, so he knows all the swimming strokes—freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly. He knows what a bildungsroman is but not what it means to live one. And he knows, the same way he knows he might not speak to Sakura again in five years, or he might lose touch with Shikamaru before the end of summer, that Sasuke will always be in his life.
He doesn’t know yet though, whether that’s terrifying or comforting.
break
They’re sitting on the floor of Sasuke’s bedroom, leaning against the foot of the bed—against each other. It’s nighttime. It’s cold. Nights can still get cold in Konoha summer.
In trying to avoid the winter they know is ahead of them, escape, redact it, take a jumbo Sharpie to it and forget, they found something.
Found poetry. Negative space. It’s like Year 12 Literature all fucking over again.
Naruto’s hand finds his and squeezes. Sasuke squeezes back, hard enough that he can feel Naruto’s bones, feel the fragility of flesh and the future.
His cheeks are wet but they haven’t gone swimming today. It hasn’t rained in weeks. His chest fucking hurts.
Is this what it is to be alive? Longing and regret?
A choked laugh escapes Naruto, as if he can hear Sasuke’s thoughts, and he scrubs a thumb over his knuckles.
Sasuke sniffs and looks away, even as he brings their clamped hands up to rub at his eyes.
This will be just another thing to chew on, to cover on his breath with an Eclipse mint even as his tongue searches the backs of his teeth for the residual taste.
This will be just another thing to black out, to chase with a shot of chlorinated water and pretend he’s trying to forget when in fact what he wants is to immortalise.
If this is Literature then here’s the essay question:
Are they the negative space? Or are they the poetry it created?
longer break
the key change
i wasted so much time wanting
(it will get better)
i wasted so much time waiting
(i will get better)
i wasted so much time
(but maybe it won't)
break
For most of his life, Sasuke has felt the need to grip tightly onto everything in his life. His schoolwork, his sense of identity, his personal space—if he loosens his hold for one second, he believes it will all fall apart.
He squeezes his teeth around the Eclipse mint.
He slams his bedroom door shut.
He wraps his body around stupid, stupid Naruto.
What would it be like to not overthink something—just once?
What would it be like to just . . . let go?
break
“Come with me to the petrol station,” comes Sasuke’s voice through the phone.
(I don’t want to be alone)
They always go out as a group. It’s just a thing.
(I don’t want to be alone)
“We can get slurpees,” Sasuke adds, but Naruto’s already decided.
(I don’t want to be alone)
He would follow Sasuke anywhere.
break
As he downs another jelly shot in Shikamaru’s backyard, between the bite and the swallow, the end of one song and the start of the next, Sasuke has a brief moment of clarity.
He knows that one day he’ll stop counting birthdays. It’ll stop being an excuse to drink and party and show off and more of a burden to hold old connections.
But for now, he’s eighteen years old, and he’s got the whole world ahead of him so he’s going to watch it fucking spin. Because no one ever said that the whole world is large and hollow, and having it all in front of you is not freeing but terrifying. That “you can do anything you want” is a curse instead of a blessing.
It’s 7pm, and the sun is still blazing, bright, burning.
If this isn’t what he dreamed of, then what the hell was he promised? What was the point of all those stupid movies Naruto made him watch if they weren’t going to tell him the truth, give him the tools he needed to survive?
It takes a lot to get him drunk, he learns, his mind clinging to the edges of structure, thwarting his escape.
Maybe one day, he’ll go to work and sit at his desk and no one will wish him happy birthday.
Maybe that will be a good thing.
break
The Avenger.
Naruto’s standing behind Sasuke at the last-day-of-school assembly and the ridiculous name on his Year 12 jumper is right in his face, bold white lettering.
He remembers the day they had to choose those names. Writing them in his best handwriting onto a paper form in the spare classroom next to the senior school coordinator’s office.
It seemed like the most important decision in the world. Naruto knew Sasuke had agonised over his for at least two years, aiming for the perfect level of irony. They’d all been thinking up ideas since they were in Year 7 and they’d seen the Year 12s, half a decade their senior, wearing those perfectly witty declarations of themselves.
And then one paper form later they were real.
Principal Tsunade steps up to the podium to give a speech. When Sasuke turns his head, Naruto sees his jaw work, chewing his Eclipse mint.
Year 12 is over. After today (and exams), there won’t be a reason to wear these jumpers anymore. And then what? Will he just, like, stick it in a closet for the rest of his life?
It kinda makes him wonder, ya know. What it was all for. All that worry and hope—was it really just for one year?
The gymnasium is blindingly bright from the windows high up near the ceiling. Sasuke’s neck is slender. His hair is spiky even at the nape of his neck.
Naruto wonders what his sweat tastes like.
There will be more years.
Won’t there?
break
The pop music swirls around Sasuke in an unbearably cheerful litany of positivity— all “put your hands up” and “we’re gonna live forever.” The fire pit flickers in front of him and he takes another sip of his . . . fuck, he doesn’t know. Something in a black can. Something he’s had far too many of this summer.
Distantly, he hears himself say something to Shino, something about Jane Eyre, or whether he would ever date Sakura, or about that time in Year 9 when the music teacher abandoned them for sixth period and they had a D&M in the woodwind practice room.
Something flares in him, fiery and hot.
These friends. Do they really know him? Or do they just know who he’s projected? And if they do, well, can he fault them for that? Aren’t they all just projecting the people they want to be until they finally become them?
His tin of Eclipse mints smacks against his can as he tips one out. As he chews—and chews and chews and chews, the mint taste slowly masking the sour tang of all alcohol—it’s somehow not as satisfying anymore.
It’s February. It barely qualifies as summer still, and yet it’s the same—the fire pit and the D&Ms and now—the nostalgia.
He looks around the fire at the people he’s spent the last six years and one summer with. Will they one day meet up again, one, three, nine years from now, just to be nostalgic about this time? To return to these personalities and pretend time didn't pass? Will they fall back into these dynamics, less jaded and nuanced, more superficial and aspirational? Will they say “yeah, we should totally hang out more” and then never text?
The next thought is crystalline, cold as mint, and it soothes him like the ache in his jaw:
They don’t know who I will become.
He spits the gum into the sunbleached grass. Shino has stopped talking. Sasuke stands up and starts walking, determined.
They don’t know who I will become.
He feels a hand on his shoulder and already knows who it is.
“C’mon, Sas,” Naruto says softly. “Let’s go home.”
That’s right. The ocean is only blue because it reflects the sky.
longer break
the fourth body paragraph
you might be thinking:
this feels hollow
this feels messy
this feels empty
this feels drawn out
this feels like it went one line
one phrase
six months and ten thousand words
too long
but it's too purposeful to be an accident
so therefore
it had to be a choice
(i chose this
but you know that
because so did you)
break
It’s raining.
Naruto and Sasuke are in Sakura’s swimming pool when the cool change hits. After several curses and dramatic squeals, the rest of their friends have all gone inside, taking the pop music and the summer and the witnesses.
They’re alone. But it doesn’t feel like a bad thing this time.
Naruto looks up at the darkening sky, purplish grey like the colour of dust. The rain falls on his cheekbones like tears. It’s cooling, refreshing against the warmth of his summer-tanned skin.
Under the water, Sasuke’s arms snake around his waist. He feels his chin come to rest on his shoulder. Their hair is already wet with chlorinated water but the rain soaks it nonetheless. Droplets cascade around them, faster, louder, club music, white noise. Across the surface of the pool, the raindrops splash, leave ripples the same way their bodies do as they displace the water.
After summer comes autumn. And then winter. And then spring and back to summer, but a different summer.
There’ll never be one quite like this again.
It feels strange, being submerged in water while another form of it engulfs you too. It feels good. Not good like orgasms or alcohol or movies, but like . . .
“Hey Naruto,” Sasuke says, quiet under the rain.
“Hm?” Naruto turns to look at him, shifting in his embrace under the water. Their skin is slick and sticky at the same time.
Sasuke is watching him carefully. Naruto wants to kiss him. So he simply does, feeling the water on his lips, tasting residual mint and chlorine. The feeling in his chest doesn’t boom like a firework. It doesn’t burn like the sun. It simply exists—like water, like sunlight—and he appreciates it.
Teachers thought Naruto was stupid for the longest time. He knows that some of his friends still think that. He knows that Sasuke thinks that sometimes, in a different way.
Hell, even Naruto himself knows he’s kinda dumb sometimes and he knows he’s dumb right now—relative to the rest of his life—but at the same time, there’s a part of him that knows, maybe it’s his gut, his heart, his soul, he doesn’t know, but he knows, he knows that he’s never going to have clarity like this again.
It doesn’t feel like clarity. It feels like a poem he doesn’t understand. It feels like he knows shit all. And yet.
The rain drips off the ends of his hair and ripples through the swimming pool. And then it fades into the water and Naruto can’t tell where it landed anymore. He’s young, and he knows nothing, but he’ll never know as much as he does right now.
“Are you okay, Sas?”
The rain continues to fall. Sasuke’s head settles back on his shoulder, and he squeezes Naruto’s hand.
“I don’t know,” Sasuke whispers.
break
we know, okay?
we know the answer and we pose the question regardless
isn't that what all the essays are for?
asking and answering and asking and answering until maybe one day that echo chamber calls back with a new sound and something finally
resonates?
we are aware of the liminality of this summer
we are aware of the fragility of the myth
we are aware of the fear—we feel it in every sound the void world swallows
growing up is not all it's chalked up to be
we know
but if we just cover it up in permanent marker
(black it out)
chew on this gum
(never spit, never swallow)
apply our sunscreen
(SPF3000)
hold our breath
(drown underwater)
hold on
(tighten your grip)
hold on
(wait for me)
then maybe it’ll buy us enough time
to learn
how to be okay
break
The blaring pop music from Kiba’s last day of school party is still ringing in Sasuke’s ears as he drives them home. He borrowed Itachi’s car for the night, and while he loves the sleek red shape and the old leather seats, the AC is broken and it’s hot tonight.
Naruto’s in the passenger seat—as he’s been most of the year, given Sasuke got his Ps back in July—but tonight he’s unusually quiet.
At the lights, Sasuke stops. Looks at him.
His head is tipped back against the leather headrest, showing off his neck. His white school shirt is covered in black Sharpie signatures, completely unbuttoned. Over his white singlet, stained with permanent marker, hangs his black cord necklace, blue crystal shining in the streetlights.
He’s smiling.
“Uhhh, Sas?” Naruto says. “It’s green.”
Sasuke floors it, and it throws them back in the seats. Itachi’s car is old, but it’s fast and he laughs, laughs hard enough to forget that they could die in a car accident, that today was their last day of school, that something Sasuke barely understands but desperately wants to is licking its way up his spine and when he looks at Naruto, it only gets worse.
His textbooks are all over the backseat because he had to clean his locker out today. Naruto’s idiotic ‘Nine Tails’ Year 12 jumper is somewhere back there too, along with Sasuke’s ‘The Avenger’ one.
School is over. They can never go back.
They’re only two minutes from Naruto’s house.
i don’t want this to end
He’ll drop Naruto at the end of his driveway, headlights lighting up the garage door.
i don’t want you to leave
Naruto smells like sweat and sugary alcohol. Sasuke can feel his gaze on him—blue and familiar.
oh god i need—
“Naruto—”
“You’re hot, Sas.”
He brakes hard.
The traffic lights are green.
School is over. They never have to go back.
“I know,” he bites, rolling his eyes. “It’s summer.”
it’s so fucking hot in the car why the fuck didn’t Itachi fix the AC fuck
Naruto shifts in his seat so he’s fully facing him. “You don’t get it, do ya?”
Sasuke looks away from the road even though they’re on the highway and it’s 80.
All the air escapes his lungs and is replaced by water.
He looks back at the road.
“Well we can’t go to my house,” is his breathless answer.
He can almost hear Naruto’s grin. “The park?”
“Gross.”
“The carpark at the community centre?”
Sasuke speeds the rest of the way.
They’re going to regret this.
They’ve never felt more alive.