#ryssafic

(The windows of the shop had been foggy at the edges, snow sitting on the windowsill with picturesque practice, an almost-constant winter giving it the time it needed to perfect its exact placement on this exact windowsill. Until recently, the shop over which the snow lived had sat empty, because that’s what shops did when there was no one to fill them. But snow had never minded, because the building occupied the same space regardless of whether or not it was occupied.

A door shut and the snow had rustled before settling back into place, the same place it always settles into. The sound of a bell followed a patron in. The snow had ignored it.

The windows hummed with the noise from inside, not disturbing the snow whatsoever, because the snow is older than the people inside the building, older still than the building itself, living a thousand lives and dying a thousand deaths year after year, after year—

A teacup had been placed next to the window to cool. On the outside, the snow had begun to ease itself into a softer shape, going liquid against the steam. A quiet death, like most of them, despite the noise that made the glass tremble when someone laughed particularly loud. Occasionally, the snow can feel whispers through the glass, small vibrations of sound that carry nowhere except into solid things, melting some of the flakes against the windowsill with the force of it, passing along rumors to its kin.

Tea steam condensed on the window, and a thin line of moisture had dragged itself down on a misshapen path, led by a bead of icy water. Through the haze, there were shapes of patrons, shapes of dishware, shapes of shopowners—a figure haloed in light and another swallowed by the shadows of a back room, barely glimpsed in the brief clarity given by the condensation, fogging up again as the steam again sighed against the window.

“did you hear?” the window carried the conversation through its panes, a murmur against wood and glass. The news had traveled slowly here to the Land of Snow, if only because the village was remote enough to miss, and yet even this was delayed by those standards. The snow had known for eons, it seemed—because there were flakes of it born from the Valley of the End. “the uchiha clan is done for good. last one kicked it not too long ago.”

The window’s tone had changed, delivering a different timbre, a different patron rumbling deep from the back of their throat. “jackass,” the window relayed like the shifting of the earth, so low was it spoken. “that news is three fucking years old. you’re late.”

A click of a tongue, sharp against the glass. The snow shifted, startled, before relaxing again. It had waited with bated breath, footsteps and the rumble of snowmobiles falling into the background in the middle of nowhere, swallowed by gossip and the clatter of ceramic plates. An embarrassed cough had fired off, making the window creak. “about fucking time, though, if you ask me, right? three years ago or now, it just means one less thing to start a fucking war over. it’s been so quiet since.”

Another bead of condensation, another glimpse into the tea shop.

A smile, mostly teeth.

Blue eyes, glittering like light refracted off of snow melt.

“can i get you anything else?” the owner had shown a dimple before the fog hid him from sight, obscuring a grin so wide it could’ve swallowed the sun. Whiskered scars folded into the laugh lines beside his mouth.

The window had shivered against the melting snow, straining to listen. 

“no thank you, uzuha-san,” the patrons answered, almost in unison. The weight of it had caused the snow to shift again. “delicious, though, as always.” A little bit out of sync, but genuine, for all the brief-yet-eternal time the shop had been there it its current state, warm, and full, and creaky with people. The snow outside could feel it in the grain of the wood underneath it.

“glad to hear it,” Naruto had replied, beatific and shameless and, reportedly, dead. “always good to have you.”

The shadow in the back of the tea shop had rolled its eyes, a ghost from this distance and inaudible.

The snow had listened anyway, living and dying with the thrill of it.)

“You look like an old man, Uzuha-san,” Sasuke tells him, their fake name rolling off his tongue with the mocking sort of softness that carries the echo of a patron while also doing the warm-and-fuzzy thing in Naruto’s stomach that patron voices do not do. All the while, of course, looking like a gloomy but very hot barista, apron and everything, like they hadn’t decided to open up a traditional tea shop, instead of something like a ramen shop. Both of the things are warm, you know? Both of the things are a dime a dozen in a climate like this! Either one would’ve sold like hotcakes, or—or a hotcakes shop? Or—

“Well, we can’t all look young and hip like you, Uzuha-san,” he mimics back, shifting dirty plates from his good forearm to the one that doesn't feel much, its joints more-or-less responsive to changes in chakra pressure, but hardly precise. It does what it needs to, in a pinch, and, actually, helps him pinch things, so a solid choice for a person that has to grab plates and teacups all day, much less a person that has to grab plates and teacups all day while in very standard and very fashionable hakama, unlike some people, whose idea it was in the first place.

Sasuke rolls his eyes, closing the practically ancient register with his hip, carrying the till to the back to the shop, using his shoulder to part the curtain, as his arm is occupied with other business, and the empty sleeve at his side wouldn’t be much different anyway. As the curtain shuts, Naruto thinks he can see a little dusting of pink on the tips of Sasuke’s ears and a glow partway down his neck; it’s the sure sign of embarrassment, the sign that Naruto had returned the warm-and-fuzzy right back, or whatever Sasuke calls it in his own head when he thinks about these things. 

It’s true, to some degree, Naruto tells himself as he lifts the curtain aside with his left wrist, balancing dishware atop the aluminum plating just above his right wrist joint—Sasuke really does look at least a couple years younger surrounded by brewing supplies and an immaculately kept snack-kitchen. Naruto can’t tell if it’s the well-worn clothes, or the beautifully tied apron, or the work-flat hair, or the lines by his mouth that speak a little less of tension and a little more of relief. It could be anything, a sight or a sound or a feeling, but it’s there somewhere.

Naruto always finds the words for things later than he means to, so this time probably isn’t any different in that respect.

But there is a part of him that acknowledges that Sasuke was right about one thing—he’d be really easy to recognize in hakama, considering how long he’d worn one, and the look he’s working now is something just different enough that he looks everything and nothing like he used to, all at once. The most disarming thing about him now is how comfortable he looks about seventy-five percent of the time. 

“What're you thinking?” Sasuke says, taking Naruto’s expertly designed and not-at-all flawed stack of plates and teacups and dipping bowls. They rattle only slightly when Sasuke puts the dishes in the sink to rinse them, a co-opted drying rack poised under the faucet to hold the dishes in place before they wind up in the dishwasher to his right. “I can smell the smoke from here.”

“Ha ha.” Naruto rotates his right wrist joint, the socket squealing a little between his flesh thumb and forefinger as he loosens the chakra pressure there. The joint pops enough for him to flex his fingers in a semblance of what they used to do. “I was thinking about dinner.” A lie, because something sappy might make Sasuke drop a plate, or might make him cry, or might make his face tighten and obscure the softness there. “I can cook tonight.” The truth, because there are still countless things that they have to catch up on for all the time they spent running toward or hiding from glimpses and reflections and echoes of one another—namely the fact that Naruto can, by a now-less-than-limited margin, cook.

“Oh yeah?” Sasuke’s eyebrow does that thing it’s so good at, a perfect arch above perfect eyelashes above depthless eyes. There’s a smile on his face that is most evident in the hints of lines that’ll be crow’s feet sometime in the future, though there are pieces of it hidden in other places—the corners of his mouth, the tilt of his head, the lift of his shoulder. Even so, there’s something curling slowly around his pupils that doesn’t match; a conversation that could be waiting to happen. 

Naruto lets it wait, his palm ready to grab for it when it comes.

“Oh yeah,” he replies. “I don’t know if you know this, but I can make my own ramen noodles, which, by the way, is why we should’ve opened a ramen shop.”

That eye roll again, caught in the same motion that Sasuke uses to shut the dishwasher with one foot and untie his apron with a tug of his thumb. Sasuke’s eyes are so clear and exactly like Naruto remembers them that it’s easy to forget that he’d had the Rinnegan for less than a day, instead taking back a left eye that could barely make out shapes, much less channel chakra, all in the interest of opening a tea shop as far away from the Land of Fire as possible. 

It sounds almost like a laugh when Sasuke says, “would’ve been super subtle. Three months after you die, a random ramen shop opens up in the middle of nowhere, almost as far away from the Fire Nation as you can get. That doesn’t have the name Uzumaki Naruto written on it anywhere.”

“That’s Uzuha Naruto to you.” The electricity on his tongue pops against his teeth, a sensation that’s contagious in its own right, just like the pink on Sasuke’s ears is contagious, just like the twist of his mouth to hide a wider smile is contagious. 

wow, Naruto can hear himself say on a sigh lost to time, his voice much higher and the crack of it very youthful in its fervor, he’s so fucking pretty. The phantom sensation of a smack to the back of the head, a request to repeat himself, a named-and-unnamed itch at the curve of his shoulders. 

“Dinner it is,” Sasuke says with a voice like snowfall with icepack sitting underneath, tossing his apron across his unarmed shoulder as he heads for the stairs where their home is. “What do you need help with?”

The sun burns at the back of Naruto’s throat when he smiles.

(The rocky earth had been beginning its slow freeze that autumn, beaten by steady, barely-liquid sheets of rain. The shower whispered among itself, relearning the slow shifts in pavement and sediment, memorizing the shape of rainboots that would be snowboots before long. The boots’ soles tickled the dirt-specked puddles that were swallowing information and news and chitchat along their greedy edges, collecting things to hide under the pine needles, drowning in water that was too cold to let them rot.

The squall had been able to feel a relative, tucked inside the shape of a tea shop, tucked further still into the shape of arms and legs and pointed teeth as it sat in a booth, a wave given life in another form. The clouds above the village itself shuddered to shake itself free of the last of its rain before the snow started, straining itself to catch the murmurs in trembling palms.

Birch leaves, stuck to the shop’s floor, passed information to the water droplets, curling themselves around conversations that were familiar and different, the kind that other trees had heard much farther south. Migrating birds had brought their perceptions and conceptions and spins on things, twittering to themselves among seeds before fluttering away again, leaving behind only their gaps in knowledge and the urge to know more, to pass along to seasons forward.

The rain had hissed to and between itself as one birch leaf drip-drip-dripped rainwater into a negligible puddle forming beside a well-loved rainboot. Its edges, browning in the pondering death at the end of a fleeting autumn, trembled out words that would’ve been otherwise lost to the cold, the wet, and what, in a warmer climate, would be the sticky grip of mud.

“what are you doing here?” the shadow had said, for once outside the confines of the payment counter and the kitchen, and the birch leaves and the rainwater had felt a memory, somewhere, seen by them-and-others, passed along on wind streams and river paths—the shadow in a different light, shoulders held differently, its mouth a harder line.

“is that any way to talk to a paying customer?” The person-shaped water system flashed pointed teeth in a smile, the birch leaves peeling away from the floor to land in a warm palm. The rain had found itself caught in Naruto’s palm print, tucked away in his lifeline—somehow shorter and longer than expected.

Red hair had snorted, glasses slipping down the thin bridge of a nose. The shadow’s eyes had glittered, even though one of them was unable to see. “you haven’t paid me yet.”

Naurto had coughed a hidden sound of humor against the birch leaves in his hands before he’d tossed them back into the rain, the cold, the almost winter. The birch leaves shared their sights with the puddles in which they landed.

The rain itself, themself, had reached a cacophony against the glass. listening, it said. listening.

The eddy-that-wasn’t, the person-that-was, had cocked his head, a slightly crooked tooth poking out through his lips. The water in the grooves of the roof, the glass, the steps, the porch could feel his attention, his awareness, and his voice when he replied, “do i need to speak to your manager—sorry, what was your name again?”

Glasses again pushed up a nose, sharp words getting sharper against the woman’s teeth. Naruto, eyebrows arched with something like mischief, from what the rain could see between itself and the foggy chill. 

“none of your business,” the shadow said, and the autumn shower hissed with the sound of laughter.)

Naruto can see the way that Sasuke is looking at the flour in his hair, on his face, on his eyelashes, all evidence of noodles made beautifully, by the way, if messily. There’s a combination of things on his face—no flour, or anything like that, despite being on clean-up duty, that bastard—but, like, feelings. They’re smoothed along the underside of his eyebrows and pulling the skin tight, a little bit, by his eyes. The feelings are probably not about the flour, not with the way that his lips thin a little bit like that, but the words are still hiding somewhere under his tongue—under Naruto’s or Sasuke’s own, well, he isn’t entirely sure.  

“You’re getting good at this,” Sasuke says, which is not what Naruto had expected at all. It doesn’t quite match with the thoughtful tilt of his eyebrows or anything in his posture, but he says it anyway. Unreal. “The old man at Ichiraku would be jealous.”

The hum of something, simmering in Sasuke’s tone—but it doesn’t taste like what Naruto thinks it should taste like. It’s both familiar-and-unfamiliar, the-same-and-different. It’s absolutely not the feeling that Naruto thinks it is, because he would be able to hear it, the way it takes long and heavy steps across a lake that’s barely frozen, the ice cracking beneath it. It’s always been able to rattle windows and shake the earth around them.

Whatever this is, it isn’t that.

(It had been a feeling that all the seasons had remembered in equal detail, so sharp had the sound of it been. The sunlight remembered it as a singular feeling, held tightly by the shadow with both hands. But the seasons knew it had been pulled taut between the both of them.)

“I’d had to learn something,” Naruto tells him, and he can feel the flour in his palm scraping against his chin when he drops it there. “Otherwise, I’d’ve had to start freeloading, which would demolish my ‘vagrant with a heart of gold’ reputation.” 

A smile that touches Sasuke’s mouth like the springtime. “I don’t think that was your reputation.”

“It’s my version of events, so I get to decide what my reputation was.” Naruto grins when Sasuke wrinkles his nose in a silent scoff. He blinks and can see the afterimage of it on the back of his eyelids. “But I guess you got me. Teuchi wouldn’t’ve ever called me a vagrant. He was too nice.”

And oh shit, there’s a laugh, clinging to the surface of the table like dew to a blade of grass. Quiet, singular, and gone in a heartbeat, even still. “Nobody would’ve called you a vagrant, because nobody fucking talks like that.” 

Sasuke shifts his body in his seat, pushing it away from the table, stacking dishes as he goes. There’s a structure there that Naruto has memorized, the way that all the weight has to be stacked to be carried tucked against his chest, but it’s still impressive to see in action. Maybe that’s another thing that keeps him out of sight or behind the register—to watch him move is to catch a glimpse of who he had been, a ripple across a reflection from years before.

Before Naruto can catch himself, he’s half out of his seat, his flesh-and-blood fingertips resting atop Sasuke’s own.

Sasuke blinks. Naruto blinks in kind.

“Uh,” Naruto says, like the buffoon that he’s been called for his entire life. “Do you need help?”

This blink is much slower, reminiscent of the cat that he catches Sasuke feeding in the summer. His eyelashes go on for a hundred thousand years, which Naruto always seems to forget and remember at least as many times a day. They kiss his cheeks when he blinks like that, a lingering touch against his skin, and it’s wild. Something burns in the center of Naruto’s chest, something currently indefinable but familiar, like he’s been holding his breath for too long. 

“Um,” Sasuke replies, but doesn’t move his hand away. His fingertips are freezing, like always. “No? You cooked.”

If Naruto leaves his hand where it is, Sasuke’s fingers will eventually warm up underneath all the calluses and scar tissue, leftover from probably several-too-many fights. His skin will soften infinitesimally, not enough to matter, but Naruto will notice anyway, like always.

Sasuke blinks for the third time, a frown starting to draw itself along the line of his lips. “Are you okay?”

Naruto lets go. 

Sasuke watches him with that enigmatic expression on his face. There are so many different versions of himself that Naruto can see echoing in the arch of his eyebrow, the downward tilt of his lips. It’s a face that could mean anything—literally anything, from ‘I am literally about to leave you behind forever without telling you’ to ‘I cannot believe you feel any kind of affection for me and might cry.’ It’s uninterpretable, hooked into the lining of his guts and tugging, tightening all of his muscles in a panic response.

It isn’t until Sasuke turns around to make his way to their residential dishwasher (fancy) that’s probably older than the both of them (less fancy), that Naruto swallows whatever kind of melancholic bile had been rising in his throat. He coughs against the weight of it, the thickness of it, pushing his chair away from the table with one foot. The rattle of it against the floorboards breaks the almost-silence and background faucet noise. When Naruto walks across the kitchen to stand at Sasuke’s right side, his legs don’t shake.

There’s a pause that lingers between them, Sasuke’s attention apparently focused entirely on the dishes in his hand, transferred between the sink and the dishwasher with a little bit too much care. The skin under his fingernails has gone white with the force of his grip on relatively delicate ceramic bowls, the muscles of his wrists straining with the frustration of it all.

As the dishwasher squeals itself closed and there’s no more dishware to occupy Sasuke’s focus, he does that thing—that thing where he bumps their elbows, his right to Naruto’s left; that thing where he loops an arm around Naruto’s waist and presses their hips together; that thing that’s a lot like a conversation, dropped into Naruto’s open palm.

“Sasuke,” Naruto says, scattering his tone around their shamelessly tiny kitchen like dandelion seeds, light, airy, and a stone’s throw away from relieved-and-hysterical laughter, “are you worried about me?” 

A scoff, and Sasuke shifts his arm from around Naruto’s torso to drape around his shoulders. “How could I not be? You keep staring at me like I’m the one with flour all over my face, or like you’re waiting for me to break your nose or something.” The skin tightens at the corners of his eyes as he narrows them. “But when I ask, all you do is look like I smacked you.”

Their position is a little awkward, what with Sasuke’s arm where it is, and their hips where they are, and the fact that, yes, Naruto still definitely does have flour on his face and probably in his hair. Regardless, Sasuke’s pouting a little (probably shouldn’t say that out loud), and Naruto reminds himself once again that his eyelashes go on forever. It gets more awkward still when Naruto lifts his arm to loop across Sasuke’s shoulders, but that doesn’t matter either.

“Sasuke,” Naruto says, with all the seriousness in the world.

“Naruto,” Sasuke replies, with significantly less seriousness, but he speaks softly enough that it presses embers against the soles of Naruto’s feet.

“Can I kiss you?” A question that isn’t anything like the ones that are on Naruto’s mind, like the way that Sasuke’s been looking at him lately, or the way he can’t possibly tell what’s on Sasuke’s mind most of the time—but it’s close enough, kinda.

Sasuke huffs a breath between his teeth and tilts his head, turning it just enough so that their noses brush. He looks radiant in that singularly intimidating way, you know, like—like sunlight swimming around a void, or something. “Is that supposed to be a response to my statement?”

“Yeah, a little,” Naruto tells him, and he can feel Sasuke’s breath against his lips. It’s warm, warmer than the tip of his nose by a longshot. “It’s supposed to lead into my next question about whether or not you wanna shower with me.”

Sasuke’s eyes are searching his face contemplatively. Naruto watches them draw lines around the shape of Naruto’s eyebrows, down the bridge of his nose, across the curve of his mouth, around the jut of his chin. The space around them is warm, even though the living space itself is more-or-less freezing. The wood stove in the teahouse will need restocking before bed, for sure. Naruto can tell by the pallow of Sasuke’s cheeks.

“Will you let me wash your hair?” Oh, that’s a weakness—Sasuke’s methods of reciprocity hit Naruto right in the chest, grabbing his solar plexus hard enough to pop it out of place and throw it against the closest flat surface with a wet slap. 

“Um, duh.” Naruto meets his eyes with his best solemn face, schooling everything about his expression back into smoothness. “Can I kiss you now?” 

Sasuke laughs and tilts his head just a little bit further—and then Naruto can taste the laugh on his lips, his teeth, his tongue. It’s dry in their apartment and their lips are chapped beyond belief, especially with the way that Naruto’s always chewing on his own, but the kiss is perfect. They’re always perfect in a different way, even if it wouldn’t be perfect with anyone else. It relaxes Naruto’s muscles, drops the tension from his shoulders like too-heavy coat, weakens his knees just enough to remind him why he’s even here in the first place.

Sasuke’s arm shifts from his shoulder, down his back, toward his front, and the knot at the front of Naruto’s hakama is undone, like magic. Sasuke’s dexterity is beyond reproach, like he doesn’t have to think about anything before his body just moves, entirely different than the way that Naruto’s does the same thing: clumsy, graceless, and with unrestrained enthusiasm. 

“You know,” Naruto says, stupefied and delirious with a kiss like that, as usual, “you kiss pretty good for a dead guy.”

Sasuke’s palm is still wet with dishwater when he shoves it against Naruto’s face, smothering his laugh with skin.

(Summer, or what passed for it in the Land of Snow, had been brief, like a sigh, and punctuated by a village with numerous open doors, letting in lukewarm breezes and birdsong. The tea shop is no exception, its single door propped open wide with a wooden sign, the entry bell ringing softly in response to the summer wind’s gentle touches, its fingers leaving nothing behind as it moved through the shop itself. 

An observer had sat near the entryway at a table bathed in sunlight, two birds perched comfortably on the table’s edge, preening their feathers against the warmth. The cushion underneath the watcher’s knees had been limited in decoration, but comfortable, at least as far as the birds themselves could tell. The summertime itself stretched further along the floorboards, traced the graining in the wood with smooth feet, and it listened.

The birds sung to the stranger of the coming autumn, lamented the way in which summer was only a held breath between a chilly spring and an almost freezing autumn. They told stories of where they’d been and who they’d seen. They’d spoken of the shadow behind the tea shop, sitting next to a cat that had been too shapely to be unfed, too lithe to be kept. The stranger nodded, letting the summer shift around his shoulders to pull at the edges of his well-worn cloak.

A ceramic cup of chilled oolong was placed on the table with no fanfare. Its temperature had been such that condensation was beading at the lip of the cup, catching the summer’s eye. 

A mouth, split wide in a smile, sunlight peeking out from behind teeth. “you know,” Naruto had said, and the season listened, the shape of the floorboards becoming a memory on its palms, “this is the most highly recommended tea we have at this time of year.”

The man had looked up, the color of his hair set fire by the light coming in through the window at his back.

“how much?” A whisper. The birds noted that it had been a welcome change—or rather, it had been a return to something softer, for him. 

“on the house.” The summer had felt unasked questions hit the table like torn paper, fluttering against its surface to collect dust. When the stranger-that-wasn’t pulled his hands out from underneath his cloak, one of the questions had caught on the pad of his thumb.

He’d held it there, pressed to the shape of the teacup, and said nothing.

It’d been answer enough.)

-

(“holy shit!” Newborn flora had barely been able to crawl from the thawing earth before the sun startled them with its enthusiasm, their fragile leaves curling against their stems with its energy. Flowers that had already had the sense to bloom had found their petals stuck to the steel plating of a samurai helmet, resting on a table in a tea shop, almost newly opened, in the grand scheme of things. “holy shit!”

The samurai had glanced around the tea shop with pale eyes, his hair tied in a tight tail at the base of his skull. A strip of cloth was tied around his forehead, unaffiliated with anyone that mattered. His affiliations now extended only as far as the helmet did.

As far as the spring had been concerned, it’d been three dead men in a tea shop, out of place, finding new ones.

“thought you were supposed to be dead,” the samurai said to the sun, the only indication of his nerves being the way he picked his mochi into piece, after piece, after piece.

“could say the same about you.” Sasuke had moved like vapor does, as though his feet never really needed to touch the ground in the first place. For the Land of Snow, the spring had found itself something kindred in the tea shop. 

“never had you pegged for a samurai,” the sunlight agreed, catching the attention of flower petals with its motion. Outside the open door, new growth turned its face toward his hands. 

The samurai had looked at them both. There’d been white-pink flower petals in his hair, a sign that he’d taken off his helmet to breathe sometime before he’d gotten there. A risk, with a recognizable face like his. “i figured i was proficient in taijutsu.” His eyes settled on Sasuke, and an eyebrow arched, a little imperiously. “thought maybe i should take up swordsmanship.” 

Sasuke held his gaze only barely. There’d been something heavy on his mind, like a cloud filled with rain. 

A breeze pulled itself into the tea shop, catching the sunshine’s question in its path, said softly, almost secretly, to the empty eyes of the samurai helmet, “are you happier?”

The samurai had blinked, and in his eyes the sunlight glittered. In the space between these two moments, Sasuke’s eyes had dropped to the floor. 

“yeah,” the samurai replied, nodding once. “i think so.” His eyes had been clear when he’d continued, “how about you?”

When the sun grinned, he became so young, much younger than he was only a heartbeat before. Even with the time that had passed, the spring remembered the boyishness with perfect clarity. Perhaps the samurai did too.

“i don’t think i’ve been happier,” he’d said. The flowers had known he’d been telling the truth.

When next the spring breathed in, Sasuke was nowhere to be seen.)

Sasuke startles awake, as usual.

The dream that shoves him upright is always vague, but consistent. The shapes and sounds and sensations are forgettable—the feelings, of course, stick in his throat, hooked into the skin of his tonsils. They burn a path up from his chest to gather behind his teeth, tasting a little bit like bile when they flood onto the flat of his tongue.

Even with as thick as they are, the feelings are hard to distinguish, but Sasuke knows them anyway, just like he knows the shadows that linger at the edge of his periphery, even if his periphery has, obviously, been better. When he works his jaw around them, they bend into familiar shapes: i hate you so fucking much, i’ll kill you; i love you so much i can’t stand it; i love you so much i don’t know what to do with myself. 

He runs a hand down his face, because it’s the middle of the night. His fingertips come away bloody because he’d been startled awake—as usual. The space beside him is empty, because Naruto had woken up first. It’s a routine, almost down to the timestamp, the way this plays out; Naruto’s inability to sleep these days paired with Sasuke’s inherent neuroticism make for an interesting combination after dark, no matter how many bruises Naruto bites into Sasuke’s collarbone, or how tight Sasuke clings onto Naruto’s shoulders when he holds him like that.

No—that’s not a fair way to spin it. It’s getting better, the pattern of things. There are nights where Sasuke startles awake to see Naruto looking at him with that doofy, worried look on his face. Or there are nights where Sasuke wakes up first and gets to hold Naruto’s face or drag his knuckle along his cheek. Occasionally, there are even mornings where they wake up at practically the same time (rare) and Naruto kisses Sasuke’s nose (far less rare) and then shows off the dimples in his cheeks near his scars.  

Sasuke slides his legs out from under the comforter and brings himself to standing. The floorboards are fucking freezing, but not as cold as they could be. Naruto must’ve thrown more wood into the stove downstairs, with the way the air doesn’t bite at Sasuke’s cheeks as he makes his way to the bathroom.

He grabs Naruto’s jacket off of the floor where it always ends up and shrugs it on anyway, before he flicks on the bathroom light and squints against its brightness. The bathroom itself is a half-blurry mixture of surfaces and metallic finish, a combination of failing-and-standard sight. 

The mirror tells him what he pretty much already knew: his left eye is weeping blood, a classic response to a classic behavior. It means he’d tried to open the Sharingan in his sleep, for whatever reason, and this eye hadn’t been doing well before he’d switched them out. It’s hardly surprising that it struggles to function like this.

He splashes cold water on his face, paying special attention to his left eye and the cheek underneath it, clearing out the blood that’s starting to dry in his eyelashes. It’s quick work, the rhythm of all this, and any sleep that had been tying down Sasuke’s joints has slipped to the bathroom floor, left behind when he turns off the light to go find Naruto. It’s the middle of winter in the Land of Snow, so it’s no real guess as to where he’ll be standing—he says that it’ll probably never get old, watching snowfall in the almost-pitch darkness, broken only by streetlights and the glimpse of wood-burning stoves through windows.

Sasuke can smell incense as he cuts through the shoebox of their living room, passing by what passes for a shrine in a living space this size. Naruto’s mother looks like she’s smiling at him, which is uncomfortable. He doesn’t look at his own parents’ photo, framed off to the right; this is more Naruto’s area of expertise and, again, it’s uncomfortable.

His footsteps are silent against the stairs, a reminder about how difficult the death of old habits has been, can be, will be. They don’t creak when he hops the last two, and the tea shop only settles comfortably around him as he walks across the dining room on bare feet. It’s warmer down here, closer to the stove, regardless of the fact that heat rises, or whatever. The stove in the corner crackles softly—definitely refilled, certainly by Naruto.

Sasuke pulls on his boots, left very particularly by the front door, and lets the entry bell announce his exit.

The winter numbs his face almost instantly.

(That second winter had been unsurprising in its ferocity, though the building underneath the snowfall had groaned, a little, with the weight of it—the snow, the ice, and the snow again. The snow had just been relarning what it was like to have interlopers in this space outside its influence, and the murmur-rattle-chime of it all had been disorienting, had been disruptive. 

But some of the winter—some of the snow—had been tucked under the awning of the teashop-in-repair, not yet packed down by boots, or stones, or ice. It hadn’t yet melted and frozen and gathered again. It had only waited, pressed against the windows closest to the shadow of a cash register, fluttering in time with the almost-rusted ring when the register open-and-shut.

The sun’s personification breathed out a curse on a flame-curled tongue and was caught in a headlock by a flowered tree, her forearm tucked under his chin, her bicep pressed to the back-and-side of his throat. They’d been laughing, as far as the wintertime could tell. They’d been too far away to catch their laughter against the glass. 

Sasuke had been watching them almost as closely as the snow had been.

“he seems happy.” The artist spoke like curling paper, dried stiff with ink. The winter air only caught the words through the window itself. The wood around it had swallowed the words whole, refusing to let them go. “i wish i was surprised.”

Sasuke had said nothing. Or if he had, it’d been too quiet for the snow to even catch the memory of.

The pause between them had been frozen, three inches thick. The snow outside hadn’t known what weight it carried, but it was something—and it existed outside the reach of the sunlight’s smile and the flowered tree’s laughter. The floorboards creaked beneath the ice they’d shared.

“he’d’ve hated it,” the artist had spoken again, sharper than the first time, the pull of a brush against old parchment. “being hokage.”

The ice shuddered. It cracked, from the bottom.

“oh yeah?” Sasuke had leaned against the back wall, his bones speaking to the snowfall through the tea shop’s frame. “how do you figure?”

A scoff, the flutter of bristles casting aside excess droplets. “he’d only spend his time thinking about you. what you were doing, if you were hurt or not, if there was something he could’ve done.” The artist pitched his voice up just a little, thinning it out with the edge of a knife. “‘what good is a hokage if—’”

“‘—they can’t even save one friend.’ i’m aware.”

The ice cracked a second time, from the top. Whatever was pressing against it had increased its force.

Sasuke had shifted against the wall. Maybe he’d swallowed. The outside hadn’t been able to tell. “i can’t see why he likes you.”

The artist laughed, pressing an ink-dark thumb against his bottom lip. The shape of it had been unclear against the cold-fogged window, but it’d been clear enough to imagine. “just because he likes you doesn’t make you a good person.”

“case in point.” It might’ve been a laugh, in another life. Even then, it’d been close.

“case in point,” the artist agreed.

There may have been more that would’ve been said in that moment. They could’ve said anything else in that space, with the length of ice between them. The artist may have been about to see if Sasuke knew what Naruto had given up to be out in the middle of nowhere. Sasuke may have asked the artist what he’d known about the time before this, long after Sasuke had decided to bury himself alive, out of the sun’s sight. 

But instead, hair like flower petals had flashed before the window with sunlight to follow. The snow had been unable to feel anything but laughter, anything but shouting, anything but a welcome home said painfully. The tea shop’s frame had settled under the snow, had creaked at its joints, and had sighed out warmth against the cold. 

Behind the cash register, the tea shop had been able to feel the shape of a box of tea leaves tucked away on a shelf. While the tea shop had lived many lives as different things, it had known this—they’d been tea leaves dried for artian’s ink. 

They’d been wrapped in what could’ve been kindness in a different story.

In this one, it had likely been respect.) 

The heartbeat that underlies moments like these guides the teacup from Naruto’s hand into Sasuke’s like clockwork, ticking in the marrow of their bones. The teacup cuts through the chill with absolute impunity, which means that Naruto can’t have been out here that long, and Sasuke presses it to both of his cheeks to soak it up. 

“Smells like beef broth,” he says, and it feels like there’s steam coming out of his mouth with the teacup so close to his face. 

“That’s because it is,” Naruto tells him, sipping on his own teacup, using his prosthetic as a coaster as Sasuke leans against the side of the tea shop next to him. The snow huffs against the soles of his boots. “I was hungry, and this seemed like it would be toasty and satisfy my insatiable hunger.”

Sasuke takes a drink that almost scalds his tongue, but he can feel it warming its way down his throat and into his stomach. “Not a bad idea.”

“Well,” Naruto’s breath is smoky in the cold, his body temperature running too high to smother most of the time, “last time I made tea, you were like ‘this is disgusting’, because I oversteeped it or something, and it was, again, quote, ‘literally unpalatable.’”

“It was,” Sasuke says, taking another sip, “but I didn’t say it like that.”

Naruto snickers, sending clouds of white around his nose and mouth and cheekbones, catching frosted glimmers in his eyelashes. He’s beautiful, painfully so, and Sasuke remembers that at least a million times a day. Naruto will wink at a customer and Sasuke’s heart will quiver in the most unsubtle way, and it will remind him. Over, and over, and over again, it’ll remind him: god, i— 

He touches the shell of Sasuke’s ear, looping almost-too-long hair around his forefinger as he traces down Sasuke’s cheek. “Your hair’s getting long. Want me to cut it for you?” 

The softness is Naruto’s features pulls Sasuke’s stomach out from his body, leaving only a windfall where it ought to have been, and if he hadn’t been propped up against the tea shop, he’d probably go weak at the knees right about now. He takes another drink of molten beef broth to dislodge the stone that has made its home on the back of Sasuke’s tongue, threatening to close off his windpipe. 

Something overwhelming is crawling up, and up, and out of him: god, i— 

“Yeah, actually.” He sounds exactly like he’s supposed to when he speaks, and for that he is infinitely grateful. “It’s been starting to drive me up a wall.”

Naruto lets go, laughing, and brings his teacup back to his mouth, dusting snow from the windowsill behind him as he adjusts his position against the tea shop’s facade. There’s still some tiredness at the edge of his mouth, a little bit of exhaustion painted beneath his eyes, but even then he’s able to look comfortable, out in the freezing cold without a jacket around his shoulders. 

He’s always managed to look comfortable, even when his life had been under fire—maybe especially then. 

Sasuke clears his throat against the stone that’s struggling to move. It’s been there all day. All day, all week, a long time. It’s a thought and a question and every time he looks at Naruto’s face, he thinks about it. If he keeps thinking about it, he’ll run. If he speaks about it, he’ll die.

When he clears his throat a second time, it sounds like a hammer pulling back on a pistol. 

“You remember when I went to the store this week to get more milk?” Sasuke asks, pressing the teacup against the side of his throat for strength, for warmth.

“Sure do,” another laugh, this one more like a wheeze against the chill. “You were pissed about your stocking oversight, and were, like, going to swear yourself blue.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s not the important part.” Maybe the broth idea had been better than tea. He can almost feel its liquid warmth in his toes. “You know that elderly lady that owns the place?” Sasuke breathes and his voice doesn’t tremble. “She wanted me to ask how my husband was doing, since you never get sent on shopping runs.”  

It’s kind of comical, really—or it would be, if Sasuke’s hindbrain wasn’t threatening to throw him out into the street at a dead sprint. But Naruto has spit his beef broth onto the snow, coughing, and Sasuke is rooted to the spot, unable to go anywhere. It’s a feeling so far from panicked that he doesn’t even have a name for it, because the only thing panic has ever done is make him run away. He’s never quite been startled into stillness before.

The beef broth hisses into instant freeze against the snow. It steams into the nighttime.

Naruto’s cheeks are pink when he says, “oh, well, who could blame her, right? We share a last name,” which had been Naruto’s idea (“u-zu-ma-ki, u-chi-ha, so u-zu-ha. perfect, right?”), “we live together, i call you gorgeous all the time. Honestly, who wouldn’t make that assumption? I mean, you know, besides the fact that I think people still try to give you their number—”

If he doesn’t stop him, he’ll never stop talking. It’s his nervous habit, far off on the other end of the spectrum from Sasuke, who will literally shut his mouth for the rest of time, if given the chance. Naruto never gives him the chance; so Sasuke returns the favor, and tries to keep Naruto from talking himself to death.

Sasuke coughs up the stone in his throat and lets it hit the snow like deadweight.

“So,” he says, his breath competing with the beef broth currently still scalding his palms, “do you wanna get married?” 

This time, Naruto has nothing in his mouth to spit-take into the snow. It’s only silence, and the way Naruto is looking at him, and the screaming of his own abject stupidity in his ears. There’s a siren pressing against his eardrums, and he really, honestly, might just drop dead here. Naruto’s blinking, and his eyes are shining, and his jaw has gone slack with a complete lack of brain activity. He’s still breathtaking, even with an expression that could be described as almost vacant, if his eyes weren’t sharp enough to cut glass. 

“What?” The question lays itself atop Sasuke’s own, a snowball dropped from a low height. It barely even whispers when it hits the ground. god, Sasuke thinks, an echo of an echo of a thought, naruto, i—

“Do you want to get married?” Snow has started falling, casting shadows in the street lighting, and they look almost like teardrops on Naruto’s face.

The closest municipality is two hours away by truck, which Sasuke knows better than he knows the standard time to steep jasmine tea, at this point. He’s checked with town visitors, checked maps, checked online. It’s a two-hour drive and the paperwork is relatively simple. They would need their fake IDs, tucked away in a locked drawer upstairs. The municipal clerk could witness, especially if they didn’t ask any questions, like why are you sharing a name already? 

Sasuke’s thoughts run circles around themselves and begin to grow teeth, drawing blood when they get too close to one another.

“Sasuke,” Naruto says his name like a holy thing, and it’s so unbelievably romantic that the only possible option is that he’s going to say no. He’s going to say, he’s going to say— “I love you so fucking much.”

There’s a period after that sentence. It’s i love you so fucking much, not i love you so fucking much that or i love you so fucking much and. It is only itself, a statement of fact. 

god, i love you, says his own voice in his own head, a record set free from its place on a dusty shelf for special occasions, i love you so much, so much, so much. He’s either going to vomit, or—

“Holy shit, are you okay?” Naruto’s hands are on his face and his prosthetic is warmer than he expected, but then again, it was recently still being utilized as a coaster for the hottest beef broth on earth. “Are you okay?”

Or he’s going to cry.

Sasuke drops his teacup and hears it break against the frozen ground as he presses his hand over his eyes. “It’s just really fucking dry.” That’s the worst lie. That is the worst, most obvious, most feeble lie he’s ever told in his entire life, and that is including the whole thing about whims and severing bonds and whatever other shit he’s said in moments where his heart was being smothered with both his hands. “It’s dry and it’s fucking cold.”

Naruto’s hands are disgustingly gentle when he pulls Sasuke’s fingers away from his eyes. There’s no blood on his palms. “Are you okay? You’re acting like the love of your life just asked you to get married.” There’s those dimples, tucked in his cheeks. Sasuke could kiss them, if his nose wasn’t running. Gross.

“Maybe I’m acting like the love of my life didn’t give me a response?” It’s either let his nose run, or sniffle. He’s not really sure that he wants to do either.

“Oh, fuck,” and there it is. Naruto’s cheeks go scarlet, and then it’s all the way down his neck. “I mean, duh, I’ll marry you. I’ll marry you now, if you want. I—of course we can’t invite anyone, or anything, but I think that—what, you thought I wouldn’t marry you? We’re basically—I mean, I just said we’re practically married.”

“You think I’m just going to assume what your answer is?” He has to sniffle, and he does. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it a little less notable. “Like just forego the whole process?”

“I just—” That complicated look that Naruto will wear sometimes comes and goes in a flash, the flicker of a lightbulb that might be on its last legs. It’s the look he gets when Sasuke asks if he’s feeling okay, like he’d just decked him right across the face. “I thought you were going to do that thing where you say, ‘oh, i have robbed you of your youth by dragging you out into the middle of fucking nowhere and forcing you to live with me in this domestic nightmare.’”

Sasuke scoffs. “It’s never sounded like that.”

Naruto’s eyebrows rise. “It started sounding like that the sixth time we fought about it.”

(“i said that when we die, we’d be able to understand each other,” the seasons remembered, the words thrown out wide, shaking limbs free of snow, and flowers, and leaves, “so let me fucking understand you!”)

Naruto holds Sasuke’s face again, drawing his thumbs underneath Sasuke’s eyes. Both of his thumbs are cold. “Let’s get married.” 

Sasuke tilts his head to press a quick kiss to Naruto’s flesh and blood palm. “I love you,” he says there, and it makes his ears feel too warm.

“I love you back,” Naruto tells him, and he doesn’t make mention of Sasuke wearing his jacket when he warms his living hand against Sasuke’s throat, pressing his little finger against the backmost line of his pulse, “Uzuha-san.”

It’s normal, then, when Sasuke rolls his eyes, huffing out a breath of not-quite-warm air through his nose. He opens his mouth to speak, to offer to go inside, to suggest that maybe he go in to get gloves to clean up the broken teacup, but Naruto stops him, casting a glance toward the second floor of the tea shop, right where their living room should be.

“Oh,” Naruto says, and there’s an epiphany happening there. “We have to tell our parents.”

“What?” Sasuke dips his hand against Naruto’s hip for warmth. “No. You talked to them already. I smelled incense. It can wait until tomorrow.”

“We have to tell them now. Can you imagine? I mean, I can’t, but like, I’m pretty sure my folks would wreck my whole week if I didn’t tell them.” Naruto’s smile is small, and earnest, and beautiful. Another one of those reminders. “Your parents might flip! We have to tell them.”

Those stupid, shining eyes. Those stupid dimples. The unfathomable length of his eyelashes. 

“Okay,” Sasuke lets it go, because there’s something sleepy pulling at his body. Authentic tiredness, maybe. He’s so unfamiliar with it that it’s hard to identify. “But after I get the teacup. I’m not leaving shards of ceramic everywhere.”

Naruto’s laugh scatters across the empty street, hitting the silence with the force of a rock through a window. Sasuke’s heart skips. His heart skips, and his arm moves out, and he pulls Naruto forward, just a little. Sasuke’s limited height difference doesn’t mean much when they’re this close, but it never really does when it comes to Naruto’s gravitational pull determines most things anyway.

They kiss, and it’s freezing.

Naruto laces their fingers together.

Sasuke can taste laughter when he opens his mouth.

(It hadn’t been the first autumn that had been aware of itself, but it had been significant nonetheless.

The trees at the topmost edge of the Valley of the End would’ve been an array of burnt colors, if they hadn’t been pulled into the chasm with the ruined statues. There had been stones upon stones stacked against one another, brought low by a cataclysmic force. The air had been electric with discharged chakra, loose leaves scattered by the updraft from the waterfall. 

Water beaded on faces, on bodies, on clothes, all obscured by fallen rock. 

“hey,” the autumn heard a whisper, carried on the waterfall’s mist up and over the lip of the Valley, “i know you can’t go back there.” It’d been akin to the sound of sand against concrete, a familiar murmur of the Land of Wind—but it’d been different: exhausted but jubilant, like it had been trying to be louder than it was currently able to be.

The waterfall whispered a response that had been indistinct. The leaves hadn’t been able to catch it either.

“how about we leave?” The same sand-and-concrete voice. The autumn had known this voice in a different shape, had felt it reverberate through this Valley before, could recognize it, maybe, if the waterfall hadn’t been so loud. 

“what, just… go?” That time, the whispered response had been clearer, had been clinging to the stem of a leaf that fell to the jagged edge where a statue had once been. “with all that… shit you still have to do?”

The waterfall had thundered on, so long that the autumn wondered if the conversation had kept going, out of its influence, out of its sight. But then the waterfall lifted up the sound again, the mist passing it amongst itself until the autumn could pull it from the moisture there: “for all anyone knows, we’re dead,” said the sand. “if we just go, who’s to say we survived in the first place?”

It might’ve been a wheeze the autumn heard, but it hadn’t been sure. It listened anyway.

“where would we go?” The electric pop before a storm. That’s what that voice had been. Static, crawling up the surface of the waterfall, dissipating against the earth above.

“wherever you want.” The rustle of clothes, lost to the roar of the Valley. The groan of battered bodies, swallowed by the stones, the uprooted trees, the season itself. “as far away as you want.” Softer, even, than the first time the voice had spoken. If the autumn hadn’t made itself brittle at the top of the Valley’s mouth, the voice would’ve been lost entirely. It was as if the words had been spoken against another’s mouth.

“it’s probably really late to say this,” the static spoke, dying before it reached the Valley’s edge. The stone had hummed with its timbre instead, “but i’m pretty sure i’m in love with you.”

Rocks had shifted against one another, screaming out a sound that lasted eons, maybe. The autumn hadn’t been sure how to measure time so incrementally. It had never needed to, before. 

-

(The first time Sasuke had stood before the Jedi Council, he’d been eight years old and his ears had still felt stuffed with the steel-edged cotton aftershocks of his family’s death, still echoing through the Force every so often. Or maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe they’d just been in his head, bouncing across the space inside his skull. 

Either way, he’d been standing there in the center of a wide space with the city-planet of Coruscant glittering behind the Masters there, framed in sections by the floor-to-ceiling transparisteel windows. The Force had been moving with ripples of intent, back and forth across the room, mingling together, moving elsewhere entirely, making noise around him that was in competition with the city and all its two trillion people. All of the Masters had waves moving out from them that were narrow in scope, edged dangerously with sharp ambition, or direction, or purpose. The thing about seeing the paths people could take was that it was always in motion and difficult to decipher. 

It had probably been why the Jedi were looking at him like that—something about seeing the possible futures, moving in and out of his sight. The Council chamber shimmered with it, even if Sasuke hadn’t been focusing his best in that moment, or the moments after.

“he’s sensitive,” one of the Masters had said as if Sasuke hadn’t been there at all, the only acknowledgement given hiding in the Master’s pale eyes as they moved up and down, from the top of Sasuke’s head to the tips of his toes. “that much is certainly apparent.”

The floor had been cold under the soles of his feet. In all the mayhem back home, he’d left his shoes behind. He hadn’t noticed until then.

“obviously,” another Master had spoken up with a voice like cracked permacrete, his hair shorter than the last one. His right eye had been patched over by a metal surface, hidden further by the shadows of the corner in which he sat. When he spoke, ambition or direction or purpose pulsed out from his body and into the Force itself, paths streaking around the room and through the walls with neon intensity. Many of them had brushed by Sasuke close enough to split his hair. “but at his age, that hardly matters. he’d be impossible to manage. it would be foolish to take him.”

Something hot and angry had boiled in his chest for a split-second—just long enough to cut through the fabric of despair that had been pressing against the sides of his face. It’d almost carried a wind with it, ruffling the edges of his clothes. If he’d opened his mouth, he might’ve spit fire. It had burned the roof of his mouth so thoroughly that the Masters had probably felt it as it had crawled its way up his throat.

But then the Force had glowed softly, warmly, and suddenly behind him, and the waves inside the room had widened in their scope, their futures more vague in the presence of—whoever this was, making his way into the room as the doors to the chamber whispered open, accompanied by the barely-there sigh of robes.

“i didn’t bring him here to discuss his merit,” an old man had said. Sasuke had been able to feel his hand as it had hovered by his shoulder, careful not to touch. “i brought him here to notify you of his admittance and to introduce him to the council as a new pupil.”

On the surface, the Masters had remained silent. In the Force, Sasuke had been able to taste their discontent against the back of his tongue, in the roots of his teeth, at the back of his head. His knuckles had almost cracked with the urge to clench his fingers into fists. He’d seen protests forming on most of their mouths and mouthparts, in the thinning of their lips and the twitch of their long ears, in the way they hid their hands in their sleeves and crossed their legs.

The floor became colder beneath his feet.

There was another conversation there that had tried to begin—many of the Masters had taken breaths to speak, changing the pressure in the chamber more than a hair but not enough to raise bumps along the skin on the back of Sasuke’s neck.

That had come moments later in a flash of noise and purpose, an undeniable thing with wide-and-narrow strokes, scattering about the chamber and through the walls and into the ceiling and out the windows around the edges of the room. The chamber door had whispered open, but that had been lost in the noise of someone struggling, yelling, swearing to the stars and back at the in-justice of the situation— 

Sasuke had turned around and had noticed two things.

First, the man in the doorway looked very tired, his hair disheveled as though he’d just been woken, and some of the hair above his right ear had looked newly-cut, as though it hadn’t grown back from something-or-other. There had been a scar across his nose.

And second, that looking at the boy held in his arms was like looking at a binary star system, casting the space around him in light too bright to see by—the kind that can only be soaked in with eyes shut.)

Bars are the same on every world with local variations that still blur together when one has been to enough of them. Some have tapestries, some don’t. Some are covered in a thin layer of dirt or dust or whatever, some are covered in a thin layer of grease. Some have expensive drinks and some have the cheap stuff. Effectively speaking, though, all bars are the same. Even the cantinas. Even the military bars. Even the ones built of palm fronds and local lumber. 

At this point in his life, Sasuke’s pretty sure he’s been to every bar in and between the Core and the Outer Rim. 

Even so, it’s not the location or the drinks or the décor that makes a bar a bar. It’s the patterns inside them. 

The bartender’s most probable movements spread out from their body in small-and-tight ripples—the hand toward the next patron’s glass, the shape of their mouth around a laugh or a greeting or a joke that’s more than likely toeing the line of funny and into crass. Sasuke sees the future of the shrug before it happens, because gestures and body language like this is probably the bartender’s bread-and-butter. Their future is concrete. They’re predictable.

Vaguer things happen in bars than that, with wider paths scattering around in the Force behind him. Conversations start out in circular questions and answers, bumping against ceilings and walls in their size. They twist and narrow as plans become more clear, as their possible actions become more tenable and understandable. Even vagueness can have a pattern in it if he sees it enough, and every single bar in every single system in the galaxy is nothing if not routine. Some curl around one another in the standard shape of a business venture, where others serrate their edges in the common argument that indicates the end of a relationship of some form or another. 

One conversation in particular crawls its way along the floor, beneath stylish tables and within the shadows of the dim-but-warm lighting. It widens and tightens in the typical rhythm of a sales pitch, the sales pitch that had brought Sasuke here in the first place. It’s subtle, because illegal transactions almost always are, but everything can be seen if you look for it. 

He drags his thumb along the rim of his own glass, a half-carbonated, half-bourbon beverage native to Corellia but popular everywhere else. It’s classy to drink something rougher around the edges, though he can’t speak to the quality of it. It’s so far remained untested, leaking condensation onto the surface of the bar, soaking the napkin underneath it. His thumb’s been drawing circles as he’s watched and listened and hummed to himself. The analog chronometer perched above the liquor shelves gives the local time on Kuat, with the digital readout behind the ticking hands giving Coruscant’s standard time readout—a single timezone for an entire planet, aided and abetted by the orbital mirror system that shifts daytime to nighttime and back again.

It’s early afternoon there. Reflected sunlight is probably raining through the windows of the Jedi Temple, scattering itself around in the air, waiting to catch in blonde hair, on golden-brown skin, within the scope of blue irises. He’s feeling just poetic enough that, if he quiets the inside of his head just so, he thinks he can feel almost too-loud laughter tickling at the back of his skull. 

The urge to reach out rises up from the palms of his hands, itches against the pads of his fingers. It’s a waiting game—between patience and efficiency, between work and appointments he has to keep on his off-time.

When he breathes in, he can almost taste the barely-there warmth of the sun on his tongue. A binary sunrise from across the stars. 

“You’ve got a lot on your mind,” the bartender says, coming into view as they button and rebutton the middle of their waistcoat, their smile jovial and only half-performative. Sasuke can see the conflict between a long day and their work ethic reflected in the disturbances echoing into the Force around the corners of their mouth. But their presence sounds a lot like windchimes when Sasuke looks over it, and if there’s any suspicion there, he can’t feel it against his teeth. “You’ve got that look,” the bartender continues when Sasuke says nothing. 

He runs his tongue along the backs of his teeth. The servomotors of his mechanical left arm whir as he flexes his fingers against the fabric of robes, its shape hidden inside his sleeve.

More often than not, silence is a choice he often makes, his eyebrows usually balanced very specifically, and for a significant portion of his life so far, it’s either been relatively successful, or there’s been someone else to do the talking for him. But he’s in a bar that doesn’t know him yet, even though he knows its feeling pretty well, and he decides to let his thumb rest against the lip of his glass and meets the bartender’s eyes.

“I’ve got an appointment to make, and I’m trying to control for travel time,” Sasuke tells them. He can feel the creak of his leather body armor as he shifts in his seat, flicking the edges of his wide sleeves away from his wrists with the ease learned from years of practice. “Work keeps getting in the way.” Another pause, careful. “For the both of us, actually.”

Understanding flits across the bridge of the bartender’s nose in a wrinkle, before smoothing out into the composed attention of customer service. “That’s the nature of work, yeah?” The bartender was probably born on-world with an accent like that, their hair braided through with purple ribbon. “Shipyard? Or—” Their eyes move over Sasuke’s shoulders, across the embossed threading against the high collar pressed to his throat, “not.”

“Not,” Sasuke confirms. The conversation that has his attention stops, dying against the floorboards, and purpose moves out from the epicenter of illicit dealings in tight lines, crawling up the back of Sasuke’s neck. He watches the chronometer on the wall, counting the moments until he can follow his targets, stolen goods in hand. It’s about three kilometers out, and depending on if the targets are walking, or using a speeder— “I’m a contractor.”

The bartender’s face relaxes, as if the concerns about Sasuke’s definitively not Kuati accent makes sense, even though their talk hasn’t been quite long enough to rise into concern or, worse, a call to law enforcement. Then again, bars rarely get to a peak like that, even on planets as pretentious as this one where anyone could be escorted elsewhere for so much as a sneeze.

“So I’m guessing you work long hours, no benefits. High reward?” Sasuke knows this is small talk, but it makes the hands on the chronometer move with just a hair’s more urgency, even though he keeps lingering on them. If the sensation on the soles of his feet is any indication, the target and the seller are walking home. Okay, so maybe five more minutes, and then he can follow. 

“Moderate reward.” The leftovers of the ice cubes in Sasuke’s glass move against the surface of the beverage as he rotates it between his hands. “We have a union, more-or-less. An accountability structure. Support. That sort of thing.”

This laugh is louder, but it doesn’t grab anyone else’s attention at the bar. It just hides the ambient string music in long stretches, hitting their teeth like marbles and popping against the countertop. “A union? For contractors! Incredible. You’re definitely not from here, are you?” 

“Definitely not from here.” Sasuke pushes his glass forward, its base still pressed to the drowned napkin, dropping a mild denomination credit chit from the cover of his sleeve. When he rolls his wrists, his body armor feels just a touch looser, the holster against his ribcage negligible in its weight. The adrenaline was hitting his system. “But it’s been my privilege for a visit. Thanks for the drink.”

The bartender’s smile eases back into something benign and disinterested as they sweep the credit chit and Sasuke’s glass of the counter, clearing the surface of water and fingerprints. Their immediate future ripples outward toward a patron taking a seat at the far end of the room, a human positioned closer to the back door. His hands are shaking, and there’s the thin material of a body suit peeking through the top of his Kuati robes. Positioned for a quick getaway, has complete sight of the room—prime real estate for a bounty hunter, but painfully obvious in its execution. Amateurish, even.

The bartender’s polite curiosity tastes different as they look at the other bounty hunter, its flavor turning sour against Sauske’s tongue. 

Every good hunter knows that a bar isn’t the primary battleground, no matter what finish it had on the inside, and good seating is less than a quarter of any good pursuit. The really seedy chitchats happen in far nicer places, with a lot more shine to catch against the back of the eye, like senator’s offices, or corporate suites, or council chambers. Bars are all performance, and money never changes hands there. Whatever that hunter is looking for, he’s likely already given himself away.

But a colleague’s failings aren’t Sasuke’s problem at this time of day, with the star of the Kuat system lumbering toward the curve of the horizon, split in half by the orbiting shipyards, knocking sunlight aside to turn the bright green foliage of the planet’s surface a burnt orange, though there’s still a solid three hours before the sun begins to set. 

The sidewalks on Kuat are designed to look like aged brick, deep reds and browns and oranges, that look like something out of a daytime holodrama and are stable beneath the soles of Sasuke’s boots. The grass to either side is meticulously kept, not even a ghost of its former life as a lush forest of deciduous trees, still alive where the sun is kissing the curve of the planet’s surface. At that distance, it’s more than likely that those woods are some aristocrat’s campground, but it’s hard to say. All the life on this planet was determined a long, long time ago when terraformers decided that predator animals would be a waste of resources. The Force hums softly with the unassuming presences of the local drebin, though there are needles underneath all that, all politics and conversations about wine—the hot topics of the wealthy. 

The Force sighs and trembles like water with the murmurs that Sasuke isn’t close enough to see clearly, the future foggy and limited in impact, the distant conversations so irrelevant and insular that it doesn’t even matter if he can hear them or not. 

Inside all of this unheard and unseen noise, the past and the future intermingle within the scope of his sight, echoes of times past and barely-there ripples of future plans. His feet move forward in the steps of moments that have been and moments that will happen. Laughter coughs against the walkway from invisible mouths. The pasts of other planets, of planets Sasuke’s seen, superimpose themselves over this moment and the next one.

It’s been happening more often lately—the past and the future clinging to one another like half-melted sweets. 

A Naruto that’s now long-aged, but wasn’t then, looks over his shoulder at him, his Padawan braid brushing against his cheek and kissing scars left behind when his body had been too small to hold whatever energy the Force had been trying to shove into it. His face is still round and childish, his robes bordering on the edge of haphazardly bound over one another. His lightsaber is filthy and clipped to his belt. Despite all of this—or maybe within the context of it—his eyes had been bright with determination, unsupervised for recon and absolutely loving it.

He says something that makes no noise, but Sasuke can hear it anyway, can see the shape of his name curved in his lips. Grasses, tipped with blue and pink flowers, wave against Naruto’s legs, halfway up to his calves. His face is a mess—and the Sasuke with him, also long-aged, with his own Padawan braid more tightly wound, his robes more cleanly placed, wearing an exasperated expression that he’s only perfected over time.

The Sasuke who wore the title of Padawan far better than he’d worn the title of Knight opens his mouth to say something, and the Sasuke who doesn’t wear any title at all anymore can almost taste the smell of rain on the back of his tongue—

(There had been a completely disorienting moment where Sasuke wondered if he even knew the man in front of him. 

Naruto had gotten so tall, his shoulders so broad, and the ideas of laugh-lines had started to take shape beside his mouth, even when he’d been looking at Sasuke like that, which his jaw set and his eyes on fire and scars along his cheeks because the Force wanted to peel him back only as far as it needed to let the light shine out from under his skin. 

Sasuke had spent so much time orbiting him that he hadn’t really thought about what would happen to Naruto after he’d left. It’d been ego, or hubris, or idiocy that had let him think that nothing would change when he’d said what are you gonna do, hero?, as if that’d been a phrase that would stop time and let Sasuke do whatever he wanted, to figure shit out, all while the galaxy itself was waiting with bated breath for his return, while Naruto waited for their final altercation, or whatever dramatic idea had been on his mind.

Or—it hadn’t been any of those things. For some reason, he’d expected everything else to stay exactly as stuck as he had been. Sasuke had been juvenile, petulant, and had used any excuse available not to feel anything that he’d been feeling. Especially the feelings all boiling up right there under Naruto’s gaze, his intentions unclear, the known entity in front of him very suddenly unknown.

“i thought i’d find you here,” Naruto had told him, and the remnants of Sasuke’s homeworld had moved against the atmosphere of the only asteroid big enough to be called a planetoid, grinding themselves into burnt chunks every so often. The window of the abandoned military base tinted against the watery sunlight that peeked out from behind the rest of the planetary graveyard. The Force trembled around Naruto’s wrists as if it wasn’t sure what he would’ve done with them.

“what gave it away?” Sasuke had replied, his voice tight and thin, as though Naruto’s cheekbones and his shoulders and his hands weren’t making his chest feel too small, as though the Force around him wasn’t tense enough to shatter at the lightest touch. “the fact that my birthplace exploded, or the fact that madara was the one who did it? the S.O.S. transponder that i haven’t turned off? what, does the order have you doing their sleuthing now, or is it that you still can’t mind your own fucking business?”

It’d reminded him of the slaughter of his family all over again, the anger that scalded the back of his throat, the feeling of cotton in his ears, the way his skin felt like it was going to split over the surface of his skull, the way that Naruto kept on shining, leaving afterimages of his face on the underside of Sasuke’s eyelids when he’d blinked. 

For a moment, Sasuke had been unable to breathe. And Naruto had been looking at him, and he hadn’t been speaking, and the maturity of it all had made Sasuke want to puke.

Because what Naruto had done next had been so like him, to the point where it had taken Sasuke’s stomach and squeezed. Naruto hadn’t asked where Karin was, and maybe he’d already known that too. He hasn’t asked where Suigetsu and Jugo had been sent off to. Instead, all he’d said was—

“you just felt—” an unnamed feeling had moved across Naruto’s face in a heartbeat of time, and Sasuke had remembered a second kiss, a lot softer than their first, and his bones rattled with a fear a lot like that memory, “ —sad.”

Sasuke hadn’t known what to say to that, sitting in the dust-covered conference room of a military shithole, surrounded by the stardust of his homeworld, maybe breathing in the ashes of his family, looking at a person too bright to behold properly, even in the piss-poor lighting of glowstrips fixed to the ceiling. There was screaming in the Force—maybe his own, maybe the echoes of echoes of a dead world—that filled the silence that, for once, he couldn’t use to his advantage.

And, for once, Naruto hadn’t said anything either. He’d kicked a turned-over chair upright, scraping it along the floor with an unforgettable noise, and had sat down, watching the yellow-gray sky flicker with patches of space debris. 

“i thought you said that the next time you saw me, both of us would end up dead.” Sasuke’s voice had been almost lost under the rumble of the planetoid’s surface as it wobbled on its axis. “or something like that.”

“nah.” Naruto had looked at him, a binary sunrise, and the smile on his face had been small, like a hint of the smiles that would turn into dimples in virtually any other circumstance. “i’m pretty sure you’re the one that said that.” Sasuke could feel the ghost of fingertips along the side of his face, even as Naruto’s hands were hidden inside the sleeves of his dirt-covered robe.

He hadn't known what to say to that, either.

Sasuke had glanced around them both, had watched the ebb and flow of the galaxy shiver between them—and within all that noise, Naruto had been unpredictable for the first time. The atmosphere shifted outside, howling and groaning and knocking itself against the outside of the old base’s skeleton.

In a moment like that, silence had done all the talking for them.)

And the image shatters into pieces, punched through by the conversation he’d been following, knocking against the past-present-future with sharp knuckles, the tension of it warming the air around him, drying out his throat, stopping his feet in their tracks, the soles of his boots rooted to the brickwork of the sidewalk. Dealings like this always pull tighter together the closer they get to being finalized. It makes them easier to feel, hairline fractures reaching toward him with spindly fingers from the epicenter of his targets, tucked away inside a Kuati villa.

It’s all smooth stone and curved roof, bright colors made from stylized tile, completely at odds with the landscaping. On Coruscant, in some of the richer neighborhoods that can afford this kind of space, it’d be eccentric. Here, it’s typical. Anywhere else, it’s tacky. Its backyard is entirely obscured by clipped hedges, high enough to give a short Wookiee difficulties, but a tall one no trouble. The hedges’ leaves are full and green, interspersed with dull yellow flowers, open wide in the afternoon sun. 

Eccentric, or typical, or tacky, or whatever, it makes for excellent Kuati security. On planets with less restrictive landing procedures, it’s piss-poor. With valuables like theirs, it’s lazy.

A hovershaw hums by, its pilot and passengers paying Sasuke exactly zero attention, casting shadows along the hedge-fence in little more than a breath’s time. They round a corner down the street before they’re hidden again by manicured bushes, just as hard on the eyes as the hedges with their wide-petaled flowers, their bright green leaves waxy enough to be blinding.

Lazy, certainly. Perfect cover, absolutely.

Sasuke crosses the street, flexing his fingers and reaching out with his senses, people moving in and out of his awareness at long distances, the hovershaw winding its way through expensive subdivisions, multiples of its kind doing different routes on different streets. 

Nobody’s watching him. Not even the two—no, three—people inside the villa, buzzing into the Force with the intensity of a Killik nest, all elaborate dance and limited substance, like sales often were.

The future narrows in Sasuke’s sight and he jumps, propped up and over the hedges with the Force, bending his knees against the impact on the other side. The gardens in the back are immaculately kept, the grass soft beneath his feet, the ground still spongy from a sprinkler treatment less than an hour before, give or take some minutes here or there. Drops of water still cling to the marble benches, tucked close to the hedges for extra shade during midday.

With the surface as soft as it is, Sasuke’s footsteps make no noise as he crosses the gardens, but he keeps his body low anyway, the hem of his robes going damp with his posture, brushing the grass with less than a sigh. If there are cameras anywhere, they’re not trained on him, and the individuals in the villa haven’t changed in intensity. Sasuke feels his skin itch anyway, his body armor stretching as he crouches beneath an outdated window made of double-paned glass, reaching into his robes, to pull a vibroblade from its sheath against his left hip. 

He flicks the switch on its handle, its rhythm thin in his palm, and presses the tip of the blade into the middle seam of the window, wiggling it just enough to inch closer to the lock. It’s stained to look like Worshyr wood, as though it’d been brought here from Kashyyyk for this sole purpose, but it pops like Kuati pine, the latch falling loose without a place to snap to. The window tutts softly as he pushes it open, swinging through the frame feet first, the toes of his boots hitting tiled floor with a sound no louder than the flutter of his robes. 

The ceiling creaks above him as the seller leans against an object in whatever room he’s in, the buyer pacing across the floor. His gait’s uneven, but that could mean anything—he hadn’t been limping on his way out of the bar, so this could be excitement, it could be deterioration of their sale, it could’ve been bantha milk, long-spoiled, sitting poorly in his stomach.

It doesn’t really matter to him.

The interior decor is ornate, almost archaic, with artfully cracked pottery tucked into alcoves, chandeliers pieced together to look like the Vors’ Cathedral of Winds, and oil paintings of past wars that happened so long ago that accuracy has bowed under the weight of propaganda. There are lightsabers in some of them, casting glows against swamp gas or early morning mist.

The ghosts of fingers brush against the picture frames, childhood calluses catching against the wood.

Sasuke ignores it.

The villa’s stairs are also stained like the inner threads of Worshyr wood but, like the windowpane, it creaks like pine in the center. Sasuke sticks to the edges of the stairs, shifting his weight to the front most part of his instep, and the future shifts in and out of his line of sight, shimmering like the surface of a pond in early morning. Intent drips its way down the guard rails on the stairs as someone in one of the possible futures takes their time leaving. Someone’s future actions bounce down the center of the stairs, silent. 

He rounds a corner on his left, taking long steps lowering his center of gravity to spread his weight, reaching out into the Force with his senses. Despite how close the three presences are, no conversation makes its way to him—no murmurs, no low humming, no shouting. Even the squeak of the ceiling’s supports has gone silent on this floor, which is inherently suspicious. It means soundproofing, or a secret room, or something. It means the caution is not in the lack of security around the home—it’s in the structure inside the home.

A wooden door in the middle of the hall, stained the same deep brown as every other exposed-wood fixture, is warm beneath Sasuke’s touch. The Force comes and goes in waves here, with wide strokes and tight ones, the possible futures changing and shifting as the deal continues. He presses himself to the wall on the opposite side of the door’s hinges, twisting the knob and pushing it open gently. 

The hinges don’t protest.

The room itself is empty, curtains pulled out far enough to let light in from a window behind a desk, polished and looking virtually unused. Heavy shelves line almost every wall, each shelf stacked with traveler’s trophies and datapads. Behind one of them, Sasuke feels the three individuals, can see the shapes of their ambition swirling around the room. The shelving sticks out half a centimeter farther than the others. 

A secret room behind some shelves. Tacky. 

The people behind the shelf have gone still, their attention fixed in Sasuke’s direction. So he tripped something—probably when he opened the door. It’s not electronic, or if it is, it’s not wired to the villa, or it hasn’t been touched, or Sasuke had just overlooked it. Whichever way, it’s sloppy, now, and subtlety is no longer a priority. Or at least, it’s not a priority to the same degree.

Sasuke rolls his shoulders and takes a breath, takes two steps forward, takes in the dimensions of the shelving. The curtains tremble in response to the climate control humming to life. Somewhere, Naruto would smile, and his eyes would get brighter, and he’d open his mouth to say something just a little bit stupid and a little bit charming—

He pushes out, hard, into the Force.

The shelving buckles under the pressure, dumping its contents onto the immaculate floor, covered in imported rugs. The blast-door behind it is already bending inward, the three presences scattering, their essences defining themselves with bold lines and wide strokes. One of them, maybe a bodyguard, pulls out a blaster as Sasuke shoves against the door in the Force for the second time. The metal is flimsy, affordable, and nothing at all like the stuff used to reinforce the hulls of ships made in the rotating shipyards far above the planet’s surface. The way it completely caves after the third, targeted push means that it’s probably desh—excellent for droids, terrible for doorways. 

If everything else had been just a little bit less ostentatious, this would be the giveaway that he was dealing with an aristocrat.

Blasterfire screams from the torn doorway, clean, straight, and uninterrupted. Definitely a bodyguard, then. One person has pressed themself underneath a table. Probably the buyer, completely thrown off by the directness of an assault. To the other side of the ruined blast door, the last individual has pressed their back to the wall, waiting for something. Likely the seller, and therefore the thief. Prepared for conflict, but cautious. In their behavior, they’ve labeled themselves, and now they’re predictable. The Force splits into different pathways, most of them in narrow lines, shifting from place, to place, to place.

Sasuke reacts to the near future.

He ducks underneath another stream of blasterfire, using broken shelving as cover to move closer—two more steps, three more steps, slide forward, one more step—, the Force clearing out left-behind smoke from blaster shots with images and shapes and the targets’ next moves. He vaults over the remnants of the blast door, using the half-a-breath that it takes for the bodyguard to jam another energy cell into the blaster’s chamber. His boots hit the bodyguard in the chest at average height, beneath solid collarbones, and the fluorescent lights through the doorway cast the room into sharp, instant relief. 

The bodyguard rolls backward with blaster in hand, a practiced movement, and the seller changes position, a vibroblade at the ready, their futures coming together where Sasuke has come to stand his arms loose at his side. There’s not a lot that can be said for spending most of his life fighting in robes, but at least he knows his limits, here, knows how to move without getting himself tangled together.

Sasuke leans his body forward when blasterfire and a vibroblade meet at the place where his head had been, and he sweeps the seller’s legs out from underneath him. Not Kuati, more than likely with average clothing and denym pants, but hard to identify anything else of note. He grabs the seller by one ankle and swings his body into the bodyguard’s knees in the same motion he uses to stand upright.

It’s refreshing, in some kind of way, that there hasn’t been a monologue yet. It saves time.

He moves forward in a combat-ready stance, prepared to roll himself back into the bodyguard and restrict the use of a blaster at all. It lends itself to chaos, all noise and light, entirely too distracting, and the discharge smoke left behind reduces visibility, blends with the present-and-future, obscures useful data to make his next move, wrap this up quickly, get off-world and back to his client, so that he can get back to—

The world tilts sharply before he can even drop into a roll, the room itself flickering in and out of existence. The ripples of the future get chewed, swallowed, and returned in mangled pieces, crushed underneath the weight of the past that tears through the villa, howling past his ears and casting images on every surface.

Naruto stands before him, two years younger but effectively the same, stunningly beautiful, and there’s unseen wind carding itself through his hair, pulling at the sleeves of his well-worn robes, the sun-kissed glow of his face muted underneath what had been an icy cavern on Rhen Var, a long-abandoned iceplanet, left behind by a galactic natural disaster and abandoned by the Jedi, just like Anaxes. He’s speaking, and he looks so sad, and Sasuke knows exactly what’s coming out of his mouth, even as he flickers in and out of view while the present tries to reassert itself.

(Sasuke’s cheeks had gone numb with the cold by then, wind howling through the caverns of Rhen Var and dragging its claws against the smoothed-out walls. There had been water running through those cave systems once, just like the atmosphere had been thicker and more breathable, just like there had been people living on that world, both Force-sensitive and dead to the whole thing. Ice chips that had tried to pass for snow had been clinging to Sasuke’s eyelashes, but something terrifying and almost-ugly had been trying to push its way up Sasuke’s throat, clinging to his teeth and tonsils in thin webs. 

“sasuke,” Naruto had said to him, with his sad face and his flushed cheeks and his damnably breathtaking everything. His legs had been trembling as he’d pushed himself to stand upright after the punch that Sasuke had landed, but his shoulders had still been rolled back with Naruto’s killer combination of determination and confidence. Sasuke’d felt nauseous, the pull of Naruto-the-binary-star-system tugging on his stomach. There had been blood oozing from a cut in his eyebrow that Sasuke had left him with. Sasuke’s jaw had ached with a matching hit. If it hadn’t been so cold, it probably would’ve started to swell. “are we done talking?”

It’d hurt to breathe in the cold like that. Even so, Sasuke had replied, “i wish you’d just fucking stay down when i hit you.”

Naruto had just continued to look at him, his reflection distorted in the ice walls around them. “you said you wanted our fists to do the talking. are we done talking?”

Sasuke had snorted, freezing the inside of his nose. He’d told himself that he’d be sneering if his face had feeling in it, but that had been a lie. “what, do you have someplace to be?”

“yeah,” Naruto had thrown out the word with all the force of a moon in freefall, crashing toward its planet’s surface. “i’m taking you home this time.”

It’d been a conversation they’d had countless times, probably hundreds of times. And every single time Sasuke had felt his heart tremble, thin cracks working their way out from the center of his chest, as though his ribcage would split open and show off all the things he’d been keeping underneath his lungs until his blood had gone toxic with it. 

“that’s getting a little old.” The chill had taken the vision of their breath away some time before, leaving only the echo of words to reverberate against the ice around them. “isn’t it about time you got some new material?”

Naruto’s face had become complicated, but that determination had begun to outweigh the confidence in the shape of his shoulders. Even his jaw had been set. “that’s what everybody says. did you know that? everybody goes ‘naruto, you know that you can’t have it both ways. naruto, you never pay attention and you’re a dumbass and you think you can do anything if you want it bad enough.’” The wind screamed and Naruto had let it happen, filling the pause he’d left with painful, serrated air. “but nobody gets how bad i want to take you back. not even you.”

It’d been an incredible skill when they were children, the way Naruto could rock him back as if he’d struck him without moving at all. Even past the deadness of his cheeks, he’d felt a mark there, like he’d been slapped with an open palm. 

“then i guess we’re not done talking.” His words clattered to the floor, like stones.

Naruto had reached for his lightsaber, clipped to his belt. The intensity of the wind around them swallowed the whisper-flutter his robes would’ve made when he’d unclipped it. “guess not.”

Chaos had eaten them both, then, two lightsabers coming to life with a single snap-hiss, coordinated in unison for the better part of a decade. It rumbled through the tunnel walls, tossed light against the ceiling, refracted it against the floor. The Force bent and twisted and arced around them, the taste of ozone sitting on Sasuke’s tongue with featherlight touches, stinging against the surfaces of his teeth. His saber had warmed the back of his wrist almost like a sunburn from where he’d held it in a reverse-grip, swinging his body into the arc of Naruto’s own saber with all his weight.

The Force had sung, or had it screamed, or it had done neither as they’d collided together within it. Sasuke’s skin had felt as though it was being sheared from his bones, almost, and he’d been wrapped up so tightly that it had felt like an embrace, or a cocoon, or something like that. He’d felt overwhelmed by the intensity of it, or the intensity of them. It’d been impossible to notice the sting of anything—of sabers on skin, of ice against his cheek, of Naruto’s nose pressed to his forehead as they’d slumped together.

The wind still howled on the iceplanet that had died centuries or millennia before. Deep-but-thin fissures had opened up in the cavern around them. Icemelt had been re-feezing to the cavern floor. And yet it had been the warmest Sasuke had felt in a long  time, in what had felt like a starsystem far, far away.

All it had cost them was one arm each—but their almost-hysterical laughter had given birth to clouds of steam.)

He’s blinded by visions of the past, and the butt of a blaster being knocked into the side of his head. Sasuke had been stunned, in that moment where he’d been watching too much happen too quickly, and now he has stars scattering over the surface of corneas. They block his sight, jam his brain, and make it easy enough for the seller to take a foot to Sasuke’s knee—or it would’ve if Sasuke hadn’t had the foresight to twist backward so that the kick caught him on the thigh instead. 

He can feel the heat of a palm-sized blaster aimed at the back of his skull, positioned from a downward angle, just underneath the table in the center of the secret room. 

The Force rattles and his head spins—and so Sasuke shuts his eyes, blocking out the past and future and reaches into his Kuati robe, his fingers brushing against the crossed holster buckled across his chest. The hilt of his lightsaber tingles against his fingertips, then his palm, and then it’s alive in his hand. Even with eyes closed, the bright white-purple of the blade turns the backs of his eyelids red-orange, casting the afterimage of Naruto’s face in white lines. 

The blaster bolt gets reflected toward the back of the room, its impact punctuated by a swear, or a screech, or some kind of noise that might carry the hint of a Kuati accent, but might not. Either way, the buyer’s palms are scrambling against the floor, and his presence in the Force starts to flutter like tossed-away flimsiplast, collecting dirt in the underlevels of Coruscant.

“This is a fucking Jedi—” the buyer says, because the buyer is painfully unaware of the minutae of Jedi politics. Most of the galaxy is. The Jedi are there, but a mystery. Entities with laws unto themselves.

“No,” the seller and the bodyguard say at the same time, but only the seller continues, “that’s a fucking bounty hunter. He’s not a Jedi anymore.” It’s not surprising that the seller knows this, or that it’s the first sentence anyone has said since he’s been here. The Force pulls tight around him, and it might’ve reminded him of a noose if this wasn’t his element. He’s been upgraded from a nuisance to a problem, but it’s far too late for that. “He’s off his leash—”

Sasuke doesn’t know what the seller would’ve said after that, and neither does anyone else. The elbow of his metal arm takes the seller in the jaw, and by the pause-shift of his shoulder, it breaks under the force of it. Pain slams outward and spreads across the room as Sasuke twists the lightsaber in his hand and slams the hilt of it up into the seller’s chin, shifting his own body out of the blade’s path. 

The seller hits the floor, unconscious. Definitely a human, if the shape of his chin had been anything to go by.

Sasuke hears the bodyguard’s blaster hit the floor, hears their boots squeak against the floor as their posture changes into an aggressive stance, probably hand-to-hand. It’ll limit the range of a bladed weapon, regardless of if it’s effectively a laser or not. A wise choice, if it’d been someone else—but it isn’t, and Sasuke moves forward, thumbing the saber off and rolling the hilt over his wrist, catching the bodyguard’s punch against his mechanical palm, pulling them forward with far more momentum than they’d had in their swing.

He can feel the way their stomach drops, the Force loosening its grip on the room.

Sasuke brings the hilt of his lightsaber up with his flesh-and-bone hand, slamming it hard against the bodyguard’s temple. They sway, a little, just enough for Sasuke to throw them to the floor, their breath knocked out of their body, just like they’d been knocked into unconsciousness.

He doesn’t open his eyes when he turns his lightsaber back on. He doesn’t open them when he points the blade at the buyer’s throat. And he doesn’t open them when he says, “the Chiss hired me to take back the books your associate brought for you.”

The buyer swallows. The dryness of his throat makes the Force feel like sandpaper against the back of Sasuke’s neck.

“I can—I can pay you—if they want me dead, I can pay you n-not to—” the buyer’s clothes rustle against the floor as he lifts one arm. Sasuke tips the blade of his saber toward his palm, and the hand drops. The buyer sounds more Kuati when he talks like that.

“I’m not here to kill you. I’m here for the books.” A pause. The buyer sounds close to hyperventilating, his breath coming in nearly-panicked gasps. “And for you, and anyone who aided you. Their justice is very particular.” Sasuke tilts his head toward the table where the books are still stacked, the topography of the room clear in his memory. 

The buyer’s voice is shrill when he says, “it’s for a business venture—we just—we invest in artillery warfare, for now, but the—the information in those journals is—”

“—to facilitate biological warfare,” Sasuke finishes for him, lowering the tip of the lightsaber toward the center of the man’s chest. “That’s an issue I’m very sensitive about.” The lightsaber hums in his hand, steady. The buyer’s breath stutters. 

hold your breath, Itachi’s voice whispers in his ear, thin and all-knowing, though Sasuke had been in the dark then. don’t let it out until i tell you.

“Oh,” the buyer’s voice has become very small, as though the picture has cleared itself up with that statement, limited in detail and just a little bit frosty in tone. “I should have—the lightsaber, without a Jedi. You’re the—”

“Yes,” Sasuke replies. “Now, do I have to repeat myself, or what?”

Clothing whispers again as the buyer shifts to standing, his trembling hands sending the Force vibrating. The murmur of wrist on wrist tells Sasuke that he’s holding his hands together. There’s a pattern to this too, just like there’s a pattern to every bar on every world—there’s always one person who’s wildly underprepared to deal with the consequences of whatever they’d gotten themselves into. It’s almost always the one with money, the buyers of services or goods that they don’t know how to handle. 

When Sasuke opens his eyes, the Force has settled around him like a second set of robes. The future hums softly, its immediacy muted by the lack of control that any of the three leftover people have over this situation. The past is back behind its curtain.

Sasuke turns his lightsaber off, tucking it back in its holster, using his mechanical hand to pull a set of bantha-leather wrist-ties, looping them over one another to make it impossible to undo—and impossible to disrupt, unlike the magnetic clamps of the police forces across the galaxy. The buyer’s head is bowed, and he’s certainly Kuati. There are no calluses on his hands. 

Sasuke taps the comm-cuff on his left ear with his fingertip, static bursting into his ear, the shortwave radio hard to pick up by interlopers, but just as hard to use.

“Oh-ho, boss, is that you?” Suigetsu’s voice almost gets swallowed by his own unintelligible nonsense just as much as the white noise between them. “That was quick! You’re ahead of schedule. The docking cops haven’t even gotten suspicious yet—”

“When can Karin have the ship ready to go?” Sasuke speaks, because if he doesn’t, Suigetsu will get very attached to speaking. 

A pause, the white noise cut off as Suigetsu pauses the connection. And then, “twenty minutes, no sweat. You need a pick-up?”

“As soon as possible,” Sasuke confirms, taking two steps back to keep the room within his visual space. The two unconscious individuals stay where they are, and the buyer keeps to himself, eyes fixed to the floor. The books, bound in tanned beast-hide and refined cellulose paper, sit atop the table in careful stacks, undisturbed by the conflict around them. “A speeder with enough space for a couple of deadweights.”

“Sounds fun,” Suigetsu’s laughter is turned into a hiss by the audio interference. “Be there, quick as rain.”

The buyer says nothing when Sasuke ends the communication, beginning to gather up the books, sealing them in vacuumed packaging, binding the seller and the bodyguard at their wrists and ankles. The digital chronometer glowing steady, showing general Coruscanti time and local Kuati time. He’s ahead of schedule—they hadn’t put him too far behind.

The Force whispers around him, the future going in and out like waves on a beach, brushing against his ankles. He reaches out, then in, and brushes his senses across the stars and between planets. Warmth touches his cheeks, the Coruscanti afternoon still turning hair gold and making the hollows of cheeks glow softly.

A binary star system, tucked away in the Core, bright, and white, and blinding.

On Kuat, the future weaves stories.

(There is a possible future that is more likely than not, tied together in multiple threads, attached to many potential decisions in many potential situations. There are junctures where these decisions will mean more, but it’s a durable future, somewhere. It connects itself like a web, made stronger by thoughts and feelings and conversations that have been had, are being had, will be had.

When Sasuke next stands before the Jedi Council, he will be seventeen years older than he was the first time, and the city-planet of Coruscant will still be throwing lights in the background through the transparisteel windows behind the Masters sitting there. They will be of a different mixture, with some of them long-gone and others much older than they had been. The Grandmaster that will be looking at him then will not have the same bird’s-feet wrinkles at the corner of her eyes that the first one had, but Sasuke will make do. 

He will be standing at Naruto’s left, their hands at their sides, resisting the pull of one another. His eyes will be open, taking in everything, and he will be basking. His feet will be bare, because he is a man attached to themes, and this will be a rebirth. Naruto will say nothing, because he will already have laughed himself to tears about it.

The ground will be cold, but the soles of his feet will warm them.

Naruto will open his mouth, and he will not ask for permission for what they will be doing. He will be keeping them informed of his actions, because he still strives to lead the Jedi Order, but he will do so with the bull-headedness that he’s always had. His soul will be loud between them, but he will be speaking in that aggressively passionate-but-low tone.

Their hands will not be able to resist much longer. Naruto’s fingertips will brush against Sasuke’s knuckles. Their fingers will lace together. The Force will tremble around them with intent and energy and something that bubbles on the back of Sasuke’s tongue.

It’s what love would feel like, if the Force had the capacity for that. It will feel like love to Sasuke, overwhelmed as he will be by the weight of it all.

Naruto’s grip will tighten, and the Masters will look at them.

Sasuke will lift his chin, and the future will open wide like a Naboo lotus, underneath the sun.) 

-

(Sasuke had turned to look at him almost as soon as he’d walked in, the wrinkle in the bacta patch adhered to the side of his face the only indication that he’d been trying to smile.

The medcenter’s lighting had washed Sasuke out to the point where Naruto had almost been able to see the veins glow underneath his skin. It almost hurt to look at him in the not-romantic sense, like looking at Sai in the midday sun on a planet with almost no cloud-cover. The front of his head ached, just above his sinuses. There were shadows under Sasuke’s eyes that threatened to leak down his cheeks. While fragile hadn’t been the word to best describe him ever, it did kind of look like his eyelashes were going to bruise his face whenever he blinked.

For all that Sasuke was absolutely beautiful exactly all of the time, he sure had looked indescribably awful with the same sort of fervor.

In particular, the skin above where his elbow would’ve been was bright red and angry, reacting to the brand new and very shiny metal arm that had been attached in the place of the arm he’d lost. With the eye-numbingly white-and-blue theme of the room around them, the dark sheen of the new limb made Sasuke look three times paler, like he was going to sink into the sheets and disappear.

“nice arm,” Naruto had told him, taking a seat in the suspended chair, jutting out from the wall, attached there with an articulated arm of its own. 

Sasuke continued to look at him, something in his eyes flickering in and out of existence. Even under light like that, they’d still burned like coals if Naruto’d looked closely enough. “it’s cooler than yours. you kept skin and everything. it’s like you don’t understand drama.” He’d paused, his voice rasping against the walls, the medical equipment, Naruto’s hair. Naruto had flexed the fingers of his right hand. He almost hadn’t noticed the hum of the motors vibrating where they were attached to his palm. The synthflesh even pulled like his old hand had. “what a stupid way to lose an arm.”

Regret laid itself heavy on Naruto’s tongue, all uneven edges and dry as dirt. Bitterness followed close behind it, and shame after that. A palate cleanser that had been strong enough to twist his stomach and clamp down on his ears. He’d wanted to reach out and touch him. “not the worst way, though, right? it’s more like a fated meeting between hearts and fists, like what lee said or something.”

Sasuke’s eyebrows had risen up on his forehead, like a dwarf star peeking above the horizon on some backwater world. “lee didn’t say that,” Sasuke had told him, and the wrinkle in his bacta patch had deepened with something that felt like humor, crawling up the sides of Naruto’s face. “i said that.”

“oh,” and Naruto had grinned right back, because how could he not? It’d felt like ages since Sasuke had given him a glance like that, a smile like that, and years of on-again, off-again, fighting-again died right there on the sterile floor, curling up like a too-large insect. “sorry. i remember thinking that it sounded like shit lee would say.” 

Sasuke had scoffed, closing his eyes, and his metallic hand twitched against the sheets. He’d reached out, palm up, and the muscles in his upper arm strained with the effort. It was an offer that Naruto could feel all the way down to his toenails, and he’d felt stupidly emotional, and there was probably poetry writing itself about this moment deep, deep within the stars. 

“are you trying not to predict what i’ll do, mr. clairvoyance?” Naruto asked him, taking Sasuke’s left hand in his right one. The synthflesh could even process how cold the metal was. “so it’s a surprise?”

“shut up. i’m soaking.” A pause, long and almost-sweet, long enough to the point where Naruto had almost been certain that Sasuke had fallen asleep—except his eyes had opened, and they’d glittered their burning black-red even under the ugly, horrific, basically-blinding white light, and he’d said, “i’m leaving the order when i’m not bedridden.” The Force had shimmered, a curtain caught in the breeze of what Sasuke had been saying. “for real, i mean. properly.”

Naruto’s hand had almost slipped from Sasuke’s grip. Almost. But instead, he’d gone and opened his mouth like, “so, what, you’re going to do that whole thing again, where you go ‘augh, you make me vulnerable, which is dangerous and ruins my life, because i care too much and—”

“dude,” and it had sounded both entirely like and entirely unlike Sasuke, a verbal tick he’d picked up from Naruto, or maybe Suigetsu, or maybe anyone else that he’d encountered while Naruto hadn’t been watching, “are you going to let me explain, or what?”

The Force became brittle, but didn’t crack. Naruto had looked at him and the metal of Sasuke’s hand was starting to warm underneath Naruto’s synthflesh fingers. “you can explain.”

“i’ve been staring at the ceiling and thinking, because that hasn’t ever gotten me into trouble.” Sarcasm dripped form between his lips and behind his teeth a little bit like bile. The imagery was decidedly not awesome, but it was accurate. “and i was thinking that i’m tired of people telling me what to do. how to feel and not feel, what shit to dwell on or not think about. and i don’t think that i can stay here in this temple and not think about—everything. my family. orochimaru. master danzo. madara. all of it.” This pause was icier, thickening the Force between them, reinforcing it against Sasuke’s exhalations. “so i want to figure it out myself, what i want to do and why.”

“okay,” Naruto had said, and even though it really wasn’t chilly in that hospital room, he still thought he’d seen his breath for a moment. “that makes sense.”

Sasuke’s eyes had been gorgeous, even with his face all wan and tired and, you know, like that. “but i don’t want to have to come back to you. between jobs. between your jobs. i want to be with you the whole time. not, like, steal moments. i don’t know. maybe i want to go out on dates. maybe work together. maybe—i don’t know.” He’d traced a shape on Naruto’s face with his pupils. Naruto hadn’t known what it was. “but i’m telling you this because i don’t want to leave you.” A smile, small and thin and stuff, but there and oh the things it did to his cheekbones. “it’s not like that’s effective. i—” Oh—oh shit, that had been a blush. Sasuke’s cheeks had gone colorful. “i want to keep soaking you in. eyes open, or whatever.”

Full transparency, Naruto hadn’t quite known what that meant. There had been something deeper there that rippled under Sasuke’s carefully crafted expression, the color in his cheeks fading against the tension in his jaw. It had probably been a metaphor that Sasuke had had on his mind sometime before, but he never talked about stuff like that, so it’d be impossible to know how long something like that had been stewing around in his brain.

But, of course, that hadn’t mattered, really.

“that’s super sentimental,” Naruto had replied, and his chest had felt so tight, and a little bit painful, and oof, he’d been leaking it into the Force. He could see it on Sasuke’s face. “and really touching. and i’m feeling all of the emotions that you think are gross right now, and i’ll need to process it later. but before i process it, can i, like, kiss you, or is a hospital bed the wrong—”

“kiss me, dumbass,” Sasuke said, and it had been kinda hot, despite the setting. 

Naruto had levered himself up, squeezing Sasuke’s recently-replaced hand that didn’t give underneath the force of his grip, and he’d pressed their lips together in something sweet, toeing the line of not-very-chaste. Sasuke’s lips had been chapped, and he’d tasted a little bit like that bacta patch on the side of his face, and the angle could’ve been better, but it’d been the best kiss they’d shared to date, or at least the most romantic kiss they’d shared to date. 

It’d been beautiful.

Oh—it hadn’t been bacta, really, that taste on his tongue in the kiss they’d shared. It’d actually tasted like the future.)

Coruscant is busy, because it’s always busy. It’s been busy for Naruto’s entire life, and for countless millennia before that. It’s been busy-ness built on top of busy-ness forever and ever, as far as Naruto can tell, and he can feel all that busy-ness chattering his teeth together on bad days, or just vibrating in the roots of his teeth on the good days. That sense of energy infects everything here, from the people, to the speeders, to the businesses. Even data entry feels energetic here, to the point where a combination of  office-based labor and Jedi lesson-planning sits on Naruto’s shoulders and pinches every single nerve from the base of his skull to the tail of his spine. The Force squirms beneath his skin, pushing against it, threatening to tear it from his bones. 

Or, alternatively, that could be the grip that Lee has on the back of his neck, his mechanical wrist twisted and held up to just under his shoulder blades.

The city’s noise is definitely rattling around inside his skull, and the Force is also definitely needling at his skin and bones and clothes, but it is also very likely that the pain in Naruto’s upper-back-and-chest is contributing to the whole problem. 

The younglings are watching the both of them, many of them in awe, some of them in sympathetic discomfort, and Lee sounds like he’s smiling, like always, when he says, “and this is a method on how to disarm an individual without needing to use the Force. There will be instances where stealth will be imperative for the success of a mission, and if you were observed to be a person who could wield the Force, it could put you, your teammates, and the local population in jeopardy, which cannot occur!”

There are oohs and aahs at the appropriate volume and frequency. It ripples around the room from cheek to cheek, shoulder to shoulder, and it creates some warm and fuzzy feelings in Naruto’s guts. Lee’s presence in the Force flickers at his back like a candle, pride settling comfortably between his shoulder blades, beneath the synthetic skin of his wrist.

“I’m really happy for you,” Naruto wheezes when he speaks, just a little, “but could you let up a little? It hurts to breathe.” 

“Ah!” Surprise and then laughter, one from Lee and the other from the younglings. “My deepest apologies! I was absorbed in the lecture and I forgot that I still had you unarmed!” 

The soreness in Naruto’s muscles radiates out from his right shoulder, down his spine, through his chest before it fades out into the completely average ache of a completely average spar. He calls his lightsaber back to his hand before he clips it to his belt as he stands, rolling his shoulders to loosen them. Sweat itches where it’s dried at his temples, and there’s a complaint forming at the back of his head about how he hasn’t been allowed to break a sweat in weeks, stuck instead documenting reports from Jedi Knights and Padawans, looking over lesson plans for younglings—

When he breathes out, the air tastes icy, like the aftertaste of mint in hot cocoa, the sensation of it curling down his spine.

“To make amends,” Lee says from far away, still smiling, because he’s always smiling, “what say we spar with no lesson in mind, a real meeting of the fists?”

Naruto blinks. He can feel the padded mats beneath his boots, can see the high marble walls and the arched ceiling of the sparring atrium, a mural depicting the origin of the Jedi Order sweeping its way across the marble above. It’s a little disorienting, when Sasuke shows up anywhere, like Naruto gets whirled through some other place before being dropped right where he’d been standing minutes ago, seconds ago, now. 

“No can do, Bushy Brow,” his voice sounds clearer than it did in his head half-a-heartbeat before, like his ears had been cleaned out or something. He smacks Lee between the shoulder blades, in the exact place where Lee had held his wrist at the end of their duel. Anticipation is tightening his stomach. “I’ve got an appointment I gotta keep, and he’s a little bit early. I’d hate to keep him waiting too long.”

“Oh! A different sparring partner then. I see! How vivacious and noble of you! You never cease to amaze me!” Lee takes a breath, determined to continue and trap him in a conversational loop for the next ten minutes, but he’s cut off, Sakura’s voice coming from across the atrium where she’d been standing in the corner, arms crossed loosely over her chest.

“He’s got a hot date,” she tells him, almost-smug and just a hair too-amused as she pushes herself off the wall, touching younglings gently to move them aside. “I’d be happy to get some work in, if you want, Lee. That’ll free Naruto up, since his appointment is waiting out front.” She arches an eyebrow, tilts her head, grins. If she’s tense, it’s hidden somewhere that not even the Force can touch. 

“Sakura you are a life-saver! There are these skills that I’ve been wanting to try, you see, so—” Sakura waves Naruto around Lee’s body before she knocks her fists together, her Force-gauntlets tightening around her fingers and her palms, and Naruto slips between the younglings who’re settling down for another show, the whole room on-edge with the enthusiasm of it all.

Naruto breathes out another wave of mint, the feeling of electricity scattering over the backs of his teeth. Coruscant has muted itself, holding its breath as he makes his way down the polished corridor, as it opens wide into the Temple’s primary entrance, as the redirected light from the orbital mirrors mimic a sunset and almost blind him—

Through the adjustment to the glare of reflected sunlight off of the cloudcutters and starscrapers, Naruto can see Sasuke, leaning against the base of one of the countless Jedi statues, the Order’s predecessors castling long shadows in the handmade sunset. There’s a breeze, pushed between the buildings and cast aside by speeders changing hoverlanes, that’s toying with Sasuke’s hair, the gray fabric of his tunic, the loose fit of his matching pants, tucked neatly into his boots.

The sight of it closes Naruto’s throat, a little. The image carves itself into a place on his bones, somewhere, with every other memory he has.

Sasuke’s head is leaned back against the statue, his eyes shut against the noise of Coruscant. There’s a green-and-healing bruise on the side of his face, its shape no longer distinct enough to determine what had hit him, only that it had been maybe a couple days ago, and it’s a little bit bigger than a human fist.

“Didn’t want a bacta patch for that shiner?” Naruto asks from behind him, dragging his fingertips along the clean-hewn stone of the statue’s base, still at least a meter short of the long-dead Jedi’s feet. “Do you have someone that you’re showing off for, sir?”

Sasuke opens his eyes and turns his head, shifting the one crossed holster looped from his left shoulder to his right hip as he stands more upright. It’d look out-of-place on anyone else, especially without any body armor to justify it, but Sasuke wears it like he’s prepared for anything, his lightsaber tucked away into the pocket under his arm, looking like the butt of a blaster from this angle at first glance, second glance, third glance—

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me how dashing I look with this mess on my face? I’m pretty sure that’s how this is supposed to go.” Humor touches the corners of Sasuke’s mouth, even though it’s not quite a smile. His eyes are shifting between Naruto’s face and the Jedi around them, coming and going from the Temple, their own attention split against whatever errands they’re running and the fact that there’s an almost-anarchist standing atop the stairs. His gaze loses focus, his split attention going solo in a direction that Naruto can’t quite follow, like the past is creeping up on him.

it’s been happening more often, lately, Sasuke’s voice says from a week-old recording, half-eaten by the distance across the galaxy. He’d sounded tired, quiet against Naruto’s ear. The memory is clear, overlaid against Sasuke’s face, stuck somewhen else. 

(Sasuke shouldn’t’ve been in the Archive in the middle of the night—not after everything that had happened. The swearing and the shouting and the storming out of the Council chamber. The defecting and the running and the broken-edged wordplay that cut like a vibroblade. Something about breaking bonds and i’m too safe with you. He’d left to seek out more powerful pastures, trying to figure out just what it was that had made his family a target of powerful people. Naruto had missed the breadth of it, at the time, because a hole had yawned itself deep and wide beneath his ribs, swallowing sight and sound and taste and memory and—everything.

But, regardless, their sudden meeting there had been weird and clandestine and a little bit sexy in the way that Sasuke had stared at him from across the marble-and-steel table between them, his face half-cast in shadow, his eyes glowing a little bit like embers in the middle of a newly-born firepit.

It had felt like a metaphor for something, the image that Naruto had recorded and re-recorded into his brain.

Above the table, projected into the darkness, was the face of Jedi Master Danzo Shimura, glistening a cold silver-blue. On the table’s touch-screen surface was Danzo’s biography—mission reports, student records, fighting style, lightsaber design, each tucked away into their own tabs and files, ready for perusal. A memory card had been protruding from a data port in the table’s surface. 

Any sleepiness that Naruto might’ve felt had died when he’d met Sasuke’s eyes. In that moment, it felt as though sleep hadn’t ever lived inside his body.

“did you miss the kitchen?” Naruto had said, trying to smooth out the moment’s edges, trying to get Sasuke’s face a little bit less—distant. “here for a midnight snack?”

Sasuke had only watched, his face unresponsive. In the Force, there’d been only boiling emptiness there, like a storm system about to break, but not yet. From where Naruto had been standing, his face had looked wan and worn thin—but it could’ve been the lighting.  

“i came to borrow some information, but i left my library card in my other robes,” Sasuke had said, his eyes following the future beside Naruto’s face. Despite the way his words rolled off his tongue, there hadn’t been any humor there. “but since you’re here, i should let you know that the next time you see me, i’ll have killed master danzo.”

The climate unit in the Archive had hummed to life, breathing warmth into the space from corners to center. The whir of it had been the loudest thing in the room, in the Temple, on the planet. What Sasuke’d said had been so forthright, his eyes so steady, that Naruto had felt a rod slam underneath his armpits, straightening out his shoulders.

“what?” His throat had been dry. Information like this was risky to know, risky to share, but Sasuke’s face told him nothing about that risk. “you’re going to what?”

Something in Sasuke’s expression shifted with the grinding of permacrete against each other, leaning down a slope toward something that reached into Naruto’s chest, grabbed his heart, and squeezed. The curve of Sasuke’s mouth had become complicated when he’d said, “do you know why my family was killed?” The Archive climate control whirred in response. There wasn’t a response that would’ve been adequate anyway. Besides, Sasuke had held his eyes in a tightly controlled lock as he’d continued, “because they were going to break with the order. they were going to start a different school of thought. like gaara. like pain. and what do you do to a family that can see the future?”

Naruto had swallowed. It’d felt like swallowing dirt. “sasuke—”

“you have someone poison them, because a poison is hard to see coming, even harder when it’s someone from the inside. it’s disorienting. you can see something, but not what. it touches every life you see, dissolves it, makes it unclear.” For a moment, Naruto had felt something soft touch the side of his cheek. It feels like a far-off lightning strike, sends ringing in his ears. “danzo gave that order. itachi carried it out.” Despair echoed like thunder within the arms of Sasuke’s voice, and there’d been no more emptiness hanging from his features.

The memory card chimed from its place in the data port, indicating that it had finished grabbing the information it wanted. Sasuke had tugged it free, palming it into the cover of his robes. The holoprojector went dark, Sasuke’s eyes glowing low and heavy, suspended, half-lit.

“i wanted to let you know, since next time we see each other,” the achingly sad curve of Sasuke’s mouth had said, the part of it that Naruto could see, “you’re gonna have to figure out if you can kill me or not.” 

There are a lot of things that Naruto could’ve said to that, a lot of things that would’ve been more impactful, would’ve had more meaning. He probably would’ve been able to stop Sasuke right there if he’d just been able to put everything in the right order, with the right sentiment. Naruto could’ve brought up how hard everyone had worked to try and get him back, or mentioned that, now that Orochimaru was dead, there wasn’t anything else to fight over. He could’ve said something funny, if not clever, about how Danzo had one foot in the grave anyway, how, if Sasuke would let him, he really would be able to help.

“don’t go,” but the only thing that Naruto had been able to say to that was a completely unrelated statement, coughed up from deep within his chest, “i love you.”

If heartbreak had a face, Sasuke would’ve been wearing it. Something split into the air between them, throwing shards and debris into the Force. Naruto had to lift his hands to his face to check for broken skin, as though he would’ve found blood on his fingertips. 

The darkness had eaten him up in that moment, wrapped around him, pulling him under. He’d vanished from the Force, leaving behind the texture of ozone, static scattering itself across his skin. 

Naruto waited there, the sunrise creeping its way across the floor some hours later.

The shadows hadn’t opened back up again.)

“You’re always dashing.” Sasuke blinks, his attention right back where it ought to be, his eyelashes painted silver as the display light underneath the statue comes to life beside them. “Don’t I tell you that you’re dashing? I send you voice messages that tell you how sexy you are, and how much I miss you when we’re working, and—”

Sasuke’s hand comes up to his mouth, the bruise on his cheek going pink-and-green as he rolls his eyes. Anything that was left of the mint that tastes like Sasuke is swallowed up by something warmer settling in Naruto’s chest. “Shut up. I was kidding.”

Naruto mumbles something against Sasuke’s palm, says it again when Sasuke drops his hand away with both his eyebrows raised high, “I wasn’t.” Sasuke opens his mouth to say something else, his eyes following patterns that Naruto can’t see somewhere over his shoulder, the Force buzzing around them with what could be suspicion, but Naruto speaks instead. “Can I kiss you?”

Surprise, and it pops like zoochberry gum. “What?”

“Can I kiss you?” Naruto’s fingers find Sasuke’s and they twine together. It feels reflexive. 

“You smell like sweat,” Sasuke says, but his nose isn’t scrunching up, and his mouth isn’t turning into a thin line. The pause stretches out, though, and it threatens to turn into something embarrassed, but then Sasuke continues, “yeah. Kiss me.”

If Coruscant was muted before, it’s silent now as Naruto draws his knuckles over the side of Sasuke’s face, as Sasuke circles his own fingertips over Naruto’s cheek, his thumb pulling itself over the topmost scar there. Sasuke’s lips are chapped, as usual, when Naruto kisses him, but there’s absolutely a smile there now, and it’s sweet against his mouth. The kiss opens up, goes soft, and when Naruto pulls away, his face almost hurts with the joy of it. Sasuke pinches Naruto’s cheek between his thumb and forefinger, tugging gently, and his eyes are the thing of fairytales—dark and molten, something burning in their background, the sunset catching fire around his irises.

“I missed you,” Sasuke tells him. That’ll never stop making Naruto’s stomach drop, probably. “Dumbass.”

“I missed you,” Naruto replies, knowing that he definitely looks like his stomach just dropped out of his body. Their hands are back together again. “Asshole.” Sasuke breathes a laugh, soft and easily missed, carried away by the breeze, touching the tip of Naruto’s nose as he brings their foreheads together. “You’re early, you know that? You made it back in time for a reasonable dinner.”

“Ha, ha,” Sasuke’s nose does wrinkle at that. “I had another appointment on-world, and that finished early, so I thought that I’d head over to you before the night settled in.” Naruto can almost feel the kiss of Sasuke’s eyelashes as he lowers them into a look that brings to mind mischief, almost. His mouth quirks up. “You know how sunlight looks on you.”

Naruto scoffs, bumping their noses together before he pulls away. “Okay. So does that mean that you’ll let me take you to dinner? There’s a dive in the undercity that makes the best menar noodles in the galaxy, and—”

Sasuke interrupts him, the decorative lighting haloing his head, because light always does that with him. It’s always like looking at twin moons, rising above the horizon, casting the world in softness, dulling the edges of the things in their sight. “That’s what you said about the place on Corellia.

“Okay, but—”

“And the cantina on Tatooine.”

“Right, I get that—”

The quirk in Sasuke’s mouth lifts higher. Laugh-lines think about forming beside his eyes. “And the place on Chalacta, which didn’t even have noodles, and the place on Ryloth, which tasted like speeder exhaust.”

“Okay, so I get your point! I’m not picky. But,” Naruto tugs on Sasuke’s hands, taking one step back, bringing Sasuke one step forward, “this is literally the best place to eat I’ve ever been. It’s cramped, it’s dingy, and at this time of day, we’ll be some of the only people there. Let me treat you to dinner.”

Sasuke squeezes his fingers once before letting them go, shifting his holster across his body a second time. “I’ll let you treat me to dinner. Do we need to get an air taxi, or—”

“I can do better than that.” Naruto turns, moving behind the statue’s base, listening to Sasuke’s footsteps as he follows him, no questions or hesitation. If anything, Naruto can feel a tickle of exasperation against the underside of his nose. “I found this speederbike in one of the undercity junkyards, and Sai’s been helping me put it together between, you know, babysitting and data-entry.”

There’s the hesitation. Sasuke’s bootsteps don’t stutter, but they slow, and he says, “I don’t want to go into the Temple.” 

Naruto glances over his shoulder and holds Sasuke’s eyes for three heartbeats, keeping himself in step. “We’re not going into the Temple. We’re going around it.” 

Relief sets Sasuke’s jaw, a contradiction, like a lot of the things that Sasuke has done over the course of his life. It’s the grind-his-teeth relief of not having to explain himself, of not having to speak false shame at the death of a Jedi Master that had cost Sasuke more than anybody else in the galaxy, almost, followed only by Madara and Orochimaru both. 

Sasuke picks his pace up again, falling into Naruto’s heartbeat steps with practice, even when they haven’t been side-by-side in the last couple of weeks. It’s an easy rhythm, like running around the Temple, breathless and young, like wandering the undercity and sharing half-remembered stories of older lives, toeing the line of talking about family but not quite making it far enough to get there. 

The sky has gone purple with the mirrors’ rotation as they come upon the Temple’s landing pad, lined with magnetic clamps to hold ships in place, landing lights moving their in slow motion across the edge of the pad itself. Naruto’s speeder-bike is tucked underneath a plastyk tarp, leaned gently against the side of the Temple’s face. Naruto tugs the tarp into his arms, rolling it into an almost-neat wad, jamming it behind a metal crate of landing cables. 

Sasuke watches him, hip cocked, arms crossed, and Naruto wants to kiss him again.

But he doesn’t, though, not yet. He pulls the speeder-bike into the open, turning its engine and letting it idle, until the aged coughs smooth out into something a little closer to a purr.

Naruto swings himself onto the speeder-bike, feels it shift under his weight only slightly, and turns to Sasuke. “You ready to ride?”

Sasuke rolls his eyes, swinging himself onto the space at Naruto’s back, propping his feet at the stirrups’ sides. His arms loop around Naruto’s waist, his chest to Naruto’s back, and he leans his head over Naruto’s shoulder to say, “sir, are you going to be driving without a helmet?”

“Didn’t think that far,” Naruto admits, but revs the speeder-bike’s engine anyway, driving it forward and off the landing pad, letting it level into a stable thrum before he weaves his way through the starscrapers, down into the undercity’s territory. The hoverlanes have always been dubious the farther down a person travels into Coruscant’s depths, but the bike has no difficulties slipping between arched alleyways and under pedestrian walkways. The nighttime has settled in by now, and even if it hadn’t the orbital mirrors don’t reflect enough light down here.

Everything’s bright and neon the lower they get, advertising dance clubs, strip clubs, and brothels, barsm convenience stores, and payday lenders—and between all of this, Naruto settles his bike, looping a security lock through its struts and the restaurant’s runoff gutter, right beneath its brightly-colored sign. It’s matte enough that it blends into the wastebins around them, revealed only by the way it contrasts to tossed-away flimsiplast that litters the streets. 

If Naruto thinks about it, he can almost catch echoes of his mother here, peeking out from behind buildings and dumpsters, giving orders and advice, running the streets of the undercity with loud demands and louder laughter, catching the eye of a Jedi Knight, so many levels above all of this—or at least that’s what Naruto had been told, years and years and years ago.

Sasuke tweaks Naruto’s ear like he knows what he’s thinking, like he can read Naruto’s mind, and it pulls his brain forward, back into the driver’s seat of his body.

Sasuke slides off the bike first, shaking out his hair, tugging on his tunic, adjusting the holster across his chest. The lightsaber underneath his arm looks different in lighting like this, the shape of its hilt a little thicker, a little more difficult to mistake as anything else—ah. That lightsaber isn’t Sasuke’s at all.

Naruto slips off the bike next, smoothing out his robes with one hand and leaving his hair alone. The lightsaber on his belt has a hilt familiar enough to use, an extension of Naruto’s arm all on its own, but it’s not his. Sasuke’s lightsaber has found itself a place on Naruto’s belt like it always does after long jobs. It’s a ritual that Sasuke has never bothered to explain and that Naruto’s never bothered to ask about, lest he spook Sasuke to the point where he stops, and that would be the worst. It’s endearing, the little things that Sasuke does, the way he shows Naruto the impact he has.

Sasuke has thrived on subtlety when it comes to feelings like that. Naruto has thrived on audacity. 

“You coming?” Sasuke says from the restaurant’s open doorway, the door itself held open with a block of solid permacrete that looks like it was pulled up from the pavement somewhere, or like it fell from the upper levels during construction. It’s got a lot of character, this place.

“Right behind you,” Naruto replies, his outer robe whipping against his boots. 

The restaurant is almost empty, most of its patronage secured long after the chronometers reset for the day, and Sasuke has chosen a table in the corner, his back to the wall, his eyes on the doorway they’d entered from. Even with the vantage point on the rest of the dining room, Sasuke’s eyes stay fixed to Naruto’s face, before they move to his collarbones, his chest, settling on the lightsaber that Sasuke had clipped there. 

“You were right,” Sasuke tells him, lifting his eyes again so that they can lock them as Naruto sits down, his fingers pressed to the middle of the menu, his thumbnail picking at its edges. “This place is a dive.”

“But it’s delicious.” Ayame-the-waitress steps out from behind the curtain to the kitchen, a datapad in her hand after the sets down the glasses of water she’d been carrying, her fingertip poised with a purpose, her eyebrows positioned in a way that indicates that Naruto doesn’t need to bother speaking, so her attention is going to be paid to Sauske instead.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” Ayame asks, her free hand already working on Naruto’s order, her customer-service voice impeccably practiced, even this early in their business day. 

Sasuke glances between her and the menu, his thumb pausing its rhythm against the menu’s edge. “I’ll take your stewed otamot curry with Bellassan peppers and Ghoba rice, thanks.” He slides the menu back in place behind the dubious condiments, rubbing his fingers to get rid of the ever-present grease feel of the undercity’s food establishments.

Ayame nods, her face serious, and she leaves them with a bow, tucking her datapad into her apron.

The restaurant’s space is then filled with the noise of clattering dishware and the vibration of fluorescent lights. 

There’s no excuse like a date to stare at Sasuke’s face, tracing the jut of his cheekbones, the line of his nose, the shape of his eyes, the arch of his brows. Even with his hair windswept and a little scattered, he’s unreal. It’s like he can feel the touch of moonlight against his skin, washing him clean, or something like that, one of those far-flung metaphors that only ever seem to scratch the surface of all this shit that Sasuke makes him feel all the time. Even with a greenish bruise still healing on his face.

“Can I help you?” Sasuke says, resting his chin on his knuckles, his mouth curved and awesome and kissable. 

“Nah.” Naruto blinks, threading his fingers together and resting his own chin atop them. “I was just looking. I have to commit your face to memory for when I finally get poetic skill to talk about about how hot I think you are—”

A laugh, also a surprise. He can see if on Sasuke’s face by the widening of his eyes. “Shut up. Fuck.” Persistent laughter, like a carbonated liquid, hits the table in droplets. “How do you just say whatever you want like that?”

“Years of practice.” Naruto speaks with affected grace, shifting the position of his chin on his fingers to give the impression of looking down his nose. “It’s a skill borne of great trial and immense suffering, because I will say things that others keep in their heart, or whatever.”

Sasuke snorts. It takes some of the time off of his features, rubs away some of the darkness under his eyes. “Or whatever.”

“For example,” Naruto continues as though Sasuke hadn’t spoken at all, “I’m also going to tell you that I think that you should teach at the Temple.” 

Sasuke chokes on the water that he’d brought to his mouth, his shoulders lurching forward, and he coughs water from his nose. “Excuse me?” Naruto can tell that he’d spoken louder than he thought he would, and he tries again, his voice softer, lower, and closer to the surface of the table. “Excuse me?”

Naruto meets Sasuke’s eyes with no shame, focused, his chin still poised on his fingers. He thinks of all the other things he wants to say but doesn’t, the things that he’d wanted to say but hadn’t, and figures that Sasuke doesn’t need to know about all of those possible pasts and futures that Naruto grinds under his teeth, chews on and spits out. Instead, Naruto repeats himself, because if there’s anything that he’s practiced at, it’s being a broken record. 

(i love you, come back, i’m taking you back with me, i love you)

“I think you should teach at the Temple.” Naruto drops his hands from his chin, resting them on the table, keeping his fingers carefully loose and as non-threatening as possible. The two of them are different now, but it’s still hard to tell when Sasuke’s trying to bolt. There are the quiet giveaways, these days—the glancing at the door, the floor, the table, the way he watches Naruto’s face to see if he’s joking or not before he starts the pattern all over again. “Lee teaches there now, and he’s not even Force-sensitive.”

When Sasuke blinks, it’s slow, contemplative, and unsettled. The skin beside his eyes is tight. “I’m not going to be on the Order’s payroll,” Sasuke tells him, clenching and unclenching his flesh-and-bone hand. “And we’re still not on good terms probably. I killed a Master. I said I’d kill more. I’m a flunkie. Where’s this coming from?”

Naruto chews the inside of his cheek before he responds with, “the work you do is important to you. You’re expensive, and we hear about all the shit you get up to even as uninvolved as the Order likes to be in ‘minor issues’, or whatever it is we call it. And Gaara’s already started a kind of school thing in the Outer Rim for other people who are Force-sensitive but don’t like Jedi. I just think that having different ways of doing things will keep less terrible things from happening.”

Sasuke pauses, presses one thumb to his lips. And then, “like Madara.”

“Like Madara, like Orochimaru, like Danzo.” They’re on the same page, in this moment, and Naruto has the split-second impulse to say that they’d see each other more, that Naruto would get to see him more, but he doesn’t. “I just think that it’d be easier for people to figure out what they want to do with this power and these things, and it’d be easier to see when people are losing their shit.”

Sasuke looks at him like he can’t figure out how they got into this conversation, like he’s trying to trace the path from i love you to please teach children. Or, alternatively, he’s tracing the possible futures that stem from this moment. 

“I’ll think about it,” Sasuke finally says, the curtain into the kitchen rising and falling and rising again as Ayame leaves their food on the table and leaves them to their conversation and to themselves. Naruto is still ninety percent sure she’s eavesdropping. “But I’m not interested in working for the Order. I’m not a Jedi anymore, Naruto.”

“I know.” Naruto hesitates, then, even as he splits his chopsticks, stirring the noodles in their broth. “I think sometimes that’s what people need to hear. Not everyone has to be a Jedi.”

The sound Sasuke makes could be a laugh, but it’s too soft to be sure. It’s like a sigh with a half-smile, unclear in direction or intent. The only evidence that it happened at all was the way it stirred the steam coming off of his curry. “The Grandmaster Grandma probably has her hands full with you, doesn’t she? Does she know how persuasive you are?”

Naruto thinks about the conversations they’d had over the last eight years or so, about the yelling matches that they’d shared in the Grandmaster’s office, about Sasuke, and Madara, and Itachi, and Sasuke again. But he doesn’t talk about those either. All he says is, “I think she might have a hunch.”

Sasuke licks his lips around a bite of food, and there’s a look on his face that presses itself against Naruto’s sternum, pushes against his skin, makes it hard to breathe. “‘Nobody gets how bad I want to take you back. Not even you.’” His voice is different when he says that, like it’s brittle, like it’ll break if he breathes too hard, like it’ll shake apart if Naruto were to reach for his hand. “Who could say no to that?”

Naruto can feel the cold of Rhen Var freezing his breath even before it left his mouth. The nemar noodles soothe that, a little. “Sasuke,” Naruto says, and there’s a hair's-breadth of time where he thinks he might cry, “I’m glad you’re home.”

“Yeah,” and the way Sasuke says that is almost like a kiss all on its own. “Home’s where the heart is, right?”

Naruto’s eyes sting, flood, spill over. It’s a rollercoaster in this restaurant tonight, conversations are unpredictable and emotions have no roadmap. He feels his chest get tight with the urge to breathe, feels his throat get hot with the pressure of everything happening inside his stomach and heart and head. He can hear Sasuke’s chair scrape against the meticulously-clean-but-still-greasy floor, can hear the whisper of his tunic as he reaches across the table, can feel the tremor of Sasuke’s hand as he wipes at Naruto’s face.

“I’m sorry.” It’s an apology, wrapped around something else. There are a lot of things that Sasuke’s not sorry for, and he’d said as much to the Order and to Kakashi and to Naruto himself. But this feels different, feels sharper, feels brighter. It’s reflecting something back at him. “I’m so sorry.” 

“I love you,” Naruto tells him, and there are a lot of other things wrapped up in that, too. 

“I know,” Sasuke replies. Naruto doesn’t know what kind of expression he’s wearing. “I love you.” A pause, fogged over by the smell of food and steam. “Let’s eat so that I can show you something. I want to tell you what I’ve been up to today.”

Naruto clears his throat before he flicks the tip of Sasuke’s nose. “A surprise? For l’il ol’ me?”

“Are you going to eat, or not?” Sasuke drops down into his seat, wiping away any leftover snot from Naruto’s nose, drying his hand on one of the napkins in a bin on the table. “Otherwise, no surprise for you, dumbass.”

“Okay, asshole.” He sniffles, clearing his throat for the second time.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Sasuke watching him, resuming his meal only after Naruto takes another bite of his own.

(Naruto had spent four months thinking about their second kiss, a thing that had been less surprising than their first and mostly teeth, filled with all the uncontrolled clumsiness that two teenagers can shove at each other. It’d been on his mind when he’d been awake or asleep, on missions or at the Temple. He’d think of Sasuke’s mouth and Sasuke’s eyes and the way Sasuke had pulled him forward by his collar, his cheeks flushed high and pink and bright.

By the time he’d found out that Sasuke had been thinking about their kiss just as much, holding his feelings so far down inside his chest that they’d carved their teeth into serrated edges, digging into the underside of his bones, the meat of his windpipe, leaving the taste of blood on his tongue.

He hadn’t known that it hurt him so much, not until they’d ended up on a ledge with Coruscant as their backdrop, its skyline limitless and breathtaking and horrible in a moment like that one had been.

“do you know what safe even means?” Sasuke’s voice had been painful and frenzied, torn from his mouth as though lined with hooks. Even at a low volume like that, it still seemed so loud. “it means that itachi killing our family was the best decision. it means that everything before this was okay, because now i feel safe.” Sasuke’s nose had wrinkled in a snarl. 

Naruto had felt absolutely out of his depth, like he was drowning, reaching for the sky far, far above him. When he’d breathed, it’d left the tang of saltwater on his tongue. “how is that what it means? what do you even mean? bad actions are bad actions” Naruto had gestured out at the city-planet, stretched out across the whole surface of the world, the undercity buried in shadow beneath them, the Jedi Temple squarely at their backs, still looming, even this distance away. “all that safety means is that you’re making the best out of a shit situation. how is that a bad thing?”

Sasuke had looked at him like he was ten screws short of an airlock, like there’d been atmosphere leaking out into the vacuum of space from his brain, but it’d been different than the other looks he’d gotten like that. “what do you fucking know anyway?”

Speeders had moved in their hoverlanes, completely unconcerned with the topic of their conversation. They’d been effectively alone on a planet with one trillion people. Around them, the Force had pulled itself taut.

“i know that for a person who’s always talking about the future, you sure are obsessed with the past.” The words had come out of Naruto’s mouth before he could’ve stopped them, as though they’d been pulled out of his chest by something that had more than two hands. They’d left torn skin along his windpipe, the roof of his mouth. 

The lights of Coruscant had haloed the back of Sasuke’s head, turning the tips of his hair silver-pink-gold-silver again. He’d been the image of a metaphor, because that’s the only way that he’d ever be described properly, and in that moment, a darkness had crawled out from underneath the fabric of his robes, had washed his skin into something grey and undead, and the burning coals of his eyes had glimmered something acidic. 

Naruto had swallowed, like that would do anything about what he’d said, and he’d reached out for Sasuke—for his hand, his cheek, the sleeve of his robe. Anything.

Sasuke’s left arm had come up in a swipe, a full-body flinch, and the hairs on Naruto’s arms had risen, just like the hairs on the back of his neck. Sasuke’s robes had whipped around them, yanked by wind that hadn’t been there a moment before.

“don’t touch me!” Sasuke said, his tone emptied out by a void deep and wide and unfathomable. It could’ve broken through the hull of a warship—through the core of a supermassive black hole. A stormcloud was building, rubbing atoms against atoms with the energy that had been rolling itself around in Sasuke’s gut, in the air between them both.

Lightning had leapt from Sasuke’s palm in an unclean arc, fear or anger or something else entirely pulling the skin at the corners of his eyes tightly enough to split.

Even then, Naruto had found that their kiss was still on his mind.)

Naruto wonders if he’s ever eaten that fast in his life.

“You know,” Naruto shouts over his shoulder as they leave the restaurant behind, the wind whipping at his cheeks, pulling at his clothes as they move between hyperlanes, Sasuke’s directions indicated by nudges and taps in the Force, “you might make me into a curry convert at some point. Do you think they make nemar noodles with stewed otamots?”

“Don’t see why not,” Sasuke tells him, pushing downward in the Force, leading Naruto down a side alleyway, suspended kilometers and kilometers above the undercity, a residential cloudcutter rising high above them, its transparisteel windows holding onto the glare of speeders’ headlights like stars. “It’s food, so I assume you can do whatever you want with it.” His flesh-and-bone hand is warm on the back of Naruto’s neck when he says, “pull onto the landing pad. There should be a space for a bike like yours and I don’t think anyone will make off with it.”

“I resent that remark,” Naruto speaks over the whine of the engine as they come into land on the designated pad, suspended over the alleyway, its motion-sensitive lights flashing gently. “This thing is a powerhouse and it looks great.”

“It’s matte black and has orange accents. It’s a horror.” Sasuke hops off the bike before it stops, adjusting his tunic and tugging at the loose fabric on his knees, casting a glance over his shoulder, watching Naruto ease it into a spot just big enough to fit the speeder bike and Naruto both, with just enough space for him to slide from the bike’s seat, killing the engine in the same motion he uses to walk away. 

Sasuke’s back is to him as he buzzes himself into the residential building, the door whirring open as he shifts his holster on his shoulder. Naruto follows behind him, their pace the same, their steps the same, paired together over time and space and everything else, as though they’d been walking side-by-side again. But this time, they’re not, and the shape of Sasuke’s shoulders, the cut of his hips, the way his hands hang loosely at his sides, it makes Naruto’s breath come up short. The field of noise shifts around his ears, muting the hum of the climate control unit, the murmur of air-recyclers, the lived experiences of the residents as they walk themselves down the hallway, toward their exit, toward a night on the town, toward leaving the planet, never to be seen again on some stupid quest for power or revenge or whatever.

The thought of getting into the turbolift at the end of the hall makes Naruto feel like puking, and he wonders if he will throw up in the turbolift of a place where he doesn’t even live, and how he’ll have to tell the people who work here that he barfed because he thinks he might be panicking about something, that this puts him in the past somewhere indistinct but terrible, and—

Sasuke takes his hand.

He’s stopped walking, and he’s taken Naruto’s hand, and he waits in the center of the corridor, letting the rollercoaster slow down again, easing to a stop at the end of the ride, and Naruto can breathe. One breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Another breath, just the same. A third one, deeper and longer and easing his heart rate.

“You okay?” Sasuke asks, summer rain on a distant farmworld, hitting the wide leaves of some cultivated plant. His face is carefully neutral, even though the Force simmers with shame in the background. Naruto’s hands stop shaking.

“Absolutely,” Naruto replies, even though it’s, like, a cough. “Don’t you have a surprise for me?”

“I do,” Sasuke’s watching Naruto’s face with cautious consideration, taking an inventory of his eyes, his mouth, the line of his throat, which, admittedly, does feel sandy on the inside. “You good to get onto the turbolift?” 

“Absolutely,” Naruto says again, this time with gusto. Sasuke might even believe him this time, especially since it’s mostly true, but the eye-roll makes him believe otherwise. Whether or not Sasuke has his entire buy-in to Naruto’s statement, he turns back around, keeping Naruto’s hand in his own, tapping the turbolift’s call button with one knuckle. 

Naruto is breathing easier as they step onto the lift, the pressure of the change in direction only twisting his stomach a little. For extra security, Naruto laces their fingers, covering their hands with the sleeve of his outermost robe. Hidden from sight, Sasuke’s thumb traces over Naruto’s own, pressing gently against cracks in the dry skin there.

Sasuke doesn’t say anything as the lift stops, the door sweeping to the side, revealing a corridor identical to the one they’d left, its tiled floor polished to shining, its lamps tastefully decorative and modeled to look like wrought iron sconces, their light flickering like burning candles, casting and re-casting shadows on the walls and floor and ceiling. The apartment doors are farther apart up here, so the living quarters behind them must take up a little more space. They’re likely bigger than the Knights’ rooms, that’s for sure, bigger than the Masters’ suites too.

And Sasuke stops at the end of the hall, letting go of Naruto’ hand to pull two star-shaped keys from a pouch on his holster, glancing at Naruto’s face and away again in a heartbeat’s time. He tosses Naruto one of the keys, pushing the other into the lock beside the door, the mechanism itself holding tightly to it’s pointed edges, magnets whirring around it. 

Naruto inspects the key in his hands, his thumbnail catching in the miniscule folds in its shape where the magnets in the locking mechanism are pulling hidden pieces free, turning it into a different shape entirely. It’s one of the most secure locking styles ever made, immune to hackable codes and flimsiclips with screwdrivers. They’re expensive, but they’re worth it.

“Are we breaking and entering?” Naruto says into the empty hallway, even though that doesn’t seem likely in the least.

“We’re not.” The key pops out of the lock and Sasuke drops it back into the pouch it had come from, pushing the door open with his elbow, pulling his boots from his feet with his free hand as he steps inside. It’s the least elegant thing possible, and yet there Sasuke is, making it look elegant. “Boots off.”

The apartment past the door is warmly lit, lights coming on further into the entryway-and-living area in response to their entrance, reflecting themselves steadily against the transparisteel windows that are half-covered by cloud-gray curtains. The door clicks shut without any fanfare, the lock sliding itself back into place. Naruto’s boots make more noise than the lock does when he drops them to the floor, but that doesn’t really register, not in the same way that the apartment does. 

Most of the space is tasteful. 

“What the fuck is that?” There are a lot of questions Naruto could’ve asked and chose not to, because holy shit.

The couch is, without a doubt, not tasteful.

It’s an orange-and-navy-and-red monstrosity, all patchworked together and practically overstuffed. When Naruto touches it, it feels horrifically comfortable, like a coma, or something. Sasuke’s watching him from where he’s standing by a wooden desk, simply stained and unassuming. There are two holoimages upon it—from what Naruto can see, one is Sasuke, his mother, his father, and his brother. The other is the original image of their Padawan trio, glimmering a delicate, silver-blue. 

Beside the holoimages is a small metal box, the lock rusted and unusable, even if the rest of the box is in pretty good condition. It’d been a box of Sasuke’s trinkets, left behind some years ago, kept by Naruto under his bed, and returned again. He’s pretty sure Sasuke’s Padawan braid is in there. He’s pretty sure that Naruto’s is, too. 

“Are you going to sit down, or not?” Sasuke steps away from the desk, dropping onto the couch, which huffs against his weight but doesn’t squeak. 

Naruto breathes out and tastes mint. 

The couch doesn’t shift when Naruto vaults over the back, huffing just the same as when Sasuke had dropped himself there. The pillows hopped with the force of it, his feet thunking softly against the floor, the impact muted by the high socks he’d been wearing under his boots. There’s about half-a-meter of space between them, almost enough to leave the middle cushion free of weight. Sasuke isn’t staring at him anymore, his attention fixed instead on a simple holoprojector, dark and showing nothing. 

Naruto has to swallow to speak past the feelings jammed in his throat. “This is the ugliest sofa I’ve ever seen.”

A glance in his direction. An almost smile. “I thought of you instantly when I saw it.”

“Ouch! Or is it?” Naruto plucks at a loose thread on the back of the couch, blue in color, stitched into some of the white patchwork red. It keeps his brain from thinking too fast. “Is this a rental place? Did it come with this thing?”

Sasuke licks his lips, quick and missable, and his fingers are threaded together like he’s about to get a lecture. “No. This is place is—I bought it. I picked out the sofa.” Silence, inching its way across the room like a glacier in the spring. “I had an appointment to check on it and make sure it was livable, before I came over to see you.”

Naruto whistles and it comes out steady, which is a shock. “Your own place, huh? Holy shit, Sasuke!”

“The Chiss pay really well,” Sasuke tells him, and his eyes don’t move from their place on the holoprojector, still dead and still not showing anything. “And I was actually thinking that this could be, like—our own place. I guess.”

Naruto’s heart stops, skidding against too-dry dirt in his chest, wiping out against a particularly sharp rock that might’ve been his lungs or a blood clot. “Excuse me?” he says, when part of him wants to ask when Sasuke ended up on the Chiss’s payroll. They’re a picky bunch, exclusive beyond belief, and his brain is trying to hold onto that tighter than what Sasuke just said.

“Earlier,” Sasuke explains, and it sounds irrelevant, but it might not be, “I said that you can just say whatever you want. This is like that.” His knuckles pop when he squeezes his fingers together, and the tips of them are going a little bit white. “So, surprise. I gave you a key because I want to live with you.”

The rollercoaster clicks its way upward inside his head, starting the slow rise into being unable to breathe for another indeterminant amount of time, but Naruto stops it, puts his feet against its nose and shoves backward, trying to keep it in place. His heartbeat rumbles in his ears, the reverb hitting his eardrum with heavy fists.

“But what about the sweet digs at the Temple?” Naruto’s voice is higher-pitched than he remembers it being, like a wheeze, maybe, and Sasuke’s eyes move toward him then, and they’re always unbelievable. Hesitation is swirling in the burnt glow around his pupils, contracted underneath the lights. 

Sasuke only stares at him, thins his lips, blinks slowly. There’s something unsettling about the color that isn’t in his cheeks. The breath he takes is unstable when he says, “I think that it’d be easier to meet up here after a job. I think it’d be nice to have a bed that we share. I think it’d be nice to eat in and figure out if we can eat stewed otamots and nemar noodles. I think that it’d be nice to be next to you, even on nights I can’t sleep, and to think about doing that over, and over, and over—”

He doesn’t taste like mint when they kiss. He tastes like curry and Bellassan peppers, stewed otamots and Ghoba rice. Naruto cradles Sasuke’s face in his hands, tilts his head, opens his mouth into the kiss and Sasuke responds in kind. He shifts his body, angles closer, pushes his heel against the floor. Naruto can feel Sasuke’s eyelashes as he closes his eyes like he always can, and Sasuke lets out a sigh from his nose.

“I’d love to live with you,” Naruto says, kind of delirious, because of, you know, everything. Sasuke’s face and his eyes and his hands, his shoulders and his hips and his ankles, the fact that he’d come back from Rhen Var and had stuck around, the fact that he’d just asked Naruto to move in with him like they’d been normal people with normal lives and that this was the obvious next step for them both. He was giddy with it. He was going to lose his shit, because he can’t stop anything coming out of his mouth. “I’d love to live with you. I love this fucking couch. I’m going to marry you one day.”

Sasuke does that thing where he looks at him and there’s a universe that he’s seeing and can’t describe, hyperspace lanes that haven’t been set yet, ghosts that are haunting the hollows and hallways of his heart and body and soul. “You think you can tell the future?”

“I think I don’t need to.” Naruto twists a lock of Sasuke’s hair around one finger, two loops up to his knuckle. “I think the future is going to answer to me.”

They’re breathing into the space between their mouths, and it’d be distracting if Sasuke’s eyebrows weren’t trying to tell him something, if the curve of his lips weren’t trying to indicate something very important. 

“Hey,” Sasuke says instead of responding to what Naruto had said, because there’s a lot to talk about before then, but his hand played across Naruto’s chest, and his eyes are wide and astounding, amazing, deadly. “I love you.”

Naruto wonders if Sasuke can feel the way his heart is beating underneath his palm, wonders if it makes the tips of his fingers feel like they can’t get a grip. And he smiles, and it’s wide. He says, breathless, “I know”,  kisses him again, and he’s so confident that Sasuke loves him that it’s like there’s starlight bleeding from the marrow of his bones. “I love you.” 

Sasuke looks at him, and his voice almost doesn’t tremble when he replies,“I know.”

(Naruto had been pretty sure that this was the closest thing he’d ever been to being cradled like a baby.

Iruka had been holding him like a punished toddler even though he was too old for that kind of treatment, his arms hooked under Naruto’s own, squeezing his ribcage under his armpits, and Naruto had been struggling anyway. His hands had been covered in illicitly obtained spray paint, and so had the sleeves of his robe, and his knees, and the soles of his boots. The reek of it followed them both down the corridor of the Temple, singeing the inside of Naruto’s nose with it’s sharpness.

“let me go!” Naruto had said, loudly, and he’d been trying to slip out from the loop of Iruka’s arms as they rounded a corner. He’d known exactly where they were going, because he’d made this walk too many times to count already. The Force had writhed against Naruto’s bones, like there’d been too much of it in his body at once. If he’d yelled any louder, he was almost sure he could throw it up. Almost. Maybe. “i said let me go!”

“no,” Iruka had said, and he’d sounded tired. “you literally spray painted every jedi statue around the temple. not only does your dedication know absolutely no bounds, but that’ll take weeks to get rid of. you know that, right?”

“so what? they’re dead.” Naruto had coughed as Iruka’s arms tightened around his chest, hoisting him up higher with his knee. “they’re not just dead, they’re one with the force, which means they can’t even see it! what’s the big deal?”

“it’s disrespectful,” a sigh—long and very much put-upon. “and maybe they can see it.”

Naruto had felt like there was a boiled rock in his mouth, pressed against his teeth and his tongue and his gums. It’d felt like the skin was peeling away from his mouth. “if they could see it, why don’t force ghosts ever, like, visit?”

The pause Iruka had left him with stretched out almost as long as his sigh had, his bootsteps slowing against the marble floor, even as the Council chamber loomed in front of them, it’s doorway shaped like a maw that had no teeth. 

“sometimes,” Iruka had told him, and it had been the most grown up he’d ever sounded, even when he was lecturing to all the younglings in the early morning, his voice low and sad and suddenly very serious, “shitty things just happen, naruto.” It had been a very un-Jedi like thing to say, when all things contain the will and direction of the Force, and Naruto had almost said so, had almost tried to dig himself a grave so that this line of conversation would’ve been able to stop, and so the hole in his gut wouldn’t have felt quite so wide. 

But he hadn’t gotten to that, not before the Council chamber door had opened, giving it’s geriatric, Bothan-looking face teeth for a split-second, revealing the faces of all the Masters, the Grandmaster himself, and a kid who wouldn’t have been any older than he was. His shoulders had looked stiff, the skin on his hands pink and raw from where he’d been scratching at them. The robes he was wearing had been to big for him, the rough fabric pooling at his feet.

He hadn’t been wearing shoes.

But the most noticeable thing had been his eyes, glimpsed only for moment before he’d shut them. They’d been warm and molten, like burning coal, and his presence in the Force had felt like nothing else in the universe, probably. He’d cast the whole room around him in something that felt like moonlight, doubled over—sharp enough to cut through darkness, bright enough to blind if looked at the right way.

Naruto had felt something in his chest shift, and breathing had come easy.

The Force, curled tightly around his bones, had loosened its grip.