Crossing The Line

A.N: Hi. This will be a multi-chaptered clusterfuck of unresolved boylove tension that I am currently very much so enjoying. :D Currently there's not much boylove, but if you stick around, you'll be sure to find some creeping up in the approaching chapters.


Crossing The Line

“O-Ow, it hurts,” Sasuke complained, beating the butt of his fist against the wall in some half-hearted attempt at taking out his frustrations on anything but the hands slowly, deviously, purposefully torturing him.

Naruto grunted out a curse beneath his breath, withdrawing a hand only to wipe the sweat from his brow, and then continue his ministrations with gusto. “Don't be a pussy – this is nothing,” he spat, inching closer to get a better hold, tugging relentlessly, as relentlessly as he did everything else.

“Idiot,” Sasuke drew in a breath, resting his forehead against the wall between assaults. “I'd like to see you in this – ow, – position – damn it, – you'd probably piss your – shit!” His head hit the wall a little too hard, cheek smashing up against the textured paint. “…pants.”

The assailant let out a suffering sigh (like he had any right to be upset), and with one final tug, ceased in his torturing and took a step back to review his work. He dusted off his hands superficially. “Too late. Done before,” he said simply. “You act like you haven't been through worse. Of all the times you've gotten nailed in the dick with one of those wooden sword things...”

Sasuke clawed his way up the wall, regaining his posture gradually, panting with how badly his lungs were constricted. He turned, resting his back against the wall, glowering hatefully at Naruto's lackadaisical expression. “You don't normally do kendo in a corset.”


~*~

[Four hours earlier]

“C'mon, Sasuke! It's not that big of a deal!”

Three years of college later, and Uchiha Sasuke still wasn't convinced that Uzumaki Naruto was all there in head.

“I refuse,” he answered easily, digging around in his Chinese takeout with all of its green vegetables and mystery meat, doing his best to pay attention to the slasher movie broadcasting on the flat screen while it remained muted. “And, before you ask 'why', because.”

“...That's retarded,” Naruto griped, flopping back down into the arm chair and doing a great job of pulverizing his fortune cookie that he hadn't even opened. “You, of all people, I thought would be open to this kinda' thing. You're always all, 'durr, I don't care' about everything...”

He barely dodged the pillow lodged at his face, and they both flinched when it connected with a fish bowl on top of a nearby bookcase, sending the glass vessel and its unfortunate passenger on a gravity trip.

“Damn it!” Naruto fought his way off of the cushy armchair, avoiding the shards of glass clumsily and taking up the asphyxiating goldfish by the tail. “Look what you did! I'm not taking the fuckin' rap for this!”

“Shouldn't have talked shit,” Sasuke shrugged, throwing back a kernel of popcorn and watching in dim fascination as his dorm partner dropped the squirming fish into a cup of water. “That's 7-Up, by the way.”

“SHIT!”

Five minutes later, the two of them sat in silence, eyes trained on the television – still muted – and avoiding eye contact. Kiba had returned from his night class and was rambling on animatedly about the girl that had sat next to him, and the way that her shirt was too low for her own good. Normally, Naruto would have joined in on the lewd details, but the situation had become... tense.

“So yeah, I was all, 'hey, sweetie, we should hook up,” Kiba went on, kicking one of Naruto's band t-shirts aside in his miniature tirade. He seemed perfectly capable of carrying on a one-sided conversation. “But then she just looked at me, right? And then she turned to his prissy blonde bitch beside her and started giggling like they were still in high school. I mean, what the hell?”

Sasuke snorted, and then sunk down deeper into his chair. Naruto waved hastily at him, pulling a face full of warning that said, quite clearly, 'shut the hell up or I'll punch you in the nuts'. After a moment, dread sunk in when he realized that Kiba had stopped talking. He tried to appear cool, throwing his arms up behind his head and wriggling back down into the plush leather.

“Hey, wait a minute...”

Sasuke had schooled his face into the perfect disinterested stare, but Naruto was sweating, attempting to ward off the urge to bite his nails in nervousness. His eyes slid to the side, watching in horror as Kiba's shadow grew larger and larger, approaching the debunked fish in its sad little home of cup and tap water on the bookshelf.

He jumped ten feet when an open bag of treats fell into his lap, the soft bacon-flavored biscuits spilling everywhere. “Dude!”

“I told you not feed Akamaru any more of those goddamn treats! He's on a diet!” Kiba barked, stomping around the armchair and standing in the path of the television where a doomed woman was being brutally, gorily, beheaded. “You never fuckin' listen to me, Uzumaki! You want my dog to die of heart failure?”

“Oh!” Naruto laughed sheepishly, sinking further into the chair and purposefully avoiding Sasuke's smug look that was piercing him, like the serrated knife sawing into the woman's throat in the movie, from out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah, man! Sorry 'bout that. He's just too cute, y'know? When he gives you that stupid look, it's just so hard to deny him.”

“Yeah, I guess you're right,” Kiba replied after a moment, anger dissipating into a happy grin. “He is too cute, huh? Maybe I'm being too hard on him...”

Naruto breathed a sigh of relief as the dog-lover strode off dreamily to his room where, surely, he would lavish his snoozing Great Pyrenees with affection. “That... was close.”

“Will you un-mute the TV all ready?” Sasuke grabbed for the remote, but wasn't fast enough, glaring spitefully when Naruto shoved it down his pants. “Real mature.”

“You haven't answered my question!” Naruto snapped.

“You never asked a question.”

“Don't be a smart ass.” Naruto frowned, crossing his arms against his chest and refocusing on the movie where the plot was slowly beginning to draw together, the detective having found the murderer's lair, and was, quite stupidly, going in alone without calling for back-up. “It's only a party, Sasuke. If you don't go with me, I can't get in. How many times have I helped you out in the past?”

“Uh, never?”

“Don't give me that shit. What about when I posed for your art project?”

Sasuke's face crinkled into a disgusted look, clearly put-on but affective as a whole. “That was one of the most disturbing nights of my life.”

Naruto kicked at his chair in retaliation, setting it off a few inches. “Fine! Let me open my book of memories.” He mimed drawing a large book up out of his lap and flipping it open to the very beginning, where he paused for dramatic effect and pointed at an invisible passage. “We were twelve, and I kicked the shit out of that fat kid that was picking on you 'cause of how short you were.”

Sasuke rolled his eyes. “You told him he couldn't fit through the cafeteria door and he chased you around the playground until he lost his breath.”

“Yeah, but did he pick on you anymore?”

“His mom made him change schools because he was being bullied by some little blond deviant named Naruto,” he smirked.

Naruto's face grew flushed. “I hate you.”

“Why do you want to go to a drag party so bad?” Sasuke asked after a moment of letting the embarrassment stew, and frankly, wasn't too sure if he really wanted the answer to that question.

“Dude, it's like – you don't even know,” Naruto started with a burst of excitement. “It's not even that it's a drag party, man. You know how long I've been collecting raffle tickets, right? And the party's annual, yeah? They have this thing where the tickets you buy are still good the year after, and the year after, even if you don't win. It's for publicity and all, to get people to come back.” He turned and leaned his forearm against the arm of the chair, eyes wide with enthusiasm. “If you're over twenty-one, the prize is twenty-five grand. Under, and it goes into a scholarship!”

It dawned on Sasuke, finally, the reason behind his dorm partner's insistence. He recalled an angry phone conversation he'd listened in on by accident last week, with Naruto and the social security office. They were cutting off his financial aid at the end of term, something about catching up with his late mother's tax evasion...

How unrefined. You'd think they would have worked out all of the kinks in the system before getting an aspiring college kid's hopes up.

“Fine,” he said, and let his head fall into his hand.

“Seriously, Sasuke! What do I have to do to make you—... 'fine'?” Naruto blinked, slack-jawed. “...That's it? 'Fine'?”

“Fine,” Sasuke repeated, peeking out from between his fingers sourly. “Don't make me repeat myself again or I might change my mind.”

“Sasuke!”

The ensuing hug, more like strangulation, knocked the breath out of him, Naruto's toned arms far too strong their own good, all of his lean muscle falling like a lead block on top of him. “Jesus!”

“God, I could make out with you right now!” Naruto shouted gleefully, planting a kiss right in the middle of his head. Sasuke knew better than to struggle, and sat there pitifully, taking the abuse like the man that he, most certainly, was.

“Get a fucking room!” A pillow came flying out of Kiba's opened bedroom door, followed by raucous laughter when Naruto went bombarding into the room and, by the sound of it, had started an impromptu wrestling match.

Sasuke almost felt bad for whomever lived below them, and was quite mystified as to why they hadn't been kicked out of the building by now with all of the warning notices they'd found tacked to their door. He... almost felt bad.

Instead, he had better things to do. These better things involved sliding his fingers through his hair and mussing up the spot some great idiot had put his lips on, frowning all the while. He then leaned over the arm of the chair, snagged the remote control off of the floor, and un-muted the television to the frenzied shrieks of the final scenes, the detective having been foiled by her own audacity.

Somehow, he felt all of these things could be related – bad omens, even – but when had that ever stopped him from following along with Naruto's idiotic schemes? He liked being there, right at the end, to watch him fail. It was much easier to poke at a fresh purple bruise than a yellowing one that you couldn't find for the life of you.

“Please! Please, don't kill me! God, please!” the Detective was screaming, clawing at her restraints. “I have so much to live for! Please! I have a daughter! I still wanna' see the Gulf Coast!”

“You and me both,” Sasuke said to no one in particular, and turned off the DVD player.