Constellations (complete)

Just a quick note to send my most sincere thanks, and a HUG to DayDreamer79 and JtheChosen1. I had a minor meltdown and they stepped in and supported me. JtheChosen1, your last review made me laugh out loud, you are a gem! Thank you. (I wish I could send you a note, but I can’t remember your name on y!gallery.)

Anyway, on with the show…

Warning…more orphan fluffiness…(sigh…I’m a sucker for children, probably has to do with all the estrogen running through my system and the fact that I’m getting closer and closer to having to replace my children with cats)

+++

The Twinkle sisters sent a message to Naruto. Their whole house was in an upset.

It seemed that, in some circles, word was spreading that Naruto would likely be the next Hokage. There was a sudden interest in the orphanage as a few shrewd, forward-thinking people realized that these orphans would be the Hokage’s favored children. Two families had shown up looking to adopt a child and their only criterion was which ones Naruto liked best.

No one had shown interest before and the group had been enjoying living as a family for several years. The idea of being separated from each other upset everyone.

So the sisters had talked and wondered if Naruto would help them adopt all the children currently in residence at the orphanage.

Naruto had been so excited and had worked with Tsunade to put the necessary paperwork in place to continue his financial support until the children were grown. Sasuke had gone a step further and offered a building within the Uchiha neighborhood that they could make their home.

They were visiting the sisters with this offer when they noticed that Jomei was obviously unhappy.

"The sisters tell me that you’re going to be a family," Naruto said to Jomei as the three males sat halfway up the tallest tree on the property.

"Yeah," he said unenthusiastically.

Naruto and Sasuke looked at each other, neither sure how to proceed in light of the boy's sullen answer.

After several moments, Jomei looked at Sasuke. "Where did you go when you ran away? What was it like?"

Sasuke felt slightly sick at the thought of this small boy running away. "You don't want to stay here? Be part of the family?"

Jomei shrugged. "They want me to."

After a couple of minutes of silence during which Naruto and Sasuke looked at each other, one silently asking the other if he understood, anxiety filled Jomei’s face. "They said I would be the man of the family."

"I see," Sasuke said, although he really didn't.

After another minute, Jomei spoke again. "Do I have to get a job? And fight mean guys?"

In his relief, Sasuke put his arm around the boy's shoulders. "When they asked you to be the man of the family, they didn't mean the father. They meant a brother."

That didn't seem to make the boy feel any better.

Naruto said, "You know families can have many men. Maybe I could be one in yours?"

Jomei's face lit. Relief was clear in his expression, so Naruto continued, pulling a scroll out of his weapons pouch.

"I’ll take care of the job part and the mean guys and, for anything else, I'll give you this." He performed some hand seals and all three watched as a glow surrounded the rolled up paper for several seconds and then faded. "Every time you open this, a clone will appear to help you when I can't be here."

Jomei took the scroll and looked as though he might cry with relief.

"May I give you one, too? Be a part of your family?" Sasuke asked. He didn't think the boy would ever call on him over Naruto, but felt a need to be a part of this.

Jomei cocked his head and studied Sasuke for a moment, then held his hand out.

That very evening, Naruto found Sasuke standing on the porch staring at the ground, distracted.

"What's up?"

"Jomei called my clone."

"Really?"

Sasuke replayed the encounter for Naruto.

After locking himself in the bathroom, Jomei enrolled Sasuke's scroll.

"Is it hard to be a brother?" he asked as they sat on the tile, cross legged, facing each other.

"It's the easiest thing there is. Like breathing or blinking."

Jomei just looked at him.

"You know, nothing’s changing. You've been a brother all along. When you hold Sari's hand as she walks down the steps. When you read to the boys. When you pull Mei's hair and hide her brush. Those are the things brothers do," Sasuke's clone continued. "What’s important to remember is that, no matter what, this family will always love you."

After several minutes of silence, Jomei spoke again.

"Your brother killed your family, didn't he?"

Sasuke's clone nodded.

"Do you still love him?"

"Yes. I wish I understood what he did, but yes, I still do."

Jomei called Sasuke's clones several times over the next few weeks. As it turned out, Jomei felt a connection to Sasuke because they both had lost their families at about the same age. He saw Sasuke living a happy life after the loss and had endless questions about how Sasuke had gotten there, about how to move on.

Several times, Naruto found Sasuke with his eyes rimmed in red.

“Do you want me to ask him to stop calling you?”

“No!” Sasuke answered quickly.

Each time Jomei called on him, he thought of his own brother and the relationship they’d had. The Uchiha boys had been so close to each other up until the very morning of the massacre.

What he was developing with Jomei was a shadow of that, but even so, he couldn’t imagine taking the road Itachi had taken.

And because he would never harm the small boy or his family, the doubts that had been growing inside him firmed. Was he so different from his brother, or was there more to Itachi’s story?

He was surprised to find that these doubts, instead of frustrating him, were giving him peace. For years, when he took the evidence at face value, the world had seemed insane, and unfair, and unreliable.

Maybe, though, he just didn’t have all the information and in fact, the world did still make sense and family could be counted on.

The only downside that Sasuke could see to this double duty he was pulling as both Naruto’s family as well as Jomei’s, was the new nickname that Naruto had for him.

“I am not a fucking marshmallow,” Sasuke snapped.

“Okay,” Naruto said, smiling gently as he pressed his lips to Sasuke’s brow.

+++

Sakura found them in the forest again.

As she crept up on them she was inordinately pleased to see that they were both completely clothed and that Naruto was flat on his back. Sasuke had his knee on Naruto’s chest and his palm on the blond forehead. Naruto attempted to raise his head but Sasuke growled and shoved it back onto the ground.

She flushed and her breath caught when Sasuke straddled Naruto and used his other hand to free his erection. He leaned down until it brushed Naruto’s lips.

“Suck!”

Naruto clamped his lips together.

“Open up now!” Sakura could feel Sasuke’s chakra levels rise threateningly from where she sat.

Naruto barely had his lips apart when Sasuke flexed his hips and thrust. The blond narrowed his eyes and Sakura saw the whites of his teeth.

Sasuke gripped the blond hair and growled again. “Bite me and I’ll Chidori your ass from here to next Tuesday.”

Naruto must have relented because Sasuke resumed thrusting. The prone teen struggled slightly and coughed a couple of times as Sasuke thrust past his gag reflex, but the brunette didn’t seem to care about Naruto’s comfort or lack thereof. He just pumped his hips and jerked the head in his hands in a quick rhythm.

Finally the blond whimpered and thrust his own hips.

“I’m busy here. Take care of yourself.” Naruto closed his eyes and reached into his own pants. He began stroking himself and his moans joined Sasuke’s harsh panting.

After several minutes of grunting and snarling, Sasuke pulled out of Naruto’s mouth. He yanked the blond head forward with one hand and stroked himself to completion with the other, shooting strings of white fluid all over the whiskered face in his grasp.

Sakura watched as Naruto finished his own ministrations and the two poofed out of the clearing.

She sat back in contemplation. What she had just witnessed was crude, violent and from her vantage point, without feeling.

Certainly she had been aware of encounters like this over the years; more than she cared to, in fact. But she acknowledged that she was in a male world, and more, a male world built on a foundation of violence.

Actually there was damned little tenderness to be found. She and Ino had shed many tears together as they despaired of ever living the stuff of their teenage girl daydreams. Certainly none of the males of her acquaintance seemed remotely capable of filling these fantasies.

Except Sasuke, of course. He’d always been different. She could never recall him being crass or insensitive to her female sensibilities. Of course she had not seen him in years, but could not imagine him taking a piss in her presence, or talking about his sexual conquests in front of her as if she wouldn’t mind hearing a spirited debate about the virtues of a blow job over a tight pussy.

But now she began to get an inkling that maybe Sasuke was, in some ways, a real guy after all. And maybe real guys needed other guys on whom they could vent their baser urges, allowing them to treat their women with more tenderness.

She admitted to herself that having Sasuke yank her head around by the hair, fucking her mouth until she choked and then coming all over her face had no appeal. It certainly wasn’t an act of love, or even, for that matter, of affection. That much was abundantly clear in the encounter she had just witnessed.

She assured herself that if she gave Sasuke the time to take out whatever aggression he harbored, probably rooted in his relationship with Itachi, on the idiot blond, it wouldn’t be long before he was free of his demons and would desire the softness a woman, namely Sakura, could provide.

+++

Naruto and Sasuke leaned side by side against the largest tree, sharing a canteen of water.

Sasuke had his head back against the bark while Naruto used a small twig to scratch light spirals into the dry skin of his thigh.

"You gonna tell me?"

Sasuke sighed and tilted his head in Naruto’s direction. He shrugged, knowing it was useless to tell his friend that there was nothing to tell.

Naruto nodded. "It's okay either way. But I want you to know that there's nothing you can tell me that’ll make me..." He lifted one shoulder.

“Itachi’s closer.”

Naruto nodded. He had felt the other Uchiha signature that morning as well. The silence returned for another couple of minutes.

"What if," Sasuke tried to clear the tightness in his throat, "what if I don't want to kill him anymore?"

Naruto lifted one shoulder. "Then don't."

"It's just that, what I really want is..." He hesitated.

"Answers?" Naruto supplied.

"How did you know that?"

"It's what I'd want." Naruto shrugged. "None of it makes any sense. I remember what you had with him. He was devoted to you. I'd want to know what could make a devoted brother do what he did."

Sasuke had turned and was leaning sideways on the trunk of the tree, facing his companion. "I really thought he was. Devoted that is. It was like a switch was flipped.”

He moved again and was now pulling blades of grass from the ground one at a time. “What happened to him? And why did he really leave me alive? To kill him? What sense does that make? If he wants to be dead, he certainly doesn’t need me to accomplish it. What if...what if it's all wrong and there's stuff I don't know. Maybe something terrible happened to him. Hell, maybe he didn’t really even do it."

Naruto leaned his head back. "So what do you want to do?"

"Talk to him." Pale hands tried to stab the blades back into the ground. "Maybe I was just too young and remember wrong and he always was just an evil, insane bastard. But maybe there's something more."

He turned to his friend, hands up in supplication. "I don't have anyone else to ask."

Naruto joined their right hands, twining their fingers and pulled Sasuke to lean back against his chest.

"Then we'll find a way to talk to him."

+++

Sakura wondered if it was the outdoor air that made these two fuck like rabbits in the forest.

The two were rolling around on the ground in the woods again. Naruto had a split lip; Sasuke’s shirt was in shreds hanging off of one arm.

Finally the two were naked. Sasuke was straddling the blond, pinning his hands over his head. He was saying something, but Sakura was too far away to hear it. Then he bent down and licked the drops of blood on Naruto’s lip. That became a kiss. And then another kiss, and then Sasuke slid down until he was lying along the full length of the body beneath him.

Sakura was transfixed as she watched the scene, somehow different this time.

Naruto rolled until Sasuke was beneath him, keeping their mouths together. He tilted his head, deepening the kiss, moaning as slender fingers tangled in his hair.

Sasuke pulled his legs from under Naruto and wrapped them around the firm ass. He arched his back trying to deepen their connection. “Do it.” He ground up into the hard flesh of the other male. “Now.”

Naruto moved to put fingers in his mouth, but found himself on his back again. “No, now.”

And with that Sasuke slid down, coated the hard length with saliva and then slid back up and impaled himself onto the shaft between his thighs. He gasped and threw his head back. “I need you now.”

He rode Naruto for several strokes, watching ecstasy transform the beloved face below him. Then he leaned again, rolling himself to the bottom.

“Make the world go away.”

Naruto thrust slowly, his eyes locked with Sasuke’s. Then he drew his knees up under him, sat up and pulled Sasuke up into his arms. He grabbed the muscled flanks, his fingers digging into the taut cheeks of the pale ass. He moved the hips in his hands in a tight, controlled, rolling motion, single mindedly looking for just that angle that would swamp his beloved in exquisite sensation.

Finally, when Sasuke was a quivering, moaning mass, hovering on the brink of release, a blond clone appeared, kneeling into the pale back. The clone wrapped his arms around Sasuke from behind and leaned him back into his chest, not breaking the other connection. He rubbed his palms up and down the hard torso, while Naruto brought chakra to his hands. When he had the color and quantity that he wanted, he reached both hands down to the hard length between them. He placed one hand high and one low and watched with greedy eyes as Sasuke arched his back and cried out. Naruto kept a gentle motion until his lover was slumped against his clone.

Sasuke opened his eyes and moved them sluggishly to the tanned face at his neck. Then he grasped the back of the clone’s neck and pressed their mouths together.

Naruto’s eyes widened and his gut clenched. Watching his lover lazily tangle tongues with the clone was the most erotic thing he’d ever seen and his balls tightened almost painfully as his orgasm hit him like a bolt of lightning.

After several minutes of gentle petting, the clone leaned forward, pushing Sasuke into the arms of the original. Naruto and Sasuke were both swaying unsteadily, so he put his arms around them both for several seconds. Sasuke’s head was on Naruto’s shoulder and both were gazing at the clone, their eyes unfocused. Being Naruto for all intents and purposes, he was drawn to the pair and leaned in and lazily kissed each one before poofing out of existence.

Sasuke finally leaned back slightly, his arms around a strong neck.

“You make me happy.”

Naruto’s smile outshone the sun.

“And I’d give my last drop of blood to see you smile like that everyday.” Sasuke ran a finger across Naruto’s smiling lips.

“Live with me,” he said after a moment.

“I already do.”

“No. Live with me always.” He nuzzled his cheek against the whisker marks of his lover. “Stay with me after the six months are up. Be my lover, my friend, my family. Help me make that house our home. Stay. Forever.

“I love you.” He pressed his lips to Naruto’s then whispered again, “Stay.”

Naruto buried his face in Sasuke’s neck.

Sakura had unconsciously crept close enough to hear this exchange. There was no mistaking it now. She didn’t know how Naruto had done it, but it seemed that Sasuke was in love with him.

Her heart lying in a million pieces in her breast, she bolted from the scene and fled, across Konoha, over the gates and beyond the surrounding forest. She didn’t know where she was going; she just knew that she needed to run.

Because her chakra was still invisible, no one in all of Konoha knew she’d left.

+++

Naruto laughed out loud at his handiwork. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d pulled a prank and this one was a dandy; Sasuke was going to have a coronary.

This would teach Sasuke to just open his house to Naruto and tell him to treat it as his home. With the help of thirty clones, nearly every paintable surface in the house was an aneurysm-inducing shade of orange. And after a quick rummage through the box of things from his apartment, the bedding and the rug were also orange.

Suddenly he heard Sasuke coming down the hall. He flung himself onto the bed and tried to look as though he was nonchalantly flipping through a book.

The door slid open and Naruto turned a page. “Hey bastard. What’s up?”

“Not much.” Sasuke strode in and stopped at the bedside. “Whatcha been up to?”

“Oh, nothing. You?” Naruto said, suppressing his snickers.

“Nothing much.” Sasuke said. “New picture frame?”

He picked up Naruto’s photo of team seven, the frame of which was a retina searing orange.

Naruto bit the inside of his cheek and flipped another page. “No.”

“Something’s different,” Sasuke said as he reached over, turned Naruto’s book right side up and replaced it in the orange splattered hands. “New haircut?”

“Aw, you’re no fun.”

Sasuke crawled onto the mattress and slid his hand into the front of Naruto’s pants. “I’m not?”

“Ok, well, you’re actually lots of fun.” Naruto tossed the book aside and slid into a prone position. Sasuke moved to straddle him and then aligned their groins. Naruto hardened under him immediately.

“I’ll change the house back later,” he said in a husky growl as his hands worked their way under Sasuke’s shirt.

“Only if you want to.” Sasuke pulled Naruto’s shirt over his head. “I only see one thing when I’m in here with you.”

“You’re such a romantic fucker.” Naruto grinned.

“You just bring out the romantic,” he whispered against Naruto’s lips, “and the fucker, in me.”

Later, when Sasuke woke from an ejaculate-induced doze, he turned to find his blond sprawled on his stomach, his legs tangled in so much hideous orange.

He couldn’t help but smile as he sifted silky blond strands through his fingers. He couldn’t remember ever feeling such eagerness to see what each day would bring. Naruto, unpredictable, effervescent, exhilarating and hotter than a fucking Ryūka no Jutsu, brought so much, well, life, into his life.

People thought Uchihas understood fire, but Sasuke had known nothing of fire until Naruto filled his life with it. Each day burned bright and hot. And each morning brought a brand new, wondrous landscape.

As he looked around at the orange walls, he knew that even if they put the room back exactly as it had been, Naruto had send his personal ghosts screaming into the night.