Almost Sucks

Almost Sucks
by Mashiro

Naruto fandom, series, no spoilers
AU, BOYS LOVE: Naruto x Sasuke, Kakashi x Iruka, Lee x Gaara

first version: April 7th 2006, Friday
second version: August 5th 2008, Tuesday

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DISCLAIMER: I don’t own the rights to the Naruto series or characters and I make no money writing this. I’m just a fan. This is fan fiction.

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16: Missing future brides and the weather

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Iruka was a weather report freak. He loved watching the weather reports and he loved planning his life according to what he heard. No trips on supposedly rainy days, leaving the umbrella home if the guy on TV said it would be sunny. He was even prepared to reschedule the trips to the supermarket if he got a bad forecast, preferring to give Naruto an umbrella and send him to the nearby store to buy the most necessary stuff if it rained. Iruka hated when the bags and groceries got wet. Once, during a long period of rainy days, they had been forced to drive to the supermarket anyway and Iruka had cursed all the way, from home to home again, and been driving like a maniac.

Naruto didn’t care about weather reports; he didn’t even care much about the weather. You could do nothing about it and it wasn’t like you wouldn’t find out on your own eventually. Besides, the reports seemed to be wrong as much as they were right. Very pointless. He supposed it could have something to do with Iruka being obsessed with them; a reaction to balance things out.

So it was only because of Iruka that Naruto knew that the weather report guy had been threatening with rain since Sasuke got sick. Because he didn’t care about the weather or what people said about it, he tried his best to ignore the dark clouds that loomed in the horizon; but it was difficult. The threat of rain felt like a bad omen, and it encouraged the part of Naruto’s brain that whined about there being something seriously wrong with Sasuke.

Naruto had had a troublesome week. One day (hour, minute) he was convinced Sasuke was just faking, the other he worried so much that he wondered if Iruka had suddenly rubbed off on him.

It was insanely silly, of course, thinking the weather could have something to do with Sasuke’s health, but he just couldn’t let it go. ‘How else would the sky let you know if it knew?’ his weirdo brain said and it feared the day it would actually start raining. If dark clouds were the warning then the rain would be the real bad stuff. If dark clouds were Sasuke being sick, then rain would have to be... No!

‘No, you stupid brain,’ Naruto snarled in his head and kicked himself under the desk when his stupid brain wandered during class. ‘The weather has nothing to do with Sasuke!’

Still, when on early Monday morning a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder that rattled the windows woke Naruto up, he screamed. When he stopped screaming and could hear the pouring rain, he threw off his comforter, rushed out of the room, flew down the stairs and made it to the kitchen in what must have been record time. In his boxers.

“Iruka! Where is Sasuke’s number?”

Naruto didn’t look at the man, only noted him at the table as he ran toward the fridge and its collection of notes, schedule and photographs. They always put new numbers on the fridge.

Iruka said something in reply, but Naruto was too busy looking. His eyes flew over the papers, trying to find one with a number and something like ‘Sasuke’ or ‘Kakashi’ or ‘new neighbors’, but all he found were numbers with names he didn’t recognize.

“I can’t find it,” Naruto moaned. “Don’t we have it? We have to have it!”

Shopping list, parent-teacher meetings schedule, photo of him and Iruka on horseback in the mountains, a recipe with ‘Friday’ written in big, bold and underlined letters. But no ‘Sasuke’.

There came a sigh right behind Naruto and an arm reached over his shoulder and snatched one of the notes.

“Ah,” Naruto turned. “Ah!”

He reached for it but Iruka held it away.

“Naruto,” the man said firmly.

“Come on! Give it to me, I have to call him!” Naruto jumped after the note.

“Naruto!” Iruka’s voice rose and Naruto managed with some struggle to stop jumping, his feet pacing in one place. “Have you had breakfast?”

“No, but I just...!”

“Have you brushed your teeth?”

“No! I just need to...!” Naruto gasped and stopped pacing as the idea struck him. “I’ll run!”

Iruka grabbed him in mid-leap however.

“If you think I will let you run practically naked through half the neighborhood to bother our neighbors at five in the morning you need to do some more thinking.”

Alright, so it did seem a bit silly if you put it that way, especially when you remembered that Sasuke and the weather were completely unrelated. And you did, once the initial panic wore off. Grumbling Naruto went back up the stairs, cursing his spontaneous and overdramatic self as he picked yesterday’s clothes off the floor and smelled them to see if they could be worn again today.

The curtain of water rushing toward the ground outside made the early morning world seem grey and blurry. Who cared about stupid rain? Naruto didn’t.

Five in the morning. Sasuke wouldn’t be up for hours; didn’t even know it was raining. What had he planned to say to the bastard anyway? He hadn’t planned anything. Naruto felt like an idiot.

“I made you some hot chocolate,” Iruka said when Naruto came back into the kitchen, the sternness gone from his voice as quickly as it had come. The very air felt like five in the morning, somehow different from seven in the morning air.

“Okay,” Naruto mumbled. Then he stopped and frowned when he saw the fridge. The notes and schedules and photographs were gone and it made the thing look whiter and it stood out more than it should. Iruka was sorting through its former decorations on the counter. He had left a cup on the table Naruto noticed.

“There… is no fresh bread,” Iruka said without turning. “But I think there’s still some left from yesterday.”

“What have you done?”

“Hm?” Iruka looked over his shoulder as Naruto started walking again, towards him. “Oh, this? I’ve been wanting to clean it up this mess for ages, just never got around to it. What do you think?”

“It looks sterile.”

Iruka frowned, looked at the empty, white surface. Naruto pulled open the fridge and took out butter and cheese.

“Really?”

There was a hint of hurt in his voice and in his eyes too when Naruto closed the fridge door again. Naruto didn’t think it was just the fridge though.

Iruka had been a bit distant and... well, off, lately. Naruto had thought that maybe he was worried that he was somehow responsible for Sasuke getting sick, since he had been with them during the weekend. Iruka should be more reasonable than that, but he was a bit sensitive when it came to both guests and neighbors. ‘You don’t invite people over if you’re not prepared to be nice to them,’ he used to say, and Naruto had been told thousands of times that the worst enemies you could make were your neighbors. ‘So don’t you do that ever again!’ ‘That’ had been a lot of things over the years.

“Maybe if you just put up some stuff,” Naruto tried and shrugged. “It was really messy before.”

“Yeah,” Iruka said thoughtfully.

He picked a couple of photos and what looked like a schedule from the counter and tried it. Naruto found yesterday’s bread and brought it to the table along with the rest of the breakfast things. The hot chocolate Iruka had made for him was still steaming and smelled morning.

“You’re never up at five, are you?” Naruto said, glancing at the clock and then at Iruka.

“How do you know?” The man said, still focusing on the fridge decorations. “You’re never up at five.”

“Come on,” Naruto rolled his eyes. “Five?”

“When do you think I baked that bread you’re eating?”

“Yesterday?” Naruto said and raised a brow. “At six? Besides, you had already been up a while when I got here because your tea was cold. There was no smoke. You don’t get up at four, do you?”

Iruka turned, frowning.

“How did you notice that? And it’s steam.”

“I notice,” Naruto scrunched his nose. “And whatever, you get it.”

Iruka was silent for a moment and then went back to moving the two photos around.

“Alright,” he said. “So I couldn’t sleep. Why were you up at five?”

“The storm woke me up,” Naruto said. He glanced out at the roaring curtain of rain and fiddled with his bread. A lightning flashed and a few moments afterwards the thunder rumbled.

Iruka sighed and left the photographs one over the other to the left of the schedule. He started boiling some more water for tea. He looked tired and Naruto wondered how long he had been up.

Yesterday’s bread. Naruto couldn’t really tell the difference between today’s bread and yesterday’s bread, but it did matter to Iruka. He wanted to bake bread every morning and have it ready by breakfast. It wasn’t like a rule he had made up (he had a few of those), he just did it because he liked baking. It helped him to relax, he said. ‘It’s my yoga’.

And today it was yesterday’s bread.

“Are you okay?” Naruto asked when Iruka sat down at the table, cup of hot tea, complete with steam rising from it, in his hands.

“Yeah,” Iruka said and took a slice of bread from the basket. He had brought some lettuce and cucumber to healthy up things with. They were out of tomatoes.

“You’re up before five and you cleaned the fridge.”

“I told you I couldn’t sleep,” Iruka said. “I remembered what a mess the fridge was when you were looking for your number and decided to do it before I forgot.”

“Are you worrying about something again?”

“No,” Iruka protested. “Just... Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“What happened to talking?” Naruto muttered.

“I’m sorry,” Iruka looked genuinely sorry. He hesitated, chewed on his lip. “There’s just... this... man.”

Naruto stopped chewing. There was a soft blush on Iruka’s cheeks.

“A-As I said, it’s nothing you need to worry about, it’s...”

“No, that’s okay,” Naruto swallowed his bread and shook his head. “What man? Are you... like dating?”

“Well... Maybe. Possibly,” Iruka sighed. “We were dating. Now I don’t know. We... had a fight.”

“About what?”

“About... trust. I think.”

It sounded very grownup to Naruto’s ears.

“Is it anyone I know?” he asked.

“No,” Iruka said. “Not... really.”

Naruto nodded.

He wasn’t an idiot, he knew that Iruka was dating. Sometimes. They had very rarely come to the house, but... of course he had to be dating. He also knew that Iruka preferred to date guys, or men, Naruto supposed. It didn’t bother him. Definitely not now, with Sasuke, but it hadn’t bothered him before Sasuke either; not even before Lee and Gaara. They didn’t really talk about it though. Who wanted to know who or how their parents were dating anyway? Unless they were serious or came to the house.

“Why were you in such a hurry to call Sasuke-kun?” Iruka asked, changing the subject. Naruto was grateful to leave the old one, but not too thrilled about the new subject Iruka had picked.

“I don’t know,” Naruto shrugged. “I just wanted to call and see if he would be in school today.”

The first part was truer than the second, but the second was the only not weird reason he could come up with. ‘Because part of my brain is a weather idiot’ wouldn’t have gone over so well.

“Are you getting along better now?” Iruka asked. “You can call him later.”

“Yeah,” Naruto said, though he wasn’t sure if it was an answer to Iruka’s question or a ‘yeah, I’ll call later’. Either way it was a strange answer. He didn’t know if he wanted to call later and he really didn’t know if he and Sasuke got along better now.

Naruto had been to Sasuke’s house every day after school since he got sick to bring him homework and not seen him once. Kakashi-san had opened the door every time, cheerful and friendly, thanking for the homework, asking how Naruto was doing and saying Sasuke was still sick, but okay. When Naruto had asked if he could see him, Kakashi-san had said that he was sleeping or that he needed rest. Naruto hadn’t bothered going over when weekend came and he lost his homework delivery excuse. He wanted to see Sasuke, not Kakashi-san.

It felt strangely weird, not seeing Sasuke or hearing from him for such a long time. It made Naruto wonder about what he had been doing or focused on before Sasuke had moved into his life. It seemed now that if you took Sasuke away there was nothing left. So many things that had happened and had been thought about lately had something to do with Naruto’s surly new neighbor and future bride.

Not seeing him or hearing from him also made things seem like a dream, sort of like Sasuke didn’t exist at all. Had he even come here at all? Was Kakashi-san just joking and the bed where he said that Sasuke was sleeping was actually empty?

‘Of course it’s not empty, you stupid brain!’ Naruto mentally kicked his paranoid, silly head glob when it started thinking like that, but it was stubborn and kept bringing the thought up again and again.

Naruto had thought about climbing the walls of Sasuke’s house and sneaking in through the window, like in that dream. Nothing dirty, just to see him. But he was sure that Sasuke wouldn’t like that. He had said nothing about watching that night when Naruto almost ended up getting castrated, but Naruto was sure he wouldn’t like it.

And what happened if Sasuke for some reason (maybe he was getting dressed or admired himself in the mirror) was naked when Naruto reached the window? He could be so shocked that he fell and died. Not good. The joy of having something so amazing as the last thing he saw would surely drown in the disappointment of dying before he had a chance to really touch.

Naruto didn’t want to call anymore. At the same time as he did want to call. He wanted Sasuke to like him. He wanted to know that Sasuke liked him.

Sometimes Naruto thought that maybe he was completely misjudging the whole thing. Maybe Sasuke didn’t fake-hate him; maybe he wasn’t faking at all. When those thoughts showed up Naruto mentally kicked his brain again. He wanted to be not so confused.

He wanted to kiss Sasuke again, talk to him on the bus and avoid seeing him naked in the showers after P.E.

Iruka handed a wrinkled note to Naruto over the table, sincerely smiling. It had a number and said ‘Kakashi and Sasuke’.

“Wait until seven, okay?”

Naruto smiled too.

“Okay.”

-

Even though he didn’t really know what to say, or if he would even get to speak with Sasuke, Naruto called. He was nervous, his stomach swirled, but he waited patiently while the beeps sounded. After three there was a click and Naruto’s heart jumped.

“Good morning to you! Hatake Kakashi of the Hatake Kakashi and Uchiha Sasuke residence, how may I be of service?”

“Ah...”

If Naruto had known what to say, he was fairly sure that he would have forgotten it. He thought he heard a muffled voice in the background grumbling something. Probably something obscene, because Naruto had a feeling it was his future bride.

“He... Hello! This is Uzumaki Naruto,” Naruto swallowed quickly. “Can I talk to Sasuke?”

“Tsunade!” Kakashi-san laughed. “Yes, yes, but you know I can’t help myself. It drives the moody teenager crazy.”

Naruto frowned. Then he tried again.

“Um… No, this is…”

“You want to talk to him? Of course, of course. He’s got his mouth full of whole wheat toast at the moment but just hang on a second, he’ll be right with you.”

“Kakashi-san?”

“Got to go, my breakfast wants me. Good to hear from you, bye!”

“Ah…” Naruto tried again but he heard the receiver hit some surface and feet march off. A cheerful ‘it’s for you!’ came from Kakashi-san and a muttered ‘stupid bastard’ could be heard from Sasuke.

Naruto realized he hadn’t heard Sasuke’s voice in over a week; hadn’t seen his face. Hadn’t… But now a chair scraped against floor and feet shuffled closer.

Would he have to kick himself for real if he hung up? What if the seconds he had left wasn’t enough to find anything good to say and he ended up proposing?

Wait... Hadn’t he already done that? Or was there a difference between proposing and sharing wedding plans?

Could you throw up if you got too nervous? Why was he nervous anyway? It was just the frustrating Sasuke-bastard. The worst thing that could happen was that he hung up and he had done that plenty of times before live, by turning his back and walking away.

He’s alive! The rain didn’t kill him!

‘Of course not, you stupid brain!’

It crackled in Naruto’s ear as the receiver was picked up.

“Hey.” Sasuke said and sighed. “Sorry about that, you know how he is.”

“Um… Sasuke?”

It was quiet for a moment, except for Naruto’s heart rattling his ribcage.

“Naruto?”

“Yeah, but don’t hang up!”

Sasuke sighed again and there was a ‘bastard’ mingled with his breath, aimed away from the receiver.

“What do you want?”

“I… Ah… I was just…”

“Because I need to get back to my breakfast.”

“Just wait, are… Are you alright now? I mean, you’re not sick anymore?”

Sasuke sighed.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Really?”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Will you be in school today?” Naruto hurried to say.

“Yeah. Bye.”

“Ah, so I’ll see you on the bus? Because you know, it’s Monday, so the grannies will invade and, well… You know.”

There was silence again and seconds passed; though Naruto could have sworn he could hear Sasuke breathe through the no-sound.

“I don’t like you, okay?”

There was something in the way Sasuke said it and it brought a grin to Naruto’s face that was so large his cheeks hurt.

“Yeah,” he said.

His eyes almost blurred.

It sounded like Sasuke shifted, like he was flustered or didn’t know where to go.

“Right,” he said. “Bye.”

“Bye,” Naruto said.

Sasuke hung up.

Naruto couldn’t stop smiling.

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