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: January 11th 2006, Wednesday
second version: June 17th 2008, Tuesday

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The Bleeding Heart is called Ödesträd (Odestrad) in Swedish, which translates to Tree of Fate, and Clerodendrum thomsoniae in Latin. There is a link to a picture of my Bleeding Heart in my profile.

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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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02: Nothing like home

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Kakashi came strolling some ten minutes later, hands in his pockets, looking like just another lazy Sunday morning. That combined with a soft, content smile and Sasuke suspected there had been more to the cinnamon buns than just cinnamon.

Usually when Sasuke messed up Kakashi’s seduction attempts there was lots of yelling from both sides about things that were and were not relevant to that particular situation. Whether it was a punishment or if Kakashi just wanted an end to the yelling, Sasuke didn’t know, but those yellings always ended with him being kicked out of the apartment with a dinner or midnight curfew, depending on when he was kicked out. It could be that the kicking out part was Kakashi wanting an end to the yelling and the curfew part was the punishment; because those were the only days Sasuke had a time when he had to be home. But there would be no yelling and kicking Sasuke out with a dinner curfew this Sunday, fortunately. Sasuke had a fresh bout of intestine crawling just thinking about spending an entire afternoon out here.

Kakashi stopped by the mailbox and tilted up his head as if he was suddenly terribly interested in the sky. When the interest had faded he gave a sigh of more content and aimed his drug-induced-looking smile at Sasuke.

“That went well.”

“I hate your new flirt,” Sasuke glared back.

“I’m sure he will grow on you,” Kakashi said and came closer again without losing even a fraction of his smile. “Those buns were amazing, you missed something.”

Yes, it sure seemed like Sasuke did. Maybe that was the key to the perfection tainting this place. Homemade desserts spiked with happy drugs. The neighbor blond overdosed, that was why he acted like a retard.

“Just shut up and open the door,” Sasuke muttered and got his feet.

Kakashi reached the door and his smile grew a little less intense, his eyes a bit more concerned.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, open the door.”

“You’re all bloody.”

“Open the door!”

Sasuke missed the yelling. This lack of concern where concern should be and excess of it where should be nothing was making him itchy. He wanted away from the sun, away from this place that wasn’t home. It was easier to pretend he wasn’t here when there were walls around him and blaring music in his ears.

Kakashi’s smile almost disappeared, but the concern stayed in the wrong place. Still no anger, the man almost looked sad; Sasuke should punch him. It was almost worse than the good mood. Without Kakashi taking his eyes off Sasuke, the key was fished out of a pocket and pushed into the lock. It was turned and the lock made a click that sounded nothing like coming home. Sasuke was grateful that he was so angry, otherwise he might have... The door opened and creaked in the wrong places.

“He won’t grow on me,” Sasuke mumbled and slipped past Kakashi to get inside. The flirts only lasted a couple of weeks anyway. Barely enough time for mold to grow on bread.

Sasuke got his shoes off and was on his way away when Kakashi grabbed a hold of his collar.

“Hold on there a moment, moody teenager.”

“Fucking...! Let go of me!”

Kakashi dragged him into the kitchen and neither wriggling nor attempts to kick and throw punches helped. Sasuke was pushed close to the counter, hands bracing against the smooth surface that felt nothing like kitchen counters should feel. He drew in a breath with a hiss when Kakashi pressed a finger against the wound on his back.

“What did you do?” the man mumbled, voice low and soft, concerned.

“I did nothing,” Sasuke muttered, his voice had fallen low too. “That... retard just doesn’t know how to clean his room.”

“Naruto-kun...” Kakashi said his name like ‘remember it’. Poked extra hard at the wound and drew another hissed breath from Sasuke. “...seemed like a nice guy.”

Sasuke threw out a fist at the man’s side but Kakashi dodged without taking his hands off Sasuke. Damned long arms.

“As if you were paying any attention to him,” Sasuke muttered.

“As if you were.”

“I didn’t want to be there.”

“Don’t worry, they noticed.”

Kakashi gripped the edges of Sasuke’s shirt and pulled.

“Off.”

“No.”

“Come on,” Kakashi sighed. Tired. Frustrated. “Just let me bandage you.”

There was something in his voice then that suddenly made it difficult for the anger to flow through Sasuke. It stumbled, wondered what it was doing and felt bad. He tried to tell himself that Kakashi was the bastard and deserved whatever Sasuke threw at him for bringing them out here to this pathetic place, but... the anger kept stumbling. Eventually Sasuke shrugged away from the counter and Kakashi’s hands. It was easy when he wasn’t violent.

“Fine. If you can find the band-aids.”

“I’ll search the bathroom boxes,” Kakashi sighed and walked away.

Sasuke watched his back and then the empty doorway until the rummaging started in the bathroom.

They were still in the middle of unpacking. Moving boxes were everywhere and closets, cupboards, drawers were still appropriately empty. The place was a mess. Whether you wanted to go to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, the front door, there were always boxes and things not yet put in order to step over or around. Sasuke had hit his toes on cardboard corners so many times they should be blue from bruises; but he didn’t want them to be emptied and put away.

Sasuke pulled the shirt over his head, studied the back of it and found a small, newly-poked hole and blood having soaked the fabric around and beneath it. He snarled and tossed the piece of clothing to the floor. A heartbeat later Kakashi came back with band aid and a wet towel. Not waiting to be told, Sasuke sat down at the table; glanced at the crumpled dark blotch on the floor among kitchen moving boxes. He had liked that shirt.

Kakashi sat down behind him and the first dab was cold, the second was welcome. The pressing alternated from harder below the wound, where the blood had trickled on skin, to soft, soft where the plastic gun or spear or whatever the hell it had been had penetrated. The mood calmed as the blood was wiped away.

“Tell me how a messy room caused this,” Kakashi’s voice was soft and there was tentative amusement playing around the edges of it. “Lego?”

Sasuke rolled his eyes. He felt like a weakling for letting a gentle hand lure his frustration away, or at least the need to vent his frustration. ‘Remember whose fault it is you’re here,’ he tried to tell himself, but... It was the middle of the day and he felt tired to the bones.

“Toy robot.”

“A toy robot messed you up?”

“I messed it up back,” Sasuke muttered.

Kakashi chuckled and the band-aid was pressed in place.

“Good for you.”

A soft moment of doing nothing passed and Sasuke could feel Kakashi’s presence. His back was chilled where the moist towel had wandered and the wound throbbed. Then it was over. Kakashi stood and stretched and then he left, saying there were things that wanted to be unpacked.

Sasuke stayed for some more moments, seated at the table, looking at the walls and wanting to rip the ugly wallpaper off them; listening to Kakashi unpacking and wishing he would stop. When he couldn’t take it anymore he went back to the room that was supposed to be his.

He actually liked the room. If he could have cut it out of the house and moved it back to their apartment in the city, he would have loved it. The colors were subdued; dark, but without turning the place into a dungeon; one window faced the backyard and one faced the street. The main reason Sasuke would have loved the room if he could have moved it back home to the city was the built-in CD storage. One of the walls had been transformed into what almost looked like a shrine for music. There was space designed for CDs and LPs and even DVDs and big enough to store a collection three maybe even four times bigger than Sasuke’s; and Sasuke did not have a small collection.

The first time Sasuke saw it he had literally stood staring with his mouth open and he wasn’t embarrassed to admit it; that was how cool the thing was. And that was why the music had been the hardest thing not to unpack. While he missed his stereo, horribly, it was clumsy and neatly packed down and easier to resist. But when he saw all that empty space in the music shrine Sasuke had physically itched to try and see how his collections liked it in there.

Still, so far he had been able to resist. His boxes still stood untouched in the room that he would have loved ‘if only...’ Unpacking meant accepting and Sasuke didn’t want to accept that this was his home now. It wasn’t his home; didn’t matter what Kakashi said. This was only temporary insanity on the man’s part. It had to be.

So Sasuke only took out what he needed when he needed it. Toothbrush, clothes, CDs, portable CD player, headphones, cigarettes. And he always put it back in the boxes again. The room looked like it should look; like it didn’t belong to anyone, especially to Sasuke. It had his furniture, of course; bed, desk, chair. But they had just been pretty much left where the moving crew had set them down; not disarranged enough to be in the way, but enough to look like they hadn’t found their place. There was nothing on the walls and nothing except boxes on the floor. Nothing like the room of the overgrown kid of Kakashi’s latest flirt. And that was a good thing.

The only thing that Sasuke had put in a proper place was the Bleeding Heart. It hadn’t been packed in the first place, so it didn’t break the unspoken no-unpacking rule, and it needed sunlight. He had put it in the window facing the backyard, green leaves perky and soil dark and moist. Sasuke had watered it that morning.

Slipping headphones over his ears and bringing the CD player with him to bed, Sasuke dropped down on the covers. He sighed and closed his eyes and was asleep before the second track had come to an end.

He didn’t wake until Kakashi called him down for dinner, the smell of chicken slithering into his nose as soon as he opened the door to his room. He had no appetite what so ever, the too long afternoon nap having disturbed his stomach even further, but shuffled down the stairs to the kitchen anyway. The nap had only reinforced the state he’d fallen asleep in, meek weakling lured away from the need to vent his frustration and now it was hard to even remember what anger felt like. But for some reason he was still tired.

Sasuke ate only a little and for once Kakashi didn’t nag him about the risks of growing up to be a shrimp adult or an eighty-year-old too weak to grip his own cane.

‘Are you okay for school tomorrow?’ Kakashi had asked when they were doing the dishes.

‘Are you?’ Sasuke had replied without taking his eyes of the suds covered plate he was washing.

Kakashi was a gym teacher. He had told Sasuke that he’d wanted to be a teacher ever since he went to school himself and realized what the teachers were doing when the students had summer, spring, fall or winter break. ‘They’re out getting drunk because they have no students!’ He had later found out that teachers had stuff to do when the students had breaks, but picking an easy subject, like P.E., made that burden easier. According to Kakashi you could get away with almost no real work as a gym teacher.

Sasuke went back to bed after the dishes and brushing his teeth. He tossed and turned for a long time, the knowledge of how to be frustrated crawling a bit closer every time pushed his elbow in the mattress and adjusted his pillow. He wished he had resisted that afternoon nap. He wished he hadn’t brought his last cigarettes to the neighbors.

That overgrown kid had probably thrown them in the trash. Stupid blond. How could you be almost fifteen and still play with robots? Sasuke could understand having models for the sake of just having them, in a case somewhere safe because you collected; but having them on the floor? You only had them on the floor if you played with them and almost fifteen year olds did not do that.

Sasuke wished he could break that damned thing again. His back still throbbed. He grumbled and turned again to face the wall.

Though it wasn’t like the blond hadn’t already showed he was not a normal almost fifteen year old several times over before the robot incident. The drooling, the staring, the overload of energy, the almost yelling, the talking with two cinnamon buns in his mouth, the throwing himself all over people he didn’t know instead of just saying ‘don’t smoke in the house’.

Naruto, was it? Sasuke desperately hoped they were in different schools, or at least different classes. How much of a chance was there that he went to a boarding school for kids with special needs in a different town and only came home on the weekends? Unfortunately, probably as much as there was a chance that the move, this house and the blond himself were all just part of a really bad dream and that Sasuke would wake up in the morning and be home.

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