Learning the Ropes

ZOMG angst! And some language. And Neji being a slut. And some sake. Basically a smutless, plotty

chapter. (Even numbered chps are plot - sowwies)



Disclaimer: Don’t own Naruto or any of its characters. *Nods to Masashi Kishimoto*







“Where are my clothes?” Sasuke asked, as Neji followed him from the washroom back into the bedroom.



Neji indicated the bureau with a wave and Sasuke found his uniform neatly folded in the

uppermost drawer.



Neji watched him dress. “So you’re leaving then?”



Sasuke shrugged. “I didn’t want to assume...”



“That I’d want you to stay? Well, it is raining.”



Sasuke ignored Neji, lost in thought, as he busied himself with the fasteners on the front of his ANBU jacket. As Neji stood by at a distance, Sasuke decided he didn’t like this detente. Not at all. First the shower and now this awkward exchange. Neji had hardly touched him since he’d pulled him from his knees. He’d even waved away the honorific address that Sasuke used for him. It was as if little by little he was slipping out of his role. The mildness and the normality of it was too much, a disorienting transition from the fantastic to the mundane, like coming off a high to find your own shadow where you saw the devil before.



Their play was over, Sasuke realized. That brittle reality forced him to note for the first time how easily he’d lost sight of the simple fact that it was a play and that there were real people behind the other players. Sasuke shook his head. He didn’t want to think of Neji as a person, he wanted them both to remain the characters the Hyuuga had created for him. Without that one-dimensionality as a crutch, Sasuke risked being pulled into emotional territory he had not tread in years.



“Sasuke.” Neji’s voice brought Sasuke back to the moment and he finished securing his belt before the older boy caught his wrist. “If you’re going, at least wait til the storm lets up.”



Sasuke pulled his hand away. “You said I could stay. I’m staying.”



Neji paused, the only outward expression of his puzzlement. “You’re a bit overdressed

for it. Modesty at this point–”



“It’s not modesty.”



Sasuke didn’t elaborate, but Neji understood. In the interim between Orochimaru’s defeat and Sasuke’s pardon for his crimes, he’d lived a tenuous existence, a fugitive from the elite ANBU corps to which he now belonged. Being prepared to defend himself mere seconds after waking had saved his life so many times that the habit died hard.



He wondered sometimes if he would ever feel safe again in his life. He supposed not. But then, he didn’t really deserve it anyway.



When Sasuke joined Neji in bed, the older boy propped himself up on one elbow, curled his free hand into Sasuke’s damp hair and leaned in for a last kiss.



Sasuke turned away reflexively and Neji looked at him. “You’re strange. The way you recoil at the littlest things. It takes practice to use your mouth the way you do. You’re certainly not innocent. Strange.”



“I thought you had everyone figured out.”



“Not everyone,” Neji conceded. “Not you. Not completely.”



Sasuke frowned. “Is that why you picked me? For the challenge?”



“In part.” Neji freed Sasuke, settled beside him. “Also, I like you.”



Sasuke dismissed him. “You hardly know me.”



“Your life has been public. All your tragedy and triumph and stupidity. It is easy to feel as though I do. We’re not so different.”



Sasuke shook his head. He wondered if Neji was as good at seeming to feel things he didn’t, as he was at feeling nothing at all. But surely, he was lying. He didn’t know what sort of advantage Neji thought he was gaining by saying something like that, but he was pretty sure that, had the Hyuuga really felt anything warm, he would never have said so. Or maybe he would. Sasuke supposed he didn’t really know Neji either...but it was safer to leave his mental image of the other boy bare of emotion. In the morning. Yes, maybe in the morning he could make sense of everything.



Tonight, he was just too tired, already asleep when Neji’s hand settled lightly on his cheek, trailed down his neck. His touch was soft, not at all demanding, but Sasuke opened his eyes and glared. “You don’t have to do that.”



Neji looked down at his hand.



“Yes, that,” Sasuke snapped. “I’m not a girl. Don’t fake any tenderness on my account. I’m still going to let you use me if you don’t.”



Neji measured Sasuke’s upturned face with his eyes. “I wonder who it was,” he thought aloud. “Who had you before me? Who was it that made you so bitter?”



Sasuke wasn’t even shocked by the question, accustomed to Neji’s gracelessness by now. “As if I’d tell you,” he scoffed wearily, “the way you use people against themselves.”



“I’ll tell you anything you like about me, anything you want.”



“Anything that costs you nothing.”



Neji didn’t deny it.



Sasuke shut his eyes again, but he couldn’t go back to sleep. After a time, he found himself waiting, hoping to feel Neji’s hand against his cheek again. Pretense though it was, he wished now he hadn’t been so quick to reject it. Even if the affection in the older boy’s touch wasn’t real, it was such a warm, comforting lie.



Sasuke sighed inwardly, opened one eye a sliver to look across the mattress at Neji. The Hyuuga had flung an arm over his face and the languid curl of the older boy’s hand lay in Sasuke’s line of sight. That hand, Sasuke thought. Such a beautiful, deadly thing. Like those eyes that missed nothing. Sasuke wondered if there was any part of Neji that wasn’t trained to hurt.



“Why do you care anyway?” Sasuke said quietly. “Why does it matter who there was before you? Don’t you have enough power over me knowing what I let you do to me?”



Neji uncovered his face and stared up at the ceiling, swathed in shadow. “It’s not about power. That’s not why I asked.”



“It’s always about power. Everything. For both of us. Why should fucking be the exception?” Sasuke turned to look at Neji. “I know enough about the Hyuuga, about you. An accident of birth left the most talented Hyuuga son in memory the servant of weaker men. You have so little control over your fate, you’ve become obsessed with control in every other form it takes.”



“So...I make sex about power because it is a power that doesn’t respect social station, is that it?” Neji kept his expression impassive, but there was a trace, the faintest trace, of amusement in his voice.



Sasuke had to admit that it did sound stupid out loud.



Neji watched him frown, laughed. “It’s not a bad story. Not even completely wrong. Perhaps you want to try again?”



“Forget it,” Sasuke growled, turning over on his back. “There’s probably nothing to you that’s worth knowing anyway.”



“Of course not,” Neji said as he picked himself up. “You’re the only one in the world with a past full of reasons for being the way you are. Now, it’s my turn. Tell me who it was. I bet I can guess. It wasn’t Kakashi?”



Sasuke laughed drily and turned his head to stare off at the wall. Kakashi was a pervert-bastard, but he wasn’t really cruel.



“It was Orochimaru?”



Sasuke twitched, shut his eyes. “Fuck off.”



Neji waited, then pressed his lips to Sasuke’s ear. “Look at me.”



Sasuke resisted, made Neji force him to turn his head. Their gazes locked and for a long moment, gray eyes bored into black. For once there was nothing like amusement in the older boy’s face, not scorn or condescension or any of the things Sasuke had come to expect from Neji.



Sasuke set his jaw and glared, fighting the older boy’s eerie way of knowing, and for a long time Neji just gazed down into him, stripping his soul of his secrets. Then his expression changed, softened.



“It was Itachi,” he whispered. It wasn’t even a question.



Sasuke shook his head. He wouldn’t accept this. He was tired of Neji, of his perception and his talking, and of the feelings he didn’t want that Neji forced on him. Desire and sadness and trust were weak emotions, paralyzing.



Anger though, rage – that he could channel and use.



Sasuke poured all his fury into his arm. He only struck Neji once, but it was enough to send the older boy tumbling to the floor. Sasuke heard a grunt and a crack. He knew Neji had landed badly, but by then he was already out of bed, one hand on the door.



He slammed it shut behind him and cold water stung his face. By the time he slipped out of the Hyuuga courtyard, the streets were muddy. He trudged heavily, heedless of the puddles, along the familiar route through Konoha, unconsciously picking up speed as he went. He arrived at a dead run on the edge of the abandoned district that had quartered his clan a decade ago.



Dark windows stared off across rubbish-littered streets and the houses slouched, crumbling, in the dark.. They were just shells, empty of everything but memories, but whenever Sasuke was lost, his feet always brought him back here.



Before his old house, Sasuke took off his muddy shoes and stepped up on the deck. He tried the door, but it slid open a couple of inches and caught on something. A beam from the ceiling had fallen down inside and lodged somehow against it.



Sasuke sank to his knees. He could have forced the door, but he didn’t have the heart. Gods, it was unfair. He couldn’t even visit the grave of his childhood without wreaking more destruction on its derelict monument.



Locked out of his old life, Sasuke curled up against the door, buried his face in the bend of an arm. He was nearly asleep again despite the rain, when he heard footsteps behind him, out on the road. He imagined hazily that Neji had come after him, but no. Surely not. The hand that settled lightly on his arm was too small, too gentle. It patted him softly once and pulled a heavy blanket up over his shoulders and tucked it under him to shut out the wind. Sasuke didn’t turn. Nothing was said. The footsteps just faded away again and there was only the sound of the rain.



Sasuke slowly warmed and fell asleep.



*****



Sasuke woke up before he was ready, woke because of the heat. It was already afternoon he realized with horror. What time had he fallen asleep? Despite the baking sun, he pulled the blanket back over his head and groaned.



Then, he sat up sharply, blinked at the blanket. It wasn’t an extraordinary thing. He had one just like it from his days in Team Seven. Plain gray, heavy, it was the kind Konoha issued to operatives in inhospitable climates. This one though, was slightly muddy from his sandals and embroidered in one corner with the Hyuuga crest.



Neji had come?



Sasuke refused to see any meaning in that or to acknowledge how relieved he was to have an excuse to see the other boy again.



Folding up Neji’s blanket, he stood. The street before his old house was as dead in daylight as it was at night. A battle-worn stray dog was the only traffic Sasuke saw until he’d passed the edge of the Uchiha quarter.



In Konoha proper, his rumpled and mud-splattered clothing drew some sidelong stares, but Sasuke didn’t care. He was used to that. It wasn’t as if people didn’t stare when he looked presentable.



As he made his way passed the shops and restaurants, the proprietors, some of them, would disappear into their storerooms, reappear when he had passed. Sasuke was used to that too, but he wished they weren’t so damned blatant about it. He had already learned, anyway, which of the street’s little businesses were open to reformed traitors.



Finally, he arrived at the Hyuuga mansion, passed through the main gate. The guards who manned the stairs at the central building eyed him, but he turned away from them, toward the other end of the courtyard and Neij’s apartment.



The sounds that came from behind the door to the older boy’s room made Sasuke’s heart stop. Sasuke had too lately been in ecstacy himself to mistake them.



The blanket slipped from Sasuke’s hands and dropped onto the deck.



He shook his head hard, unwilling to accept what he was hearing. It hadn’t even been a day. He told himself he should have known. It was true. He’d known from the start how Neji was. He told himself that Neji wasn’t his. And it was true. Neji could fuck whomever he liked. He told himself he didn’t care...



Suddenly, Sasuke wanted to run again, but there was no one to run to, no home but a bloody patch of family land, and an empty room in the middle of a city that could never forgive him.



The sun was already sinking when Sasuke left the Hyuuga holdings to wander though Konoha, dazed and stinging. He passed Asuma’s old genin team at the noodle shop, friends after all these years and arguing, still, the way he used to with Naruto and Sakura. He passed the evasive shopkeepers, passed a light haired man about his own age who had paused in the street to wait for a boy with the same fair hair and features so alike it was plain they were siblings.



Sasuke winced, circled back around the main route through Konoha in search of anesthetic. The bar was empty in the late afternoon and that suited Sasuke just fine. He ordered a bottle and told himself that same lie over and over until he was so piss-drunk he believed it.



"I’m better off alone."