Almost Sucks
folder
Naruto › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
77
Views:
1,930
Reviews:
327
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
2
Category:
Naruto › Yaoi - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
77
Views:
1,930
Reviews:
327
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
2
Disclaimer:
I do not own Naruto, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
Breathe
Almost Sucks
by Mashiro
Naruto fandom, series, no spoilers
AU, BOYS LOVE: Naruto x Sasuke, Kakashi x Iruka, Lee x Gaara
first version: January 25th 2006, Wednesday
second version: June 24th 2008, Tuesday
.
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.
.
.
04: Breathe
.
.
Well, what did you know? Maybe there was more to the retard thing than just acting. Too stupid to take a hint and too stupid to understand ‘stay the hell away from me’. Sasuke was in awe, he really was.
There had been a few passengers already seated when he got on the bus. A couple of boys making noise in the back, a couple of girls giggling in the middle and an old lady near the front smiling at Sasuke like he was her long lost grandson.
He had picked a seat by the window, between the front and the middle. He had turned up the volume on his CD player, set his elbow on the armrest and his chin in his hand. He had sighed. Then a blur of bright orange had flashed in the corner of Sasuke’s eyes and a second later the seat next to him had been occupied. No hesitation.
“Hi. I didn’t listen.”
The voice was slightly muffled in music but clear enough to make out. Sasuke turned his head slowly. The blond that had to be a retard was smiling, for a second; then he seemed to realize what he had done, looked slightly embarrassed, laughed nervously and rubbed a hand over his neck.
“Look, I know what you said, but... I’ve got a real good reason for this.”
“You like getting your nose broken?”
Naruto looked like he’d never heard the word nose and the word broken in the same sentence before. A frowning, ‘mouth half open’ mix between confusion and disbelief. If Sasuke hadn’t refused to unpack his sense of humor, it would have been funny.
“Then fuck off.”
Sasuke went back to looking out the window. Not that he would break the guy’s nose. The screaming would get to his headache and just the thought of the talks in school with the school counselor or the principal or whoever handled such talks made him cringe. Then there would be Kakashi when he got home, the man would not be happy to hear that Sasuke had gone physical on his new flirt’s offspring. Calls would be made and even more talks would follow. Not worth it.
He knew of course that even if by some miracle the blond idiot left, there was no way he’d be left alone. Sasuke didn’t need to look at the girls slowly shuffling their way toward the back of the bus to know they were watching him, to know that their hearts sank when they noticed the seat next to him was already taken. Sasuke wasn’t an idiot. There had been cat fights over him in kindergarten. Someone else might have shown a little more consideration for his headache though. Girls infatuated with him were usually easier to shut up than guys with low brain function and desperation to make friends.
“No, look, I can’t!” Naruto sounded like he honestly believed it. “It’s Monday! The grannies come on Mondays.”
Sasuke gritted his teeth and turned up the volume on his player. He only caught a few stray words of Naruto’s rant; it was something about public buses on Mondays, lots of old ladies and a supermarket. Sasuke couldn’t have cared less. The bus rocked before starting to move again. The blur that was the world outside began a slow jog that accelerated to a run. Sasuke preferred a blur to details this morning; it helped take the feeling of reality away. This was not allowed to be reality.
Sasuke flinched as one his headphones were pulled from his ear and Naruto’s voice grew much louder.
“And I’ve got something for you!”
For a moment the violence seemed worth the trouble. The part of Sasuke’s brain still seeing reason had to struggle to keep the rest of him from letting his left elbow connect with that infuriatingly smiling face. Then he noticed the two items resting in Naruto’s held out hand and pretty much everything came to a screeching halt. Everything that was not those two items blurred, except the tingling in his nerve ends.
“You left them at my house yesterday. I thought you might want them back.”
Sasuke stared at the pack of cigarettes and the lighter while his senses slowly returned, before his hand lifted and moved in to wrap around them. They were real. Naruto’s hand was warm against his fingertips. He felt real too.
“Thanks,” the words felt difficult, like a struggle.
“I’m sorry that you got hurt on the automaton,” Naruto’s voice was a bit softer now. “That... spear is pretty vicious. Was, you really killed it. Are you still hurt?”
Sasuke didn’t answer. The blond was fiddling with his fingers. It felt awkward even though Sasuke tried to tell himself that he owed the idiot nothing. The bus came to a stop to pick up more students. Sasuke made up his mind and stood.
“Whe... Where are you going?” Naruto sounded confused as Sasuke stepped over his legs.
“Can I smoke on the bus?”
“No.”
“Then I’m getting off.”
He pressed himself past a girl and two guys coming on.
“You’re walking?” The voice rose in disbelief. “You’ll never make it in time.”
Three steps to the asphalt. The air against Sasuke’s face was relief, the feel of cigarette between his fingers even more so.
“You don’t even know the way!” Naruto’s voice came from inside the bus. “Sasuke!”
Sasuke looked over his shoulder and gestured to the driver to get going already. The man shrugged and closed the door. Sasuke flicked the lighter and listened as the bus rolled away. The smoke was caressing the insides of his lungs and he kept it there for a long time before breathing it out with a sigh.
-
Sasuke came to school half an hour after first class had started. A personal welcoming letter from the principal, complete with the school’s address and a small map, had saved him from having to stop and ask for directions.
A woman greeted Sasuke in the reception as if she’d been waiting for him for weeks. She gave him the key to a locker and a folder of papers (his schedule, school regulations, information on using the library and school computers and such things, she said), before waving for him to follow as she hurried down a corridor.
“They’ve already started,” she said over her shoulder, smiling. “First class on Monday for you is history. Good to have it out of the way, isn’t it?”
She giggled. Sasuke rolled his eyes. She was young, naïve and enthusiastic; wouldn’t have lasted a week in the city. Their steps echoed in the empty corridors. She wore low shoes but they sounded like high heels.
It had been both a good and a bad decision to get off that bus. Good because the combination of nicotine and walk had calmed down his headache to almost nothing. Bad because arriving in a crowd with everyone else would have made him seem less special. Now he really felt like a new kid, and he hated the feeling.
They stopped outside a door with a sign above it that said ‘C14’. The woman said ‘here we are!’ and knocked. When a call came from inside she opened the door just enough to get her head through and whispered something that Sasuke couldn’t make out. A few seconds of wishing he was somewhere else passed and then the woman opened the door completely, turned to Sasuke and smiled.
“Don’t be shy,” she joked and gestured with an arm for him to go in.
The world felt suddenly both very real and very unreal, and a surge of stomach ache invoking anxiety ran through Sasuke. He almost turned and walked away. For a split second he worried that he would throw up on the stupid, smiling reception woman.
But he clenched his hands to fists and stepped through the door instead of fleeing. The teacher in front of the blackboard was smiling and waved for him to come closer and he did. Girls whispered and giggled, the woman from the reception was following him close enough that he could feel her. They came to a stop next to the teacher’s desk.
The first thing Sasuke saw when he turned to face the whispers and giggling were a pair of eyes that were too blue for an almost fifteen year old without contacts. Sasuke’s stomach tightened and he gritted his teeth. Looked away. Fucking frustrating fate.
The reception woman put a hand on Sasuke’s shoulder and then she spent minutes and a lot of words to say ‘Uchiha Sasuke, from the city, your new classmate, be nice to him’.
The blur of orange and blond wouldn’t leave Sasuke alone. Even though he refused to actually look, the presence stayed, the color stood out. Who the hell wore orange? Orange was for carrots and warning signs, not humans. And what did it take to piss that guy off anyway? Naruto seemed to be as happy to see Sasuke as Sasuke was disappointed to see him.
“Would you like to say something, Sasuke-kun?” the reception woman asked.
“No.”
The woman laughed, but it didn’t quite hide her disappointment. Then she left and Sasuke could finally take a seat. He found an empty spot near the wall opposite the windows, three seats from the blond idiot.
Because it was Sasuke’s first day someone had to show him around, or so the history teacher thought. He asked for volunteers and many hands waved. Sasuke tried to pretend he didn’t care, but he did. Not the orange arm, he wished. He couldn’t see it waving from where he was, but it had to be. Waving. ‘Pick me!’
The teacher picked a girl named Sakura.
-
There was no one by the tables behind the school building during lunch hour. Sasuke was surprised; it felt like a place for gatherings. Surprised, but relieved. It was quiet and nothing bothered him. No Sakura, no Naruto, no one flirting, no one giggling, no one trying to be friendly.
Sasuke hated being the new kid. It very much disrupted the hope he was trying to hold onto that this was just a very bad dream and he was waking up soon. ‘You’re not waking up!’ it kept saying. ‘This is your life, get used to it.’ Sasuke didn’t want to get used to it. He didn’t want this shitty excuse of a miserable existence to be his life.
Sakura had taken her mission as his personal guide book very seriously. Sasuke probably knew the school better than the teachers did now. He would have told her that he didn’t need a tour, but Naruto had hovered around them practically oozing ‘I’ll do it if she doesn’t!’ and Sasuke hadn’t wanted the consequences of stopping him. Despite her obvious infatuation with Sasuke, Sakura had seemed like the lesser of two evils. She had been quite good at chasing off anyone that interfered with her tour guide mission and one flirting girl was better than several; especially if those several were backed up by a nosy retard.
During last class before lunch Sasuke had claimed he needed to use the bathroom, left the classroom and not returned. The lesser of two evils was still evil and Sasuke did not want to struggle through a lunch break of touring the canteen with giggles and a constant blur of orange fluttering around waiting for Sakura’s guard to lower. He needed a smoke and he needed some alone time or he was going to knock someone’s teeth out. The headache he had managed to get rid of before school had returned with a vengeance and was now pounding on his skull like it wanted the thing broken. He should have been hungry, it being lunch and all, and maybe he was, but a soft nausea swimming around inside him kept the feeling away.
So now Sasuke was lying on a table, alone. He had his feet on the seat and the rest of his body on the hard surface; it was wide enough that his head didn’t fall off the edge. He kept his eyes closed, his lungs breathing and tried to let the music streaming from his headphones to his ears make him forget where he was. There were tables like this in the city. He could be there. But the air tasted differently here. Sasuke had tried to drown the taste in cigarette smoke, but somehow it stuck. Sasuke tried to ignore that his hand wrapped around the lighter brought orange and blond to his mind.
Half way through the cigarette, with no footsteps and no voice as warning, someone sat down on the table next to Sasuke. Sasuke’s eyes snapped open and he sat up so abruptly that he almost choked on his second cigarette in less than twenty four hours (some kind of record, surely). He hurled a glare that asked ‘you want to die?’ at the unwanted visitor, but the guy he found seemed unmoved. It was a redhead. His pale eyes were framed with thick black lines, making him look like a six year old gone wild with his mom’s eyeliner.
“Hey,” the guy said. He sounded as indifferent as he looked.
“What the fuck do you want?” Sasuke spat out, after removing the cigarette he’d managed not to choke on from between his lips. The guy tilted his head slightly and stared for a moment before he spoke.
“Gaara,” he said and sent a hand toward Sasuke’s face. “Pleased to meet you.”
There was something strange about his voice. The hand hung limp from the wrist a few inches from Sasuke’s nose. Sasuke put the cigarette back between his lips and took a deep suck.
“Are you a retard or something?” he raised a brow.
When the guy didn’t respond, or remove his hand, Sasuke sighed and took it as a ‘yes’. He grabbed onto the limp hand and used his best ‘speaking with the mentally disabled’ voice.
“Hi. I’m Uchiha ‘leave me the fuck alone’ Sasuke. Could you leave me the fuck alone?”
He dropped the hand with a snort and shook his head. Sucked more on the cigarette. Gaara kept staring, his hand hanging where Sasuke had left it. Until he snorted with something that probably was supposed to be amusement, leaned closer, snatched the cigarette from Sasuke’s lips and stole a lungful before putting it back again. Sasuke would have stopped him if the whole thing hadn’t gone so fast and been so unexpected. Gaara looked like he hid a smile but Sasuke wasn’t sure where. The redhead blew smoke away from them both and took a breath that could be heard.
“You’ll be just fine,” he said, getting off the table, moving and sounding less like a retard now.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s a nasty habit though. Someone should make you quit.”
“Well, fuck you too!”
Because there was nothing else to say. And then Gaara left. He lifted a hand in a still wave without turning as he walked away, reminding Sasuke of a friend he’d been forced to leave behind in the city. Nausea assaulted him together with sudden stinging pain in his eyes.
Sasuke swore, told himself to get a grip and turned up the volume on his player. This was just a stupid, fucking bad dream.
-
There was no coming home.
Not wanting to care anymore, Sasuke took the bus like everyone else. Naruto sat beside him again, asking about Sasuke’s day and letting Sasuke know he had worried when he disappeared during lunch. Sasuke said nothing. He stared out the window and let the frustrating voice drown in music. He ignored the urge to knock the guy’s teeth out.
It wasn’t because the guy didn’t deserve it; it was just hypocritical to not care and still get that riled up. And why the hell should Sasuke care? It was just a stupid, fucking bad dream. You didn’t care about dreams; you ignored them until they went away because you knew they always would. Caring meant accepting it as something real and this was not allowed to be real. So Sasuke pushed the urge away and didn’t let it come back.
He ignored Naruto’s ‘bye!’ and ‘see you tomorrow!’ when they left the bus.
The door to the house that was not home was unlocked when he came there. The Kakashi bastard wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours yet, but the door was unlocked. Sasuke hated it, even though he had no key.
The hall was littered with boxes and so was the kitchen.
.
.
by Mashiro
Naruto fandom, series, no spoilers
AU, BOYS LOVE: Naruto x Sasuke, Kakashi x Iruka, Lee x Gaara
first version: January 25th 2006, Wednesday
second version: June 24th 2008, Tuesday
.
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.
.
.
04: Breathe
.
.
Well, what did you know? Maybe there was more to the retard thing than just acting. Too stupid to take a hint and too stupid to understand ‘stay the hell away from me’. Sasuke was in awe, he really was.
There had been a few passengers already seated when he got on the bus. A couple of boys making noise in the back, a couple of girls giggling in the middle and an old lady near the front smiling at Sasuke like he was her long lost grandson.
He had picked a seat by the window, between the front and the middle. He had turned up the volume on his CD player, set his elbow on the armrest and his chin in his hand. He had sighed. Then a blur of bright orange had flashed in the corner of Sasuke’s eyes and a second later the seat next to him had been occupied. No hesitation.
“Hi. I didn’t listen.”
The voice was slightly muffled in music but clear enough to make out. Sasuke turned his head slowly. The blond that had to be a retard was smiling, for a second; then he seemed to realize what he had done, looked slightly embarrassed, laughed nervously and rubbed a hand over his neck.
“Look, I know what you said, but... I’ve got a real good reason for this.”
“You like getting your nose broken?”
Naruto looked like he’d never heard the word nose and the word broken in the same sentence before. A frowning, ‘mouth half open’ mix between confusion and disbelief. If Sasuke hadn’t refused to unpack his sense of humor, it would have been funny.
“Then fuck off.”
Sasuke went back to looking out the window. Not that he would break the guy’s nose. The screaming would get to his headache and just the thought of the talks in school with the school counselor or the principal or whoever handled such talks made him cringe. Then there would be Kakashi when he got home, the man would not be happy to hear that Sasuke had gone physical on his new flirt’s offspring. Calls would be made and even more talks would follow. Not worth it.
He knew of course that even if by some miracle the blond idiot left, there was no way he’d be left alone. Sasuke didn’t need to look at the girls slowly shuffling their way toward the back of the bus to know they were watching him, to know that their hearts sank when they noticed the seat next to him was already taken. Sasuke wasn’t an idiot. There had been cat fights over him in kindergarten. Someone else might have shown a little more consideration for his headache though. Girls infatuated with him were usually easier to shut up than guys with low brain function and desperation to make friends.
“No, look, I can’t!” Naruto sounded like he honestly believed it. “It’s Monday! The grannies come on Mondays.”
Sasuke gritted his teeth and turned up the volume on his player. He only caught a few stray words of Naruto’s rant; it was something about public buses on Mondays, lots of old ladies and a supermarket. Sasuke couldn’t have cared less. The bus rocked before starting to move again. The blur that was the world outside began a slow jog that accelerated to a run. Sasuke preferred a blur to details this morning; it helped take the feeling of reality away. This was not allowed to be reality.
Sasuke flinched as one his headphones were pulled from his ear and Naruto’s voice grew much louder.
“And I’ve got something for you!”
For a moment the violence seemed worth the trouble. The part of Sasuke’s brain still seeing reason had to struggle to keep the rest of him from letting his left elbow connect with that infuriatingly smiling face. Then he noticed the two items resting in Naruto’s held out hand and pretty much everything came to a screeching halt. Everything that was not those two items blurred, except the tingling in his nerve ends.
“You left them at my house yesterday. I thought you might want them back.”
Sasuke stared at the pack of cigarettes and the lighter while his senses slowly returned, before his hand lifted and moved in to wrap around them. They were real. Naruto’s hand was warm against his fingertips. He felt real too.
“Thanks,” the words felt difficult, like a struggle.
“I’m sorry that you got hurt on the automaton,” Naruto’s voice was a bit softer now. “That... spear is pretty vicious. Was, you really killed it. Are you still hurt?”
Sasuke didn’t answer. The blond was fiddling with his fingers. It felt awkward even though Sasuke tried to tell himself that he owed the idiot nothing. The bus came to a stop to pick up more students. Sasuke made up his mind and stood.
“Whe... Where are you going?” Naruto sounded confused as Sasuke stepped over his legs.
“Can I smoke on the bus?”
“No.”
“Then I’m getting off.”
He pressed himself past a girl and two guys coming on.
“You’re walking?” The voice rose in disbelief. “You’ll never make it in time.”
Three steps to the asphalt. The air against Sasuke’s face was relief, the feel of cigarette between his fingers even more so.
“You don’t even know the way!” Naruto’s voice came from inside the bus. “Sasuke!”
Sasuke looked over his shoulder and gestured to the driver to get going already. The man shrugged and closed the door. Sasuke flicked the lighter and listened as the bus rolled away. The smoke was caressing the insides of his lungs and he kept it there for a long time before breathing it out with a sigh.
-
Sasuke came to school half an hour after first class had started. A personal welcoming letter from the principal, complete with the school’s address and a small map, had saved him from having to stop and ask for directions.
A woman greeted Sasuke in the reception as if she’d been waiting for him for weeks. She gave him the key to a locker and a folder of papers (his schedule, school regulations, information on using the library and school computers and such things, she said), before waving for him to follow as she hurried down a corridor.
“They’ve already started,” she said over her shoulder, smiling. “First class on Monday for you is history. Good to have it out of the way, isn’t it?”
She giggled. Sasuke rolled his eyes. She was young, naïve and enthusiastic; wouldn’t have lasted a week in the city. Their steps echoed in the empty corridors. She wore low shoes but they sounded like high heels.
It had been both a good and a bad decision to get off that bus. Good because the combination of nicotine and walk had calmed down his headache to almost nothing. Bad because arriving in a crowd with everyone else would have made him seem less special. Now he really felt like a new kid, and he hated the feeling.
They stopped outside a door with a sign above it that said ‘C14’. The woman said ‘here we are!’ and knocked. When a call came from inside she opened the door just enough to get her head through and whispered something that Sasuke couldn’t make out. A few seconds of wishing he was somewhere else passed and then the woman opened the door completely, turned to Sasuke and smiled.
“Don’t be shy,” she joked and gestured with an arm for him to go in.
The world felt suddenly both very real and very unreal, and a surge of stomach ache invoking anxiety ran through Sasuke. He almost turned and walked away. For a split second he worried that he would throw up on the stupid, smiling reception woman.
But he clenched his hands to fists and stepped through the door instead of fleeing. The teacher in front of the blackboard was smiling and waved for him to come closer and he did. Girls whispered and giggled, the woman from the reception was following him close enough that he could feel her. They came to a stop next to the teacher’s desk.
The first thing Sasuke saw when he turned to face the whispers and giggling were a pair of eyes that were too blue for an almost fifteen year old without contacts. Sasuke’s stomach tightened and he gritted his teeth. Looked away. Fucking frustrating fate.
The reception woman put a hand on Sasuke’s shoulder and then she spent minutes and a lot of words to say ‘Uchiha Sasuke, from the city, your new classmate, be nice to him’.
The blur of orange and blond wouldn’t leave Sasuke alone. Even though he refused to actually look, the presence stayed, the color stood out. Who the hell wore orange? Orange was for carrots and warning signs, not humans. And what did it take to piss that guy off anyway? Naruto seemed to be as happy to see Sasuke as Sasuke was disappointed to see him.
“Would you like to say something, Sasuke-kun?” the reception woman asked.
“No.”
The woman laughed, but it didn’t quite hide her disappointment. Then she left and Sasuke could finally take a seat. He found an empty spot near the wall opposite the windows, three seats from the blond idiot.
Because it was Sasuke’s first day someone had to show him around, or so the history teacher thought. He asked for volunteers and many hands waved. Sasuke tried to pretend he didn’t care, but he did. Not the orange arm, he wished. He couldn’t see it waving from where he was, but it had to be. Waving. ‘Pick me!’
The teacher picked a girl named Sakura.
-
There was no one by the tables behind the school building during lunch hour. Sasuke was surprised; it felt like a place for gatherings. Surprised, but relieved. It was quiet and nothing bothered him. No Sakura, no Naruto, no one flirting, no one giggling, no one trying to be friendly.
Sasuke hated being the new kid. It very much disrupted the hope he was trying to hold onto that this was just a very bad dream and he was waking up soon. ‘You’re not waking up!’ it kept saying. ‘This is your life, get used to it.’ Sasuke didn’t want to get used to it. He didn’t want this shitty excuse of a miserable existence to be his life.
Sakura had taken her mission as his personal guide book very seriously. Sasuke probably knew the school better than the teachers did now. He would have told her that he didn’t need a tour, but Naruto had hovered around them practically oozing ‘I’ll do it if she doesn’t!’ and Sasuke hadn’t wanted the consequences of stopping him. Despite her obvious infatuation with Sasuke, Sakura had seemed like the lesser of two evils. She had been quite good at chasing off anyone that interfered with her tour guide mission and one flirting girl was better than several; especially if those several were backed up by a nosy retard.
During last class before lunch Sasuke had claimed he needed to use the bathroom, left the classroom and not returned. The lesser of two evils was still evil and Sasuke did not want to struggle through a lunch break of touring the canteen with giggles and a constant blur of orange fluttering around waiting for Sakura’s guard to lower. He needed a smoke and he needed some alone time or he was going to knock someone’s teeth out. The headache he had managed to get rid of before school had returned with a vengeance and was now pounding on his skull like it wanted the thing broken. He should have been hungry, it being lunch and all, and maybe he was, but a soft nausea swimming around inside him kept the feeling away.
So now Sasuke was lying on a table, alone. He had his feet on the seat and the rest of his body on the hard surface; it was wide enough that his head didn’t fall off the edge. He kept his eyes closed, his lungs breathing and tried to let the music streaming from his headphones to his ears make him forget where he was. There were tables like this in the city. He could be there. But the air tasted differently here. Sasuke had tried to drown the taste in cigarette smoke, but somehow it stuck. Sasuke tried to ignore that his hand wrapped around the lighter brought orange and blond to his mind.
Half way through the cigarette, with no footsteps and no voice as warning, someone sat down on the table next to Sasuke. Sasuke’s eyes snapped open and he sat up so abruptly that he almost choked on his second cigarette in less than twenty four hours (some kind of record, surely). He hurled a glare that asked ‘you want to die?’ at the unwanted visitor, but the guy he found seemed unmoved. It was a redhead. His pale eyes were framed with thick black lines, making him look like a six year old gone wild with his mom’s eyeliner.
“Hey,” the guy said. He sounded as indifferent as he looked.
“What the fuck do you want?” Sasuke spat out, after removing the cigarette he’d managed not to choke on from between his lips. The guy tilted his head slightly and stared for a moment before he spoke.
“Gaara,” he said and sent a hand toward Sasuke’s face. “Pleased to meet you.”
There was something strange about his voice. The hand hung limp from the wrist a few inches from Sasuke’s nose. Sasuke put the cigarette back between his lips and took a deep suck.
“Are you a retard or something?” he raised a brow.
When the guy didn’t respond, or remove his hand, Sasuke sighed and took it as a ‘yes’. He grabbed onto the limp hand and used his best ‘speaking with the mentally disabled’ voice.
“Hi. I’m Uchiha ‘leave me the fuck alone’ Sasuke. Could you leave me the fuck alone?”
He dropped the hand with a snort and shook his head. Sucked more on the cigarette. Gaara kept staring, his hand hanging where Sasuke had left it. Until he snorted with something that probably was supposed to be amusement, leaned closer, snatched the cigarette from Sasuke’s lips and stole a lungful before putting it back again. Sasuke would have stopped him if the whole thing hadn’t gone so fast and been so unexpected. Gaara looked like he hid a smile but Sasuke wasn’t sure where. The redhead blew smoke away from them both and took a breath that could be heard.
“You’ll be just fine,” he said, getting off the table, moving and sounding less like a retard now.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s a nasty habit though. Someone should make you quit.”
“Well, fuck you too!”
Because there was nothing else to say. And then Gaara left. He lifted a hand in a still wave without turning as he walked away, reminding Sasuke of a friend he’d been forced to leave behind in the city. Nausea assaulted him together with sudden stinging pain in his eyes.
Sasuke swore, told himself to get a grip and turned up the volume on his player. This was just a stupid, fucking bad dream.
-
There was no coming home.
Not wanting to care anymore, Sasuke took the bus like everyone else. Naruto sat beside him again, asking about Sasuke’s day and letting Sasuke know he had worried when he disappeared during lunch. Sasuke said nothing. He stared out the window and let the frustrating voice drown in music. He ignored the urge to knock the guy’s teeth out.
It wasn’t because the guy didn’t deserve it; it was just hypocritical to not care and still get that riled up. And why the hell should Sasuke care? It was just a stupid, fucking bad dream. You didn’t care about dreams; you ignored them until they went away because you knew they always would. Caring meant accepting it as something real and this was not allowed to be real. So Sasuke pushed the urge away and didn’t let it come back.
He ignored Naruto’s ‘bye!’ and ‘see you tomorrow!’ when they left the bus.
The door to the house that was not home was unlocked when he came there. The Kakashi bastard wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours yet, but the door was unlocked. Sasuke hated it, even though he had no key.
The hall was littered with boxes and so was the kitchen.
.
.