Illuminating Heaven

Title: Illuminating Heaven / 天照 / Amaterasu

Pairing: Kakashi/Sasuke

Rating: NC-17

Warning: Overwhelming amount of subtext and dense narrative. Only partially beta'd.

A/N: Set in post-canon. Reviews highly appreciated. A huge thank you to my lovely beta editor . This fic so would not be what it is now without her!

Summary: Kakashi'd wondered when and if he'd ever encounter his prodigal former student again, but never expected it to be quite like this.

This Chapter: "And you're drenched in it, this ravenous need that feels almost inhuman -- primal; animalistic, even.



It's easy to let a feeling like that consume you."



Chapter 8: Tension



Something like that could drive you insane, if you weren't careful.



Hunger.



It starts with quiet twinges tugging slow, at the back of the mind and the pit of the stomach, that you tell yourself you can ignore. You think that you can manage without it, and for a while that tickle, those twinges, settle and dissipate; the track of life continues to spin uninterrupted. It's just a little hunger, a little need, a little something that sits and waits as you go about with your life unaffected. Taking the time to satiate the need and staunch the pang doesn't seem reasonable when the feeling is almost negligible. And while you are conscious of its existence taking form within you, it is small and insignificant enough that it doesn't require your attention or any form of sustenance with which to silence it.



It is like anything else in life -- an unnecessary annoyance.



But hunger is a thunderstorm that starts with a drizzle, a barely-there mist that lingers humid in the air. Then you breathe in that scent, so thick at the back of your throat, heavy with all the things you told yourself to ignore, and it hits you all at once -- torrential.



And you're drenched in it, this ravenous need that feels almost inhuman -- primal; animalistic, even.



It's easy to let a feeling like that consume you.



Sasuke had never known how overwhelmingly frustrating hunger could be until he woke up starving. He cut a hard glare across the fire at its source and had to bite back a groan when the hunger gave such a sharp, throbbing twinge it felt almost painful. He was nearly panting, his body trembling with it as he slid his hand down to confront it, making a few adjustments in his clothing that made it easier for the hunger to breathe, unconstricted.



The soundtrack of his breath quivered with each respiration. It sounded so frantic and pathetic and desperate that he clamped his palm across his nose and mouth to stifle it, eyes snapping shut as his teeth sank down on the fleshy heel of his palm, vivisecting through skin in the process.



Hunger tasted like anger, he thought.



Metallic.



~



It was a taste that Kakashi knew well, and one that remained faint in his mouth, when he finally woke from the kind of deep slumber he rarely ever experienced in the field.



It was dangerous to let your guard drop in the midst of a civil war on soil that wasn't even yours; but Kakashi's injuries had been serious enough, wore him down enough, that in his battered state of exhaustion, the jounin had succumbed to physical need. He slept deeply and dreamlessly. The kind of sleep that left him defenseless.



Had he been alone, he would've risked further injury instead, by imbibing a soldier pill and pushing forward despite the rest his body desperately needed.



But he wasn't alone.



The concern and guilt that weighed heavy on Sasuke's face and the hesitance of gentle fingers had been enough assurance.



Pain was a lightning bolt straight through his body when he turned, and Kakashi groaned, the sound low and gravely at the back of his throat. He felt Sasuke's eyes shoot over to him instantly before splitting away. But when those eyes tracked back a moment later, the jounin wondered what it was about him that made Sasuke's eyes so hesitantly avoidant when Kakashi wasn't even looking back.



Kakashi steeled himself against the next wrenching jolt he knew would come and forced himself into a sitting position with a soft grunt, one dark eye sliding over to meet a dark pair that immediately flicked away to the fire.



Spine rigid and shoulders tense, Sasuke looked confused and flushed and tired all at once. The way he balled a fist up in the fabric of his cloak didn't go unnoticed by the jounin, who simply watched him for a moment. Long enough to make that fist of fabric grow tighter, and that flush creep higher.



Kakashi felt one corner of his mouth twitch and he schooled it into submission as he briefly wondered what kind of a dream Sasuke had last night.



This time, Kakashi had a hypothesis about who and what the dream was about. And the mere thought of that had the corner of his mouth, as well as an eyebrow, twitching up again. With no mask to hide behind, Kakashi brought his hand up instead, rubbing slightly at his nose as he started to inspect the dressing of the wound on his side to give himself something else to focus on as he tested out his theory.



"Hmm," he hummed softly, not expecting a response from the boy, who was trying to make himself look busy by stoking the flames of the fire with a stick. But when Kakashi reached for his medical pack to extract a roll of tape, he felt the careful slide of dark eyes settling over him once more. So he indulged him, taking his time with taping down a corner of the dressing that had come loose, before sighing and turning his eye back on Sasuke again. Unsurprisingly, the Uchiha had found something else to engage his eyes with.



For a moment, Kakashi watched him, noticing how Sasuke twisted at the thick purple rope in his hands, as though tightening the knot would somehow make it less easy to unravel. Teeth left little indentations of tension where it pinched the softness of a lower lip. In a sudden swell, theory suddenly found itself confirmed as unquestionable fact, and Kakashi wasn't sure how to negotiate with it. Warmth pulsed through him in a strong wave of pleasant surprise before receding from his shores, leaving behind the froth of uncertainty swirling about his ankles. He could've waded a little deeper into the waters, to drag back that wave with insistent fingers, but found himself tracing backward steps instead.



Riptide could be dangerous, and he had no intention of being dragged out to sea by the undertow.



Instead, he'd change the focus. It was for his own good and for Sasuke's.



"Mm, looks like we're going to be very late for our date with the empress," Kakashi casually commented as he pulled his travel bag a little closer and began rooting through its contents, pulling out two scrolls and something to write with. When he extracted from its depths, a fresh shirt and mask, Sasuke's eyes suddenly snapped back on him with a burst of surprise laced with unmasked anger that sheared straight through the cloying tension.



Somehow, Kakashi found the hostile change both familiar and strangely comforting.



"You have spare clothing," Sasuke said, his voice flat, pinched with accusation. He watched Kakashi start to pull on the shirt with a wince as wounds stretched open and attempted to split.



Kakashi met Sasuke's incriminating gaze with a slight smile. "That's right. You don't."



~



It was funny how a little bit of anger could change the tides.



Sasuke's anger and annoyance towards Kakashi's lack of consideration was just the proper cayenne pepper to override the flavor of a stew of unguarded, dangerous attraction that had no place in war. As tempting as the aroma was (the delicious sweetness of that musk was one he wanted to bury his face in and greedily inhale), with a mask pulled up over his face, the jounin firmly placed the cover on that pot and mechanically began to go through the motions of working on the scrolls.



Sasuke remained silent the entire time, but his eyes told a different story. Kakashi could feel his eyes on him whenever the boy thought he wasn't looking. It began with a hard, stony intensity, brimming with anger and spite that softened into something else entirely as time went by. He tried not to look interested when Kakashi summoned Pakkun who sniffed in Sasuke's general direction and looked at him curiously before asking, "Oh hey, ain't that the kid you always use'ta talk about?"



Kakashi's eyebrow twitched slightly and he managed to smooth it with a crinkle of his uncovered eye. Then, he unceremoniously handed the pug the scrolls to take to the empress, one of which would unseal the barrier he constructed, along with express instructions to guide back the retrieval team he had requested.



Had the other half of his mission not included orders to support Snow Country's imperial forces in their efforts to quell the coup d'etat, Kakashi very well would've been in serious trouble, given the hostile territory they were caught in, and the extent of his injuries.



He still had the worse luck, but at least not where it mattered.



In the period of time between Pakkun's departure and the retrieval team's arrival, Kakashi shared the last of his rations with Sasuke before turning his attention to Icha Icha. Somewhere between the illustrious hero's heated encounter with a pair of incredibly impressive, voluptuous breasts and the woman that came attached to them, Kakashi became aware of just how intensely Sasuke was studying him. His eyes moved over him in calculated slow strokes, as though if he licked Kakashi up with his eyes alone, he'd somehow understand what compelled him to do just that.



Kakashi bit the corner of his lip and turned the page slowly, feeling Sasuke's eyes moving all over him in a way that was so hungry and filled with so much confusion all at once, he could feel the conflicting intensity almost as keenly as the boy. And suddenly, he found himself reading the same line: His desire swelled within him, heliotropic, when the impact of passionate recognition broke through the gates of self-control; it was unstoppable now.



He turned to the next page and stopped reading, though his eye kept moving in slow, lazy strokes that matched the rhythm Sasuke set.



Then he zeroed in on the final line on the page.



"You know you want this."



~



Or did he. Sasuke frowned and turned his eyes away when Kakashi glanced his way. The more he turned the tangled knot within him between his hands and tried to find the right string to tug loose, the tighter that knot grew and he just wasn't sure whether to pull at it more or to tuck the string away and somehow ignore the tightness of its constriction. Thinking about it made his head hurt, so he tried to focus on something else.



He wasn't sure when it started, only that it did. His eyes kept moving back to Kakashi every time the older man looked away, pulled by some strange gravitational force that had no explanation.



There were only questions with no answers, or answers that he didn't understand. Answers that seemed too simple in their complexity or too complex in their simplicity. So he stopped asking, stopped thinking, and merely looked.



It was like seeing him for the first time, even though Sasuke'd seen him so many times before. But maybe then, he had only been looking, and not really seeing. Maybe now, he was finally seeing for the first time, with eyes that seemed to reveal so much more than he had ever noticed before. Like how it was possible to determine, with the mind's eye, the topography of covered up features, if you looked closely enough.



With nothing else to do as they waited for the retrieval team to arrive, Sasuke was determined to discern what lay under Kakashi's mask through careful observation. He told himself it would be good practice for uncovering future masked opponents, as he discovered the best angle for what Kakashi's nose looked like was from the side, with his chin slightly lowered. Or how the optimum angle for figuring out the rest of Kakashi's face was when he tilted his chin up slightly and let his head roll back gently.



Sasuke wasn't sure how he never noticed these details before, and knowing how the man actually looked under that mask made his visual assessment all the more compelling. But then he realized that no amount of looking could reveal the way Kakashi's face looked when he smiled. How when that smiled formed dimples in cheeks and softened into something so gentle and tender, the feeling it induced was so paradoxically strong, it was impossible to keep eyes focused on a face with that much warmth.



Kakashi was hard lines and angles, power and cold steel, not tenderness; not warmth.



It was so much more comfortable looking at him like this, all covered up.



~



It was easier to digest someone else's version truth instead of negotiating with the boundaries of his own; easier to keep himself hemmed up, each stich firmly in place around the softness of expression or the sharpness of a frown.



Kakashi never liked to deal in absolutes when it was about himself. He preferred the malleability of clay over the unchanging stability of concrete; the unpredictability of lightning storms over the predictability of when the sun would rise. Though it was easy to succumb to the comforting reassurance of predictability, there was something about taking anything for granted that bothered him and set him on edge; one day the sun would set, and a perpetual night would rise.



So Kakashi never took anything for granted. Not even sunrises. Or what many liked to believe was the unchanging nature of the elements that made up a person. But if nature was so predictable, storms would never swoop in unexpected to decimate forests and flatten villages. If it was only the world that kept on turning while its inhabitants were held in stasis, life would be so much simpler: you are born, you live, you marry and have a family, then grow old. At some point you might have grandchildren, and you die at an old age, sitting in a rocking chair, watching the cycle repeat itself.



How easy life would be then. How predictable.



But it was change that was the only constant in a life filled from corner to corner with the unexpected; it was change that shifted the currents of Sasuke's seas and weather patterns in his onwards march towards his own self-assured authenticity that plucked apart the roots from where it had first hatched. And Kakashi had watched as change crumbled Sasuke's life apart in his hands; change that made it impossible to stop the force of unpredictable nature when Sasuke's truth grew into something far darker and more convoluted in all of its solipsistic righteousness.



And here they were again caught up in the cycle, though this time, the change was different. Something made of hunger and need and the poor logic of too much attraction.



Kakashi was all too relieved when the barrier was released and the arrival of the imperial retrieval team broke through their own private microcosm that had grown too intimate in a period far too short. He was even more relieved when the tension that had grown unbearably palpable shimmered apart and burst with the intrusion of outside attention.



The way Pakkun looked between Sasuke and Kakashi was unsettling as the medic worked on healing the jounin's wounds.



The pug sniffed at the air with a sense of shocked uncertainty, before sniffing again and looking at them strangely.



Kakashi refused to meet his summon's knowing gaze. Pakkun opened his mouth as though he meant to say something, then closed it again. When he announced, "Ah....I think it's time to go home..." and poofed out of existence instead, Kakashi let out the breath he didn't know he had been holding. He'd almost expected the pug to comment on the change of their mutual scents. Charged with something purely sexual.



The need for tactical planning was an invited change. A map had been unrolled for Kakashi and Sasuke to look over as Kaiya, the leader of the team, tapped at a point on the map with a senbon.



"This is where we are right now," he pointed at a drawing that depicted an enclave of mountains overlooking a large tundra flanked by forests with a river cutting through the middle. "And this is where we need to be," the senbon pointed at a star on the map that marked the imperial palace. "It's about twenty klicks away. We should be able to make it there within two hours if we don't encounter hostiles."



Kakashi hummed softly to himself as he gingerly pressed a hand to his side, which still tingled from the rudimentary medical ninjutsu. The wound had been stitched together with chakra; if he wasn't careful, it'd rip apart once more. "We should recon our travel area for any hostiles, so we're not taken by surprise. If we need to engage in battle, we should enter it fully prepared."



Sasuke merely watched quietly as the planning went on. If the boy found it strange being in an environment that reminded him so much of the past, or odd that the retrieval team was referring to Kakashi as "taichou," he did his best not to acknowledge it -- schooling his features into his usual mask of stoicism. The faint glint in his eyes was the only thing that gave him away. He was paying too much attention for someone that was supposedly watching more out of boredom than genuine interest.



"That's a negative. Hatake-taichou, we don't have enough time to execute a proper recon, and the more time we spend in this area, the higher the chances are of us being ambushed. Our last intelligence reports show that a team of hostiles were last spotted here," Kaiya pointed at a spot on the map that Kakashi ascertained was roughly eighty klicks away from their current destination. "That was almost four hours ago."



The jounin's eye cut up sharply. "Then we need to move out. Now."



"Yes, Sir."



"Did you bring the extra gear I requested?"



"Yes, Sir. However, we could only procure half of what you requested, Sir."



"That's more than enough."



Sasuke's eyes widened with surprise when Kakashi took the bag of weapons from Kaiya and pressed it into the boy's hands. Then he scowled when Kakashi let his eye arch with a gentle smile and lightly said, "Try not to hit the wrong person with a kunai, Sasuke-kun."



When the medic approached him to check for wounds, he shied away from her with a frown, his lips set in a thin, stubborn line. "I'm fine."



Kakashi sighed. Sometimes dealing with Sasuke was like dealing with a small child. A very petulant small child who always needed to get his way, regardless of the circumstances. "You should let her check you, Sasuke-kun."



"I said, I'm fine. And stop calling me Sasuke-kun."



"But that's your name, Sasuke-kun," Kakashi sounded almost sing-song as he zipped up his vest and received a glare in response, taking comfort in the familiarity of it while he sealed his travel pack. "Or would you prefer I call you Sakkun? Hmm... or maybe Sacchan?"



Kakashi had to swallow down a laugh when Sasuke nearly growled. The retrieval team looked on, bewildered at the strange exchange that had interrupted their tactical planning. But before they had any reason to worry, Kakashi returned his attention to the task at hand.



"We move out in single-line formation. Sasuke-kun and I will take the flank." Kakashi pointedly ignored the worried looks he received from that idea.



"But Sir... the flank is the most dangerous position to be in."



"Which is precisely why I should be there."



There was a moment of hesitance as Kaiya exchanged looks with his medic before clearing his throat slightly. "...you're injured, Sir. If anything should happen-- if we're ambushed--"



"Then having me at the flank will drastically increase our chances of survival." Kakashi's eye crinkled with a reasurring smile. He stood up after a routine weapons check and clapped his hands together. "Let's move out."



With the barrier released, winter was steadily creeping in with more determination to drain away the minute warmth their fire had created. The cold was slightly numbing, but not where it mattered the most. The tension had merely escaped inside and found itself a home in a strange itch deep within Kakashi's chest that he couldn't quite scratch. He drew in a bit of a breath to ease it, and then nodded for Sasuke to go on ahead of him.



But then the shadowed enclosure of the cave gave way to all that blinding white around them, made startlingly bright by the sun overhead. Before Kakashi knew what was happening, Sasuke suddenly slammed backwards into his arms with a strangled sound.



Through the cracks between the boy's quaking fingers clamped over his eyes, Kakashi thought he saw the glint of red too wet to be Sharingan.



And then he caught the scent a moment later.



Copper.



----------



TBC....