Chapter Text
“Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief.
There is a grace in denial.
It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.”
– Elizabeth-Kübler-Ross and David Kessler From ‘On Grief and Grieving’
Stage I: Denial
The irony of time is that it is endless, ceaseless, immutable, irrefutable, infinite; and yet you can never have enough of it.
(...so what’s some uncanny timing in times like these, really?)
.
.
.
The beginning of the end starts with a hairline thin fissure that triggers his world into fracturing to pieces.
Naruto wears exhaustion like the precious air shrinking and inflating his lungs, again and again and again, incessant and inescapable and ever present.
He wears pain like a punch to the gut; it doesn’t leave marks, being hardly visible at all—but the hurt, he can feel it bruising the inside of his chest like a second heartbeat.
It’s late, he was walking alone, watching the dark sloughing the sun off the sky until it burnt the weight of the day out of him—up to a brief exchange with an Anbu member that turned his night on its head.
Unconsciously, Naruto lowers the cause of his dismay, fixated on the damaged bark of a lonely tree standing in the direct line of his sight, but unable to see anything—
Anything beyond his name.
The confidential scroll sits heavy between his shaking hands.
So, so heavy, even if it’s nothing more than strokes of ink; to think a fragile piece of paper could wield such power.
Naruto has no idea how long he actually remains rooted in place.
With the passage of time blotted out, his breaths shiver out of him, he can feel that in the way his chest stutters, his throat closes, can’t find it in himself to actually care at all. That very distinct and familiar feeling he can never seem to shake off for too long swallows him down, now.
Naruto feels...powerless.
For what has already been, for what will come to be—he just can’t seem to get away from it, from this helplessness plastered to him, coating him inside out and staining him outside in, it’s everywhere.
It’s...it’s in everything.
“And what exactly are you planning to do about it?”
It’s the additional voice that breaks him out of this churning spiral, thickening his misery.
The question filters like moonbeams through the narrow gaps between leaves, enters his mind one word at a time, his eyes are slow to widen, lips to part in disbelief, lungs to hitch with the realization.
Naruto stills frozen while his world bursts aflame.
He recognizes it, this voice...
Slow-motion like, Naruto turns to face the intruder. A brand weight weighs down his torso, invisible, but so unbearable, he thinks his ribs might crack from the sheer force behind it.
“Hey, teammate.”
The greeting is casual, as if he, of all people, still owns the right to the sacred burden that term carries.
“It’s been something like, what, three years now? Give or take two, but hey. Who’s counting, right?” There’s an uncharacteristic grin slanted across his cheeks, growing with the stifle of silence on Naruto’s end. “What, toad got your tongue or something?”
The last person Naruto expected to see is currently staring him dead in the eyes.
The scroll falls from his slackening grip. The dull thud it makes once it hits the grass in the otherwise deafening hush of the woods going unheard. Because how could Naruto even attempt to register anything, anything at all except for...
“...Sasuke?”
It's pushed out of his throat, both poison and antidote in light of the information he’s still trying to wrap his head around of, the ground beneath his feet still breaking at the news.
Unfamiliar as ever, Sasuke stands a stone’s throw away from him that feels a mile to his feet.
Distantly, Naruto is thinking about how he can’t even recall the last time he spoke his name aloud.
Sasuke tilts his head to the side, mouth tugged up at the corners, a splash of amusement splayed across his expression. “In the flesh.”
Naruto is thrumming with the pressure of what he’s feeling, he’s nauseous with it, the bottom dropping out of his stomach, his knees will surely give out beneath him any minute now, and—this is impossible.
...this isn’t actually happening, right?
He is not—this can’t —it isn’t...him.
“Or...well.” Sasuke hums noncommittally, a light furrow in his brow, as if he’s working his way through a thought. Almost as a non-sequitur, but in sync with Naruto’s innermost line of thinking stricken in bold on his face, he goes on to add. “Allegedly?”
Sasuke doesn’t avert his eyes. Naruto doesn’t feel like he has the will to even try.
His emotions bear down on him, brick heavy, like sheets of rain ramming down a window pane, the sting of tears begins to blur the seams of his vision.
His heart’s on fire and his insides are writhing in ice.
Sasuke lowers his head, but still doesn’t avert his gaze, anthracite and absorbed and alert, steeped in something Naruto can’t quite put a name to.
Sasuke breathes out a laugh, the edge of a smile knifing through his features.
“Guess we still have unfinished business left, huh?”