Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

friday, may 12 

instagram message 

@uzumakiswag to @taka99

hey! it’s naruto remember me from high school? ahhahaha 

Yeah

hows life been? u still live in konoha right? theres no pics on your grid so i wasnt sure lol

Yeah I do

this might b kinda weird but like i just got back from my deployment and stuff and i saw u on the kwp direct action discord when i joined that? and i was gonna go to a meetup but idk anybody else there yet sooo do u go to those? wld u want to go together next week? hahaha

That’s a joke right

no y is that funny 

You’re literally in the US military 

Nooo im not!!!!! yeah so like i was but im out now i totally quit, i rlly dont believe that stuff anymore thats why i wanted 2 go, im trying to actually do anti imperialist stuff now cause i rlly hate that i did all that i want to do better 

like i seriously hate the military now dude 

i saw so much fucked up shit in kuwait it totally changed how i thought about everything 

and i read a ton 

i can tell u the whole story? if u want? we could get a drink or something before the meeting? 

[....]

[...]

sorry if thats a lot haha 

[...]

Yeah fine 

Can you do 4:30 downtown

yes!! 

You really better have a good story because rn I’m fully convinced you’re a plant 

lololol 

ok fair enough 

see u then 

🪴

***

“So basically the only reason I didn’t get a DD is ’cause my CO didn’t wanna deal with the whole court thing,” Naruto was saying over a quarter-full pint glass of Heineken. “I actually wanted to do it, but they pretty much let me finish out my contract teaching daycare, so I figured, what the hell. Even though now I kinda wish I’d just left anyway.” 

“DD?” asked Sasuke, flicking his cigarette above the plastic ashtray between them with black-nailed fingers. He’d picked a table under the netted outdoor porch of the dive bar where they were meeting so he could smoke, mostly because he figured it would annoy Naruto. Naruto hadn’t said anything about it other than to silently wave away the scent every time it floated near his face. 

“Dishonorable discharge,” said Naruto. “Which is like a felony, basically. You don’t always go to jail, but it still fucks you up, especially with getting a job and everything.” 

“Hm,” said Sasuke, mildly impressed in spite of himself. He’d been more invested than he expected in Naruto’s story of disenchantment—the disrespect and hatred his fellow soldiers had shown for the civilians in the city they were supposed to be protecting, the sexual harassment his best friend had been blackmailed into denying she experienced, the dangerous grunt work he’d been assigned to after garnering a reputation for disobedience and insubordination. Naruto was obviously not anything close to a plant; anybody listening to the absurd sincerity in his voice could see that within five minutes. Not that Sasuke was going to admit that to Naruto. He didn’t want anybody getting too comfortable. Though they’d been talking for nearly half an hour, neither of them had skirted anywhere close to the subject of Danzo’s classroom junior year. 

“So, what,” Sasuke said, “you spent all that time reading Lenin in the desert, or...” 

“Kinda. More like Sparknotes, really.” Naruto giggled as he finished the remainder of his beer. “But yeah, I basically got really tight with my friend Shikamaru while I was deployed, and he gave me, like, a crash course on all that stuff, over texting and everything. He’s the one that put me onto the stuff you guys are doing. But obviously he’s all the way over in DC now, so that’s why I wanted to, you know, ask you.” He smiled at Sasuke from across the grimy table, tracing a finger in the puddle of condensation under his glass. Sasuke stubbed out his cigarette and looked away. 

“Oh, yeah,” he said, the words coming out slightly mumbled. “That guy.” Shikamaru Nara had, like Naruto, gone to high school in Konoha with Sasuke, and later, in college, had been responsible for organizing the first actually successful action against the pipeline project that still loomed over their city like a stormcloud. He and Sasuke had both been arrested over the course of that protest, but only Shikamaru had leveraged his sprained wrist and his picture in the Post to get a full “Changemakers of Tomorrow” scholarship to Georgetown Law. Sasuke thought he was kind of a liberal. Plus, everybody at the Konoha Workers’ Party meetings still talked about him like he was a martyr of the revolution, and it annoyed Sasuke. 

“He’s the best,” said Naruto, agreeing to a statement Sasuke had definitely not made. “So what about you? What’s your thing?”

“My thing?” Sasuke asked. 

“Yeah,” said Naruto, “you know, like Shikamaru’s so into all his union stuff, what’s your big cause you’re doing all this for? The environment? Animals? I remember when you were always getting detention for putting those Meat is Murder stickers on everybody’s lockers back in high school.” 

Sasuke lit another cigarette, making eye contact with Naruto as he did it. Naruto watched him. Was it possible he’d really forgotten? Neither of them had ever brought it up back then, either, of course. Sasuke had plenty of reason to believe the whole incident would have logically meant much more to him than it ever did to Naruto. That was why he was reluctant to answer Naruto’s question—somehow he felt it would reveal just how much he’d cared. But still, it wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t the kind of thing most people just forgot. 

The most likely possibility, then, Sasuke had to acknowledge, was that Naruto was embarrassed about it. Ashamed, even. Sasuke had figured as much when he joined up the week after graduation—the kind of guy to do something like that was definitely the type to be ashamed. When Naruto reached out the week before, seven years out from that afternoon in eleventh grade, Sasuke almost changed his mind about that assumption. Now he was changing it back again. 

Naruto was definitely embarrassed. Embarrassed of him— Sasuke Uchiha. Sasuke, whose Grindr profile regularly received messages from guys asking to pay four-figure amounts to suck his dick, who’d once been approached in a bar by a Bachelorette scout who told him he could have a spot on the show without even auditioning, who’d been voted Best Looking in the senior superlatives as a freshman —and Naruto had the nerve to be embarrassed about being associated with him? Fuck that. If he was going to be embarrassed, Sasuke would go ahead and embarrass him. 

He put the cigarette between his teeth and used both hands to lift up the bottom of his black t-shirt. Naruto leaned over on his elbows to peer over the edge of the table at the strip of lean stomach Sasuke was showing off to him, where the linked boy-boy symbol was tattooed right below his navel. Sasuke thought he saw Naruto’s eyes widen slightly, possibly the hint of a blush on his cheeks, though it could have been wishful thinking. “Okay,” said Naruto, blinking a few times, looking at Sasuke through long golden eyelashes. “So...what’s that mean?” 

Sasuke straightened out his shirt and ran a hand through his bangs in a gesture he hoped appeared a lot less practiced than it was. “It means what it looks like,” he told Naruto. “My thing is gay people. It’s what I care about. I’m kind of a separatist, I guess you could say.” 

Naruto’s mouth twitched in amusement. “So, like, you think straight people should die or whatever? Or they should just all turn gay?” 

“Little of both, I guess.” Sasuke smiled, leaning one arm against the bench rest behind him and ashing his cigarette.

Naruto laughed, shaking his head, blue eyes crinkling sweetly. Sasuke couldn’t help but feel a twinge of affection for Naruto’s familiar easy laugh, his openness, the way he responded to everything people said with interest and sincerity, no matter how absurd or provocative. That was probably why Sasuke enjoy provoking him so much, both back in high school and apparently now, still. 

Well—that and the obvious. Naruto had always been Sasuke’s type when they were growing up—in fact, Sasuke often suspected but never cared to admit, he was probably the whole reason that type existed in his mind in the first place—but now it was as if someone had taken Sasuke’s vague and blurry image of his ideal guy and sharpened it into painstaking 4k detail. Sitting across from Sasuke, he slouched forward on his stool, tan forearms on the wooden table, their whitish-blond hair catching the sunlight in new ways every time he lifted his glass to drink. His shirt was orange cotton, fabric worn into translucence in places on the hem and the shoulders, advertising a 5k sponsored by some local construction company Sasuke had never heard of, and it hugged the muscles in his biceps tightly enough that Sasuke kept having to remind himself not to stare. His cargo shorts and combat boots were obvious vestiges of military service, but even they turned Sasuke on in a perverse, totally counterrevolutionary way. But really it all came down to Naruto’s dumb face, the messy blond hair falling over his forehead, his sweet smile and his big eyes and the little dimple on his chin. Sasuke was a sucker and he hated himself for it, so he couldn’t help poking and teasing and prodding Naruto like a boy sticking a pretty girl’s braids in an inkwell, fearing the attention just as much as he needed it. 

“What about you?” Sasuke asked him before they left for the meetup, curious in spite of himself. “What’s your cause?” Anybody else, Sasuke thought, would have expected it, would have asked the original question only as an excuse to get on their own soapbox when it was politely returned, but Naruto seemed genuinely surprised. He considered it for a moment in silence, chin in hand. 

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I just want to find a way to feel like I’m actually doing something good, you know? Making stuff better for people. That’s why I enlisted in the first place, and it just kinda...screwed me up for a while when I realized how much we weren’t actually doing that. I don’t even really know what I believe in anymore. I just wanna, like, try and find it, I guess.” Naruto raised his eyes from the bottom of his glass and looked at Sasuke. “I don’t know. You’ve read all those books Shikamaru was telling me about, I probably sound so dumb to you.” 

“No.” Sasuke shook his head. “No, you don’t sound dumb.” He meant it. Naruto smiled. 

They went to the basement of the co-op, and Naruto mostly listened while the rest of them talked about their ideas for disrupting the next city council meeting, where yet another vote was being held for yet another pipeline proposal, another blip in the same neverending incremental battle they’d all been fighting for five years by now. Sasuke was getting tired of it. Not that he didn’t think it was important—he feared as much as any of them the likely consequences for the wildlife and the biodiversity and the groundwater if the lobbyists got their way, and he even had a sentimental attachment to the lake they wanted to run it through as the place where Itachi had taught him to birdwatch when he was a kid. He still really cared. It was just the symbiotic feeling they’d settled into, the way the same local environmentalist groups showed up dutifully every time the new zoning plans came in, making the same arguments and holding the same signs, doing their part to give the same councilmembers their excuse to vote no. It was as if over time they’d been folded into the process, become just as much a part of the workings of the city’s institutions as the elected officials they were supposed to stand against. Weren’t they anarchists? (Well, some of them, at least.) Did they really have to play by all these rules? Besides—

“Okay, Sasuke,” said Neji wearily. “Go ahead.” 

“You know what I’m going to say,” Sasuke said, putting down his raised hand and leaning forward in his folding chair. “Same thing as last time. We shouldn’t be letting this guy spout his shit to the school board. He shouldn’t even be able to get to the meetings. He’s a fascist, he’s an evangelist, and if you don’t think the homophobia shit matters right now you’ll be singing a different tune when he decides to come for—”

“We know,” said Ino. “We all agree with you, Sasuke, we hate the guy as much as you do.”

“I doubt that,” said Sasuke, folding his arms. 

“Whatever.” She shook her head, long blonde hair flipping onto her other shoulder. “You know what I mean. But we’ve done everything we can. We’ve sent emails, we’ve postered everywhere we could, we got all those people to call about him, they know they won’t be able to give him a platform without getting backlash again. I mean, it’s not like we can camp out in his yard and—”

“Why not?” Sasuke stood up, out of his chair, eliciting some irritated mumbles from the rest of the group. “What are we supposed to be, a fucking letter-writing committee? This is the real world. That’s not how shit gets done. He should feel threatened, he should feel like something might happen if he keeps spouting this shit, I don’t care if it scares some people who can’t handle any action stronger than a petition.” He looked pointedly at Neji. “And I have to say it, if this was about some big oil shit we’d be having a very different conversation already, and you know that.” 

“Please.” Neji shook his head.

“What?” 

“Sasuke,” said Neji, “come on. It’s not like I blame you, but if you didn’t have such a personal vendetta against the guy, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.” 

Sasuke stood for a moment in silent rage, clenching his nails into a palm. “ Whatever ,” he finally forced out, and jammed himself back down in his chair and glared. He could feel Naruto’s stare next to him and tried to calm his vengeful heartbeat in silence. Ino asked the rest of the group whether they wanted to hold another vote about the issue, and a consensus was reached that not enough new information had been introduced since the last conversation to require one. A part of Sasuke was grateful he’d been saddled with the obviously lost Naruto, since if he hadn’t been there, if there hadn’t been anyone in the group about whose opinion of him Sasuke cared a nonzero amount, he would have definitely gone off on Neji for his shitty little comment hard enough to get him kicked out of the house. As it was, he couldn’t bear to stick around for even two minutes after they broke for Naruto to socialize the way he clearly wanted to, so he told Naruto that he’d see him some other time, but he had to get out of there. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or not when Naruto said he’d come with. 

“Fucking cowards,” Sasuke muttered, cigarette already in his mouth as they exited through the back door of the co-op where half the group downstairs lived, out into the quite scrappy-looking vegetable garden with its homemade tomato splints and ripped wire fencing. “Personal vendetta. Like he’s fooling anybody with that whole permanent bachelor act. What a hypocrite.”

“Who is?” Naruto asked, trailing a step behind as they came out onto the street. “What’s he fooling them about?” 

Sasuke shook his head. “Nothing. Neji acts like I’m an oversensitive fag because he’s afraid if he acknowledges homophobia exists everyone will realize how deep in the closet he’s been for ten years. Sorry.” He glanced at Naruto, who’d made a shocked face at his use of the slur. “It’s not important,” he lied. “Just stupid infighting. Don’t worry about it.” 

“What were you guys arguing about, though?” They’d come to the spot on the street where their cars were parked, and Naruto was hovering next to his own door without moving to take out his keys. Sasuke rubbed his face with his smoking hand, fiddled reflexively with his eyebrow piercing, trying to avoid Naruto’s eyes as well as his question. He knew how it would sound to Naruto, the impression it would give him about Sasuke’s resentment and pride and his relationship to a certain memory he’d been trying to skirt around the mention of. But Sasuke had been the one to bring it up in the first place. Like an idiot. Anybody listening to their conversation would have thought he’d actually wanted Naruto to ask or something. 

“There’s this guy trying to move up in local politics,” said Sasuke grudgingly, trying to obfuscate as much as possible until the last second he could. “He’s on the school board now. He basically ran on a platform of banning staff from discussing anything gay in the school district. Can’t read about it in books, can’t talk about it in social studies, whatever.”

“Wait, really?” Naruto’s eyes were wide. “Is that really a rule now?”

“No, he hasn’t been able to actually get it through yet. That’s why none of them think it’s a big deal. But that’s not the point. It’s normalized now. Now that people know it’s safe to say this shit, it’ll be everywhere. That’s why I think we have to nip it in the bud—make it so it’s not safe. They just don’t get it. They don’t think it’s worth it. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’m the only one who cares and I’m also the only person in that basement who actually admits I’m gay.” Sasuke could hear his voice getting more strident and angry as he talked about it again. He sucked on the cigarette in his fingers a little desperately, looking away, trying to regulate his heart rate. 

“That’s crazy,” said Naruto. “It is dangerous, it totally is. That’s like how it was in my platoon—you’d think they were all the nicest guys for weeks, and then one of them starts talking about Muslim terrorists or something and all of a sudden everybody’s saying the most racist stuff. It’s crazy,” he repeated. He sounded nearly as passionate about it as Sasuke had—Sasuke knew it was probably just typical overzealous Naruto, but it still made him feel a little bit better. “So is that what Neji meant?” Naruto asked him. “About you having a vendetta just because you’re gay? That’s kinda messed up.” 

“Mm.” Sasuke flicked some of his ash onto the pavement and avoided Naruto’s eyes. Naruto hadn’t sounded uncomfortable at all saying the word, or in fact talking about any of this stuff, which Sasuke noted with probably too much interest. “Sort of,” he said. “It’s actually. Well, it’s actually more that I had some personal experiences with this guy. In high school. When he used to teach.” 

“Wait,” said Naruto. Oh, God. “You’re not talking about Danzo, are you?” 

Sasuke dropped his cigarette butt onto the ground and took his time stepping on it, not responding. When he finally looked up, Naruto met his eyes, and Sasuke could tell it was written all over his face. 

“You’re kidding.” Naruto let out an incredulous breath. “Jeez, what an asshole. I can’t believe he’s still around. He was the worst!”

“Yep.” Sasuke fidgeted with his keys, trying to fight the urge to chain-smoke. 

“Wow,” said Naruto. “That is so crazy. Hey.” He laughed. “You think he still remembers me? ’Cause of that one time?” He bumped Sasuke’s elbow lightly with a hand, and Sasuke, before he could stop himself, jerked his arm away. “You remember that?” Naruto asked him, eyes bright and amused.

“Oh, right,” said Sasuke. “That thing. I forgot about that.” 

Sometimes he couldn’t believe what a liar he was.

***

Sasuke’s so-called personal vendetta against the famously hardass, famously conservative history teacher Shimura Danzo had begun in tenth grade, when he’d provoked a heated class discussion by raising the probability that not only was Alexander the Great gay, but his sexual orientation was the entire reason for his military prowess and skilled rulership. Danzo had cited “disrespect and disruptiveness” as the justification for Sasuke’s detention that day; Sasuke spent the hour scratching the words onto his forearm with a Pilot G2, which was the kind of thing he did a lot of back then. The next day he got another detention when Danzo came into class to find the word “homophobe” in big letters on his whiteboard, even though he never even proved Sasuke did it, and from that point on the enmity between the two of them became schoolwide lore. (Despite an old boyfriend’s onetime accusation that he acted like he’d spent his entire adolescence being gaybashed, Sasuke had actually been pretty well-liked in high school. Sure, he was always a weird loner, always hanging out by himself in the halls, listening to the Smiths in his headphones, wearing bad eyeliner and black wristbands, but for the most part his classmates treated him like a familiar novelty rather than an outcast, and a few of them might have even thought of him as a friend. The altercation with Danzo was probably the first time he’d really been persecuted for his notorious Sasuke-ness, and it shocked and hurt him in the way of first wounds while simultaneously inflaming the righteous anger he felt he’d been waiting his whole life to have an outlet for.) 

By junior year, Sasuke had developed a habit of earning black marks and suspensions the way other maladjusted teenagers used cutting or drugs—at least, that was the explanation given by the adolescent psychiatrist his father had sent him to after he’d been caught trying to steal his pre-calc teacher’s Blackboard password to change the midterm grades of the lowest-performing students (despite having a 95 average in the class himself). Not that this diagnosis had done anything to motivate Dr. Uchiha to pay any more attention to his younger son; as with most things involving Sasuke, he was content to throw some money at the problem and call it a day. Sasuke continued to go about his petty institutional interference with a kind of grim duty, as if smoking on the patio every afternoon during lunch until a teacher came out to write him up was a politically significant act of civil disobedience. The ISS teacher got to know him well enough to give him an early birthday present on the last day of school. &c. 

Understandably, given this state of affairs, neither Danzo, Sasuke, nor the school’s administration had wanted his schedule to come anywhere near the former’s classroom. But back then Sasuke still entertained hopes of studying history at an Ivy League, and Danzo was the only faculty member certified to teach AP US. On the first day of class, Sasuke showed up in a t-shirt bearing a reproduction of a Robert Mapplethorpe photo; Danzo told him it was inappropriate for school and he would have to turn it inside out, in response to which Sasuke stood up on his front-row chair and took his time stripping off the shirt and slowly redressing to a chorus of whoops from the girls in the class (plus one from Suigetsu Hozuki). Sasuke averaged two detentions per week that year, an especially impressive number given that Danzo’s class only met three times a week. 

It was at one of these detentions that the “thing” Naruto had so tactlessly brought up occurred. Sasuke was in his usual seat, already engrossed in his copy of On the Road —he’d gone straight from his last period class to Danzo’s classroom, as was his routine by then—when the door opened and a blond head poked itself in. Sasuke glanced up. “Hey,” said Naruto with a wave. “You staying after?” 

Sasuke nodded. “Are you?” he asked, mildly surprised. Naruto had been in constant trouble throughout elementary and middle school, but as of freshman year he seemed to have mostly straightened out, getting heavily into multiple varsity sports and even, the year before, taking a role in the school musical. The two of them had never really talked before—Sasuke’s academics-and-abstract-political-rebellions milieu didn’t exactly overlap with Naruto’s jock-and-party-boy one, so there had never been much reason for them to cross paths. The only thing they really had in common was an awareness that everyone at school knew both of their names, so neither bothered introducing himself in the quiet classroom. Naruto just deposited himself into a nearby desk in his recognizably clumsy, unselfconscious way and nodded. 

“Yup.” He leaned forward and put his chin in both his hands, kicking one of the desk’s legs erratically. “Me and Kiba got in a fight at practice. I mean, not really—we were just messing around, it wasn’t even a real fight, but somebody came by at the wrong time. Kiba’s only got one strike left or they might kick him off the team, so I said I’d take the fall.” He shrugged. 

“Hm.” Sasuke nodded. He didn’t really care about the details of Naruto’s lacrosse misadventures, and he was only vaguely certain he knew who “Kiba” referred to. Mostly he would have liked to get back to his book. He’d definitely never gotten any kind of homophobic vibes from Naruto, but it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable conversation a person could have: talking for the first time in an empty classroom to a straight guy who was at least twenty pounds heavier than you, who was explaining how he’d just come from a fistfight, and about whom you’d had an extremely vivid wet dream the night after attending the fall student production of Grease. In fact, coincidentally, that dream had also involved a lacrosse stick. Now that he was thinking about it. Which it was definitely best not to do. Sasuke looked down and rubbed his thumb against the crease of the book where he was holding it open.

“What are you in for?” Naruto asked him. Sasuke reluctantly extracted his finger. 

“Because Danzo’s a fascist,” he said. “And he wants to get me expelled.” 

Naruto laughed. “No, seriously.” 

“That is why.” Sasuke picked at the flaking black nail polish on his middle finger. “He pink-slips me every time I say anything about being gay in class. He’s not gonna stop getting me in trouble until I go back in the closet, or get kicked out, or sent to conversion camp or whatever.” He looked down at his lap, trying to emphasize with his expression and his tone the abject injustice he was being faced with. He didn’t bother mentioning the little things he might have occasionally done to provoke Danzo on purpose, such as, that afternoon, snapping mint bubblegum loudly between his teeth every time he tried to lecture on a topic, then putting a new piece in after every time Danzo made him go to the trash can to spit it out. It wasn’t like that other stuff wasn’t still true, and anyway he never would have done anything like that if Danzo hadn’t been a total heinous bigot in the first place. 

“Jeez, that’s horrible,” said Naruto. Sasuke glanced over at him. His face looked completely sincere, as if Sasuke’s words had genuinely upset him. After three years of being treated like a sort of adorable politically militant class mascot by teachers and students alike, Sasuke hadn’t been prepared for someone to actually listen to what he had to say. 

“I know,” he said, emboldened. “He’s the worst. Like, last week I gave him the outline for my final paper about the AIDS crisis and he said I had to pick a different topic because I’d be too biased, even though I’ve already read so many books about it. He’ll use any excuse to fail me, and history is my best subject, too. I probably know even more about it than he does, actually.” 

“Whoa,” said Naruto. “He’s such an asshole.” 

“Look what he put on my cover page.” Sasuke reached down to his backpack and pulled out the folder where he stuffed all his papers. He’d illustrated the top sheet of his essay proposal homework with a black-and-white header of the old “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” ad from the 90s showing different gay couples embracing. Obviously he’d included it to piss off Danzo, who hadn’t even required them to use anything visual for the project; but even if he’d expected it, it still angered him to look at the red pen his teacher had used to X out the picture and write “Not appropriate!” in the margin. He handed Naruto the paper, who held it close to his face to examine the pictures. 

“I mean, yeah, wow,” said Naruto, his brow creasing. “It’s totally related to the subject and everything. They’re not even doing anything that bad.” 

“And he’s the one who put that picture of the sailor molesting his girlfriend on the World War II slideshow, like, last month.” Sasuke folded his arms, feeling himself get indignant all over again. 

Naruto shook his head and put the paper down. “What a jerk,” he said. “Is he the one doing detention in here today?” 

Sasuke nodded. “You’ll see,” he said. “He hates me.” 

“You know—” Naruto stopped mid-sentence and laughed, putting a hand over his mouth. 

“What?” 

“Nothing.” He laughed again. “I was just thinking about something my friends did a while back—it’s stupid. One of them had this really shitty boyfriend, and he’d always get mad at her for hanging out with her guy friends, but then he ended up dumping her for another girl anyway. So for a while whenever we saw him at lunch she’d be like, quick, pretend we’re kissing, and act like she was making out with one of us to make him mad.”

“Hm,” said Sasuke. He wasn’t sure why Naruto had brought up the subject, and an irritable part of him suspected he felt weird looking at the paper Sasuke had shown him and wanted to get the conversation back to talking about straight people. 

“Yeah,” said Naruto, “it was pretty dumb, but I was just thinking, like—” He shrugged, grinning at Sasuke. “It’d be kinda funny if we did that when Danzo came in, right? Like, he’d be so freaked out.” 

Sasuke blinked. He was sure he was misunderstanding Naruto, but he couldn’t think of what else he could have meant, and felt embarrassed at himself for being so weird and gay and horny that he’d somehow tricked himself into thinking Naruto Uzumaki wanted to pretend-make out with him for no reason practically the first time they’d ever talked. “Uh,” he said, “like,” and then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. 

“I learned this trick for it when I did the play,” Naruto said. “You put your hand on the person’s cheek and your thumb goes on their mouth, so you can just, like, kiss your hand and it looks like you’re doing it for real.” And then, without warning, he reached over and demonstrated the pose on Sasuke, placing a warm palm over the side of Sasuke’s face and a thumb in the center of his lips. 

Sasuke felt the hot flush spread up his neck before he could stop it and jerked his eyes down to the floor. After a second, Naruto took away his hand, still smiling breezily at him, unconcerned, like he was totally oblivious to the effect his touch had so clearly had on Sasuke. Okay, so it might have been possible that Naruto wasn’t totally aware of his own hotness—he’d never had a girlfriend, as far as Sasuke knew, and admittedly his dorky orange sneakers and yellow-sweat-stained tank tops and unruly mop of hair did kind of obscure some of the more appealing qualities of his looks. It was just that Sasuke happened to pride himself on having a more nonconformist taste in guys than could be found in the typical teen idol contingent beloved by most of the hetero girls at their school. If the consensus opinion was Team Edward, for example, Sasuke’s type was more like Bella’s dad. To his mind, Naruto’s differences were exactly the kinds of charming boy quirks that he found not just forgivable but actively enticing. Point being—it suddenly felt very difficult to come up with a reason he shouldn’t take Naruto up on his offer of prolonged intimate contact, however fake. 

Sasuke swung his feet around to the other side of his chair and faced Naruto. “Danzo usually gets here after three,” he said, and glanced at the clock, which read 2:55. “Should we practice first?” 

Their first attempt, though hindered significantly by mutual awkward giggling, knee-bumping, and false starts, still felt hot enough to Sasuke to make him a little suspicious about Naruto’s motives in proposing the idea. Naruto’s hand was over his mouth, the other touching Sasuke’s hair lightly on that side of his head, his nose breathing air onto Sasuke’s skin and his messy hair brushing Sasuke’s forehead. Sasuke put both his hands on Naruto’s shoulders, for realism. He was totally getting a semi, and tried to squeeze his legs together to at least camouflage it. They each moved their heads a little bit, breathing, pretending. Naruto’s thumb, pressed against his mouth, slipped with enough distracted pressure to touch Sasuke’s teeth; when Naruto adjusted it, Sasuke felt the remnant of his own spit cold against his lips. Naruto smelled like grass and sweat and Irish Spring. When he cleared his throat, Sasuke could feel the vibration. His brain felt like like the inside of a car, windows fogging up with moist heat until the inside was completely obscured from view. Naruto shifted in his chair, his hand moving against the back of Sasuke’s hair. Sasuke realized he’d closed his eyes without meaning to. He opened them, and there were Naruto’s—the clearest blue he’d ever seen staring back at him. Sasuke moved his knee to touch one of Naruto’s. Naruto moved his thumb off Sasuke’s mouth. 

It wasn’t like Sasuke had never been kissed or anything. His first kiss had come almost five years earlier, when he was in sixth grade and tagged along with Sai, his older friend from art camp, to a boy-girl party where Sasuke told everyone he was thirteen and let an eighth-grade girl French him during the pool scene in Cruel Intentions. But that didn’t count, for obvious reasons; even back then he’d pretty much realized his desires were exclusively same sex-oriented. His real initiation had come over the most recent summer, when after three stultifying weeks he’d finally gotten sick of spending days at a time without speaking to anyone who wasn’t named Uchiha and texted the only other gay person he knew in their town to hang out—the aforementioned Sai, who’d come out shortly after he started high school, beating Sasuke to it by two years. They’d already drifted apart by then, Sai into his painting and Sasuke into his constant unformed rebellions, and when they met up again it was the first time they’d talked one-on-one with full knowledge of each other’s sexual tendencies. Fifteen minutes into their game of Mario Kart they were already making out on Sasuke’s bed. 

Sai was headed to art school in the fall, so having an actual relationship seemed out of the question from the beginning—besides, they were both too hopelessly vain and competitive and their looks and personalities far too similar for it to ever have worked out. But it was fun while it lasted. Sai came over once or twice a week from July through August; Sasuke would tell his dad they were watching a movie in his room, they’d fool around for ninety minutes or so, and then Sai would leave out the back way so he didn’t have to talk to Sasuke’s parents. At first these sessions mostly consisted of shirtless kissing and dry-humping, eventually graduating after a few weeks to acts involving actual climax, and toward the end of the summer Sai made it clear he’d be down to have real sex if Sasuke wanted to—he was eighteen by then, after all, and about to start college, where the gay dating scene would presumably be quite different. Sasuke said he wasn’t ready yet. In fact he didn’t really know what people meant when they said that. How could you know whether you were ready for something if you’d never done it before? Losing his virginity when he was too young and before he was ready would actually have appealed nicely to Sasuke’s tragic-heroic vision of himself. It wasn’t that. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged it out of him, but honestly Sasuke just didn’t want to do it with somebody he wasn’t in love with. He knew, even without having ever experienced it, that there’d be a difference. 

Well. There was certainly a difference now. Naruto felt nothing like Sai, certainly nothing like Sasuke himself; he was bigger, stronger, rougher, sweatier, smellier, grosser, and all of it made Sasuke weak and overwhelmed with desire. It had taken about three seconds after their lips met for real before Naruto’s mouth was opening into his, or maybe vice versa—Sasuke couldn’t be sure. Naruto tasted sweet. His lips were dry. At least they had been a moment ago. Was it a moment or a lifetime? Before Sasuke could get control of his own extremities he was already shoving a hand through Naruto’s thick hair, Naruto’s tongue pressing up behind his teeth, his palm against Sasuke’s hot cheek. Sasuke opened his mouth wider, sucked harder at Naruto’s, hoping for more of his tongue, his spit, his taste. He wanted Naruto’s mouth all over him, wanted his ass pulled onto Naruto’s lap, wanted Naruto’s hands inside his jeans, he wanted, he wanted, he wanted—

The door hit the side of the wall with a bang. Naruto and Sasuke jumped apart. There was murder in Danzo’s eyes.

Chapter Text

So Naruto did remember. This was the fact Sasuke contemplated with a complex mixture of frustration, shame, and horniness for the whole of his drive home. Naruto remembered, and he thought it was a funny story. Naruto had hit Sasuke up via DM for purportedly platonic purposes, acting as if a three-minute bisexual-experimentation-thinly-disguised-as-prank makeout hadn’t represented the complete extent of their interaction throughout high school, and had apparently been not at all affected upon their adult reunion by Sasuke’s leveled-up sex appeal or Sasuke flashing his slutty tattoo at him or anything at all Sasuke had done over the past three hours. At least, he hadn’t been affected enough to make any kind of move, despite the humiliating obviousness of Sasuke’s guaranteed enthusiasm had he decided to go for it in absolutely any way. Apparently that wasn’t in fact what he was doing this for. Apparently—shockingly—he seemed to, like, actually care about the issues.

There was really no reason it should have bothered Sasuke as much as it did. After all, Sasuke cared about the issues too. It wasn’t just about getting his dick wet. He cared. He definitely cared more than Shikamaru or any of the other activists in their impotent little small-town cooperative. He was the one who was trying to push them into militancy, into actually fucking doing something about the conservative hellhole nobody seemed to realize their city was fast becoming. Naruto didn’t even read theory. There was absolutely no reason he should be allowing this meathead deodorant-challenged former soldier to make him feel bad about either his looks or his political commitments.

And yet.

He tried to put it out of his mind at work, but the coffee shop was hellishly slow—they were definitely going to go out of business soon, Sasuke was almost certain—and every time he interacted with a customer without them visibly checking him out he found himself getting absurdly offended. After his shift was over, he went down to walk around the rich neighborhood and razorblade all the Trump bumper stickers he could find, but even when he got caught scratching up an Audi and chased down the block by a scary-looking buzzcut, even then he still didn’t feel any better. Back home, hiding in his room after getting sniped at by Karin for leaving his hair products open on the bathroom counter where her cat might get into them, he attempted to initiate a little sexting with Jugo out on the research boat, only to be solemnly informed that Jugo was on another one of his Buddhist fasting/celibacy/abstention kicks and would not be engaging in such activities for the foreseeable future.

“Shit,” said Sasuke aloud to his ceiling. “Motherfucker.” Danzo should be proud of himself, he thought petulantly. It really was fast becoming impossible to find anyone willing and available to have gay sex in this town. Would this always be his cross to bear? Would upholding the very existence of slutty gayness within city limits always fall on his shoulders and his alone? It was a heavy burden, one Sasuke was getting pretty tired of. Not, of course, that he was considering abandoning any of his duties. There was at least one ethical tenet his dedication to which he could count on never dwindling.

***

“They almost shot me down back there,” a dark-haired guy was saying to Naruto. “I called for backup and nobody came. I could have died.” Both of them were deep in concentration as he spoke, on the bunk bed across from Sasuke, carefully putting together the separate pieces of their shiny black rifles.

“You can’t rely on anybody but yourself when you’re up there,” Naruto said solemnly. His face was smudged a little with dirt and oil, a small cut on the right cheek. He wore camo fatigue pants and a tight white tank top that showed off his arms as they moved, stroking the long barrel of his gun slowly up and down with a rag. “It’s just you and your head. You’re alone. Totally alone. Right, Sasuke?” He raised his head and directed an intense blue stare into Sasuke’s eyes.

Sasuke opened his mouth, but the words weren’t quite forming. He looked down: there was a small, palm-width pistol in his hands, unassuming but clean, shiny, sinister in its power, and all in one piece. He closed one fist around the handle.

“Yeah,” said the other guy, “what about you, Sasuke? What do you know about it? You ever been in the shit?”

Still mute, Sasuke just shook his head once. The guy scoffed at him, and Sasuke turned to Naruto, who wasn’t saying anything, just looking at him with that hard look. Sasuke swallowed. At his side, he felt cold metal poking into his shoulder. He looked up.

“You ever been in the shit, Sasuke?” The man standing above him was strangely blank-featured. He held a long rifle, the same as the ones in the hands of Naruto and his friend. His question was echoed, and Sasuke realized there was a whole group of them, surrounding him, looking at him, a whole tent of tall broad-shouldered muscular guys with army pants and big guns and penetrating stares. Sasuke looked down at himself again and saw his highly inappropriate outfit: his ripped black jeans, his too-small t-shirt, the tattoo on his stomach exposed, his hard-on quickly growing without the insulation of underwear between skin and denim. He gripped the pistol tighter in his hand, tried to push himself backward on the cot, but they were everywhere, behind and in front of him. Across from him, Naruto stood up, put his gun down.

They were at the entrance to the tent, Naruto leading him in silence, beckoning Sasuke through. He stepped out to the other side, and then they were in Danzo’s classroom, just as it had looked when Sasuke was sixteen. He felt the whiteboard smell and the yellow fluorescent lighting and the stale windowless air inside him, transporting him. Pinned across the back wall was a giant American flag. Naruto’s hand was on his shoulder. Sasuke turned.“We have to kiss,” said Naruto, and when he said it he looked sixteen again, too. “We have to pretend so they don’t see us.” Outside the door, Sasuke could hear the sound of the other men, about to enter.

“Will I ever be able to get out of here?” Sasuke asked him. Naruto didn’t say anything, just gestured to Sasuke’s hand. It was still holding the tiny gun.

“I don’t think I can use this,” said Sasuke.

“Come on,” said Naruto. He put an arm around Sasuke. Sasuke buried his face in Naruto’s shoulder. Naruto rested a hand in his hair. Sasuke heard the door open.

Then they were kissing, just like they had that afternoon—except this time they weren’t teenagers. This time they were both adults, one with five years of prolific sexual history and one who’d been through a traumatic tour of duty and an extremely recent existential-spiritual crisis, and Sasuke could taste all of it in Naruto’s mouth when it opened for him. They kissed desperately, passionately, pressing their bodies close, Naruto’s hands on Sasuke’s face, Sasuke clutching the chest of Naruto’s shirt, the feeling of it spreading through Sasuke’s body like bubbly water. Without opening his eyes or breaking from the kiss, Sasuke could tell the room was filling with people, men watching him and Naruto lick each other’s tongues, and it only egged him on more, filled him with a decadent and giddy pleasure. He ran a hand through Naruto’s thick hair, moaned into Naruto’s mouth, pulled the bottom of Naruto’s tank top out of his pants. Naruto was sucking on his neck, the wet sensation somehow making its way to Sasuke’s crotch. He shuddered, felt Naruto’s arms around him as he did, holding him close, and Sasuke could see with his closed eyes how delicate and small and fuckable he looked in Naruto’s embrace and felt another gauzy wave of pleasure lifting him at the image.

“Naruto,” Sasuke whispered into his ear, “they can see us.” He meant for Naruto to feel what he was feeling, how hot it was, how hot they both were, but when he said the words out loud he realized for the first time the threat he was describing. Naruto’s hand was rubbing over his jeans like he hadn’t heard any of it. Sasuke tugged at his hair, opened his eyes to warn him—but when he saw Naruto’s looking back at him, he realized the room was empty.

“Who can?” Naruto asked, and before Sasuke could answer he felt himself being lifted—so easily, like the weight of his body was nothing at all to Naruto, God that was fucking sexy—and then he was on the edge of a big bed, and Naruto was shirtless and tan underneath him, unzipping Sasuke’s fly—“They’re,” said Sasuke, and again he couldn’t find the words. “They’re...”

“It’s just you and me, Sasuke,” said Naruto. He pulled down Sasuke’s jeans. “There’s nobody else who can do it.” Then he leaned over and put Sasuke’s cock in his mouth.

Sasuke was mid-gasp when he woke up, heart beating fast and loud, the pillow under his head damp with sweat and his underwear humiliatingly sticky. Jesus Christ. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had an actual wet dream. A wet dream about Naruto Uzumaki, no less. What was he, fucking twelve?

His only consolation was the eventual memory of what he’d been doing before falling asleep that night—browsing, for no particular reason or other, an old Wordpress blog dedicated to anthologizing military-themed gay erotica. Unless that had been a dream, too. It all had felt strangely realistic. He felt around for his phone on the floor to double-check, but when he touched the screen the first thing he saw was—

@uzumakiswag to @taka99

Yooo sasuke! guess who i just got some legit DIRT on???

our GUY

can we meet up again to tell u about it?

Sasuke stared at it for a moment, put his phone back on the floor, and pulled a pillow over his head.

***

“Hey,” Naruto said to him as Sasuke slid into the passenger seat of his beat-up orange Subaru. “You kinda look different today.”

Sasuke looked down at himself. It was true, he was dressed abnormally conservatively that afternoon, especially compared to his last outing with Naruto, when he’d been in one of his special black fitted Loewe t-shirts and a pair of running shorts just slightly shorter than he normally would have worn to the co-op. Today, probably only about half-consciously, he’d put on a normal pair of non-form-fitting jeans and a black sweater over his undershirt, almost as if he were trying to conceal all his highest-tier physical assets (ass, stomach, and chest in that order) from exactly the guy who’d been fondling them in his dreams two nights before. It wasn’t entirely false. Naruto was doing something really nice for him. For once, Sasuke didn’t feel like muddying things up with manufactured sexual tension or by getting his own hopes up over superficial shit.

“I was cold,” was all he said to Naruto about it, though. “Where are we going?”

“Oh, wherever.” Naruto’s hand moved to turn the car’s heat two notches higher. “I just figured it would be easier to talk in here, instead of somewhere public or around our roommates or whatever.” He laughed a little nervously and tucked some blond hair behind an ear. “Can you tell my last tour made me kinda paranoid?”

Sasuke shrugged. “They say it’s not paranoia if people really are out to get you,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Naruto. “I guess.”

“Did you ever see combat when you were in Kuwait?”

Naruto, pulling onto Main Street, looked over at him at the abrupt question. “Sort of,” he said. His eyes were on the window behind Sasuke instead of Sasuke’s face. “I dunno. It’s all a combat zone, technically, but there wasn’t that much going on where I was at, except for, like, one or two things.”

“Yeah?” Sasuke picked at his nail polish. “Ever dream about it?”

“Mmmyehhn.” Naruto made a noise Sasuke couldn’t interpret as either confirmation or denial. “Dunno,” he repeated. “I don’t even really remember it that good, honestly.”

Sasuke nodded. He couldn’t help the stab of affection he felt at Naruto’s obviously maladaptive optimism, at his unhidden combination of vulnerability and repression, at the nervous banging of his thumb on the steering wheel as he drove. I had a weird dream, he almost said in solidarity, and then after point-two seconds realized how absolutely dumb and counterproductive that would have been. “So,” he said instead, to relieve either Naruto or himself of the moment, “what did you want to tell me about?”

“Oh, shit,” said Naruto, leaning forward to make a left turn. He looked tired, a little pink lining around his blue eyes, but if he was it hadn’t really put a dent in his usual loud enthusiasm. Looking at his hand on the wheel, Sasuke could see a dingy, fraying rope bracelet he hadn’t noticed the last time they saw each other, as well as a raised, white, and precisely vertical scar behind one elbow. Hanging on his neck was a brown leather string that disappeared under the neck of his Quiksilver t-shirt, which had the unfortunate effect of placing the image in Sasuke’s mind of Naruto stripping off his shirt to reveal the pendant underneath. Sasuke didn’t know if he was taking them somewhere or just circling around, and didn’t ask. 

“Yeah, dude,” he was saying. “I heard the craziest shit from my friend. He’s Shikamaru’s friend, I guess, but he’s like a reporter or something. And when I brought something up about Danzo—”

“What’d you say?”

Naruto blinked. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t know, just something about what you were saying, the stuff about him being really homophobic and everything. I was just thinking about it, I guess.” He rubbed a hand on his cargo shorts. “Why?”

“Never mind,” said Sasuke. “Can I smoke in here?”

“Oh, uh—” Naruto pushed the dashboard’s airflow switch to the side and rolled down the window. “You know, it’s not really, like, that good for you to smoke so much.”

Sasuke couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “Yeah?” he asked, blowing out the top half of the cracked window. “Where’d you hear that?”

“What?” Naruto’s blue eyes were wide, trusting, for a second, and then he seemed to hear Sasuke’s words and shook his head. “No, I meant—no, shut up, I just—”

“I can’t help it.” Sasuke tried to hide his smile with the cigarette. “You’re too easy.”

“Shut up!” Naruto went to punch Sasuke in the shoulder, which he blocked with a hand, laughing.“Wait, no.” Naruto was giggling, swatting at Sasuke’s palm as he batted him away. “It’s actually serious, okay.” He put his big hand over Sasuke’s, stopping him, and Sasuke felt a harsh tingle in his stomach at the feeling.

“Okay,” he said, taking his hand back and clearing his throat. “So what is it?”

Naruto glanced at the open window, leaned in closer to Sasuke—he smelled like cedarwood deodorant and sweat—and started to talk in a hushed whisper. “So this guy works for this website, right? And they got a, like, tip or whatever, saying that there’s gonna be all this crazy drama in the local elections this year because people are digging up all this stuff about the people on the school board and whatever, their families and stuff. And he kinda was looking into it and I guess the tip came from one of the people they hired to find stuff, and he said they’re doing all this really invasive shit, basically just to fuck with people around here so they drop out of the elections, and then the guys they actually want are gonna do it instead. And my friend asked who hired him, and the guy said—” Naruto raised his eyebrows and held both hands out to Sasuke in anticipation. “Guess!”

“Danzo?” asked Sasuke.

“Yeah!” Naruto nodded frantically. “How crazy is that? Isn’t it scary?”

“Sorry,” said Sasuke, who was a little foggy from the feeling of Naruto’s breath and hadn’t quite followed his scattered explanation. “I don’t think I get it.”

“He’s trying to take over the city council!” Naruto banged the steering wheel. “And put all his horrible guys on it! So they can pass all the—you know, all the horrible stuff you were talking about!”

“Jesus.” Sasuke threw the butt of his cigarette out the window and rolled it back up, feeling shaken. He wasn’t sure how much to believe of Naruto’s secondhand story, but if even half of it was true— “Fuck,” he said. “That’s not great.”

“I know, right?” Naruto ran a hand through his messy hair. “Seriously, it’s gonna be a shitshow if it actually happens. I was thinking—we have to tell your friends about it, right? Like, I can talk to that guy again, get him to explain everything better, and then—I mean, there’s gotta be some way to protest it or whatever, spread the word, that’s the kinda stuff you guys do, right?” 

Sasuke clenched his teeth, staring out the windshield. The whole time they’d been sitting in the car, the gas station in front of them had been letting in a steady stream of customers, walking in and then out with their Cokes, lottery tickets, smokes. Sometimes when Sasuke thought about living in this town his whole life, the same place where he’d grown up, the same place that was constantly teetering back and forth between hard-right and bare-minimum-centrist-liberal, where forty-nine-point-six percent of his neighbors would have happily traded away Sasuke’s legal rights to exist for a small business tax cut, he just didn’t know how much longer he could take it. That’s why people like us have to stay here, Ino or Neji would have said, because it’s places like this where you can really make an impact, where there’s still a chance at shifting the conversation, instead of some perma-blue echo chamber where your vote doesn’t even count. Well, it was fucking easy for them to say. They didn’t have to see it in front of their face every time they left the house, feel the disdainful looks from football jerseys and beer guts at the grocery store, hear the condescending sighs from his own comrades at yet another Sasuke soapbox about homophobia. They didn’t have to hear the name of the person who’d made Sasuke’s teen years such hell, who’d reminded him daily just how abnormal and deviant he was, how miniscule were his chances of ever fitting in—they didn’t have to live with the knowledge that nothing was getting better, that things were only getting worse, that they would never be anything but powerless against him and everybody like him. Fuck. Sasuke scraped his face roughly with a hand, brushing away the hot moisture from his eyes, and shook his head. 

“Protesting won’t do anything,” he said, hearing the tightness in his own voice. “We’re past that point now. If this is the shit they think they can get away with then it’s like I was saying—it’s already coming.”

“You think so?” Even Naruto sounded anxious. 

“I know.” Sasuke looked him in the eye. “Look,” he said. “The people you met at the co-op last week—they won’t do shit. I know them. They’re complacent, they’re sheltered, they can’t see two feet in front of their own eyes. But you know what?”

“What?” Naruto’s eyes were wide. 

“I know where that fucker lives,” said Sasuke. 

***

“You know what this is like,” Naruto laughed as they got out of the car a block from Danzo’s subdivision. “You ever watch that movie Point Break? With the surfers that rob banks?” 

“Sure.” Sasuke shrugged off his black jacket and grabbed the fleece blanket and hammer from the backseat. “This isn’t a bank, though.” And that movie is gayer than my XVideos search history, he didn’t add. 

“Yeah, but I just like how it’s, like, regular bros doing that stuff.” He giggled again, double-checking and re-snapping the many spacious pockets of his shorts. It felt a little weird to be doing this in broad daylight, but Sasuke had managed to find a schedule of school board meetings online and knew Danzo would definitely be out of the house for at least two hours for their executive session at 3 pm that afternoon. Naruto had taken surprisingly little coaxing to go along with his crazy plan, which had Sasuke wondering a bit about what kinds of activism he really had been looking to get into after his un-amicable departure from service. (“It’s kind of like a felony,” he remembered Naruto saying, and the supremely unperturbed tone when he did.) His only resistance had come when Sasuke asked, more out of curiosity than actual utility, whether he had a gun they could bring along; Naruto had again widened his already wide eyes and shook his head vehemently. 

“ Not anymore,” he told Sasuke. “I got rid of all that stuff. I’m a pacifist. That’s actually, like, really important to me.” 

“Okay,” was all Sasuke had said in response. He didn’t mention anything about his own feelings on pacifism (it was for pussies and liberals) or express any kind of disappointment, though he secretly had been hoping to witness the undoubtedly fear-boner (Sasuke’s favorite kind) inducing sight of Naruto packing heat. Not that he was complaining. Naruto already looked stupid hot that afternoon without any accoutrements, definitely the hottest of any of the three times Sasuke had seen him that week. He was wearing a baggy tank top with an orange stripe across the chest and obviously cut-off arm holes wide enough to show off the hollow under his arms and the sun-spiral tattoo on his left shoulder, and his shaggy hair was held back by a black sweatband that should have been ridiculously dorky but instead was somehow nothing but sexy. The leather necklace string was visible again under his shirt’s neck, and again Sasuke had to stop himself from asking to take it off so he could see. He eyed Naruto’s arms as he unclipped the Swiss army knife keyring from his belt loop and secured it in a side pocket.

“I used to be so into Keanu Reeves in that movie,” he said offhandedly, slipping the pocket’s button into its loop. Then he looked up at Sasuke and gave a thumbs-up. “Ready?” 

Sasuke, temporarily thrown off enough to forget his words, opened his mouth. “Uh,” he said, which apparently in his deep monosyllabic voice sounded reasonably like “Yeah,” because Naruto pounded him lightly on the back and told him to lead the way. He pointed in the direction of their destination, and they started down the sidewalk, Sasuke’s mind racing. 

Now what the fuck had Naruto meant by that? He was “into” Keanu? What did that mean? Despite his historical sexual investment in their community, Sasuke was still woefully unversed in straight bro vernacular, so he had absolutely no clue whether being “into” a guy could have some other totally platonic connotation he’d never thought of. It wasn’t totally implausible that Naruto could have just been saying he wanted to be like his character or something—ex-football player turned FBI agent didn’t seem that far off from his own former interests, after all. But then there was the other nagging aspect to his comment: the fact that Sasuke was pretty frequently told, by everyone from former lovers to coffee shop patrons to random women on the street, that he really looked a lot like Keanu Reeves. It was by far the most common celebrity lookalike he ever got, to the point that he tended to feel a little secret twinge of flattery whenever he heard someone talking about how hot he’d been in some movie. And besides—it wasn’t really something he acknowledged often, but Naruto had been the one to suggest they make out all those years ago in high school...

He was so lost in speculation that he almost missed the mailbox for 302, Danzo’s house. When they came up on the number, he reached out instinctively to grab Naruto by the side of his shirt and pulled him back. “Hang on,” he said, whispering slightly despite nobody being outside that he could see. “He probably has a doorbell cam or something. We should go around the back.” 

“Roger.” Naruto followed Sasuke down the slight hill of the driveway and across to the backyard of the house. It was a small but nice-looking property, a two-story craftsman with shrubs in the front and a neatly tended garden behind. The house looked basically identical to the other four on that street, the only difference being the lawncare companies advertised on their curbs and the amount and fanciness of the cars in front. (It hadn’t occurred to Sasuke that Danzo probably had a wife who might easily have been home, but thankfully the driveway had been empty when they arrived.) Sasuke, having grown up in a McMansion with an even bigger yard in an even nicer part of town, knew he really had no place to judge (especially not compared to Naruto, whom he was pretty sure had spent at least some of his childhood in the foster system), but still...he just hated the suburbs. Every time he was here, something inside him just itched to fuck shit up. 

The back door had no windows, but a few yards away there was a sloped metal basement entrance next to a small rectangular pane. Sasuke nudged him, and they went over to inspect; the door’s handles were secured with a padlock, though Naruto tugged at them anyway. Sasuke knelt down in front of the window and peered in. The basement appeared unfinished, dark inside with concrete walls and lined with boxes, and an optimistic part of Sasuke (which, since when had a part by that description ever existed?) hoped that maybe they’d find what they were looking for without even having to go upstairs. When he glanced over, Naruto was attempting to wedge the blade of his pocketknife between the glass and the frame.

“Worth a shot,” he said in response to Sasuke’s questioning look, and pointed to the window. “You wanna, or should I?”

“I’ll do it,” said Sasuke, already spreading the blanket over the glass in front of him. “Hold the side.” Naruto, ever the soldier, did as he was told. Sasuke balanced the weight of the hammer in his hand, hesitated for a moment, then whacked it into the glass as hard as he could. 

At the only-sort-of-muffled sound of the glass shattering, Sasuke and Naruto both froze, listening (at least Sasuke was) intently for any sound of alarms or security devices going off. Once he was satisfied that nothing had been triggered, Sasuke put the blanket back down and started clearing off the jagged stalactites and stalagmites of glass around the window’s frame with the claw of the hammer. His heartbeat was a little stuttery. Next to him, Naruto was giggling in what Sasuke assumed was nervousness, but mostly just sounded like excitement. 

“You want me to give it a try?” he asked once Sasuke was almost done. Sasuke turned to him, baffled. 

“To go through here?” He gestured at the 18-inch-long window. “Your arm is bigger than this thing.” 

Naruto smiled and jokingly flexed a bicep. Sasuke looked down. “Yeah, but I feel like it’d be, like, the right thing for me to go first. Because of chivalry and shit.” 

Sasuke made a disgusted sound in his throat. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, meaning it. “There’s nothing to be chivalrous about. You’re aware I am actually still a male? Like, my XY chromosomes didn’t disappear when I started having sex with men?” 

“Come on.” Naruto, sitting on the grass on his knees, pouted. “I didn’t mean it like that.” 

“Whatever.” Dually motivated now by righteous anger and petty spite, Sasuke kicked out the last shards of glass with his Converse and laid the blanket over the bottom of the window. “Spot me,” he said tersely, and began to lower his bottom half into the dark interior as Naruto scrambled over. 

The window was a tight squeeze at both Sasuke’s hips and his torso; despite the hyperbole born from his horny mind, he wasn’t actually that much smaller than Naruto. When he managed to get most of himself through, he grabbed onto the bottom of the frame and felt the sharp remnants of glass press into his palms under the blanket. Naruto held his wrists loosely. The basement floor was about a six-foot distance from where his feet hung. Sasuke closed his eyes, said a quick prayer for his ankles, and dropped. 

“Fuck.” The word came out of his mouth automatically as he felt the shock of the hard cement floor on his feet, then his ass and hands. Nothing felt broken, though one palm was stinging especially violently. 

“You okay?” he heard Naruto shout. 

“Shh,” he said back, pushing himself up gingerly. When he looked down at the painful hand, he saw watery red blood on the skin. “Shit,” he hissed, and felt with a fingertip the sharp blade of a piece of glass he must have pressed into without noticing. 

“What’s up?” Naruto called again.

“Jesus,” Sasuke muttered. He put the butt of his hand to his mouth and sucked on it as he went over to unlock the basement door. 

“You did it, dude!” Naruto stage-whispered as he came running into the house, tools tucked under one arm, and held up a hand for a high-five. Then he looked at the hand in Sasuke’s mouth and creased his forehead. “Are you okay?” he repeated, grabbing Sasuke’s arm before he could answer. “Shit, is that glass?” 

“It’s not that bad,” he said, as Naruto’s fingers hovered over the bloody skin. 

“Come here,” said Naruto, and pulled Sasuke by the wrist to sit down on a plastic crate by the wall. He pulled the string of a ceiling-mounted lightbulb and came back over, holding Sasuke’s hand up to his face intently. 

“Can I take it out?” he asked. “The glass?” 

“I mean, I don’t really want to leave any more blood in this house.” Sasuke looked at the ceiling, clenching a fist in discomfort.

“Hang on.” Naruto let his hand go and started rummaging in the pockets of his shorts, eventually emerging with a paper-wrapped butterfly bandage and a smile. “Got it!”

Sasuke laughed. “What the fuck? Are you a Boy Scout?”

“Nah.” Naruto ripped the bandage open and laid it on his knee. “Too much money. I always wanted to be, though.” 

Right. “Sorry,” said Sasuke, embarrassed at having rubbed his privilege in Naruto’s face so automatically. 

“How come?” Naruto glanced up to meet his eyes, then back down. “Here,” he said, took Sasuke’s uninjured hand, and put it on his bare knee. “Just squeeze my leg if you have to, okay? I’m gonna pull it out.”

Sasuke, his mind muddled with pain and adrenaline and the feeling of Naruto’s soft blonde leg hair under his palm, didn’t even respond. Naruto apparently took it as a yes. He pinched Sasuke’s skin with one hand and with the other, steadily but quickly, slid the glass out of Sasuke’s skin. 

“Shit.” Sasuke dug his short nails into Naruto’s skin reflexively. Naruto, to his credit, didn’t even react. 

“All done,” he said, and put the tiny shard in another pocket. “Good job.” 

“You should be a nurse,” said Sasuke, slightly deliriously. Naruto laughed. 

“Yeah, right,” he said. “I’m way too dumb.” He paused for a moment, as if making calculations, then pulled the bloody hand close again. 

“Hang on,” he mumbled. “I just—we probably shouldn’t wash it off in the sink, right?”

“I think it’s okay,” said Sasuke. 

“Let me just—” Before Sasuke could realize what he was doing, Naruto put a finger up to his own mouth and let out a glob of spit, then started rubbing it against Sasuke’s skin.

“Uh,” said Sasuke, “that can’t be sanitary.” He could feel the sensation of Naruto’s warm spit all the way down to his toes. 

“Better than nothing,” shrugged Naruto. He finished caressing Sasuke’s wet palm, put—Jesus fucking Christ—put the finger he’d been using in his mouth, sucked it clean, then wiped the remaining moisture off Sasuke’s hand with the bottom of his shirt. Once he was satisfied with the state of Sasuke’s now completely limp appendage, he secured the bandage tight around the hand and pressed the adhesive down into the skin. 

“Any better?” he asked Sasuke, standing up. Sasuke, who’d been vividly fantasizing about grinding his crotch into Naruto’s while he stuck both his fingers and his tongue into Naruto’s throat, tried to swap the mental image for something that wouldn’t precipitate a middle school-style erection mishap when he got off the crate. Dead puppies. Nancy Reagan. Knee amputations. Wait, why was that one kind of doing it for him? 

“So,” said Naruto, interrupting him mid-spiral, “you think we should start down here, or what?” 

They investigated and rifled through and tossed aside boxes in a fairly efficient manner for two amateur idiot thieves, but by the time they’d looked into everything remotely possible, there was still no sign of what they were looking for. “It’s gotta be, like, an office or something, right?” Naruto theorized, so, gingerly and very quietly, they crept up the basement stairs to peek out the kitchen window and make sure nobody had come into the house while they were searching. All clear. And, it seemed, there was in fact an office in the house, one of two rooms besides the master bed, the other a guest room that had clearly been converted from a daughter’s bedroom. It gave Sasuke the creeps even to imagine Danzo having kids. 

In the office, Naruto was flipping through the papers on Danzo’s desk with little regard for continuity. “Be careful,” Sasuke told him. “They probably actually go in this room.” 

“Bossy.” Naruto sat down in the leather chair and swiveled it back and forth. “Seems like we’re close, though,” he said, indicating the discarded files. “That’s all school board stuff.” 

“Really?” Sasuke came to the other side of the desk and knelt down next to the chair Naruto was in. “What about in here?” He pulled out some top drawers and skimmed through the papers, which were mostly politics-related but missing any of the incriminating evidence they were looking for. “Jesus,” he said aloud, reading one. “Look at this. All these emails back and forth about how they want to get this grade-school teacher fired for going to drag night. Fucking fascist.” 

“He prints out his emails?” Naruto asked as Sasuke passed him the stack. “Wow,” he said, flipping through. “What an asshole.”

“I can’t wait to ruin this motherfucker,” Sasuke mumbled. He shut the desk drawer hard and ran a hand through his hair, suddenly agitated again. He knelt down in front of the file drawer below and tried to open it, but it was caught by a lock in the center and wouldn’t budge. He looked up at Naruto, who raised his eyes. 

“You think?” he asked. 

“Do you still have that knife?” Sasuke responded. 

Naruto pulled out both the pocketknife and the multiuse tool in his pockets, and they both crouched in front of the drawer, taking turns trying to wiggle different instruments into the tiny keyhole, to no avail. Eventually, as Naruto wrestled with the corkscrew, biting his lip in concentration, the blonde hair on his arms brushing against Sasuke’s elbow, Sasuke had the brilliant idea to actually Google it, after which he was able to easily locate and unfold a paperclip, which he stuck into the lock and began to turn. Naruto pressed his ear against the desk like a movie safecracker. With his bandaged hand, Sasuke carefully slid the metal around in the lock until he found the spot where it met no resistance, held his breath, turned the paperclip to the right, and—

“Holy shit!” Naruto jumped away from the drawer like he’d been shocked as Sasuke clicked the lock and pulled it open. “Dude!” He hit Sasuke on the arm and ruffled his hair affectionately, making Sasuke laugh and push him away, amazed himself that it had actually worked. Naruto dove into the file folders while Sasuke fixed his hair, pulling out papers seemingly at random before stuffing them back inside. 

“Should we steal the deed to his house?” He shoved the paper in front of Sasuke’s face and laughed. “This is so badass, dude. I feel like a spy or something.” 

“What about this one?” Sasuke reached for a thick folder at the very back of the drawer labeled “Background.” Inside was a series of manila envelopes sealed with string and with no identifying information visible. Feeling high on adrenaline, Sasuke put the stack on the ground and started untying the first envelope. 

“Is that it?” Naruto leaned his head close to Sasuke’s as he pulled out the files inside. First out was a topsheet, nearly blank except for a handwritten name and a letterhead with the contact information for a company called—

“Insight Information Services,” read Naruto out loud. “And—wait—” He gripped Sasuke’s arm. Sasuke was nodding hard.

“This is it,” he said, flipping quickly through the rest of the papers. The name written on the front was for one of the city councilmembers Sasuke had tried to memorize in preparation the night before. Inside, as he and Naruto both stared in awe, was what looked like a comprehensive report into every aspect of the guy’s life, his history, his family, and highlighted in yellow were certain extra-invasive phrases like “illness,” “separation,” “abortion.” 

“But that stuff’s not even wrong or anything,” said Naruto as they read on. “How are they gonna use this for blackmail? It’s not like—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sasuke interrupted him. “It’s just intimidation. This whole section is just on stuff that would get his daughter bullied at school. They don’t care how ridiculous it is as long as it’ll make people’s lives hell. Jesus, these people are such pieces of—”

“What?” Naruto turned. Sasuke, stopping midsentence, had grabbed his elbow and was squeezing tight. When Naruto spoke, he moved the hand to his mouth, shutting him up.

“Shh,” he whispered, as quietly as he possibly could. “Did you hear that?” 

They both sat frozen still on the ground, listening intently, Naruto breathing on his hand. For nearly thirty seconds Sasuke couldn’t hear anything else, and had almost convinced himself he was paranoid when there was another sound—a door closing inside the house, unmistakable this time. Naruto clutched Sasuke’s arm too. Heart pounding, Sasuke cast around the room, trying to gather the heavy files in his arms without making noise—

“In there,” Naruto whispered, and pulled Sasuke by the wrist, pointing at a white slatted door at the side of the room. Sasuke could hear the sound of footsteps getting slowly louder, clearer. Grabbing their tools from the basement off the floor and clinging to the folders tightly, he pushed the file cabinet shut and scrambled to follow Naruto into the closet. 

Inside, they were both beset by a mob of out-of-season clothing, coats and sweaters and cardigans that smelled overpoweringly like old people. Sasuke tried impotently to shove them away from his face, still holding the papers in his arms, until finally Naruto came to pull the hangers to the side and stand close to him. The closet was just big enough for both of them—pressed against each other, they had about six inches of space left to maneuver in. “Shh,” Sasuke whispered, pointlessly since Naruto was barely breathing next to him. The sounds outside the closet were barely audible through the clothes and the door, but they continued listening for the slightest noise, still and completely silent. Sasuke could feel Naruto’s hand clutching the back of his shirt in a tight fist. The sped-up rhythm of his heartbeat syncopated with Sasuke’s own, both of them vibrating in the place where their shoulders pressed together. 

The footsteps were getting close again. Unconsciously, Sasuke found his hand grabbing Naruto’s arm an inch from his, squeezing tight the same way he’d done to his leg in the basement, the springy band of a muscle pressing into his thumbpad as Naruto clenched his fist. The sound came closer, then so close Sasuke felt nauseated, then, just as quickly, began to recede. Sasuke took a hesitant breath. It was silent outside the door as far as he could hear. Then, just as he was about to relax by a half-centimeter, they were back again, louder than ever—and then the office door opened. 

Naruto’s hand dug into his waist, gripping hard enough to leave marks. The shoes walked past the door, toward the desk at the end of the room. Sasuke could hear papers rustling, the click of a lamp. Through the tiny slit of the closet door that Sasuke could see through, a pair of feminine-looking clogs was visible. So it wasn’t Danzo. The tiny relief didn’t make much of a dent in Sasuke’s fear. Without realizing it, he and Naruto had started clutching each other’s free hands tightly, sweating into each other’s palms. Sasuke heard the noise of a drawer opening. The folders in his arms felt like they weighed a ton. There was a bit more rustling outside, and then the drawer slid closed, and—Sasuke shut his eyes and prayed for the second time that afternoon—the shoes crossed once again to the door, and left. 

Sasuke breathed out a ragged breath after the sound of the latch. Naruto grabbed his shirt again, pulling him closer, both of them putting hands to their mouths in redundant instructions to remain quiet. Slowly, carefully, Sasuke bent down, put his papers on the floor, and pressed his ear to the open slats of the closet. After a quiet moment, he felt Naruto doing the same, his head turned to the side so that Sasuke was breathing in the smell of his apple-scented shampoo. He didn’t hear anything outside for a long time, long enough for his heartbeat to just subside the tiniest bit and for Sasuke to become cognizant of the feeling of his closeness to Naruto, Naruto’s side pressed against his, the dampness of his hand from holding Naruto’s. In his panic he hadn’t had time to feel anything remotely sexual; now the possibility was starting to emerge, but it wasn’t only that. The memory of Naruto holding him tight in this tiny closet was hot, of course, but more than that it made Sasuke feel something he hadn’t felt in a long time: safe. 

“I think that was the front door,” Naruto whispered in his ear. Sasuke hadn’t even heard it. “You don’t think they saw the basement yet, do you?” 

Sasuke didn’t say anything. He kept his face pressed to the wood, trying to steady his breathing, until finally he heard what sounded like the ignition of a car. Naruto grabbed his elbow. Sasuke looked up at him, and together they listened to the faint crunch of the driveway, the short reversal, then the long fade of a vehicle retreating down the street. 

“Holy fucking shit,” Naruto whispered. Sasuke straightened up awkwardly, batting away coats, pressing a hand to his temple in exhaustion. When he put it down, Naruto’s face was an inch from his. 

“She’s gone,” Sasuke whispered back. “I think.” Naruto’s hand was still clutching the hem of his shirt. 

“That was so intense,” said Naruto. They both kept their voices nearly inaudible, despite the purportedly empty house. Naruto stared at Sasuke, his lips slightly open, eyes dazed. Sasuke put his hand on Naruto’s arm. “Are you okay?” Naruto asked him. 

Sasuke took a slow breath, swallowed despite his dry mouth. Naruto was still staring into his eyes. “I think so,” he began to say—but before he could get through the second word, Naruto’s mouth was pressing into his. 

Fuck. Within an instant all of Sasuke’s subsiding adrenaline was surging through him again, fear and panic and dread all alchemizing into pure response to the taste of Naruto’s kiss. He pressed his hands to the sweaty fabric on Naruto’s back, pulled him tighter, closing the already miniscule space between them in the cramped closet. He half-gasped, half-whined into Naruto’s mouth, their kiss frantic and messy, wet, ungraceful, and Sasuke couldn’t get enough. Naruto’s arm wrapped around his waist. He grabbed a fist of Naruto’s hair, pulling the sweatband off clumsily, and sucked at his teeth and lips. Naruto was rubbing a rough hand against the front of Sasuke’s shirt in a way that really shouldn’t have felt as good as it did. He pressed closer until Sasuke felt the wall of the closet against his back, hangers shifting and falling around them. 

“Oh my God,” Naruto was mumbling into his mouth, his thigh pushing between Sasuke’s legs with painful pressure. “Are you okay, that was so scary, oh my God—”

“Shut up,” Sasuke grunted. He was too close to Naruto to touch his chest, so he slid his bandaged hand under the back of his shirt instead, pressing against his hot skin. Naruto pulled Sasuke’s head to the side, mouthed over his ear and his hairline and down his neck. Sasuke kissed the hand in his hair, then took Naruto’s wrist in his own hands and opened his mouth to suck on Naruto’s thumb. Naruto pressed harder against him, a hand traveling down to feel the parts of Sasuke’s waist and thigh and ass he could reach, and Sasuke couldn’t help rubbing the crotch of his jeans against Naruto’s shorts, which Naruto responded to in kind and even more intensely. When Sasuke felt the shape of the second, larger hard-on pressing against his own, he—humiliatingly—whimpered a little into Naruto’s hand. Naruto removed the wet finger and held Sasuke’s chin, kissing his jawline as he rubbed himself harder against Sasuke’s pants. The space around them was so cramped Sasuke couldn’t even maneuver enough to unzip Naruto’s fly and stick a hand inside, despite wanting it more than anything. He could only press his fingers into the top inch of Naruto’s ass and let himself be humped against the wall while Naruto licked his mouth and his face like a feral canine, could only pant and whine and gasp as the friction intensified between his cock and Naruto’s, Naruto’s thigh, the zipper of his shorts. He hooked an ankle around Naruto’s leg to angle himself better, and felt the heat and weight of Naruto’s erection rubbing against him with almost more intensity than any actual sex he’d ever had. His dick, confined in boxer-briefs and tight jeans, practically ached. He could feel a damp sticky spot forming in his underwear. He wasn’t sure he could actually come like this—he hadn’t dry-humped anybody since Sai in the eleventh grade—but Naruto didn’t seem too concerned. His body was so warm and big and heavenly pressed against Sasuke’s that even he didn’t really care. His mouth was making a wet circle on the shoulder of Naruto’s tank top. Naruto was biting the skin above his collarbone. Sasuke had never seen him so animalistic. He thought it was probably one of the hottest things he’d ever witnessed. 

“God,” he heard Naruto groan, and then he was pulling just slightly away from Sasuke, only one or two inches but enough for him to grasp a hand clumsily between them and into Sasuke’s pants. Sasuke, astounding himself, pushed his hips forward into Naruto’s fingers as they reached into the button-fly, pressing the back of his head into the wall and whining as Naruto’s warm and sweaty hand finally touched him. Naruto got closer again, kept thrusting against Sasuke’s hips as he fumbled inside Sasuke’s underwear, both of them breathing heavy and ragged. He was barely even touching Sasuke, just holding his palm against Sasuke’s dick as Sasuke rubbed himself against it. Sasuke wrapped his arms around Naruto’s neck and wondered if he was going to cry. Finally, incredibly—Sasuke wasn’t even touching him—he heard Naruto sigh harshly against his neck and press his face into Sasuke’s skin, and the feeling of it, combined with the hand in his briefs and the unbelievable realization that Naruto Uzumaki just came in his pants from humping Sasuke in a coat closet, was enough for Sasuke’s guts to tighten and his legs to weaken and him to spill all over Naruto’s fingers, too. 

They were both silent for a long moment. Sasuke loosened only slightly his grip on Naruto’s shirt. Naruto’s lips were still pressed to his neck. Eventually, he felt Naruto swallow, and he put a hand on Sasuke’s shoulder and straightened up slightly, then pulled, slowly, his hand out of Sasuke’s jeans. 

His fingers were covered in come. There was still a lot more inside Sasuke’s underwear. He watched as Naruto looked at it for a minute, simultaneously aroused and anxious—did he think it was gross? had he ever seen another guy’s before? how would they get it off while still in Danzo’s tiny closet?—but silent. Naruto turned his hand over, then back again. 

“Wow,” he said. Then he put the side of his hand to his mouth and started licking it clean.

Chapter Text

“I don’t know what the hell I was thinking,” Sasuke said. He was sitting on his mattress, door shut and locked (Karin’s cat whining to be let in), bent over, head between his knees on the floor. “He’s never going to talk to me again. What am I going to do with all this shit now?” He kicked childishly at one of the manila envelopes currently sitting very incriminatingly on his floor. “I’m such an idiot,” he groaned into the phone. 

“Don’t say that,” said Jugo. “You’re not stupid. What did you say to him after it happened? Didn’t you two talk about it at all?” 

“Uh,” said Sasuke. “Well...I sort of told him we shouldn’t text each other for a few days. Just in case. Because of the crime.” 

“And he agreed?” asked Jugo.

“Well...yeah.” He still cringed to remember it: his panicked words as they walked fake-casually to their cars on the other side of the street, his desperation to shove away from himself the raw and intimate moment they’d just shared. Naruto’s deflated “Oh.” His self-hatred at his own cowardice. I’m doing this for your own good, Sasuke had wanted to tell him, but even he didn’t really believe it was true.

“So what makes you think he doesn’t want to talk to you?” 

“Because.” Sasuke flopped onto his back on the bed. “This already happened. I told you. When we kissed in high school, that was the last time we ever spoke until last week. He obviously regretted it. And now I just forced him to do the same thing all over again.”

“It didn’t really sound like you forced him. Either time.” 

“Well, I basically did,” said Sasuke. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re a good person, you’re honest, you tell people how you feel about things. You don’t have these disgusting perverse little compunctions that make everything  you do come out completely manipulative and sinister.” 

Jugo laughed. “Sasuke,” he said. “That’s not what you’re like at all.” 

“Yes it is,” grumbled Sasuke, an arm flung over his face while he talked into the speaker. “How would you know?” 

Unfortunately, Jugo did actually kind of know. Not that Sasuke would have ever said it to his face, but there were certain technical definitions by which Jugo might have even been considered his best friend. They’d first met two years earlier at an animal rights event (Jugo worked for a wildlife rehab back then), during which Sasuke had singlemindedly badgered Karin, who’d introduced them, for explicit confirmation that the intimidating, six-foot, totally-Sasuke’s-type Jugo was in fact both gay and single until she’d finally snapped and texted him my roommate wants to fuck you before they’d even left for home. Sasuke had given her the silent treatment for thirty-two hours (that was so not how he approached guys), only forgiving her once Jugo hit him up via the number Karin had passed along. 

In any case, excepting whatever the thing with Naruto in the closet should be considered, Jugo was far and away the best sex Sasuke had ever had in his life. He was also—again excepting Naruto—the person he’d hooked up with who’d been the nicest to him in general, which fact Sasuke, who prided himself on having very refined fucked-up masochistic appetites, didn’t really care to investigate. From the first time they met he found himself surprisingly comfortable around Jugo, able to discuss things it would normally have taken him years to open up about, and for his part Jugo seemed to feel the same way. The whole thing might have even approached some kind of terrifying falling-in-actual-love scenario had Jugo not been completely, bizarrely, antisocially hung up on his ex, Kimimaro, who was also kind of still his boyfriend, but not, except for that they still fucked sometimes, except when they weren’t doing that. This state of affairs paradoxically allowed Sasuke to feel much more comfortable with the emotional intimacy that had begun growing between him and Jugo, even if on Jugo’s part the intimacy mostly involved long conversations dissecting the meanings of various glances or offhand remarks from his last meeting with Kimimaro. He knew it would never be possible for the two of them to get what Sasuke considered dangerously close, so he allowed for a tiny crack to form in his rigid internal walls, which felt a little like stretching out muscles that had been atrophying on a hospital bed for five years straight. 

All of it lasted for about five months, until Sasuke got sick of Jugo accidentally calling him “Ki—Sasuke” during sex and proposed, half as a joke, that if the two of them were so dead set on not getting back together then maybe they could at least do a threeway and relieve some of the misery. Jugo accepted with far too much enthusiasm for Sasuke’s taste, though he did actually end up really enjoying it once it happened, mainly because Jugo and Kimimaro were so passive-aggressively studious about not excluding Sasuke that they both ended up pretty much only paying attention to him the whole time, and between Jugo’s paternalistic service top and Kimimaro’s sulky femmey sub personas there was more than enough fantasy-type sexiness to make up for Sasuke basically letting his body be used as a conduit for tiresome gay drama. But afterward, when Sasuke came back from cleaning himself off in the bathroom, he could hear the obvious cadence of an intense hushed argument between the two ex-boyfriends, and within a week they were running off for a lover’s retreat in the woods and Sasuke knew he had to extricate himself from sexual involvement in their dysfunction for the sake of his own dignity, if nothing else. After the next breakup was when Jugo announced his intention to find himself on an eight-month research expedition in the Arctic Circle; nowadays his cell service was spotty and rare enough that Sasuke was always very touched whenever Jugo found a chance to respond to one of his requests for dick pics. Or to, like, talk about feelings, or whatever. 

“You know,” Jugo was telling him now, “I really think you’re worried about the wrong thing, anyway. Didn’t you say there were some—um, fluids when you were in the closet? Isn’t that DNA?” 

“It’s just B&E,” said Sasuke. “I don’t think they’re going to be sending anything to the lab. The cops in this town are lazy as fuck.” 

“Still,” said Jugo. “It is a felony.” 

“Naruto almost got a dishonorable discharge from the army,” said Sasuke, twisting some hair between his fingers despondently. “That’s a felony too. But he thought it was worth it because of what he believed in.” 

“Do you?” Jugo asked him. 

“Do I what?” 

“Think it’s worth it? How far are you really going to go with this anyway?” 

“What do you mean how far?” Sasuke sat up and put a hand on one hip even though he knew Jugo couldn’t see him. “As far as I have to. I’m not going to sit by and watch this town become even more of a fucking christofascist hellscape than it already is. If there’s something I can do I’m going to fucking do it. What, do you think I should give up on it already?” 

“I didn’t say that.” Sasuke could hear the noise of a foghorn from where Jugo was speaking. “It’s just that I know how close you are to this Danzo thing, and now with Naruto being a part of it too—I just worry about you.” 

“Well, don’t,” said Sasuke. “You don’t have to worry about me, you’re not my dad.” Well, not outside of certain roleplay scenarios, at least. “Just—just tell me what you think I should do,” he said, frustratingly aware of how contradictory his last two sentiments were. “Should I try and track these people down to warn them or something? Or should we be telling people about what’s going on? Stage a disruption or something? And what the fuck am I going to do about Naruto?” 

“Don’t worry about Naruto,” said Jugo. “Naruto likes you.” 

“I really don’t know about that,” said Sasuke. 

“Well,” said Jugo, “anyway. You said he heard about the spying thing from a journalist? Why don’t you try taking it to him, see if he’ll write about it?” 

Sasuke had to admit it wasn’t actually a terrible idea. Even if it would involve talking to Naruto soon, which he’d already decided he should never attempt again and was also desperately angling to come up with a reason to do. And even if it had come from Jugo and all his incredibly irritating and smug claims to maturity. Sasuke just mumbled something ambivalent in response.

“Text me when you start jerking off again,” he said by way of a goodbye. Jugo laughed and told him he’d be the first to know. 

***

“So how did you guys...get this stuff again?” the journalist asked them, flipping with a creased brow through the pile of documents Naruto and Sasuke had brought over in Naruto’s closely guarded canvas messenger bag. Naruto said he’d asked the guy if they could come to his office at the newspaper, to which the guy had laughed and asked him if he really thought anybody working at a newspaper had an office anymore and suggested they meet at Starbucks. Naruto, still paranoid, refused outright, and after some back-and-forth they finally agreed on the library, where Naruto insisted they use one of the open meeting rooms with a door instead of the stacks. Opsec, he called it. Sasuke came this close to making a Deep Throat joke before catching himself. 

“Do you really need to know how we got it?” Naruto responded, not suspiciously at all. “Isn’t it enough to just see what kind of crap they’re trying to get away with?” 

“I mean,” said the guy, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses, “not really, no. Reporters need sources. We’re legally responsible for the stuff we publish.” 

“It was legal, though,” said Naruto. Sasuke kicked him under the table. 

“He’s just saying we’d like to be anonymous,” said Sasuke.

“Right.” He flipped through some more pages. “That’s fine, but it’s really not even the issue. There’s just nothing really actionable here. It’s not illegal to look into your political opponents’ background. It’s pretty common, actually.” 

“Come on,” said Sasuke. “You know that’s not all this is.”

“Sure, I can infer it. But you have no concrete evidence. You don’t think a guy like Danzo is going to come after us if we write a hit piece about him? It would have to be airtight, and this just doesn’t cut it.” 

“So you’re just going to let him get away with it?” asked Naruto urgently. “This guy’s crazy! He was totally homophobic to Sasuke when we were in school, and he’s even worse now—he’s doing it to, like, teachers and stuff, we saw these emails that—” This time Sasuke dug a heel into Naruto’s shoe hard to get him to be quiet. Naruto made a little whine of protest and looked at Sasuke pleadingly to back him up. 

“This is in the public interest,” Sasuke said. “It’s antidemocratic.” Naruto nodded vehemently next to him. “Weren’t you the one who got the tip about this in the first place?” Sasuke asked. 

“Yeah, well.” The reporter sighed and restacked the papers he’d been flipping through into a pile. “That’s kind of the issue. Look—our paper’s not doing great, okay? Print is dead, the internet’s killing us, nobody reads. The reality is, the people with money in this town are crucial for our bottom line, and a lot of those people wouldn’t like to see Shimura Danzo bad-mouthed on the front page. You know what I mean? That’s really why I was telling people about that tip. I might not be able to write about it, but maybe if I can get it out there another way...” He waved his hand lamely. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Sasuke. “You’re just going to let this shit happen because it’s good for business? Do you people not have any standard of ethics? Beliefs? Anything?”

“Do you know how few cities this size still even have local journalism?” He was avoiding Sasuke’s eyes. “If we start losing advertisers, we’re screwed. It sucks, but that’s the way it is.”

“So change it,” said Naruto. “Make it not that way.”

“This is a fascist fucking coup we’re talking about,” said Sasuke. “Not a bad restaurant review.” 

“I’m sorry,” said the reporter, and pushed back his chair in a clear indication that their conversation was ending. “Don’t shoot the messenger, okay? This shit isn’t up to me. I’m sure you two will figure it out.” He slung his bag over one shoulder and headed to the door. “And try not to get caught with this stuff,” he added on his way out, gesturing to the pile of papers on the table. “However you got ahold of it.” 

“Seriously?” Naruto asked, twisting himself around in his chair, but as he spoke the guy was already gone. Sasuke watched him press two frustrated fists to his face. Then he shook his head and slammed one onto the wood in front of him with a loud “Fuck!” 

“Hey.” Sasuke reached instinctively to touch his arm, then quickly let it go again. “Keep it down,” he said, and leaned over the table to start gathering their things. “We should get out of here.” 

“What the fuck are we gonna do?” Naruto asked. “I mean, can you believe that guy?”

“Yes,” said Sasuke. 

“I know, but, like.” Naruto ran a hand through his hair and sat back in his chair, legs spread in his shorts and posture slouched. Sasuke fiddled aimlessly with the papers in his hands. “It just sucks,” he heard Naruto mumbling under his voice. He was about to speak up, to tell Naruto something about how typical it was, how he hadn’t expected anything anyway, how he never did—when Naruto reached out and grabbed his wrist. 

“Sasuke,” he said, looking up at Sasuke where he stood with big sad eyes. Sasuke couldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry.” 

“For what.” Sasuke said it as flatly as he could.

“Just...everything. This and, like. I don’t know. The—you know.” He dropped his hand and went back to staring between his legs like a mopey dog. “You probably hate me,” he said, shrugging sulkily. 

Sasuke clenched his teeth for a moment. He’d really hoped he was going to be able to avoid something like this. Naruto was ex-military; wasn’t that supposed to be one of the demographics least prone to instigating emotional relationship talks? In fact Sasuke had always assumed part of his much-derided attraction to the straight-acting-straight-appearing crowd was how unlikely they were to do stuff like this. But somehow he’d still ended up first with Jugo, now with Naruto, whom if he was honest he’d always known perfectly well if they ever had sex would end up doing exactly that. 

“Can we talk about this outside?” he asked Naruto. “I need a smoke.” 

Outside, Sasuke dumped their shit into his passenger seat and took his time lighting up before finally turning to face Naruto. Naruto was staring up into space, chewing on the leather strand of his necklace, which looked to have some kind of crystal blue pendant dangling off the other side. When Sasuke cleared his throat, he tugged it out of his mouth with a finger. 

“What is that?” Sasuke asked.

“Huh?” Naruto looked down. “Oh. It’s just something somebody gave me. A long time ago.” He tucked it back under his t-shirt. “It’s like, a symbol,” he added, without explaining further. 

“Okay,” said Sasuke. “So what did you want to say?” 

Naruto blinked. “I thought you wanted to say something,” he said. 

“Does that sound like me?” Sasuke tried to blow a smoke ring that dissipated almost immediately, undercutting his dry retort somewhat. 

“I don’t know,” said Naruto, giving him the puppy eyes again. “I just felt bad about everything the other day. I mean how I acted and everything. I didn’t want to make you feel—bad. But I didn’t—you said we shouldn’t talk to each other, so...”

“I feel fine,” said Sasuke. 

“Really?” 

“Yes.” Sasuke fought the urge to roll his eyes. “What am I supposed to be feeling bad about exactly?” Immediately, his mind supplied him with a barrage of extremely mean follow-ups to this question, mostly along the lines of “You think you matter enough to me that anything you do could possibly bother me at all?” The impulse was cruel enough that it actually surprised Sasuke a little; he hadn’t realized he was so sensitive about this. Uh-oh. 

“Not supposed to.” Naruto started tugging on the necklace again. “I just thought you might be feeling, like, creeped out, you know, like uncomfortable...like, it’s not like I asked you if I could do that or anything.”

Sasuke laughed. Naruto frowned. “What?” 

“I’m not a girl,” Sasuke said. “You don’t have to ask my permission.” 

“What?” The crease in Naruto’s brow deepened. “Yeah I do, it’s not about girls, you’re not supposed to do that to anybody without asking—”

“You know what I mean.” Sasuke waved some smoke out of his face, realizing he actually wasn’t sure he knew himself. Don’t need permission? Maybe it was kind of true when it came to Naruto, but, as Jugo was so fond of telling him, you really shouldn’t say that about yourself. “I mean I’m not scared of you,” he explained after a moment. “I’m not just going to let you do something I’m not okay with.” 

“So you were okay with it?” Naruto asked him. 

“What’d I just say?” Sasuke was avoiding his eyes. 

“Okay,” said Naruto, not sounding any less apprehensive. “Because, like...can I be honest?”

“What?”

“It’s just...the whole time we were in there talking to that guy...I kinda couldn’t stop thinking about touching you again.”

Sasuke snapped his eyes back to Naruto’s face. He was scratching at his hair a little nervously, but there was no blush on his cheeks or embarrassment in his eyes when Sasuke looked into them. He was serious. And apparently not as shy as he’d been presenting himself to be. It definitely hadn’t been anywhere near what Sasuke had expected him to say when he asked to talk, but as he was quickly learning—and as he probably should have already known—it was generally a losing bet to guess Naruto would ever act in the way anyone expected him to. 

Sasuke took a final drag and dropped his cigarette on the ground, took his time putting it out under the toe of his sneaker, then gestured at Naruto to come closer. The back parking lot of the library where they were standing was nearly empty, only three cars parked at the opposite end from Sasuke’s. Still, they weren’t far from the door, in plain view of anyone who might drive by, forty-nine-point-six percent of whom would probably be tempted to yell or cuss or worse at the sight of two guys pressing up against each other in broad daylight. The people with money in this town don’t want to see Danzo being bad-mouthed, he heard the reporter saying in his head. Well, they were about to start seeing plenty of things they weren’t too fond of, if Sasuke had anything to do with it. He reached out and tugged the hem of Naruto’s shirt, eliminating the last inches of space between them. 

“You wanted to touch me?” he said quietly, his mouth by Naruto’s ear. Naruto was about an inch shorter than him, something Sasuke had never realized before. He could see each tiny whorl of golden hair glinting in the sunlight. When he asked the question, Naruto just nodded dumbly, mouth half-open. 

“You want to kiss me?” he asked. Naruto nodded again. “You want to fuck me?” Sasuke  asked him, and this time his nod was even more vehement. Sasuke, his knee pressed to Naruto’s, thought in an insane part of his mind that he could almost feel the heat of Naruto’s hard-on through his jeans. He raised a hand and pushed his fingers through Naruto’s thick hair. 

“If I asked you to do something for me,” he asked Naruto, “would you do it?” Naruto nodded. “Anything?” he asked. 

“Yeah,” said Naruto, clearing his throat. “Yeah. Course. Whatever. Anything.” 

Sasuke gripped the hair in his hand harder and pushed it down. He saw Naruto swallow, still staring at him wide-eyed. Sasuke nodded. “Come on,” he said, moving his eyes to the pavement under Naruto’s feet. Slowly, like a good soldier, Naruto followed orders and got down on his knees in front of Sasuke. 

“Good boy,” said Sasuke. Naruto just looked up at him. He looked so sweet, with such an earnest innocence on his face, that Sasuke could hardly believe he’d ever been a thug-for-hire, a tool of empire deployed under pretenses of heroism to defend oil interests in unstable theocracies with deadly force. But, of course, he had been. Not even a year ago, in fact. And now he was so desperate for Sasuke’s ass that he’d relinquished all his power and let himself be collared like a dog on the sidewalk. 

God, it was so hot Sasuke could barely stand it. 

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” he said quietly, and then, as Naruto listened obediently, Sasuke laid out the plan he’d come up with as he sat in the library tuning out the pathetic excuses of a spineless hack too chained to capitalistic interests to follow even the first rules of journalism. Saying the words, his crazy, reckless idea, out loud filled him with a conviction he hadn’t felt in a long time. They didn’t need anybody else. They could do it themselves, and when they did it, that fact would make it even more satisfying to finally take Danzo down. It’s just you and me, Sasuke. He’d been right—dream-Naruto, or Sasuke’s unconscious, or whoever had whispered those words in Sasuke’s sleep. Real Naruto didn’t say a word until he was finished and Sasuke asked him, “Got it?” 

“Yeah,” said Naruto. “Okay.” 

“You’ll do it?” 

“Yeah,” said Naruto. “If you want me to.” 

“Good,” said Sasuke. “Then get up.” 

Sasuke relinquished his grip on Naruto’s hair, and he stood, brushing ground off his bare knees and looking pink-faced at Sasuke. A heady feeling of power spread through Sasuke as he watched him. The despairing regret he’d told Jugo about on the phone two days earlier now felt almost completely alien to him. He felt for a moment like he could do anything he’d ever dreamed of. Naruto wiped his open mouth with the same hand, then asked, his voice impatient, “Can I kiss you?” 

“Come here,” said Sasuke. Naruto grabbed him by the waist and pressed his body against Sasuke’s, his tongue into Sasuke’s mouth, Sasuke’s back against the side of his car. Even when Sasuke heard the noise of someone else coming out into the parking lot, doors opening and closing, cars driving by on the street, even knowing full well what they all probably thought about the sight of him and Naruto making out in the middle of city government property, even then he couldn’t bring himself to give the slightest fuck. 

***

“Um,” said Sasuke when he felt Naruto’s fingers approaching somewhere very sensitive from behind him. “Do you know what you’re doing back there?” 

“Uh-huh!” Sasuke turned around to see Naruto nodding enthusiastically. “I Googled it!” They were on Naruto’s box-spring on the floor of his very small one-windowed room, which still looked as if Naruto had just moved into it about three days earlier: the only decorations were a vertical line of Polaroids of a blonde and redheaded couple, a hill of fast food bags and empty soda cans was colonizing one corner, and he appeared to still be living out of at least one suitcase. He’d warned Sasuke about the state of it before they got out of the car—if a few mumbled words between kisses as they felt each other up across the center console constituted a warning—but Naruto’s roommate, unlike Sasuke’s, worked nine to five, so there they were. The other semicoherent disclosure Naruto had felt the need to make was that he’d never had sex with a guy before, to which Sasuke had only responded, “You’ll learn,” before climbing onto Naruto’s lap and grinding into him in the driver’s seat. It took until both of them started to get a muscle cramp before they finally made it across the driveway and into Naruto’s house. As he’d figured, Naruto was a pretty intuitive learner, but Sasuke had still expected to be educating him on some of the finer points. Such as. 

“You Googled it?” Sasuke straightened up from where he’d been bending over on the mattress for Naruto to take his underwear off. “When?” 

Naruto, sitting on his knees in his ratty plaid boxers and crystal necklace, shrugged a bare shoulder. Sasuke could still see the spots of wet golden hair where he’d been sucking on Naruto’s firm chest a moment earlier, a pink hickey starting to form next to his navel. “Dunno,” he said, “like, after I got home from Danzo’s, I guess? I was just kinda curious about it, you know, curious if like, whatever...” He let out a hiccuppy laugh and looked down. “But yeah,” he added, “I basically read something explaining how to do it, and then I watched this video thing, and when I saw the guy doing it in the video it kinda made me feel like...” He laughed again and turned his head, his face adorably flushed and embarrassed. 

“Like what?” Sasuke tried not to smile. 

Naruto glanced back at Sasuke nervously. “Just that I really wanted to do it to you,” he said. 

Shit. “Yeah?” Sasuke asked him, reluctant to show just how stupidly hot Naruto’s words had made him. He leaned over on his hands again and got closer to Naruto on the bed, moving a hand slowly up one of Naruto’s thighs. “You thought about it a lot?”

“Yeah.” Naruto’s face was starting to look less shy and more like a horny kid on Christmas. Sasuke trailed his fingertips into the gap of Naruto’s boxers. 

“Did you touch yourself when you thought about it?” Sasuke’s fingers closed around the warmth of Naruto’s hard-on, which he was pleased to have a little trouble fully covering with one hand. Naruto bit a lip and nodded. 

“You did?” Sasuke maneuvered himself onto one of Naruto’s legs and started to rub him inside his underwear. Naruto gave a surprised giggle in his ear and balanced himself on a hand behind him. “You were jerking off to me? Thinking about fucking me with your fingers?”

“Yeah.” Naruto was smiling, his voice a little dazed. “Yeah,” he said, “a lot. Like every day. Thinking about it.” 

“Like this?” Sasuke tried to start jerking him off for real, but the fabric and their tangled-together legs were inhibiting him a little. He took his hand out from the hem of the boxers and reached in through the front to pull it through—

“Jesus Christ, Naruto.” The words were already out before Sasuke could stop himself. 

“What?” Naruto’s voice was suddenly anxious. “Sorry, I haven’t, like, trimmed down there or anything lately, I didn’t know we were actually—”

“Your cock is fucking huge.” Sasuke didn’t even think that was the right word—it probably wasn’t even over eight inches, not exactly the biggest Sasuke had ever seen, but it was thick and weird-looking and heavy and there was just so... much of it. Sasuke’s mouth was watering a little bit. 

“Oh.” Naruto smiled and covered his face with a hand. “Yeah, it was kinda a whole thing with my ex-girlfriend, we couldn’t really...not that I wasn’t, I mean, we still—”

“Do you have condoms?” Sasuke interrupted him. 

“Oh! Yeah!” Naruto brightened and wriggled out from under Sasuke, shoved himself halfway back into his underwear and reaching for an open suitcase on his floor, then began rifling through a clown-car-esque amount of clothes and shoes and papers and exercise equipment until he emerged with a strip of Trojans and a half-full bottle of KY in one hand. “Good?” 

Sasuke gave him a nod, and Naruto scrambled back over, already reaching for Sasuke’s underwear before he was fully on the mattress. “So I can do it?” he asked. Sasuke propped himself up with an elbow as Naruto hovered over him, spreading liquid over three fingers. He tilted his shiny hand out to Sasuke when he was done. “Enough?”

“Rub it around so it’s not too cold,” said Sasuke. “And—put a little spit in it too.”

“Ohh.” Naruto nodded knowingly and let a thick line of saliva out onto his hand. “That makes it warmer?”

“Yeah,” Sasuke lied. “Okay, just one to start.” He shut his eyes as Naruto got closer, felt the warmth of Naruto’s hand coming between his legs, Naruto’s breath on his thigh. Naruto’s wet finger caressing him softly, in slow circles that made Sasuke shiver, then—just as Sasuke was about to give him the order—the gentle stretch of Naruto pushing inside him.

“It’s so pretty,” he heard Naruto sigh as he wiggled further in, bending his finger just slightly and rubbing against what felt like a dozen raw nerve endings at once. Sasuke looked down to see Naruto, staring soft-eyed at Sasuke’s open legs, move his other hand from where it held Sasuke’s bent thigh to stroke the tip of his dick. An embarrassing little groan escaped Sasuke’s throat as the two sensations combined, the perfect hot ache against Naruto’s finger and the soft whisper of his mouth—shit, his mouth, really?—

“Naruto.” Sasuke, overstimulated, heard his own voice come out more sternly than he meant it. He pulled Naruto off him by the hair, eliciting an anxious look.

“’S okay?” Naruto had stilled the hand working inside him too. Sasuke tightened the fist in his hair in frustration. 

“Put another one in,” he instructed, “don’t do two things at once.” 

Naruto pouted. “But I wanna try sucki—”

“Yeah, I know.” Typical straight guy. “After this. Come on, don’t make me ask you twice.” Sasuke gestured to the hand in question. 

“You are really bossy,” grumbled Naruto, and pressed a second finger up to meet his first. 

“Yeah, well, you’re really subby.” Sasuke closed his eyes again, feeling the fingers widen, then bend. 

“What does that mean?” 

Sasuke sunk his head into the pillow as Naruto pushed his fingers deeper, his knuckles meeting Sasuke’s skin on either side of his hand. “It means you like it when I order you around,” he said. “Private.” 

Naruto just giggled. When Sasuke looked at him, he was blushing. Interesting. “Okay,” he said, willing his voice not to wobble despite Naruto’s eager clawing into his guts. “Condom?” 

“I can keep going if you want.” Naruto smiled sweetly at him. “I’m really good at it, actually. With my ex—”

“Oh my God.” Sasuke bent a knee and pushed his bare foot into Naruto’s face. “Just shut up and fuck me, idiot.” 

“Roger!” Naruto gently extracted his fingers and used the same hand to salute Sasuke, laughing. Sasuke rolled his eyes. He couldn’t believe this was what his weakness had turned out to be, that this goofy overenthusiastic army jock was for him the end-all be-all of ultimate sex appeal. Except that of course he could. Because it wasn’t just any dumb hot boy: it was Naruto. He’d been hooked since the moment their lips touched that day in eleventh grade—since the first time Naruto had given him that smile, all the way back in elementary school, that crazy radiant sunbeam of a smile, the one that seemed to wedge itself next to his own dark perma-glare in the order of the universe the way nothing else ever had or would. The smile now wedging itself there for real, pressing against Sasuke’s lips as Naruto kissed him and laughed, kissed him and laughed some more. Sasuke threaded his fingers into Naruto’s hair and shoved what appeared to be Naruto’s only pillow under his hips and breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth as Naruto, finally, pushed himself in. 

“Shit, dude.” Naruto’s mouth opened in awe as his hips met Sasuke’s thighs for the first time. He leaned his weight on one arm and touched Sasuke’s shoulder gently, his necklace dangling above Sasuke’s face hypnotically. “Is it—are you okay? Is it too much? Should I—”

“Mmf.” Sasuke kept breathing slowly, adjusting to the feeling, feeling Naruto in every cell of him, so much Naruto inside that Sasuke could practically taste him in the back of his throat. “It’s good,” he mumbled, closed his eyes, and reached out blindly to grasp onto the leather string as he gave Naruto the forced-out order to start fucking him already, for God’s sake, please. Please. Please. God. Naruto. Fuck. Naruto’s jerks inside him seemed to push the words out of his mouth involuntarily, pulsing through his whole body, the consuming feeling echoing through every inch. He knew turning over on his knees or getting on top of Naruto would probably have made it easier for himself, less overwhelming and paralyzing and somewhat painful, but he couldn’t even imagine voluntarily changing anything about what was happening right now. Naruto was breathing hard on his neck, and Sasuke could tell he was focused intently on his movements, which were slow and rhythmic in a way Sasuke knew from experience didn’t come naturally. He was such a good boy, really—Sasuke wanted to tell him, to give him the praise he always so obviously craved, but by the time he remembered his mouth existed he realized he’d started sucking on the crystal pendant that had been swinging in front of him as Naruto moved. Jesus. He was so far gone already and he hadn’t even—

“Oh God, baby,” he heard Naruto whine next to his ear, his hands tightening around Sasuke’s legs. “I’m gonna—Sasuke, I’m sorry, it’s—I’m really—”

“It’s okay.” Sasuke pulled the wet pendant from his mouth, one hand still clinging to the string around Naruto’s neck, the other moving to stroke his hair. “You can do it, go ahead.” 

“Really?” Naruto’s voice sounded almost tearful. 

“Do it,” said Sasuke. “Come in me. That’s an order.” 

***

Two days later, the morning after the execution of their crazy unsanctioned Danzo revenge plan, Sasuke woke to the sound of his phone buzzing frantically on the floor. Exhausted, his whole body worn out and achy from the exertions, both sexual and criminal, of the past thirty-six hours, he chose to assume it was someone from the cafe asking him to cover a shift and rolled over on the mattress to go back to sleep. But when the call went to voicemail, the buzzing only started again, then again, at which point Sasuke started to get a bad feeling in his stomach. In the end it was Naruto who pushed himself up on an elbow and poked Sasuke on the shoulder. 

“Your phone’s ringing,” he said in a very loud, tired whisper. 

“Nnngh,” said Sasuke into the pillow. 

“Should I answer it?” He felt Naruto’s body moving on top of him to reach over to the floor. “Oh, uh—” Naruto paused, then jostled Sasuke’s arm again. “Actually, I think you should probably—”

“What?” Sasuke threw the pillow petulantly to the side and shoved himself half-upright on the mattress to glare at Naruto. “I’m still sleeping, just hit ignore, for fuck’s s—”

Naruto turned the phone screen to face him, and Sasuke stopped in the middle of his sentence. “Oh,” he said. “Fuck.” 

“Want me to, like...” Naruto tilted his head toward the bedroom door. 

“Do you mind?” Sasuke took the phone and rubbed his forehead, exhausted. Naruto felt around on the floor for his underwear, pulled a t-shirt on backwards, and stepped out of the small room, closing the door behind him. Sasuke’s phone went silent, then lit up again. He counted three full breaths, closed his eyes, and slid a thumb across the screen. 

“Sasuke,” he heard on the other end in the unhappily familiar baritone. “What the hell is this that they’re saying on the news? What in God’s name did you do this time?” 

Sasuke sighed and leaned over, pressing his forehead to his knees. 

“Hi, Dad.”

Chapter Text

Sasuke hadn’t heard his father’s voice in over three months. The last time they spoke had been, just like the time before that and the time before that, about money: Sasuke’s lack of it, his father’s disappointment in his disinterest in earning it, the amount of it that had been wasted on three semesters of expensive tuition for Sasuke’s abandoned degree. The even greater disappointment Sasuke’s young adulthood represented when compared to Itachi’s, who’d already passed the bar and started working at the family firm by the time he was Sasuke’s age. That conversation had ended, as was typical, with Sasuke going completely nonverbal in the face of his father’s judgments, finishing the last quarter of two of Karin’s liquor bottles while watching rare Nine Inch Nails concert bootlegs on his laptop, and two days later receiving a check for the exact amount of his outstanding credit card balance, which made him feel physically ill as he scanned the impersonal handwriting to deposit it with his banking app. Sasuke didn’t hate his father, per se; at least, he could conceive of a world in which Sasuke wasn’t gay and his family hadn’t lent their name to their state’s most morally reprehensible corporate law firm and he and his dad actually had an okay relationship. But this wasn’t that world. 

“Have you seen this report on Channel Six?” the senior Uchiha demanded for a second time. Sasuke tried to get something out of his dry mouth.

“I don’t know,” he managed, two of the three syllables coming out more like a grunt. “What?” 

“Don’t give me that.” Shit. This was worse than usual. “You think I wouldn’t remember the name I was getting calls about every two weeks when you were in school? Who you almost got yourself expelled by antagonizing with ridiculous stunts exactly like this? Christ, Sasuke, you’re almost twenty-four, I would have thought you’d at least grown out of—”

“This wasn’t me, Dad,” Sasuke mumbled. He’d pulled up the city news site on his phone while his father ranted on speaker, and found exactly what he’d simultaneously been hoping for and dreading ever since they got home the night before. Local educator’s home vandalized by political opponents, the headline read, in screaming sans-serif type that took up half Sasuke’s screen. Radical leftists pose violent threat to traditional family values, says Shimura Danzo, 64. Jesus. This place was even worse than he thought, Sasuke thought feverishly, scrolling rapidly through the scare-tactic article without reading. “Local educator”? They weren’t even pretending not to be a right-wing mouthpiece anymore. Not that Naruto and Sasuke had exactly made it difficult for them. 

“Do you think I’m stupid, Sasuke?” Sasuke dug a heel into the mattress. He’d always hated the way his name sounded in his dad’s voice. “You might as well have signed your name. This is exactly the kind of thing you used to pull with him back then—the kind of thing you still seem to love pulling with your little friends, these childish stunts I have to do damage control on every time to keep our name out of the papers, out of—” 

“It wasn’t me. ” Sasuke squeezed his eyes shut. At some point during their conversation he’d unconsciously pulled his knees to his chest, hugging them protectively with one arm like a little kid. “I was home all night. With a friend. You can ask him.” 

His father let out a derisive laugh at the male pronoun. Sasuke felt like somebody had dropped a brick onto his stomach. “I hope you know I’m not posting bail for you again,” he said. “I don’t care what happens.” 

“That was like two years ago, Dad.” Sasuke’s voice came out muffled against his hand. 

“Three times since you turned eighteen,” said his dad. “You know how many times I’ve gotten a jailhouse call from Itachi?” 

Everybody at that firm would have been locked up a long time ago if there was any justice in the world, Sasuke wanted to say—would have said without a second thought to anyone else, any cop, any reporter, even his older brother if it came to that; anybody other than his dad. With his dad, as usual, his troublesome acidic liability of a mouth was finally sealed shut. 

“Well,” Fugaku said, his voice dripping with disapproval. “If you won’t take responsibility, I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. You say you weren’t involved in this?” 

“I wasn’t involved,” whispered Sasuke—cowardly, hypocritical, traitorous, selfish Sasuke. 

“Okay then,” said his father. “You’ll just have to hope I don’t hear otherwise.” They were both silent. Sasuke heard a sigh from the other line. 

“You know,” said his dad. “I always felt for Danzo back then. It’s hard enough to be a teacher without this new generation of kids jumping on your every word. And now he can’t even feel safe in his own home?” 

To that, Sasuke had absolutely nothing to say. 

**

They’d done it at three a.m., which was one reason it had been so difficult for Sasuke to wake up enough to take his dad’s call. Danzo’s street was lit by yellow lights and dead silent in the middle of the night, each neatly delineated property sitting peaceful and still on its square of grass. Sasuke, walking down the block, completely turned upside-down by his own excitement and optimism and the utterly unfamiliar feeling of expansive possibility that seemed to have somehow been sexually transmitted from Naruto’s body to his own, didn’t even hate them. He still wanted all of it destroyed—all the Danzos of the world, all the wussy journalists and complicit media, all the conformist and spiritually dead and oppressive walled-off subdivisions of imperialistic privilege that formed the city of Konoha. If anything, he wanted it more than ever. He just no longer wanted it with the tight painful cutting bitterness that used to define his every dream and desire and fuel all his petty interpersonal feuds and self-destructive habits, and the loss of that feeling was both more disorienting and more freeing than he could have ever imagined. 

“Like this?” Naruto turned to show Sasuke the words he’d spraypainted on Danzo’s garage. He was wearing a ratty black hoodie and basketball shorts, chewing spearmint gum he’d taken from the glove compartment of Sasuke’s car. His flaxen hair seemed to reflect the wash of the streetlights; Sasuke reached over and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over it. Naruto giggled, wrapped an arm around Sasuke’s neck, pretending to headlock him, and Sasuke used the position Naruto was wrangling him into to grab the can of spraypaint from Naruto’s other hand. It put a kind of giddy fear into Sasuke’s stomach when Naruto roughhoused with him like that—which Sasuke was starting to realize he kind of did a lot, starting with about three minutes after they were done having sex for the first time, when Naruto had returned from the bathroom and jumped onto the mattress to play-wrestle. Sasuke, who ever since his days of sitting under the gym bleachers with Sakura Haruno during grade-school flag football games had never had another boy on top of him for any reason even remotely unrelated to sex, could only think to react by rubbing Naruto’s crotch with his leg, but Naruto was already mid-grab and the combined movements accidentally jammed Sasuke’s knee into a very delicate place before he could stop it. Somehow even that hadn’t broken Naruto of the habit, though, and over the rest of that afternoon and night and the afternoon after the next morning’s cafe shift, Sasuke had been on the receiving end of innumerable comradely noogies and elbow-jabs and slaps on the back that together added up to his own version of the kind of education he’d promised Naruto on the way to his apartment. In fact, he was actually starting to kind of enjoy it. 

“Wow,” said Naruto, his laugh a little hysterical-sounding, as Sasuke continued spraying the message he’d begun over the white vinyl siding. “I can’t believe we’re seriously doing this.”

“Weren’t you like, disarming IEDs in the Gulf last year?” Sasuke replied without looking behind him. “But this scares you?” 

“I’m not scared.” Sasuke felt an indignant push at the shoulder of his free arm. “I’m just saying, it’s pretty illegal, yknow. Like we could really get in trouble for this.” 

Sasuke decided to hold his tongue on the subject of the construction of legality vis a vis state-sponsored violence and property destruction, given that Naruto probably had enough firsthand experience of the distinction himself. “Then we have to cover our tracks,” was all he said instead, and finished off his work with a long red slash underlining the words decorating the garage. He stepped back, handed the can to Naruto, and looked at the result. FUCK FASCISTS , it read, LEAVE KONOHA ALONE, the first two words noticeably larger and sloppier than the rest of the message. As he examined it, Naruto was bending down to spray something else at the bottom of the siding. Sasuke, feeling an unfamiliar satisfaction, reached into the back pocket of his jeans and lit a cigarette. Naruto turned around after his first exhale. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said, creasing his forehead slightly. “I mean, what if somebody smells the smoke?”

“They can’t smell anything in there,” said Sasuke. “Trust me, I spent three years doing this outside my dad’s office window before I moved out. What are you writing?”

“Yeah, but, like, somebody on the street.” Naruto put a last finishing spray on the garage, put the can down, and let Sasuke pull him up by the arm. “You really shouldn’t smoke so much,” he mumbled, but Sasuke couldn’t respond, too busy trying to hide his laughter at Naruto’s addition: a six-inch long cartoon dick. 

“Idiot,” he said, elbowing Naruto next to him. Naruto held the elbow and tugged Sasuke closer to him, put an arm around his waist. 

“Anything else you wanna do?” he asked, a hand creeping distractingly up Sasuke’s stomach, under the hem of his t-shirt. “Should we slash his tires?” 

“Actually,” said Sasuke, who hadn’t thought of it. “You do have a pocketknife, right?” He reached down to feel around Naruto’s legs, searching for the weight in his shorts, but Naruto was already pushing his face into Sasuke’s neck, hand pulling Sasuke’s waist into his, his lips wet against Sasuke’s skin. Sasuke had already forgotten about his original goal by the time Naruto’s mouth had made its way up Sasuke’s neck and his throat to his lips. He felt Naruto’s hand covering his left one, nudging the cigarette out of his fingers and dropping it to stub out on the pavement, and even then he didn’t bother protesting, too reluctant to pull away from Naruto’s warm, heavy kiss. When he finally did, he saw Naruto, breathing hard the same as Sasuke was, frown slightly and move a confused hand to his mouth. 

“Want to get out of here?” Sasuke asked. The tasteless, chewed-up gum that had made its way from Naruto’s mouth to his flashed between his teeth as he spoke. Naruto, seeing it, laughed. 

“Gross,” he said, smiling big. Sasuke shrugged. As Naruto collected all the evidence of their presence from the ground, he pressed the it to the roof of his mouth, feeling with his tongue the impressions of Naruto’s teeth in the tiny wad. “Trash,” he remembered Danzo repeating day after day back when Sasuke was his student, rapping his fist on Sasuke’s desk and pointing to the classroom garbage in the corner by the door every time he caught Sasuke with verboten Doublemint in his mouth. He said it so often that Sasuke, with the self-mythologizing melodrama he cultivated endlessly in those days, began to hear it as an accusation rather than an order, a frank description of the only thing he would ever be in the eyes of a small but vocal minority of their city—Danzo’s being the only voice expressing itself louder than his father’s. Now, turning away from the house, Naruto leading him toward the street three blocks away where they’d parked the car, Sasuke had the urge to spit it out and smear the gum into the ridges of the door they’d marked until it stuck there for good. But he didn’t. 

***

“Everything okay?” Naruto asked. He’d waited, sweetly, for Sasuke to come out from the bedroom rather than knocking himself, and was sitting on a plaid couch markedly nicer than any of the furniture in his room. He reached for the remote next to him to mute the ESPN panel show playing on the TV on the far wall. “Was that—” 

“My dad.” Sasuke rubbed his sleep-stiff face with the back of a hand, avoiding Naruto’s eyes. “He saw—well.” He opened his phone again and handed it to Naruto, who blinked in confusion before letting out a nervous giggle at the headline still up on the screen. 

“Holy crap,” he said. The childish expression coming out of Naruto’s mouth, which just the night before had been doing things to Sasuke’s intimate areas that scandalized even him, elicited a tender pang in his heart so intense it felt violent. He clenched a fist, trying to scare it out of himself. Naruto was still talking, looking at the article. “Educator? Seriously?”

“I know,” said Sasuke. 

“Do they say anything about—the stuff from last week? I mean, does he know we—” Naruto cut himself off abruptly and turned the phone off as a figure emerged from the kitchen doorway, a dark-haired guy wearing black athletic shorts and a red bandana tied like a headband around his forehead, a neon-yellow can of C4 in one hand. He paused, looking apprehensively at first Sasuke, then Naruto, then back to Sasuke, who despite technically being the more clothed party suddenly felt extremely exposed in his old Farm Sanctuary t-shirt and Calvins. Finally, after what felt like an interminable length of silence, Naruto cleared his throat and stood up from the couch. 

“Hey Keebs,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically subdued. “Uh, this’s my friend Sasuke. My roommate,” he said, tilting his head toward the shirtless guy and handing Sasuke back his phone. 

“Hey,” said the roommate, and raised a hesitant hand to Sasuke. “Are you guys—”

“We were just, uh, you wanna—” Sasuke felt himself being physically pushed back into the bedroom before he could open his mouth. “See ya later!” he heard Naruto say, and he followed Sasuke inside hastily, closing the door behind him with a decisive yank, his face strangely clouded when he finally turned around for Sasuke to see it. 

“Okay,” said Sasuke, unable to keep the irritation from his voice. “Excuse me.” He stared up at Naruto’s door jamb rather than look him in the eyes. He knew it wasn’t exactly fair to expect Naruto, whose very first same-sex experience had occurred less than a week ago, to feel completely comfortable introducing the other party in said experience to a straight male friend, especially while all three of them were in various states of undress, but the conversation with his father had left Sasuke feeling victimized and raw enough that he didn’t particularly feel like extending the required amount of empathy while he was being shoved into the closet like a dirty secret. 

“What?” Naruto’s tone was unexpectedly accusatory. Sasuke looked down to see him furrowing his brow, arms folded in front of his chest. 

“Nothing.” Sasuke laughed bitterly, running a hand through his uncombed hair. “Forget it. Don’t worry about me, okay? I’ll just sit quietly in here and wait for the house to clear out so I don’t embarrass anybody.” 

“Embarrass? It’s not—” Naruto made a frustrated noise in his throat. “Fine,” he said, gesturing petulantly to the door. “Go back out and introduce yourself, I don’t care. He’s literally an idiot, but whatever, if you have abs and a spray tan that’s all anybody cares about, I guess.” His exaggerated eye-roll was extremely ineffective in hiding his obvious anguish. 

“What?,” it was Sasuke’s turn to ask. 

“Yeah,” said Naruto, “it totally is. A spray tan. By the way.” 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” asked Sasuke. 

“Like—” Naruto gestured angrily at the door again. “Whatever, that jerk, he just—he always got all the girls in high school, too, and now it’s like, seriously, you really have to walk around with your shirt off all the time, even with, like...” He waved a hand limply at Sasuke, his face turned away. 

“Sorry,” said Sasuke in disbelief. “Did you think I was into that guy?” 

Naruto turned back to look at him, face flushed and scowling, and didn’t respond. 

“Were—” Sasuke had to pause and collect himself, he was so close to laughing. “Were you jealous?” 

“Well—yeah!” Naruto folded his arms again. “Come on, we just did all that, like, all that stuff together, you know, and now you’re all like...I mean, how come you were all mad just now? Just because I...” He trailed off, looking hopefully at Sasuke. 

“I thought you were embarrassed of me,” said Sasuke. “For your friend to see I was here.” 

“What?” Naruto’s face changed in an instant, upset now in a whole new way. “No, of c—jeez, Sasuke, nuh-uh. Seriously?”

“I don’t know.” Sasuke couldn’t stand how intense the relief felt, hearing Naruto deny it. “It’s not like it’s the first time it’s happened to me.” 

“Are you serious?” Naruto asked him. Sasuke shrugged a shoulder. “Okay,” said Naruto, “well, that’s just re—I mean that’s stupid. Come on, it’s like, the opposite. Look at you, I should be the one bragging that you even like me.” 

Sasuke laughed and ran another hand through his hair, trying to hide his expression. “Yeah, right.” 

“Yeah,” said Naruto, “seriously. I mean.” He cleared his throat. “If you do. Like me. Or whatever,” he hinted, giving Sasuke one of his disgustingly effective puppy-dog expressions. 

Sasuke rolled his eyes. “Nice try.” 

“What?” Naruto smiled, showing the asymmetrical dimple on the right side of his face. “You already admitted it, don’t even.” 

This, humiliatingly, was true. Sasuke felt his neck get hot, remembering it. It was all just so unlike him—the feeling, the admission, pretty much everything he’d done over the past two days. Okay, it wasn’t the first time he’d gone to a guy’s place and spent thirty-six hours having sex with him, but behavior like that was generally reserved for times when Sasuke was feeling like shit and wanted to make himself feel worse—for instance, the weekend three months earlier when he’d deposited that check from his dad. That guy had been kind of cute, sure, but Sasuke generally tapped out after around five sober minutes in any conversation with a law-adjacent professional, plus he’d been weirdly obsessed with getting Sasuke to film the whole thing. With Naruto, Sasuke practically couldn’t stand how much he enjoyed listening to him talk—about politics, about his military experience, about high school, about anything. The night before, they’d stayed up until almost sunrise doing just that—okay, talking and fooling around, but honestly mostly talking. 

“Was I your first guy kiss?” Naruto had wanted to know the moment Sasuke brought up Danzo’s class, imbuing the words with enough forced casualness that Sasuke could tell he’d been itching to ask it since that first day at the bar. “Cause you were my first. I mean, like, my first kiss ever, with anybody.” He didn’t seem bothered at all to admit it, just leaned forward over the pillow he was holding on top of his crossed legs, put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands as Sasuke gave him an abridged recounting of his and Sai’s mutual teenage sexual initiation, Naruto laughing nervously and blushing slightly at appropriate moments. 

“And then senior year I met this guy,” Sasuke found himself saying, leaning his back against Naruto’s bedroom wall, head turned to look out the smudgy window to the apartment’s parking lot. “He was a little older. That’s how I got into KWP, actually—he was one of the people who started it. He sort of messed me up, I guess.”

“Yeah?” Naruto’s blue eyes were big and worried. “Messed you up how?”

Sasuke picked at a thumbnail. “I was kind of obsessed with him,” he said reluctantly. “I tried to be cool about it, but of course he knew. He was gay, but—he had a lot of issues.”

“Like what?” Naruto asked.

“Just issues,” said Sasuke. “Anger, mostly. He fucking hated my dad, but he’d always make me feel guilty that I wouldn’t tell my family about him—which I did, after a while, and of course it was a total disaster. My brother said I was dangerously naive for seeing anything good in him. Maybe I was, I don’t know. He was just really hot and cold on me, all the time. I lost my virginity to him and the next day he stood me up at after school so I had to walk home. That kind of thing.”

“Sasuke.” Naruto touched Sasuke’s knee with his fingertips. “That’s terrible.” 

“It’s whatever.” Sasuke’s chest felt tight thinking about it. Even five years later, he could still conjure up vividly the sights and smells of that afternoon: waiting outside the high school as one by one his peers all got picked up by parents and friends, turning his head hopefully at the sound of each car only to be disappointed every time. Staring at an unanswered blue text message on his screen until his battery was nearly dead. Walking the two and a half miles home, chain-smoking for so long his fingers stained yellow, wearing the uncomfortably tight jeans he’d only worn to impress the boy who’d been holding Sasuke in his arms so recently that Sasuke could still smell his aftershave in his own hair. Coming through the back door so he wouldn’t have to face Itachi, home from law school and happily engaged, who as far as their father was concerned might as well have been the only person drawing breath in that house. The humiliation of it was only matched by the fact that Sasuke, visiting their friends at the co-op less than a week later, was already acting as if none of it had ever happened. He wished he could say he barely recognized that person now, but the truth was he felt that version of himself floating perilously close to the surface nearly every day, threatening to break out and ruin him all over again. Which was why he spent so much time and effort trying to crush it into dust. 

“So what about you,” he said dully, to change the subject. “Me and you made out and then you had some girlfriend you couldn’t fuck?” 

“Oh my God, shut up.” Naruto uncrossed his legs and kicked Sasuke with a bare foot. “You’re such a dick, I was totally being, like, vulnerable when I told you that.”

“Not bragging about how good you are at fingering?” 

“Well, I am, for your information.” Naruto leaned back on his hands, one foot still resting in Sasuke’s lap. “But yeah, she was like my big relationship or whatever. It sucked trying to date while I was still in the service. Moving around all the time. We almost got married when I found out I was getting deployed. Pretty dumb, huh?”

Sasuke shrugged. “How’d you meet her?” 

“I dunno, just through friends. She lived near the first base I got stationed at. She was kinda like, the first person I ever knew actually had a crush on me. I always felt like I was so ugly and weird in high school, so it made me feel really good, you know?” 

“Really?” Sasuke couldn’t conceal the skepticism in his voice as images began to pop up unbidden that he’d seared into his brain all the way back then: Naruto’s flushed face an inch from his in Danzo’s classroom, strands of overgrown blonde hair in his eyes; Naruto on the field with the lacrosse team after school, lifting up the bottom of his jersey to show his stomach as he wiped his sweaty face. 

“Uh, yeah, obviously.” Naruto laughed. “Trust me, I know you can’t relate, okay? I remember your fanclub buying up ten billion pictures that year.” He was talking about their sophomore year, Sasuke knew, when the student government held a fundraiser for prom over Valentine’s Day week allowing the purchase of any student’s school photo for $5 apiece—intended as keepsakes for friends or partners, but resulting in Sasuke’s scowling headshot decorating the inside lockers of half the girls in their school. Sasuke just smiled, unable to refute Naruto’s point. 

“I don’t know, I guess it’s because I was a late bloomer or something,” Naruto said, fiddling with the strand of his necklace and looking away from Sasuke’s face. “And then me and Hinata had those, yknow, those issues, like you said. I just—” He cut himself off and laughed, hugged the pillow in his lap tighter and stared at the sheets under him. “You’re gonna make fun of me.” 

“What is it?” Sasuke asked. 

“I just, like...I dunno, sex is just, like, kind of a big deal to me?” He looked nervously up at Sasuke, his neck flushed pink. “Not to make you feel weird or anything,” he added. “I know not everybody’s like that. But for me it’s like, I don’t really wanna do it with somebody unless I really like them.” He cleared his throat. “So, um. Yeah.” 

Sasuke was quiet. He had the urge to close his eyes and press his hands to his face, hide from the painful sincerity and sweetness of Naruto’s words. Sometimes—the thought jarred him as it came into his head, unexpected and a little unsettling—sometimes the things Naruto said terrified him in how openly they expressed feelings Sasuke spent most of his life trying to deny in himself. Nothing could have been more distasteful to him than letting Naruto know he’d always secretly felt the same, that all his posturing and pretensions of sluttiness were only attempts to kill the hateful sensitive and desperately romantic part of him that no matter what he did would never just die already. And yet—did he really have it in him to lie? 

“Is it okay that I said that?” Naruto asked after another beat of silence. “Sorry, I didn’t—”

“It’s fine,” said Sasuke shortly. “I—know what you mean.”

“Yeah?” Naruto’s eyes were hopeful when Sasuke met them with his own, and after a moment of wordless connection he saw them change, hesitant and then bright, into a familiar creased smile. 

“Don’t push your luck,” Sasuke warned as Naruto climbed onto him on the mattress, pressing his smiling mouth into Sasuke’s neck, his body between Sasuke’s open legs. Naruto just laughed. 

***

Having already called out the day before, Sasuke couldn’t exactly skip another day of work—and anyway, Naruto agreed, it was probably best to act like everything was normal after the article. Sasuke couldn’t concentrate. Before leaving for his ten a.m. midshift, he’d permitted Naruto to demonstrate the aforementioned talent honed during his last relationship, and now he couldn’t shake the memory of Naruto’s head nested in his shoulder, fine strands of blond hair brushing his arm and his neck, Naruto’s warm chest pressed into his own, crystal pendant cold on his stomach, Naruto’s hand between his legs sending wave after wave of sensation mercilessly through his whole body, Naruto’s soft breath on his skin. He fucked up three lattes in a row, thinking about it, and had to comp a whole egg sandwich after forgetting to specify gluten-free bread, after which the self-righteous ABC manager sent him to fold napkins in the back. 

So when he heard a knock on the wall and saw that same blond head standing in the kitchen doorway, he thought, at first, that he was seeing things. But he wouldn’t have thought to imagine the nervous intensity in Naruto’s blue eyes, the hesitant way he asked Sasuke if he maybe wanted to come out to the cafe for a second, but just so he knew, Naruto’d totally had no idea he knew about anything, no clue he was even gonna be in town. Sasuke didn’t have time to ask what the fuck he was talking about before Naruto was already pulling him out by the elbow, pointing to an unpleasantly familiar ponytailed silhouette drinking from a ceramic travel mug at the table by the front door.

“He saw the article,” Naruto was saying into Sasuke’s ear as they approached. “He wants to talk to you, like, really bad.”

“Great,” mumbled Sasuke. His face was already arranging itself into the familiar glare he’d exchanged during countless meetings and demonstrations and pissy passive-aggressive ideological debates. By the time they reached him, Shikamaru had started doing the same.

Chapter Text

“Sasuke,” said Shikamaru. 

“Shikamaru,” said Sasuke. 

They sat at one of the coffee shop’s outside tables, where the afternoon’s loud wind had prevented any other patrons from choosing to sprawl out with their laptops and textbooks. Sasuke had been shooed off the last hour of his shift after spending every spare moment glowering in irritation in the general direction of the entrance, so he and Shikamaru were now free to face off in tense silence and competitively chain-smoke—Sasuke’s American Spirits looking suddenly hipsterish and snobby next to Shikamaru’s man-of-the-people Marlboros; he was just thankful he’d left the hand-rolled ones at home—for as long as they wanted. Naruto was sitting with a just-slightly-suspicious amount of space between him and Sasuke and fidgeting anxiously with the plastic stirrer in his empty hot chocolate. At the moment, it was in his mouth, tapping up and down between his molars and only somewhat distracting Sasuke and making him think about sticking his pinky in there for Naruto to suck on. Shikamaru seemed not to notice him at all. 

"So,” said Shikamaru. “I’m assuming you know what I’m going to say.” 

Sasuke held his gaze. “What,” he said. “Thank you?” 

“Sorry?” 

“I don’t know,” said Sasuke, “thank you for finally doing something that’ll make an actual impact on people? Thank you for taking a stand against the most harmful policy ideas in this city in years? Thank you for making the party look like we actually fight for things?” 

“You’re incredible,” said Shikamaru, and shook his head. “You’re really standing by this stupid shit?” 

“So I’m supposed to be apologizing to you.” Sasuke tried to keep his voice cool despite the genuine frustration galvanizing his pulse. “Sorry I didn’t ask Daddy for permission. Sorry I don’t run everything I do in my spare time by the official decision-making committee of Marxism. Is that what you wanted me to say?” 

Shikamaru laughed. “No, trust me, I definitely didn’t think I’d be hearing an apology out of the mouth of Sasuke Uchiha. Not in this lifetime.” 

“So why are you here? Did you seriously drive all the way from DC just to lecture me about vandalism? How do you have so little going on in your life?” 

“’S graduation,” he heard Naruto mumble around the plastic stick. Sasuke turned to see him hunched slightly over his elbows, looking down at the table as he chewed. 

“What?” Without thinking, Sasuke reached over and took the stick out of Naruto’s mouth himself. Naruto blinked and, so quickly Sasuke might have imagined it, glanced over at Shikamaru before looking back at Sasuke. For a short but heavy moment, nobody talked. 

Then Shikamaru cleared his throat. “He’s right,” he said, gesturing to Naruto. “I graduated this week. That’s why I’m back in town.” 

“Oh.” Sasuke swallowed and tried not to look down at the plastic stick in his hand, still wet with Naruto’s spit. “Well...congratulations, I guess.” 

“Yeah, thanks.” Now Shikamaru was definitely looking weird at them. Sasuke clenched his fist tighter. “You know, I told Naruto I’d be coming back, getting back involved with the org while I study for the bar. And this all has made me think that maybe we should start making some real decisions again. About policy. And membership.” 

“You’re not the head of KWP, Shikamaru,” said Sasuke. “In case you forgot.” As a non-hierarchical organization, all decisions relating to the party had to be made by (occasionally tedious) majority opinion. But it was true that some members’ votes had, in practice, ended up weighing somewhat heavier than others’, if only through the power of personality; namely, Shikamaru, (at the moment) Neji, and, at one point in time, a certain very charming and very troubled founding member about whom Sasuke generally preferred not to think too much. 

“This isn’t about me,” said Shikamaru. “There are a lot more members than me who don’t want to be associated with pointless, counterproductive shit like” —Shikamaru lowered his voice and leaned slightly forward— “spray-painting fucking dicks on the houses of some teacher who gave us detention in high school. I mean, Jesus Christ, Sasuke, what the fuck did you think you were going to accomplish by—”

“It has nothing to do with the party,” Sasuke hissed back. “Who’s going to associate it? Nobody’s going to think we’d do something like that—nobody gives a shit about anything we do, because we don’t do anything, we can’t even prevent a fucking school book ban, like, the most basic building block of authoritarian—”

“And what the hell do you think you’re preventing?” Shikamaru glared at him. “This isn’t putting any books back in the library. It’s not changing anybody’s mind. The only thing you’re doing—besides cementing all these people’s ideas about the intolerant left—”

“Oh, give me a fucking break—” 

“—the only thing you’re doing is satisfying your own petty grudges and stroking your own giant ego. It’s immature, it’s counterproductive, it’s fucking selfish, and frankly I can’t believe you managed to rope Naruto in on any of it.” He sat back and folded his arms, turning his accusing look to the silent member of their conversation, who was biting off a thumbnail as they argued. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 

“Don’t be mad at him, okay?” Sasuke thought for a moment that Naruto was talking to him, until he turned and saw him facing the other side of the table. Shikamaru looked just as surprised. “Sasuke wasn’t being selfish,” he went on. “Danzo’s really a bad guy, like, dangerous, for real. And he really tried to do something about it, something legit. We both did. It was just, like, a last resort, y’know?” He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think Sasuke’s really smart. And brave.”

He scratched at the side of his hair, looking embarrassed. Sasuke felt something scratchy stuck in his throat. When Naruto dropped his hand under the table, it touched the back of Sasuke’s, and, before he could realize what he was doing, Sasuke hooked his own pinky around Naruto’s beside it.

“Okay,” said Shikamaru. “What the hell is going on between you two?” 

“What?” Naruto asked, at the same time as Sasuke said, “Nothing.” He felt Naruto turn to look at him and extracted his sweaty hand to light another cigarette. 

“Sasuke,” said Naruto. “Just say. He can know, I don’t care.” 

“It’s none of his business,” Sasuke muttered behind the hand shielding the flame of his lighter. 

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Shikamaru, rubbing his face. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” 

“What the fuck does it matter?” Sasuke folded his arms. All the discomfort he’d felt a moment ago at the idea of telling Shikamaru Nara anything about his sex life had vanished hearing his irritated words, replaced instantly with feverish righteous anger and pride at the hypocrisy of Shikamaru’s self-satisfied, watered-down, incremental-change work-within-the-system get-a-fancy-postgrad-degree brand of activism so clearly masking—just as Sasuke had always suspected—plain old pedestrian male heterosexism. Suddenly he wouldn’t have minded Shikamaru watching him get under the table to suck Naruto’s dick, as long as Sasuke could see his face when it was over. “Why do you care?” he repeated instead. “Why are you so obsessed with my personal life? Are you that threatened by—”

“Really, Sasuke?” asked Shikamaru. “You can’t think of any reason I might care? You don’t think you’ve spent the last seven years making your personal life everybody else’s business? Remind me, why is it that our funds have been decreasing every year since we lost the best organizer we ever had in the city? Why did Neji have to remake our entire internet presence from the ground up because the person who ran it decided he no longer wanted to be associated with any of us? Did any of that have to do with your precious personal life?” 

“That was not my fault,” said Sasuke through clenched teeth. “You know that.” 

“I don’t know,” said Shikamaru. “Because to me it looks like we’re about to have another defection in about two weeks thanks to your narcissistic little mission to prove you can convert every guy in—”

“Are you serious?” asked Sasuke. “God, you are such a fucking homophobe. I know it kills you to believe it about your idol, okay, but he was gay way before he met me. Which was a pretty long time, by the way, considering he was a full-on adult and I was seventeen—”

“I know, Sasuke, you’re always the victim.” Shikamaru rolled his eyes, then addressed himself to the other side of the table. “Naruto—I just don’t get it, man. I thought you wanted to make a difference. Why get involved with him? This isn’t how stuff gets done, you know that. Why don’t you just come to the co-op with me tonight and we can talk about you working with the rest of us, start planning some real actions you can join. You know we could really use your experience? We need people who are good at public speaking, who can spread the stuff we believe in, and you have so much inside knowledge about the kinds of institutions we’re trying to take down, it’s really invaluable.” 

Naruto dropped the empty paper cup he’d been ripping up restlessly while Sasuke and Shikamaru bitched at each other. Sasuke, though tense and off-balance from having to talk about Yahiko in front of Naruto, still had enough presence of mind to be a little scandalized by the way Shikamaru spoke to his friend: at once paternalistic and patronizing, like Naruto was a student being imparted upon from his teacher’s unimpeachable wealth of knowledge, and almost certainly insincere flattery and attention. He recognized that tone better than almost any other, having lived for thirteen years of childhood under the same roof as one Itachi Uchiha. Shikamaru really was going to make a great lawyer, he thought bitterly. 

“I still wanna do all that stuff with you guys,” Naruto was telling him. “I just wanna be friends with Sasuke too. Why can’t I do both?” 

“You can,” said Shikamaru, obviously reluctantly. “Of course. But going around and doing things behind the party’s back, it’s—”

“I know,” interrupted Naruto. “It was dumb, I know that. Sasuke does too. Seriously.” He paused, but Sasuke made no comment to back up this assertion. “It’s just,” he continued, and Sasuke felt the warmth of a hand come to gently touch his back, over his black work t-shirt. “It’s kinda personal for us. Like Danzo was really awful to both of us in high school, actually, especially this one time—and it’s just scary. ’Cause it’s gonna affect us, him doing all this anti-gay stuff. Both of us. So it just really makes me mad, yaknow? And when I was deployed and all that stuff happened, I made this promise to myself that I wasn’t gonna just let people off the hook like that anymore. That’s why I did it. I wasn’t trying to go behind your guys’s back or anything. It was just about us, how we were feeling.” He cleared his throat and rubbed a distracted thumb against Sasuke’s shirt. Sasuke was experiencing a strange combination of gratefulness, admiration, and horniness that was making him kind of lightheaded. Across the table, Shikamaru continued looking at both of them with a blank expression for a long moment. 

“I just don’t get it,” he finally repeated, voice weary. “I mean, Hinata was such a nice girl.” 

***

“Hey,” Naruto whispered into his mouth, one hand halfway up Sasuke’s shirt, the light touch of his fingertips tickling Sasuke a little as they moved. “Was it okay? That I told Shikamaru? Like did you not want him to know?” 

“Mm.” Sasuke kept his eyes closed and his face against Naruto’s. “It’s fine,” he mumbled. “I just don’t like him.” He licked inside Naruto’s top lip. They were in the Forester, still parked down the street from Sasuke’s cafe, where they’d been making out disgustingly and messily for the length of about five songs from Naruto’s awful playlist, ever since parting with Shikamaru on the sidewalk. Sasuke’s mouth and his neck were tender and covered in spit. “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” was playing on the bass-boosted speakers. He felt a little like a teenager, a stupid hormonal teenager with an all-consuming crush and absolutely no impulse control—a feeling he’d really only ever had two times before in his life, with one of those times also instigated by Naruto and Naruto’s lips and hands and sweat-and-soap scent. He pressed his nose to Naruto’s hairline to smell it better. 

“He is my friend, though.” Naruto was sucking on the skin under his jaw. “Like, I wanna talk to him about stuff. I don’t get why he was acting so weird about it.” 

I can think of a few reasons, Sasuke wanted to say, but occupied himself pulling his fingers through Naruto’s thick hair and sticking his tongue back in Naruto’s mouth. Truthfully, Sasuke—whose current adolescent infatuation was making him feel unusually benevolent—could admit that he didn’t really think the brunt of Shikamaru’s resentment of him stemmed from homophobia, as much as he liked to accuse him. In fact, he and Shikamaru, had, in their own ways, sort of always been competing for the same boys. It didn’t exactly take a Georgetown degree to figure out that the staking of Sasuke’s newly established claim on Shikamaru’s own pet leftist radicalization project was reactivating for him all the old discomfort and competition that had characterized their relationship back in the old days, back when the object of both of their idolization and adoration had been someone altogether different. 

Sasuke and Shikamaru’s first glimpses of Yahiko happened at almost exactly the same time. It was the week before the beginning of their senior year, and that afternoon Sasuke had lied to his dad about attending an SAT prep class in order to take the car to a talk at the university by a former hanger-on of the Weather Underground. Despite his outspokenness and constant provocations at school, still as a teenager Sasuke wasn’t really used to engaging with real adults about the sociopolitical beliefs he held so strongly, and when he showed up wearing his trademark black armband and black nail polish and black jeans and black Black Flag cutoff tank top, he couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious around the fashionably dressed college kids and professors and the Weatherman guy at the podium in a button-down and khakis. He loitered at the back of the lecture hall for a while after entering, observing the sparse crowd and trying to look involved in something important on his phone, until he glanced up at the sound of the door opening and was surprised to see a face he actually recognized. 

Shikamaru met his eyes, looking unperturbed and a little bit stoned. “Hey,” he said, and raised a hand, coming over to where Sasuke stood. “Uchiha, right?” 

Sasuke nodded. “Are you here for the...” He trailed off and looked over at the speaker at the front of the room. 

“Yeah,” said Shikamaru. “Should be interesting.” 

“I didn’t think you were into this kind of thing,” Sasuke couldn’t help saying. Not only was Shikamaru captain of the unequivocally square debate team and generally considered a solid candidate for valedictorian of their class, but he’d also been in the infamous junior-year AP US class with Sasuke and had said exactly zero words all semester in protest of any of their teacher’s very obvious bigotry. He hadn’t really said anything to anyone unless called on by Danzo, to be fair, but still. 

“Yeah,” said Shikamaru, “I guess I try not to come off too controversial at school.” He gave what Sasuke interpreted as a judgmental glance at Sasuke’s outfit.

“Hm,” said Sasuke, trying to make the syllable sound as disdainful as he could. 

Shikamaru looked at his watch. “Are you waiting for somebody?” 

“No,” said Sasuke. 

“Well,” said Shikamaru, hiking his messenger bag higher on one shoulder. “I was gonna sit down, if you wanted to join.” 

They sat at the second-to-last row, empty except for the two high-schoolers, and tried to pretend neither was at all uncomfortable in the other’s presence. Sasuke fidgeted with his newly acquired and not-quite-healed helix piercing. Shikamaru stared at his phone in his lap and scrolled through the speaker’s Wikipedia page. About twenty minutes into the guy’s reading from his recent memoir, the back door opened again and a third person slid into their row, a longish-haired guy holding a loose sheaf of flyers in one hand, ducking his head to avoid notice and turning briefly to give an apologetic wave to Sasuke and Shikamaru as he slouched down in the seat by the aisle. 

Sasuke didn’t know why, but for some reason he suddenly felt self-conscious all over again. He wished he hadn’t sat next to Shikamaru. It wasn’t like the guy was so incredibly attractive or anything—okay, he was cute, just not that cute—but something about him just made Sasuke really want him to think he was cool. For the rest of the lecture, he found himself glancing back at the guy again and again, noticing almost reflexively whenever he looked bored and when he laughed quietly behind a hand and when he twisted idly the thin gold chain around his neck. Sasuke couldn’t decide whether he thought he seemed gay or not. But even by then he’d realized that whenever somebody he didn’t know could command his attention that strongly, they usually were. 

Once the speaker was finished, under the light spatter of applause and the event organizer’s bland instructions for where to stand to get a copy of his memoir signed, the guy stretched out his legs—long and hidden by olive work pants—and looked over at the two of them. “Hey,” he said, his voice deep and laid-back. “You guys don’t happen to have a swipe card I could borrow, do you?” 

Sasuke and Shikamaru looked at each other for a second. “It’s cool,” said the guy, just as Sasuke was about to open his mouth. “Never mind.” 

“We don’t go here,” said Shikamaru, and Sasuke really hoped he’d leave it there, but— “We’re in high school.” Ugh. How embarrassing. 

“Oh.” He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“I figured you did,” said Shikamaru. 

“Nah.” The guy stretched an arm over his head casually, exposing a tiny strip of stomach under his baggy gray t-shirt. “I don’t believe in college. Just came here for this.” He looked at Sasuke and Shikamaru again, more attentively this time, and Sasuke tried to suppress his instinct to avoid eye contact. His eyes were a deep brown, alert and magnetic, fringed by long reddish eyelashes; the same light color tinged the roots of his messy chin-length hair, the rest of which was bleached a paler blonde. He reminded Sasuke a little bit of a young Kurt Cobain. Okay, he was actually maybe really cute. “You said you’re high-schoolers?” he asked. 

“Seniors,” Sasuke added quickly. 

“And you’re interested in this stuff?” He gestured to the front of the room, where the speaker was signing books. “Activism? Marxism? Or is this like a school project thing?” 

“I’m interested,” said Shikamaru. “I was working on some bail projects with the DSA this summer.” Sasuke looked at him, surprised. Shikamaru shrugged.

“That’s cool,” said the not-college-student, and turned to Sasuke. “What about you?”

“I’m an anarchist,” said Sasuke, and saw the guy smile genuinely.

“Guess I should have figured,” he said, gesturing to Sasuke’s shirt. “I dig it.” 

Sasuke tried not to blush, and failed. 

The cute guy introduced himself as Yahiko, handed them each a flyer for the Marxist reading group he was leading at the co-op where he lived with six other activist-minded young adults, and invited them to accompany him in his effort to sneak in for a free lunch from one of the college dining halls. Shikamaru and Sasuke spent the hour competing to impress him, the former with his theoretical bona fides—apparently he was a fan of Trotsky—and the latter with his recountings of institutional and familial disenfranchisement. He could tell Yahiko was particularly interested to hear who Sasuke’s father was, and may have laid on the oedipal thing a little thick, describing an adolescence full of ideological clashes and intense animosity from his dad where in reality there had mostly only been apathy. At the first mention of sexuality—when Sasuke told them how his dad had replied to his coming out in ninth grade merely with “What do you want me to say?” and the unceremonious cessation of his weekly allowance (which, he made sure to mention for the record, had still never been fully restored)—Yahiko just raised his eyebrows, giving no other hint to any possible affinity until Shikamaru had already changed the subject, after which Yahiko reached over to steal a single french fry off Sasuke’s half-finished tray, catching his eye for a split second as he did. 

Later, once Sasuke had acquired much more experience in both seduction and being seduced, he was able to see more clearly just how pedestrian and predictable the beginning of his relationship with Yahiko had been, but while he was living it, it felt like just about the most thrilling thing that had ever happened. Yahiko was twenty-one when they met, much older and more mature than Sasuke in certain ways and in others surprisingly innocent, especially to Sasuke’s preternaturally jaded eyes. That first day, he told both Sasuke and Shikamaru to come over to the co-op for a meeting sometime, and both accepted his invitation with embarrassing eagerness and showed up the very next Thursday to an enthusiastic welcome from Yahiko; before the semester was halfway through, they were both immersed in a life-changing political education that was at once practical and theoretical and, for Sasuke, very, very personal. They learned to distract from property damage with blockade protests and erase biometrics from their devices and never talk to cops, to grow native seasonal crops and harvest rainwater and identify invasive plants, to apply superstructural analysis and debate Mao vs. Stalin and break down alienation theory and commodity fetishism for a fifth-grade reading level, and throughout all of it Sasuke and Yahiko were sending each other intimate nightly texts, searching for each other in large groups to exchange looks that lasted just a moment too long, finding any absurd excuse to touch each other’s backs and arms or be alone together in enclosed spaces. Naively—unbelievably naively, he felt looking back—Sasuke really thought nobody else had known what was going on between them, probably because even he didn’t really understand it himself. For months there was only implication, suspicion, trembling hope; then, one day after school when Yahiko had insisted Sasuke come up to his room to watch a thirty-eight-minute video podcast on his phone, Sasuke mustered up all his courage (and incessant practice in the mirror the night before) and asked, over the painful stabbing of his heart, “So when are you finally going to kiss me?” And then, all at once, everything was happening. 

In many ways, their relationship was everything teenage Sasuke had ever wanted, which was exactly what made the ways it wasn’t hurt even more. Yahiko was the smartest person he’d ever met, believed in most everything Sasuke believed in (though the anarchist-v.-communist friction was admittedly always a sore point), and Sasuke’s admiration and devotion in combination with Yahiko’s real tenderness and attention (and the fact that it was technically illegal) made the sex intense in a way Sasuke had never imagined possible. In school Sasuke found himself drifting off in class just thinking about it, constantly looking for any reason to mention Yahiko just so he could say the words “my boyfriend” out loud. But even in the beginning, Yahiko was unreliable, unpredictable; passionate one day and remote the next, talking about his and Sasuke’s future after graduation while they cooked house dinner then brushing him off with monosyllables at the table. For a while, Sasuke was able to fool himself that the intensity of their good moments together meant Yahiko just didn’t feel the need to repeat it all the time, that he trusted Sasuke to know how he really felt. But that could only last for so long. 

By February of his senior year they’d been seeing each other for three months, a fact only about fifty percent of the burgeoning KWP membership was aware of—including Shikamaru, who’d walked in on Yahiko with his hand down Sasuke’s pants in the garden shed one Sunday afternoon and refused to look either of them in the eye for days afterward. Eventually, at Yahiko’s request—Shikamaru had missed the last pipeline planning meeting and wasn’t replying to his texts—Sasuke tracked him down in library computer lab during free period and asked, a little awkwardly given how rarely they ever interacted in school, what his problem was. 

“What do you think,” Shikamaru said flatly, without taking his gaze from the single-spaced-ten-point-font debate brief on the screen in front of him. 

“Okay,” said Sasuke. The resonance between Shikamaru’s tone and his father’s whenever he was forced to engage with the reality of Sasuke’s sexual orientation was prompting him to dissociate a little. He closed his eyes, thought about the feeling of Yahiko kissing his bare shoulders in bed the night before to steady himself, then opened them again. “Well,” he said. “It’s between me and Yahiko. So don’t get worked up over it. There are more important things to worry about.” 

“Thanks for the advice,” said Shikamaru. “Anything else?” 

Sasuke stood up from his chair, pushed his bangs back in irritation. “You know,” he said, despite his best instincts telling him to keep his mouth shut, “I’m the one who started it, not him. He didn’t do anything wrong. I wanted it. So if that’s what’s making you mad, you shouldn’t be.” 

Shikamaru took his hands off the desk and turned to face Sasuke for the first time. “You think I’m angry at him?” he asked, meeting Sasuke’s eyes with a tense stare. “I’m not. I’m angry at you.” 

And he wasn’t the only one. In an irritating twist of irony, Sasuke’s immersion in Yahiko’s world of action and activism had led to his failure to take part in any of the SAT practice he’d been using as cover in their first meeting, as well as in much of his actual schoolwork or preparation for his looming college applications. The relatively skimpy class schedule he’d assigned himself for his senior year provided some cover for just how much he’d started to slack off, but by the time winter rolled around, he’d set himself up for a veritable avalanche of paternal/fraternal disapproval, beginning with the news of an utterly unacceptable 1250 SAT and leading into subsequent revelations of his current B+ average, quiet withdrawal from his position on the school lit mag and therefore his sole extracurricular, and failure to secure all but one of the three advised recommendation letters for admission to his top choice school. The Uchihas, whose front door had displayed a Crimson football pennant since before Sasuke’s birth, had already been bitterly disappointed by his tenth-grade announcement that he planned to apply to Brown rather than Harvard when he was a senior, but the idea of his own flesh and blood ranking ineligible to attend even the pansiest, most hippy-dippy of Ivies—to attend even Stanford, for Christ’s sake—was simply a bridge too far for Dr. Fugaku Uchiha, JD, PhD. Sasuke was subjected to an intervention that included confiscation of the keys to the garage Lexus, purchase of a seat at the next possible test date and the most expensive tutor his father could find, and groveling requests for late-game recommendations forcibly sent from Sasuke’s email to multiple prominent alumni friends of the family; the next week, mostly in revenge—though he assured Yahiko it was only out of love and commitment to their relationship—he informed Fugaku and Itachi that he’d had a legally adult boyfriend for nearly half a year and that said boyfriend would be joining them for a vegan-friendly dinner that Sunday evening. 

Even Sasuke didn’t particularly care to recall the details of that meal, but suffice to say that Sasuke and Yahiko’s relationship was once again forced underground as a result, and it was only due to Yahiko’s insistence on rigorous periodic deletion of all text communications that Sasuke was able to deny that any sex had yet occurred between them and Itachi was left without any proof with which to go to the cops like he’d threatened to. Sasuke Frankensteined together the imitation of a halfway decent student’s transcript and ended up accepted into a non-renowned but still respectable liberal arts school an hour from Konoha, where he immediately failed to ingratiate himself into any kind of social life and spent all his spare time glued to the KWP Signal chat and/or having FaceTime sex with Yahiko. Or rather, attempting to have FaceTime sex; Yahiko’s avoidant tendencies had in Sasuke’s absence grown into days of radio silence and tense rebukes whenever confronted. Sasuke returned for Thanksgiving break fully expecting to find out that Yahiko had been cheating on him all semester; instead, he found a cohort of comrades just as concerned about Yahiko’s behavior as he was. 

“He won’t listen to anybody anymore,” Shikamaru told him at the informal meeting they’d convened while Yahiko was once again MIA. “If we vote against him he goes and does it anyway. He smashed in some cop’s windshield in the guy’s parking lot after the last time he got booked. It’s so dangerous.” 

“Maybe he’s working with the cops,” Neji suggested.

“He’s not,” said Sasuke and Shikamaru in unison. 

“But seriously,” Shikamaru said, addressing himself only to Sasuke in a grave tone. “There’s something going on with him. It’s like he wants to just run everything now. Has he said that to you?” 

“No,” said Sasuke, but he could tell it came out sounding guilty. “It wasn’t my fault,” he wanted to say. He didn’t know what to say. He could have told them about the building resentment Yahiko had expressed re: the party’s shift toward “bourgeois academia” (Shikamaru was at Stanford for economics, but Sasuke knew the insult was mostly directed at himself) or about the three-years-prior bipolar diagnosis Yahiko had once dismissively mentioned to him while complaining about his estranged parents. But he didn’t tell them. He loved the party, but he loved Yahiko more; he always had. 

They broke up that weekend, only to get back together over Christmas, and the rest of the year went more or less the same, a series of violent splits that often involved Sasuke trying to subsequently (and sometimes proactively) get unsatisfying revenge in the bed of one of the moronic sports gays at his school. Over the summer, three weeks after Sasuke had moved out of his dad’s house and temporarily into Yahiko’s room at the co-op, they both got arrested at an action at the RTX facility the morning after a screaming fight almost certainly heard by the entire house, and the next day Yahiko skipped bail and disappeared. He didn’t show back up for nearly a month, by which time the party had mostly scrapped itself back together, a state of affairs that led him to quit in a fit of rage, tell them all to fuck themselves and die, and leave with half his possessions stuffed into a Carhartt duffel. Another thing Sasuke would never tell anybody in the group was how he’d spent every last cent of goodwill he had with his father convincing him to assign a Uchiha firm associate to pro-bono plea Yahiko’s hefty list of accrued charges down to thirty days in jail and eighteen months’ probation. He knew telling them wouldn’t make a difference; they all blamed him, and he didn’t really even know if they were wrong. 

“Hey,” said Naruto, caressing one of Sasuke’s nipples while he licked at his teeth, waking Sasuke for a moment from his unhappy thoughts. “That stuff Shikamaru was saying for a second. About the best organizer person. Was that the same guy you were—”

“Yeah,” said Sasuke. He took Naruto’s hand out from under his shirt and pressed it to his mouth, closed his eyes as he breathed in the scent of the skin between his thumb and index finger. “It’s not that important. Just stuff from the old days.” 

“Okay.” Naruto’s thumb stroked his cheek. “’Cause I wanted to say, I love Shikamaru and all. But I just didn’t think it was cool what he said. About you being a victim or whatever. Like, you’re really not like that. At all.” He shifted the hand to meet Sasuke’s, lacing their fingers together. Sasuke swallowed and felt something hot in his throat. 

“It’s okay,” he said finally, leaning over to press his nose to Naruto’s cheek. Naruto bit some of the skin under his ear. “It really doesn’t matter anymore,” Sasuke said. 

Chapter Text

“You’re in deep shit,” said Sasuke, folding his arms sternly. “This is a serious infraction. You’re lucky I haven’t told my...” He paused, grasping for the correct terminology.

“CO,” Naruto helpfully inserted. 

Sasuke nodded. “My CO.” He cleared his throat, trying to prevent any noises of amusement from escaping. “Because we could both get in big trouble.” 

“Sir, I’m sorry, sir,” said Naruto, giving Sasuke his biggest, wettest eyes. 

“Yeah, well, sorry doesn’t cut it.” Sasuke gave Naruto an exaggerated once-over: green camo jacket and pants still wrinkled from months in vacuum-seal, laced-up boots, stiff-brimmed cap looking slightly absurd jammed over Naruto’s very grown-out haircut. “Take off your hat,” he instructed. Naruto obliged. “Now unbutton your jacket.”

“Really, sir?” Naruto was somehow able to maintain the innocent tone of voice despite the barely stifled look of excitement on his face and the fact that he was already doing as Sasuke had told him. “How come, sir?” 

“I’m your superior, don’t question me.” He heard Naruto stifle a giggle as Sasuke came toward where he stood against the opposite wall, still frowning. He put a hand on Naruto’s shoulder, slid it over the white cotton tank top and into the sleeve of his jacket to feel his warm bicep. 

“Sir?” Naruto asked throatily. 

“You know, I can do whatever I want with you right now, private.” Sasuke moved his hand back up to press into Naruto’s chest. “And you’ll have to do whatever I tell you to. It’s like I own you. Don’t you think I should be able to do whatever I want with my property?” 

“Uhhhh,” Naruto groaned. Sasuke smiled. Normally he would have considered himself far above this kind of elementary handheld-camera-porn roleplay scenario—Sasuke’s ideal sexual fantasy was usually one that left its other participant/s pondering what he could possibly have found erotic about it; dentistry often featured in—but ever since the conversation at the cafe, he’d been feeling like he probably would have done just about anything to make Naruto happy. And Naruto had been so embarrassed (yet specific) when Sasuke finally got him to describe the “guy stuff” he used to jerk off about during his service that Sasuke almost wondered whether something passably similar really had once happened to him, which at least added enough of a veneer of possible fucked-upness to satisfy his own proclivities. He moved his hand to grab Naruto’s crotch. 

“I’ve heard you’ve been carrying around an unsanctioned weapon,” he murmured in Naruto’s ear. “Think you could show me how you use it?”

“You’re good at this,” Naruto whispered as they kissed, his hand fisting Sasuke’s shirt tightly. “I’m, like, kinda scared.” 

“Yeah, I can tell.” Sasuke rubbed his hard-on, already feeling the wetness soaking through the fabric (he happened to know Naruto wasn’t wearing underwear). “God,” he mumbled half-unconsciously, licking Naruto’s mouth, “it’d be so hot if you really did have a gun.” 

Naruto giggled, sounding uncomfortable. “Nuh-uh,” he mumbled, pressing himself harder against Sasuke’s hand. “I know they’re cool, but it’s so dangerous, though. To have them in the house. Seriously, you really—mmgh.” 

Sasuke had put the first two fingers of his free hand into Naruto’s mouth to shut him up while he opened his fly with the other. “Okay, private,” he said as Naruto sucked on them. “But you know how to handle your equipment, right? You can’t tell me this thing isn’t dangerous.” 

Naruto laughed wetly and made an incoherent muffled noise. Sasuke removed his hand, spat on it, and started rubbing Naruto harder, inside his pants this time, holding Naruto’s muscular shoulder under his jacket to steady himself. Naruto opened his mouth and was about to speak when there was a loud knock on the door.

“Sasuke,” Karin’s voice was calling loudly from outside. “There’s a cop outside the house asking for you. Can you get out here and tell me what the fuck’s going on?” 

“Mother fucker.” Sasuke froze against Naruto and tried not to inadvertently squeeze his dick off in his hand. “Shit.” 

“Uh,” said Naruto, whose increasing heart rate Sasuke could feel through his shirt. “Uh, that’s—that’s kinda—”

“Sasuke!” The sound of a hand rattling his locked doorknob. “Why aren’t you answering me? And how come my zip-ties are missing from the truck? What are you even doing in there?”

“Nothing!” Sasuke and Naruto yelled at the same time. 

“Are you Sasuke Uchiha?” asked the plainclothes officer standing on the doorstep of Sasuke and Karin’s rented duplex. 

“Who’s asking?” Sasuke shut the door behind him, blocking Karin and Naruto from earshot where they stood inside, huddled next to the entrance. The cop looked at him, and Sasuke met his gaze straight on. He’d always put a personal emphasis on his ability to keep cool when interacting with law enforcement—the pictures from their big pipeline arrest three years earlier were particular items of pride, Sasuke’s face impassive and his pulse under 100 while he was cuffed and while Shikamaru, Ino, and Neji were scuffling, cursing, and crying respectively. He wasn’t going to let something as trivial as being interrupted mid-gay-military-mild-sub/dom-roleplay-scene break that streak. In fact, in a way it kind of helped. 

“Konoha Police,” answered the cop. 

“Do you have ID?” 

Sasuke took his time inspecting his badge, then took out his phone and snapped a picture of the badge number (which he knew cops really hated). He returned the phone to his back pocket and looked up at the cop. “Am I being detained?” he asked calmly.

“We just have a few questions for you,” said the cop, adhering nicely to the usual script. 

“I can’t answer any questions without my lawyer here,” said Sasuke. “Can you tell me what the problem is?” 

“We have reason to believe you’ve been involved with stalking and harassing a community member,” said the cop. “Someone recently destroyed some of his property, and he tells us he’s been dealing with this kind of abuse for years. And he gave us the information of the person he believes is behind it. Someone with a grudge against him and his work.” 

Sasuke swallowed and tried not to let his face betray any emotion. Stalking. Harassment. Abuse. Danzo was such a fucking piece of shit. And of course the cops had swallowed it all whole. Sasuke was perfectly aware that the only reason he’d never been formally charged with any misdemeanors (or worse) was his last name and the fact that the city knew any kind of legal proceedings they might initiate against his family would end up long, unpleasant, and very, very expensive. But something like this—no social implications, no free speech angle, just a spoiled rich kid rebelling against his daddy and any other authority figure who’d ever told him no—and if Sasuke had, as unlikely as it had once seemed, actually left proof—

“I need my lawyer,” he repeated. “Or you can come back with a warrant.” 

When he opened the door again, Karin and Naruto were at the table, Karin scrolling on her phone and Naruto anxiously disemboweling a paper napkin, a small mountain of scraps on the imitation wood in front of him. He jerked his head up and stood—he was still in the army pants, embarrassingly, though at least he’d lost the jacket and boots—and asked Sasuke, voice urgent, “What happened? Are you okay?” 

“I want a fucking gun,” answered Sasuke. 

“It’s right up there,” said Kiba from the driver’s seat, pointing a leather-clad arm across Naruto’s face toward the opposite side of the intersection where they idled. Naruto elbowed him away, and Kiba goosed him on the side in retaliation. Sasuke shifted slightly, sitting on his hands in the backseat, trying not to touch anything. Kiba’s car smelled unmistakably canine, and the fabric upholstery was blanketed with so much hair it practically formed its own textile pattern. This despite the fact—which Sasuke had confirmed with Naruto, just to make sure he wasn’t going totally crazy and hadn’t somehow failed to notice an apparently very large animal living in the apartment where he’d spent half of the past week—that Kiba didn’t technically even have a dog right now, since it was nigh impossible to find an affordable rental unit in downtown Konoha without a weight limit on pets, even ones who were “totally housetrained, like, better than a lot of humans [finger pointing toward Naruto behind a hand].” So Akamaru was temporarily staying back at the Inuzuka dog rescue, situated in the most backwoods exurb of Konoha where Kiba had grown up and where he was now driving them in his beat-up and smelly red Toyota convertible, specifically to the town’s pawnshop, where two months earlier he’d taken Naruto to offload his guns shortly after his dramatic return to US soil. “Even if he already sold ’em,” he’d informed the two of them that morning, leaning against his and Naruto’s kitchen counter and shaking a Hydroflask filled with water and pre-workout powder aggressively and somewhat distractingly, “he always has a shitload of weapons stuff you could buy. And he doesn’t do background checks.” 

“Really?” Sasuke asked. 

“Yeah, I mean, not if he knows you.” Kiba shrugged, then unscrewed the cap of his bottle and took a long swig, tilting his head back, while Naruto and Sasuke both waited expectantly. He finished with a wet “ahh,” wiped his red-stained mouth with his shoulder, and said, in response to their obviously tense faces, “I guess I could take you guys there after the gym and talk to him or whatever.” 

“You better still not be into him by the time this is over,” Naruto warned Sasuke as soon as Kiba was out of the room. Sasuke, whose sexual energy remained humiliatingly undetachable from the warm golden-haired body in front of him, just rolled his eyes. 

“I’m starting to think you’re the one with the crush,” he said. Naruto made a gross-out noise and grabbed Sasuke into a headlock to shut him up. 

The shop was about exactly as sketchy and off-putting as Sasuke had expected from Kiba’s description, though even if it was probably not the safest place for someone with his style of voice and mannerisms and facial piercings, he figured it’d at least be cheap. The owner, similarly confirming Sasuke’s preconceptions about under-the-table used goods salesmen in hick towns with his scraggly beard and camo baseball cap, greeted Kiba loudly and familiarly when they walked in, reaching over the glass counter to ruffle his thick hair and slap him on the back. Naruto and Sasuke held back, watching, trying not to look too green while scoping out the assortment of tools and stereo equipment and firearms and musical instruments lining the dingy walls around them. 

“How’s your family, kid?” the guy was asking Kiba as he finger-combed his hair back into place. “How’s your mother? Still taking care of the zoo up there?” 

Kiba laughed. “Yeah, they’re good. Never have too many dogs, right?” 

“Who’d you bring?” he asked, gesturing to Naruto and Sasuke. “Big city friends? Is that where you this thing, by the way? Out in Konoha?” He reached out to feel the arm of Kiba’s jacket. “I don’t get your business anymore?” 

“Sure, you got anything for me?” Kiba grinned, the straw of his post-workout smoothie (not to be confused with his pre-workout shake) in one corner of his mouth. He gestured at the two still hovering awkwardly near the doorway as the owner bent down under the register to rifle through a box of clothing. “I wanted to see if you could help out my buddy here,” he said loudly, leaning slightly over the counter. 

“What can I do for ya?” The guy straightened up to hold out a slightly worn-looking motorcycle jacket with dark red accents and an excess of zippers. 

“Shit, this is pretty sick.” Kiba unzipped the jacket and started inspecting the tags inside. “Uh, Naruto, you wanna...” he added distractedly. 

“Hi!” Naruto came up to the counter, Sasuke trailing a hopefully normally distance behind. “So, like, a while ago, Kiba and me—I’m Naruto. By the way.” He gave the guy his usual exuberant smile and wave. “I came in ’cause I was getting rid of some stuff from when I was in the army,” he explained. “Which was really nice of you. To help us with that and all.” He paused, but the guy just blinked at him. “So,” he added, “we were just wondering if maybe you still—had any? That we could buy back? Maybe?” 

“Gotta be more specific,” said the owner. “We get a lot of vets.” 

“Um.” Naruto cleared his throat, rubbed his nose a little nervously. “Well, it—the ones I was, uh, thinking about, they were Sigs, actually.” His words were slightly muffled, spoken behind the palm of a hand. “Like, the handgun, yknow. Sig Sauer M-17 pistol.” He cleared his throat again. Sasuke looked at him from the side, unsure why he was being so weird about it. He knew Naruto was nominally anti-gun these days, as he’d told Sasuke that first time they went to Danzo’s, but it wasn’t like he’d seemed too offended or uncomfortable the day before when Sasuke informed him of his decision to arm himself. (He had repeated “are you sure” about a dozen times and texted a series of links to various chilling gun death statistics, including one suspiciously targeted-seeming article about the increased suicide risk for people diagnosed with depression who also owned guns, which Sasuke chose to ignore. But in the end he’d relented and even admitted he kind of saw Sasuke’s point about not wanting to walk around the city completely defenseless after some of its most powerful citizens had officially put a target on his back.) 

“Ohh.” The shop owner gave Naruto a knowing look, raising his eyebrows and smiling. “Yeah, sorry, kid. Those all got snatched up. C’mon, you had to know they were gonna go fast, right?” 

Naruto rubbed his nose and made an incoherent noise that seemed to indicate agreement. 

“Plenty of choices here if you’re looking, though,” said the guy, indicating a locked glass case on the wall to the side of where they stood, then turned to Kiba. “So what’s the verdict?”

“It’s dope,” said Kiba, who had exchanged his original jacket for the new one, which did, in fact, look pretty cool on him. “How much?” 

“One-eighty,” he said, coming out from behind the counter with a key in hand, “just for you, kid.” 

Sasuke, after testing out five or six, seeing how they felt in his hands and looking in the mirror as he held them, settled on a lightweight black model (labeled the “Hellcat”) that fit snugly between his slim fingers. He could feel Kiba and Naruto both watching him with a little impressed apprehension as he carried it to the register, counting out enough cash from his wallet (his bank account may or may not have gone into overdraft after his trip to the ATM that morning) to cover the gun and a box of ammunition recommended by the shop owner. When he stepped out into the sunlight with the weighty box in his hands, he felt again the same intense tingle that had spread through his fingers down into his stomach as he picked up the series of guns inside the shop, and had to fight not to smile, for Naruto’s sake. 

“Say hi to your mom for me!” the guy shouted out the door as the three of them walked out. Kiba just laughed and held up a hand. 

“Poor guy,” said Naruto, taking shotgun again.

“It’s not like he doesn’t know,” said Kiba. “I’m pretty sure he’s met her girlfriend. Dumbass.” He flexed for Naruto. “Fucking baller jacket, though, right?” Naruto leaned over and sniffed the leather, then pretended to retch. Kiba whacked him, making Naruto giggle. 

“I want to shoot this thing,” said Sasuke, interrupting their irritating flirting. They both turned to face him. 

“I was gonna go home and chill with the dogs for a while,” said Kiba. “You guys could come by. Woods are pretty empty out there.” 

The Inuzuka family dog rescue was located on at least five acres of farmland about forty minutes outside of Konoha and at least fifteen from any recognizable markers of civilization. Kiba drove them down a long dirt driveway until they finally reached the property, which greeted them with an unkempt lawn sprouting with weeds and toys and dogs running all around. Even before he’d fully parked the car, Kiba was rolling down his window and blowing a loud whistle between thumb and middle finger, then soon jumping out to bury his face in the fluffy white fur of the giant Great Pyrenees who’d come running in response. The place was really pretty. Even Sasuke couldn’t help be somewhat moved by the motley collection of mutts playing and sprinting around the grounds and the robust welcome they got from Kiba’s mother and her partner, who gave them a tour of the equally mangy inside of the house and insisted they all sit down for some of the macaroni casserole she was making. While Kiba and Naruto ate seconds and Sasuke picked at his plate, she described how she’d inherited the property from her parents shortly after leaving Kiba’s dad for her best friend when Kiba was six and his sister four, and converted the family greyhound breeding business into a foster shelter for retired racing dogs and eventually, after buying up the three acres on either side of them, an all-purpose shelter and training facility for stray/elderly/disabled/displaced canines of all kinds. Sasuke listened to her story while watching Kiba feed half of both of his servings in bites to Akamaru under the kitchen table. 

“I thought you said he was trained better than me,” snipped Naruto next to him. 

“He is,” said Kiba, completely seriously. “He never begs. You steal my food all the time.” 

“You wouldn’t believe how many people complained when Kiba moved to the city and had to quit running his training classes,” said Kiba’s mom. “We still haven’t found anybody nearly as good to replace him.” 

“That’s why Akamaru gets to share,” said Kiba. “He’s a good boy.” 

After Naruto had finally had enough food, he and Sasuke grabbed their purchase from the car and headed out to the trees behind Kiba’s property. (“My mom hates guns,” he’d told them outside, “so just go far back enough she won’t hear. There’s literally nothing out there, though.”) About two minutes into their walk, once their view of the farm was fully obscured, Naruto reached over to put an arm around Sasuke’s waist, the first real physical contact they’d had since leaving the apartment that morning, prompting the question that had been itching at Sasuke’s mind all day. 

“So does your friend still not know we’re—” He stopped the sentence short in indecision. Naruto, of course, noticed. “You know,” he finished lamely. 

“Know we’re what?” He pinched Sasuke on the side. “What were you gonna say?” 

“You know what I mean,” said Sasuke. In fact, he’d only been about to say “fucking,” and his moment of doubt had come not from an accidental near-slip up but the realization that Sasuke himself suddenly didn’t really like that word to describe what Naruto was to him. Which fact was, actually, a whole hell of a lot more embarrassing than the first thing. 

“Nah, I haven’t said anything.” Naruto took his arm back and stuck the hand in his own pants pocket. “Like, I will, though. I don’t care. I just thought you might not want me to tell people.” 

Sasuke chewed on his bottom lip and didn’t speak. 

“It really wouldn’t be a big thing,” Naruto added. “Kiba’s super close with his mom and all, he’s really cool with that stuff.”

“Do you really not care?” Sasuke asked him. Naruto turned. 

“Whatdya mean?” 

“You keep saying it’s not a big deal,” said Sasuke. “Most people have some kind of feelings about it, at least. Coming out.”

“Oh.” Naruto scratched at his hair. “Huh. I dunno, I guess I wasn’t really thinking about it like that? Like, it’s just me telling people, yaknow, I like Sasuke, not that I’m, like, for sure gay or whatever. Bisexual. I don’t know.” Naruto looked at Sasuke, who was squinting at him, trying to follow his scattered line of thinking. “I mean,” he explained, “obviously I want everybody to know about you and me. Like, it’s awesome. You’re awesome. So duh I wanna talk about it. I just don’t really think about all that other stuff.” 

Sasuke shook his head and started walking further into the woods. “You’re so weird,” he said to Naruto, following. 

“So?” He grabbed Sasuke’s free hand and swung their arms back and forth. 

“You know, a lot of people would consider it pretty gay to eat another guy’s ass for the length of three Guns n’ Roses songs.” Naruto had claimed host privileges and insisted again on DJing when they got back to his place the night before. Sasuke would have rather gotten hit by a cybertruck than admit it to anyone, least of all Naruto, but over the past week and a half he’d come to associate terrible 80s power ballads with sexual arousal strongly enough that he was actually starting to not even hate them that much. 

Naruto just giggled. Still holding Sasuke’s hand, he lifted both of their arms to point at a grassy hill just ahead of them. “How about up there?” he asked. 

Once they reached the top of the clearing, Naruto beckoned Sasuke to sit down next to him and took the shoebox from his hand. “Okay,” he said, taking out the gun and laying it gingerly on the grass in front of him. “So first thing I’m gonna do before I show you how to hold this and aim and everything is make sure it’s not loaded, right? Which means you hold it like this—” He pointed the gun down into the grass in front of him. “And just click out this part right here. That’s the magazine.” He held the metal rectangle up to his eye and looked into its hollow center, then showed it to Sasuke. “So there’s no bullets in there right now. But any time you do anything with this thing, seriously, anything that’s not shooting, you gotta check and make sure it’s empty. Okay?” He slid it back into the gun’s handle. “Now you do it.” 

“Are you gonna be this uptight the whole time?” Sasuke let Naruto guide his hand into position and pulled out the magazine, then pushed it back in, gripping the cold handle tightly, until it clicked with a satisfying finality. 

“Sasuke, it’s seriously important.” Naruto took the gun back and looked at him with big eyes. “It’s so easy to fuck up. And if you fuck up you can literally die. Or worse. There was a guy on my base who shot his best friend in the shoulder on accident and almost killed him. It happens way more than you think.” 

“Sounds more like a cover-up than a mistake,” said Sasuke, only half joking. 

“Nuh-uh.” Naruto shook his head hard. “No, it really was on accident. I was there, I saw it happen. He was freaking the fuck out, crying, and his friend’s like in shock—you could see his, like, what are they called—his ligaments. In his shoulder.” 

“Really?” Sasuke asked quietly. 

“Yeah, it was horrible, the guy was so fucked up after.” Naruto rubbed his nose and looked down. “So, you know, it’s just important.” He clicked the magazine back into place and held the gun in front of him again. “Okay,” he said, his voice suddenly cheery again. “So when you’re holding it, it’s just three fingers down here, one on the trigger, right? And the grip should kinda fit right in your hand with this one, ’cause it’s small, which is nice.” 

“Naruto,” said Sasuke. Naruto glanced up, looking guilty. Not for the first time, Sasuke had been gripped with a horrible sick-feeling tenderness witnessing Naruto try to disguise what was clearly raw and unaddressed trauma from his deployment, which he’d still hardly told Sasuke anything about, despite the multiple successive hours they’d spent together talking about everything else that crossed his mind. But Sasuke, not exactly the poster boy for healthy processing of adverse life experiences himself, didn’t have the first idea how to bring up any of it—didn’t know if Naruto would ever even want him to. So, instead, he did what he did best and changed the subject. 

“What was the deal with the stuff you sold at the pawnshop?” he asked. “You and the owner were both being so weird about it.” 

“Oh my God.” Naruto put down the gun and covered his face with both hands. “I was really hoping you wouldn’t notice that,” he said, voice muffled. 

“Why?” Sasuke smiled. “What did you do?” 

“You can’t tell anybody.” Naruto dropped his hands and stared wide-eyed at Sasuke. “Like, you really really can’t.”

“I can keep a secret,” said Sasuke. “Better than you can.” 

“Shut up.” Naruto shook his head and pressed a hand to his forehead. “Uhhh,” he said, looking past Sasuke nervously. “When I left the army. You’re really actually supposed to turn your weapon back in and all. Legally. But, uh, I was really pissed at some people by the time I went home, and I just kinda....didn’t.” He squeezed his eyes shut and started speaking even faster. “And also it wasn’t actually just one. I had like five guns. That sorta weren’t actually technically mine. That I took back and sold to that guy.” He made an embarrassed noise and threw his arms over his face again. 

“You stole an arsenal of guns from the US army?” asked Sasuke. “And sold them at a pawnshop? Because you were pissed at them?” 

Naruto cringed and nodded. He still wouldn’t look Sasuke in the eye. 

“Naruto,” said Sasuke. “That’s the sexiest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.” 

Naruto started laughing and let himself fall backward into the grass as Sasuke climbed into his lap and kissed him. 

After they got out of the car, standing in the driveway of the co-op, Naruto asked Sasuke if he wanted to hold hands. Sasuke, already deep into a tunnel of sulky thoughts about how little he thought he was obligated to apologize for absolutely anything, how petty and self-interested all his supposed comrades were, how badly they deserved the shock they were about to get when Sasuke revealed his big news, didn’t know how to respond. He wanted to say no, since he was already in such a dark mood and liable to get worse, since he knew engaging in such an innocently sweet gesture with someone who (ugh) meant as much to him as Naruto did was guaranteed to send him into paroxysmal spirals of self-hating panic, since Shikamaru’s pissy insults about Yahiko the week before had reactivated his old discomfort and guilt over everything that had happened with the last boy he’d held hands with during a KWP meeting and he didn’t want to put that on Naruto, especially considering what else Sasuke was about to spring on him. He wanted to say no, but he knew that when he did Naruto would assume it was either because Sasuke considered himself too cool or because he didn’t want to let himself be happy, and the fact that both of those assumptions were true only made Sasuke want to prove him wrong even more. 

These two paradoxical impulses wrestled in his head for a moment or two until he saw the front door open and Neji step out, phone to his ear, glancing at Sasuke and Naruto with an irritated expression before returning to whatever conversation he was involved in. Within seconds, Sasuke was seized with a disdain so powerful it felt like rage—suddenly he couldn’t imagine anything more cowardly than the way Neji and Shikamaru were acting, so pathetically repressed and unimaginative that just seeing somebody else living life according to their actual feelings was enough to terrify. Yahiko hadn’t exactly had the most sparkling record of ethics, but at least he knew who the fuck he was. It was what Sasuke had always admired about him the most, what drew him into this life in the first place, the one trait that he still hoped to have absorbed from the entire experience, whatever else came along with it. As he watched Neji hang up the phone, before he could turn to go back inside, Sasuke pulled Naruto close by the front of his shirt and kissed him open-mouthed. 

“’S that for?” Naruto asked when Sasuke finally let him go, pink-faced, smiling sheepishly, wiping his wet lips with a hand. 

“Nothing,” said Sasuke. “I just wanted to say you’re better than anybody in there. So don’t let Shikamaru act like he’s smarter than you. Or any of them.” 

“Shikamaru’s definitely smarter than me,” said Naruto, his smile having brightened at least a few hundred watts while Sasuke spoke. 

“You know what I mean,” said Sasuke. 

They were waiting for him when he entered, everyone unhappy and stone-faced, staring at their shoes and the legs of their chairs. Sasuke, sitting down, unexpectedly flashed to the pistol currently tucked in the glove compartment of his car outside, the dense and dangerous way it had felt in his left hand as Naruto guided his arm to aim at the spot he’d marked on a tree ten yards away. The violent jab of pressure through his arm as he shot it, Naruto’s hand gripping his shoulder to keep him still as it recoiled, the flush of adrenaline tingling his toes and fingers and making him feel almost high. “You’re a good shot,” Naruto had told him after a few more rounds, sounding surprised and reluctantly impressed, and Sasuke just nodded. He’d known he would be, knew he’d proved himself right, and Naruto’s compliment only stoked the already hot furnace of pride inside him. He hadn’t felt like that in years. He’d used to feel it all the time. Lately Sasuke had been experiencing what felt like a physical shift in the landscape of his mind, formerly rigid tectonic plates of bitterness and and fear and self-loathing rubbing and jarring against each other to create entirely new coastlines, fault lines, skylines. Part of him wondered if his sudden and uncharacteristic attachment to Naruto—a guy he’d only been sleeping with for like two weeks, who had absolutely unconscionable taste in clothes and music and friends, who was also a literal US army vet, for God’s sake—was really a side effect of all this emotional upheaval, if he would have fallen in instant whatever-the-fuck with the first guy he kissed after breaking into Danzo’s, no matter who he was. He tried not to follow that train of thought too long, though, because its alternative—that it was Naruto himself who’d incited everything he was feeling in the first place—was both far too scary and far too plausible-seeming for him to dwell on with any level of sanity. 

“Okay, so, business,” Ino was saying, her chair pressed close to Shikamaru’s—they’d been all buddy-buddy since childhood, Shikamaru was the one to bring her into the group in the first place back in high school, and Sasuke had always suspected them of having some utterly tedious clandestine teen affair hidden somewhere in their past; in any case, she was clearly biased as hell. “Shikamaru’s officially done with school, so—” She paused awkwardly for a few people to clap perfunctorily, then cleared her throat. “So, we’re all really excited to have him back and helping organize again—and you had some stuff you wanted to talk about, right?” She gestured to indicate she was ceding the floor to him, and Shikamaru nodded.

“Yeah,” he said mildly, sitting slouched against his folding chair, one arm slung casually against the back. Sasuke had long been convinced that Shikamaru’s whole nonchalant/disaffected/stoned act was just that, an act, put on in purposeful contrast to the more emotional, strident members of their cohort and intended to make his opinions seem even more reasoned and logical by comparison. As someone who had spent a significant portion of his life attempting to construct an adequately convincing facade of detachment, whose cool exterior still represented more of a desperate scrabbling for cover than reasoned strategy, Sasuke found the apparent success of this performance personally insulting. “I just think it’s a good time to check in on what our strategy is here,” he was saying. “What we want to accomplish, where we’re putting our energy. I don’t know if it’s the greatest idea to have some of us going out on our own, doing our own thing without a group discussion. I think it makes us seem like we don’t have a message.” He cleared his throat. “And you know,” he continued, as if it were just occurring to him, “Trotsky actually wrote about this. Individual terrorism. He said it invalidates the need for class struggle and only leads to stronger repression once the symbolic action is over. Which I personally really agree with.” 

Sasuke’s hand was already up before Shikamaru was finished speaking, but of course he passed it back to Ino instead. “I definitely agree,” she was saying, nodding her ponytail up and down. “I know we’ve been a little more quiet lately than usual, but I think if we’re going to try and do some more demonstrations as the local elections come up then it’s really important to—you know, to have...a unified...front. What?” She snapped a glare over to Sasuke and Naruto, who were now both holding up their hands—Naruto completely unprompted by Sasuke and kind of annoyingly—and Sasuke clearing his throat. 

“Can I speak?” he asked, and kicked Naruto’s foot. Naruto put his hand down. 

“Go ahead.” Ino sat back in her chair and exchanged an obvious glance with Shikamaru. 

“What’s our message?” he asked. The circle was silent. Ino kept waiting, raising her eyes at Sasuke. 

“What?” she finally asked, when it was clear his question wasn’t rhetorical. 

“What’s our message?” he repeated. “Do we have one? Can anybody articulate that for me? Because personally, I can’t tell. I see certain things going on in this city that it seems like a leftist activist group should be, you know, acting against, but when I look at this one it seems we’re more concerned with laying low. So is that our message? That we won’t make waves unless they come for the trade unionists or whatever the fuck?”

“Jesus.” Shikamaru rolled his eyes. 

“That’s so unfair, Sasuke,” said Ino. 

Sasuke ignored them both. “I just don’t think I want to be a part of it anymore,” he said, raising his voice louder. “I think if there are still some people who are willing to risk it then I’d rather put my ‘energy’”—Sasuke hoped his single air quotes were enough to convey his disdain for Shikamaru’s ridiculous enlightened-bro terminology—“with those people.” He stood up and dug out from his back pocket the folded piece of paper he’d printed in secret that morning in the back office of the coffee shop. “Here,” he said, leaning over to hand it to Shikamaru, who took it with a weary expression. “Read this.” 

Another confused silence hung in the large room. Sasuke, watching Shikamaru as he scanned the text in front of him, felt the tug of a hand on his shirt. “Hey,” Naruto whispered next to him. “What is that?” 

Sasuke didn’t bother looking back. “One second,” he muttered. “Trust me.” Naruto made a frustrated noise in his throat, and Sasuke heard him slouch back in his chair. After another short moment, Shikamaru looked back at him, and Sasuke met his eyes defiantly. 

“He sent this to you,” Shikamaru said quietly. “Personally.” 

“Why don’t you tell them what it says,” Sasuke replied. 

Shikamaru stared at him for another moment, then shook his head, clutching the paper tight in a fist until it crumpled at the side. “‘Members needed,’” he read in a monotone. “‘The city of Konoha has reached a tipping point. Far-right ideologies are securing their footholds in local government and overreaching even the inadequate processes of capitalist so-called democracy. The civil liberties of sexual minorities already at risk are now the testing grounds for full fascist repression. The working class must declare a state of emergency and fight back the rising tide of tyranny in our city. KWP founding member Yahiko asks all party members interested in direct and substantive action to keep fascist homophobia out of local power to meet at the community garden on Saturday the thirtieth, nine am.’ Sasuke,” he said, dropping his hand and sighing, “what is this?” 

“What does it sound like?” Sasuke had to fight not to smile. Hearing the words in Shikamaru’s irritated drone gave him almost as strong of a vindicated rush as he’d gotten the night before when, scrolling on his phone on the mattress after finally extricating himself from Naruto’s sleeping embrace, the notification had popped up with a buzz at the top of his screen and the email icon next to a name he’d really thought he’d never hear from again. The message was short—barely more than a greeting, not even the faintest shadow of an apology—but contained something more secretly precious to Sasuke than almost anything else: validation. Yahiko had seen what he did to Danzo’s, had realized who was behind it instantly, thought it was awesome, and he knew it had been a long time but would Sasuke be interested in helping out with some stuff he was doing these days? 

Sasuke deliberated for fifteen minutes over a nine-word response, heartbeat uneven in his chest as he pressed send, and they switched to Signal to talk until nearly one a.m. He felt only maybe the tiniest bit guilty. It wasn’t like he was keeping it a secret from Naruto; there was just the whole element of surprise thing, the dramatic effect, and it worked better if nobody else in the room knew what was about to happen before it did. Besides, he’d literally been asleep when he got the message—what was Sasuke supposed to do, wake up his current fuckbuddy in the middle of the night to inform him his ex-boyfriend had texted? And there really was nothing in their conversation that hinted toward flirting or rekindling of any sort, nothing that would or should have made Naruto feel hurt or betrayed if he’d read it—if he’d been able to read it, that is, since all Sasuke’s messages were encrypted and set to disappear after twelve hours and no longer existed on his phone or anywhere else. But still, there had just been a little twinge in Sasuke’s stomach when he felt Naruto shift next to him and his bare foot come to rest against Sasuke’s ankle under the sheet, a little voice in his head that said maybe he wasn’t doing exactly, totally, one hundred percent the right thing here. 

But he couldn’t worry about any of that now. Shikamaru had folded the paper up violently and was holding it out to Sasuke, shaking his head. “This is totally inappropriate,” he said, Ino nodding her head next to him, having peered over his shoulder the whole time he was reading it. “We are not about to let you and Yahiko try to undermine everything we’ve—”

“Is that from your ex?” Naruto interrupted him. “I thought you guys weren’t talking.” 

“We’re not trying to undermine anything,” Sasuke said to Shikamaru, ignoring Naruto, covering the guilty twist in his stomach with his equally unpleasant frustration at Naruto’s embarrassing reference to his past, which at least half of the people in the room hadn’t been around to witness and which made Sasuke sound just totally unserious. “We’re trying to build something. We’re trying to do something about shit that actually affects our lives, right now, right—”

“Really, Sasuke?” As Shikamaru spoke, Naruto stood up to grab the paper in his outstretched hand and unfolded it to inspect for himself, looking unhappy. “You really can’t see through him? Still? After everything?”

“When did you guys write this?” Naruto asked, looking at Sasuke with big worried eyes. 

“He sent it last night,” said Sasuke quietly. “I’ll tell you about it later.” 

“This is just spite,” said Shikamaru. “How can you not see that? We don’t even know what Yahiko’s been doing all this time. He could be wearing a fucking wire, I mean, it’s not like we know if he’s—”

“Fuck you,” said Sasuke, and regretted it almost instantly. He could feel himself losing control of the moment, pulled away from his big reveal by Naruto’s wounded confusion and Shikamaru’s ridiculous accusations, and didn’t know how to defend himself against any of it without looking like an overemotional idiot. He’d thought he was going to be able to rub it in Shikamaru’s condescending face that Yahiko still trusted, respected, acknowledged him more than anybody else in their old cohort, that he wanted Sasuke to lead his revolution, not Shikamaru, but instead he’d just given Shikamaru the perfect ammunition to invalidate everything he was trying to do. “Yahiko’s not a fucking fed,” he told Shikamaru. “Jesus, you’re disloyal.”

“You’re naive,” said Shikamaru. 

“No, I just give a shit.” Sasuke grabbed the paper from Naruto’s hand and went to the bulletin board on the wall. “You know, this is real for some of us. That’s what you never got about Yahiko and me. It’s not theory, it’s our fucking lives. Right, Naruto?” He looked wildly to where Naruto was standing, arms folded, by Shikamaru. 

“I guess,” Naruto said sullenly. “Whatever.” 

Fuck. “Okay,” said Sasuke, his resolve quickly diminishing, “well, if anybody else feels like actually doing something, you know where to go. Saturday. But you know what?” He turned to Shikamaru. “I really don’t even give a shit what you do. I’m just not going to sit around anymore. Naruto didn’t let it happen in the army, and I’m not going to let it happen here.” Naruto, standing next to Shikamaru, didn’t move to acknowledge this uncharacteristic peace offering. “Come on,” Sasuke said to him anyway. “Let’s get out of here.” 

Neither of them spoke until they reached Sasuke’s car on the street. Sasuke’s emotions were swinging wildly between righteous indignance and guilty embarrassment; he couldn’t even bring himself to look at Naruto next to him, only at his bottom half, where both hands were shoved into cargo shorts, feet dragging slightly as he walked. Sasuke had become intimately familiar with a wide range of paradoxical Naruto emotions over the past few weeks—excitement, anxiety; pride, embarrassment; innocence, horniness; confidence, obedience—but regardless of category, all of them had been expressed spontaneously and without restraint. He didn’t know how to approach this new withdrawn, quiet Naruto, or whether he even should. But it was clear this Naruto wasn’t going to break the ice himself. 

“Look,” Sasuke said finally, putting a hand on the driver’s side door of his car without opening it. “Don’t be mad. It had to be a surprise.” 

Naruto kept staring at his feet. After a long moment, he took one hand out of his pocket, scratched his messy hair, and looked up, past Sasuke, not meeting his eyes. “Can I ask something?” he began. “Like, what am I to you?” 

“Naruto,” said Sasuke. 

“No, because it’s just, like...” Naruto shrugged. “I dunno. I feel like I’ve tried to ask you, like, a billion times, right? And I know you don’t wanna label it, and that’s cool, but—I thought we were at least getting close, like, telling each other stuff, doing stuff together. But I guess...” 

“It’s not like that,” said Sasuke. “Last night was the first time I’d talked to him in years. He treated me like shit for so long. I don’t want to get back together with him, seriously—it’s the last thing I want.” 

“Yeah,” said Naruto, “but you were in love with him, right?” 

Sasuke didn’t know what to say to that. Yes, he wanted to tell Naruto, of course I was, I was so in love with him it hurt, it physically fucking hurt, it was the only thing that mattered to me and it was all I ever wanted and it fucked up my entire life and everything about me and that’s why I can’t have it ever again, that’s why you scare the fuck out of me, that’s why I can’t tell you how I feel about you, because it fucks everything up and I can’t do that to you and how can you not fucking see that? He didn’t say anything. Naruto stood there, waiting, watching him, his blue eyes pale and distant. 

“I’m not anymore,” Sasuke told him. “So it doesn’t matter. Because I feel...I mean, you’re...”

“What,” said Naruto after a long silence. “I’m what.” 

As he asked the question, Sasuke took out his phone, which had started to buzz in his back pocket, and looked down at the screen. Naruto looked too. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to; Sasuke already knew what he was thinking. 

His thumb hovered over the green button. Both Naruto and Sasuke himself seemed to be in suspense over whether Sasuke was going to hit accept. He didn’t move. The name on the screen was Yahiko’s.