Title: Antagonize
Author: Jinhito
Disclaimer: I own nothing except my deluded yaoi-filled mind.
Summary: If you keep digging in old unkempt gardens, you're bound to find something nasty sooner or later.
Theme: #06 so just kiss me and let my hair messy itself in your fingers
Author's Note: This was written for lemonaftertaste on lj as one of the 45 possible challenges. I wrote it on my plane ride to China two weeks or so ago. I rather enjoy it myself and made sure to get out of my system before finishing up the remaining chapters of my other stories. Beta read by a friend Jen, so it's dedicated for her. Have fun reading.

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Naruto had never been one to dwell, but as time went by over and through the years, it became a privilege he felt he had every right to enjoy.

He was human after all, just like everyone else. He had feelings dammit, he had needs too! And maybe it was time he actually let himself be weak. Just this once... no one needed to know.

And he hadn't meant to be caught in the act or let someone purposely see him in such a vulnerable state... but Sai was the exception.

It was just convenient that the other wound up finding him on such pitiful terms and in the most remote of all training grounds; eyesight lost and locked to a training post that had seen better days.

It was noon and the jig was up.

"Isn't it funny how you always show up at the worst times?" Naruto laughed bitterly, his voice the only betrayal of emotion. Jounin should know how to act better.

Sai slithered up along side him, neither interested in his companion's quiet reminiscing nor the wise ass commentary that had prefaced his arrival.

"I see no humor in it."

Naruto just shook his head and stuffed his hands in his pockets, suddenly regretting the fact that he had even opened his mouth in the first place.

"Get bent," he breathed easily, "can't you find someone else to buggar today?"

Sai shrugged but didn't remove himself as wished from Naruto's company.

"Everybody else has better things to do rather than mourn over someone who never really cared for them in the first place."

Now that was hurtfully unnecessary.

Naruto's shoulders tensed for a moment and he felt the little hairs at the nape of his neck begin to rise unbidden. Maybe a few weeks ago he would have let that anger explode. Let it evolve into some ugly thing that was willing to lash out unabashed by it's own violent actions at everyone and anything that reminded it of this subject... but Naruto was getting used to such rough handling of his more profound emotions - at least when it came to Sai.

Because that's just what he would have wanted... what he would have been aiming for in the first place. Naruto would not be so easily triumphed over, he was far too sick of playing into people's shameful ploys by now.

So instead he calmed himself down and let it slide.
No big deal.

Sai could talk all the trash he wanted and it would mean nothing anyway.

Besides, if Naruto ever felt the need to reciprocate, he could do so (and however maliciously sadistic as he wanted) in his head... and there would be nobody to answer to when he was done.

But even as he stood there thinking of more than two thousand quick and painless or slow and torturous ways to kill Sai over and over again in his mind's eye, he didn't even see the other take some daring steps forward towards the beaten post.

Sai's right hand was outstretched experimentally, forward and blunt as though by it's own curious naivety to begin learning by touch without permission.

Naruto managed to snap out of his daze when Sai's index finger lingered on a particularly large indentation of former abuse. The gash was suken far and looked painful. Sai traced it so artistically slow that soon Naruto's face began to portray agony as he continued to watch.

Most training fields were old, damn near ancient if you counted the ones still remaining intact since the beginning of a hidden village. And of course they were passed down from generation to generation in rank to the youngest from the oldest as time went by, so it was obvious that they would suffer use year after year... and when the equipment wore, it would eventually need to be replaced but only to be used again just as it had when it was created - but not this place.

This place was special.

It was so untouched.
It was so open.
It was so troubled...

The plotted land around it seemed wild, still so free from constant visitors. And the scarred trees had knotted over to heal past wounds... the training posts seem to sag and slant, still gutted and torn from all their withstood practicing days.

This place was unkempt and therefore must have been abandoned.

It would only have been a matter of time till people forgot about it, being so remote and all; some place still too wild and still too out there to bother with.

Surely it no longer had no more frequenters nowadays... it should be unsual for someone to visit uninvited, unless they had previous business here.

And by the way Naruto kept flitting his sight out of the corners of his eyes when Sai's fingers kept finding other distinct marking on this single post, he just knew something much more complex than a simple sparring match had taken place here.

Somehow everything was interrelated and held a further meaning just below the surface of Naruto's front.

These cuts and nicks were deep reminders of past hurts both he and the wood would have to live with for the of their lives until decommissioned.

Just because Sai wasn't practically good at portraying emotions didn't mean he wasn't adept at perceiving others' and how they worked them. This all meant so much more, he just needed to piece it together properly.

"It started here, didn't it?" He asked this so surely. His voice was nothing more above an unfeeling monotone, the expression of his face entirely too mild for such a touchy subject.

Naruto said nothing however and just kept his distance.

"Something happened Naruto," as though it wasn't simple as that, "all this damage and all that anger... You did something didn't you?"

Everything was worded so generically... it was almost laughable to think that such easy words and such childish phrasing of accusations can tell you all the things you ever wanted to know. Sai would have done a perfect imitation of a laugh right then if this wasn't any other situation to be amused by... but this was different. This was a time to be serious.

An act of determined coldness was needed for this role. He had to be the solemn inquirer throughout their little game. Sai was still in the notation process of the players.

Most all unpleasantries stemmed from Naruto. It was always the Kyuubi vessel's fault it seemed... How ironic even that maybe that was the reason Sasuke had decided to -

"Shut up when you don't even know what you're babbling on about." It came gritted out hard, voice strained and bordering a dangerous threat rather than the friendly advice Naruto had made it seem to sound.

But wasn't it convenient that Sai felt no fear?
So he went right on pushing.

"What did you say then Naruto?" My God he was a persistent little parasite. Sai knew he should stop, quit now while he was ahead... layoff jabbing the wrong buttons and just let it be... but it was always so much fun to see just how far someone would let you go.

"Stop it Sai... I'll only warn you once."

Silence.

Naruto thought he'd won.

"What did you say to him?"

Wrong.

Naruto growled low and quiet in the back of his throat. So Sai kept pursuing the moment he heard it.

"You said you liked him didn't you?"

His guttural noises stopped as suddenly as they had begun... a pregnant pause ensued.

Bingo.

Naruto couldn't hide it anymore when the silence backfired on him and gave away all of his dirty little secrets.

"He would never admit to feeling the same, so you had to say it first. He was much too proud to give in to weak feelings like that..."

Oh it was so rewarding to put the puzzle together all by yourself. Naruto watched on but was not about to join in the victory as Sai relished it.

"So you decided to meet here... how or when is not important, but you figured you'd have a better chance at breaking your feelings to him in a secluded private place where no one else was there to watch you... to judge you and hurt you any more than he could have done by himself."

Sai withdrew his hand from the wood but kept on anyway. Until there was a strange quirk of hesitation or confusion from his study, there would be no reason to stop now.

"I must commend you though, that was a brilliant idea. A vacant training ground, somewhere so far away that nobody could ever interrupt you... sounds so romantically tragic like all those popular novels or movies that glorify it...

"But real life isn't a game and you were being serious. He wouldn't tell you no because he knew that... so it made it all the easier for you to lure him into it. He was going to stay here and hear you out, you knew that."

Naruto had long since hunched forward and away, a comforting sort of fetal position while standing to protect himself in the most simplistic of ways imaginable. His fists were clenching and unclenching spasmodically... he didn't know what to do with himself.

But he was just aching inside to shut that self-righteous bastard up. What the fuck gave him any right to criticize? Who was he to barge on into someone else's personal life and flit around until he was satisfied he'd discovered the secrets to the universe?

Naruto bit his lip to still his tongue.

"Yes... because even if he said he hated your guts, he still respected you so much for your mutual understandings of loneliness, so much so that he would know that it would be the worst thing to do in a situation such as that. To leave you alone would be to walk away from his past... and as I hear it, he was quite the focused avenger."

Blue eyes briefly flashed a pained look, but Naruto's face hadn't moved at all since it was fixed into absolute place by his stubbornness.

"So I can only imagine how ecstatic he must have been to indulge in such a rare and guilty pleasure if you were the one who'd had the gall to instigate it in the first place."

Nothing more to show or say.

"So you met here one day, probably on the excuse of extra practice because that's how everything ever began with you two. The spark of a rivalry that could lead to so much more... but what that so much more is all depends on the parameters of the rules you set up before you play.

"There was no harm in coming because it was going to be a fight one way or the other. You always fought, Sakura says." Sai eyed a puncture near the top of the wooden post that clearly marked a once embedded kunai. A mark from so long ago that it was making Naruto wish he'd torn apart this training field himself as a personal mission of forgiveness.

"But you never really meant it did you? Never enough to harm anyway," Sai finally paused to openly stare at his partner who'd been uncharacteristically silent throughout their whole exchange. It was far too long since the other had spoken even a word. Watching this next reaction would be the sweetest of all.

"I'm right, am I not?"

Nothing, ever the same.

Uchiha Sasuke had to be the touchiest subject with everyone native to Konoha. Such a symbol of pride couldn't possibly have been the biggest disgrace in all their history... and Sai expected behavior like this from even the most detached villager because it was so common for humans to hide away the shame they felt when wounded too deeply, as everyone had been by this particular incident.

But Naruto was different.

He would have struck Sai as one of the unusual few who could build a bridge and get over those feelings. That he would have been the one who could lead a revolution of change to say, 'Hey, forget the bastard! He never cared anyway!'

But it was different in what you expected and what you saw when the stereotypical norm was busted away and the hurting inside was exposed out in the open once again. So even Sai could be proven wrong from time to time...

He took the empty air as a yes and decided to continue. It wasn't as though Naruto felt the need to relive his story through someone else's words, but there was a weak and powerless aura that had managed to settle around him in the last couple minutes. He couldn't work his jaw or his vocal cords right, so therefore he had nothing to say.

"It didn't matter who won or how either of you did it. Neither of you were players for keeps because tallys for kids don't count when you become adults. Maybe he was pushing you into the dirt, or it could have been the other way around... but something happened.

"A word, a touch, a kiss even... and you suddenly didn't mean it anymore like the feelings in your heart had been telling you from the start. How awkward that must have been," Sai noted this with interest because the excuses to clear up such a mess must have been entertaining. Surely no relationship could be as clean cut as that.

"But even if you apologized over and over again, and said it was an accident... you wanted it... you'd wanted it to happen for so long... didn't you?"

"ENOUGH!"

Naruto shouted loud enough for his voice to echo through the surrounding trees. The forest seemed to cower in fear after that but Sai remained callous.

Surely someone nearby must have heard that, but it didn't seem like Naruto cared. He looked to have stood as much as he could stand and with a bit of a huff and a silent sulking glare. He moved himself between Sai and the wooden post who'd said it all already.

"You shouldn't mess with things you'll never understand..."

"So tell me then."

That reply had come so fast that there was barely any time for it to register in Naruto's brain. Being confused was the easiest route and it must have shown because Sai went on as if unperturbed.

"Explain it in a way I'll understand."

Naruto shook his head slowly, final realization hitting him repeatedly in that lethargic way of it's that would take some more adjusting to get completely used to. As Sai took small gradual steps towards his protagonist, a look of horror began to worm it's way into Naruto's more expressive features.

"No, I... I ca-"

Sai had somehow managed to back Naruto unconsciously into the very post he'd been trying all afternoon to avoid, but it was getting dark now and there were no more places to hide.

It was funny how some things managed to come in pairs and that it was actually very easy for history to repeat itself. Because when Naruto's back hit the wood, he was thirteen again and it wasn't Sai who was staring him down... it was Sasuke. Who's soulfire Sharingen eyes were burning into the most inner reaches of him in such a way that even a social outcast such as Naruto could easily understand and make sense of even then.

"Tell me Naruto," they both asked in unison, "tell me..."

His mental constraints crumbled and when will broke, it's rivers overran the dam. He sang sweeter than any songbird in the world could have ever hoped to.

"It was an accident!" He leaned as far back against the pole as he dared, splinters lodging themselves into the fabric of his clothes - but that was okay, he was too worked up to notice.

Naruto really hadn't thought it could still hurt this much...

"He landed on me funny... after we'd fought hand to hand and when our chakra was failing us... But when he did that, he made an already horrible situation even harder. I didn't... I'm not!"

Naruto's face burned red with shame and soured up with disgust.

"I'm not like that... At least, I've never been attracted to anyone else. When you're desperate for someone else's affection, you'll do desperate things and everyone else knew I was aching in the worst ways... He was special to me... He was different from them!"

Frustrated tears seeped at the end of his vision and Naruto had to squint to keep them in. He couldn't stop this feeling now but he was damned if ever let something take him down without so much as a fight.

"I wanted him... in every way that's humanly possible. No one can understand a need like that unless they feel it themselves. Not even me... I never knew... I never knew it could run so deep, go so far..."

Sai let him go, was just the spectator at the end of the line watching on in morbid fascination as a heart began breaking for a second time.

"And because our positions were so bad... he noticed. I didn't mean to - I hadn't -" he was choking on his words, "He freaked out. He went berserk. For one minute he looked down at me like everyone else did. It was awful. I'm a terrible person aren't I?" Naruto asked no one in particular.

"He shoved me away, spat when he screamed... I'd never seen him so upset before."

Tanned arms came up to wrap themselves up as a shield over his heart. Naruto was trying his best to salvage the remains like a little child tries their best to repair a broken toy by placing the pieces back together and eventually giving into the inevitable; regretfully holding it's fragments in trembling hands.

"And he yelled at me, he swore at me, pulled me up off the filthy ground like some meaningless sack of rice and pushed around until we ended up like this.

"His eyes were red when he looked at me again... and he wanted to know why. He wanted to know how this was possible, how could I feel such a way about someone like him. What gave me any right to ever hope?

"But words never came out and I couldn't speak... so I kissed him."

Actions speaking louder than words was a given, and nothing needed to be said but Naruto spoke anyway.

"He didn't say a thing after that..."

Whatever implications that phrase may have held would forever be up to moot because no further detail was given. Such a vague response should have been difficult to make sense of, but all problems would eventually lead to only one ultimate solution. Sai didn't need to know the facts to figure what must have happened between the two not shortly after.

"But then... when it was over, after he stopped... when we knew for certain all it was that we were really feeling, he only cried." Naruto laughed humorlessly even though he was beginning to cry himself. Overlooked tears of sorrow he'd rather have forgotten how to give were pooling dangerously in his eyelids.

"Sasuke cried... he just - cried. It seems funny now," the laughing came to an abrupt end, "but it wasn't then."

Naruto hung his head ashamed, that something of that nature shouldn't have elicited such a response.

"He walked away when they had stopped falling, walked right on away like nothing had ever happened and as if he had no memory as to why I was laying used and hollow behind him."

A long pause and a voice thick with hurt, "But he told me something before that moment ended... He told me never to love him again. Nothing could ever come of it. So I should just give up, he said. It would be the wisest of all choices in the end because this was pointless... and everything we'd ever been, everything we'd ever done, meant nothing to him anymore..."

Naruto didn't speak again until Sai pressed the subject verbally.

"How so?"

"Because he was already dead inside."

It all made sense. Sai stepped closer to Naruto until the gap between them no longer existed and they were as face to face as Naruto was allowing. He didn't protest anything anymore and kept right on suffering like he were alone.

"He'd been dead the moment Itachi had taken away his future. The dead can't be with the living and they can't come back to life no matter how much love and mourning you pour into them. He was lost to me and everyone else by then, I just didn't know it yet."

"Ah."

Quiet tears of remorse began to form pathways down Naruto's cheeks. It'd been too long since he'd been wholly honest, and with himself of all people.

"I stayed here so late that night... I think I cried myself to sleep before I managed to wake up the next morning to finally drag myself home." He only sniffled to stop the mucus but didn't pause in his confession.

"He never spoke to me the same way after that either and he never looked at me unless it was absolutely necessary. It was never the same and we never spoke of it so no one ever knew."

Now he looked up guilty for having spilled his heart so bluntly to a near complete stranger in his life. The saddest part was he wasn't quite finished yet.

"But after he'd left for Sound... and after I thought I'd fooled myself into believing he was truly dead inside... for one second, at the Valley of the End, when he looked up at me with his one snake eye more than seemingly out of place in such a purely human emotion... I knew then. I knew he remembered this place, and that he remembered everything and all that had happened.

"That was enough for me even if I didn't win and even if he never came back to me after that. To see him alive, if only for one last time, before I never saw him again until his real death... well, I don't think anyone could have asked for anything more."

Sai nodded and could easily gather the rest on his own. It wasn't a secret that the last Uchiha's end had come about at the hand of his own older brother. Because it had been just as they planned, a glorious fight to the end, some place where destruction and hatred alone would determine only one victor.

Sasuke had just lived a little longer, so it was his revenge after all.

But if you looked at it the way that Naruto described it, then a wandering dead boy was never really alive to begin with. That was a real shame, in Sai's eyes at least.

Naruto was still crying in that mute way of his, slumped back on the pole at such a cruel angle but nothing more became of him as he continued to cry lost in his thoughts.

So instead of carrying on with anything more than was unnecessary, Sai reached forward to take tear-rotten scared cheeks into the palms of his hands. Darkened blue eyes looked up for mercy and Sai provided it most tenderly in the form of a kiss.

He was new to the physical realm with another individual, but for what he lacked in experience, he somehow made to make up for with natural talent.

Shaky hands brought themselves up slowly to twine in and about the dark strands of hair Sai had kept tamed and neat beneath the cover of his hitae-ate. But Naruto clung with such ferocity that he ended up tearing away Konoha's pride symbol and discarding it lowly and down to the dirt at their feet.

Sai said nothing and allowed him this grace.

It wasn't worth much, but you took pity when you could.

And as Naruto's fingers dug deeper into that dark mass of hair he very obviously knew didn't belong to the person he was imagining - for that one moment, he was thirteen again and it wasn't Sai who was staring him down... it was Sasuke. Who's soulfire Sharingen eyes had burned into the most inner reaches of him in such a way that even a social outcast such as Naruto could have easily understood and made sense of even then.

- owari -

This is by far one of my favorite pieces... reviews are not expected but loved nonetheless. Hope you enjoyed it.