Loko: It's, um, it's genfic SasuNaru andIwritecanonOTPsshutup.

Disclaimer: Kishimoto-san makes them gayer than I do.

Summary: There are things Sasuke cannot understand, but the passing of the days is clearer than a Sharingan'd jutsu. NaruSasuNaru subtext

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in waking

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A dream has power to poison sleep. (Shelley)

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... We sleeping wake, and waking sleep. (de Montaigne)

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. (Canetti)

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zero

Naruto is breathing when Sasuke leaves.

one

Sasuke spends his first day in Sound being poked and prodded by Kabuto.

"You two did a number on each other, didn't you, Sasuke-kun?"

Orochimaru looms an unappealing grey in the background, frowning.

"I left him alive," Sasuke says, and their expressions are unreadable.

He spends the night in a drugged sleep so that he can't feel his blood raging chemical, his bones filling slowly with something foreign, burning.

two

The Village Hidden in Sound is less a village than a warren, twined darkly through the earth. A damp, moulding smell seeps from the dirt hallways even into the stone-walled rooms, and in the windowless air it feels like a mausoleum, like everything Sasuke breathes is dead and rotting.

Sasuke Chidoris a window into his room, much to Orochimaru's amusement, but at night his dreams are still soaked with the scent of wet soil and Naruto's face beneath his is slowly eaten away until the eyelids are gone and nothing remains but blue accusing, bright and furious.

When he jolts awake his chest and throat ache with a yearning he can't comprehend.

Sasuke makes a list of reasons he should have killed Naruto on one side of the paper and one of reasons why he shouldn't have on the other. When the brush finishes its journey of cold, flat black, he is short on one side.

Orochimaru sees them one day, after Sasuke leaves the sheet on the dinner table. He comments, "Perhaps we will now move on from clones, Sasuke-kun."

Kabuto raises an eyebrow above his thick-rimmed glasses and says, "Although this is pleasant news for me, don't spare him for my sake, Sasuke-kun."

The next morning there is no Naruto or Sakura standing outside his door with kunai raised. Sasuke searches and feels nothing until he reaches the blue of the dawn sky and his palms scream for want of something to hit or maim or touch.

three hundred and sixty-five

The grapevine says that Naruto is training under Jiraiya-sama and Sakura has become apprentice to the Godaime. So Team Kakashi's easy melodrama matures into sharp parallelism, Sasuke supposes, marginally more useful.

In honour of it having been a year since the Valley of the End, Sasuke henges into a moderation of Naruto's Oiroke no Jutsu and visits Konoha. Hoping for nothing.

His old class is all gone, training, and Sakura is holed up somewhere being exhausted by the Fifth. Their childhood is gone, then, what there was of it – eaten by the lull between wars or the story of the Villages itself. Something like that.

The rumour in Konoha is that the Kyuubi-Jinchuuriki is training with the greatest of the Sannin to retrieve That Deserting Uchiha Boy, What Has Become of That Poor Once-Glorious Clan.

Stories say that the only time Jiraiya-sama was seriously wounded was in an attempt to spy on Tsunade-sama in an onsen. Sasuke suspects that it may be true, his being seriously wounded. Tsunade-sama only pulled punches for one person in that trio – pale and fragile and beautiful in their old team pictures – and today? she would destroy him in a heartbeat if she could.

Sasuke wonders if Naruto knows fact: that Jiraiya-sama's other set of broken ribs and limbs and ruptured internal organs, the set no one talks about, were acquired in an attempt to retrieve a departing team-mate.

Sasuke wonders if Naruto knows: if anyone has bothered to tell him, if it would even matter to either of them if he did.

In the morning he realises that he has been counting the days and vows to stop, even as something in his core breathes with an implacable calm, three hundred and sixty-six.

six hundred and ninety-seven

Chidori Nagashi is a bright blue tingling throughout his body, a flow from his fingers to his thighs to his feet, and Sasuke trains to hold it as long as he can without tiring. By dinner he is chakra-exhausted, body-exhausted, a mass of pain and a reverberating jolt from temple to medulla oblongata to temple. He suffers through the food, able by now to ignore the vague unnatural taste of chemicals and the sweet darkness of forbidden jutsu. Kabuto does the cooking; it could be worse, Sasuke supposes.

They passed through Bird Country in the morning, where Orochimaru bought three memento shuriken and Kabuto picked up a few bodies. Sasuke broke from the group and bought a popsicle, its garish azure staining his lips violet and saccharine fruit flavour sliding down his throat, a cold empty taste but the first food he's had since Konoha's hospital meals that hasn't been tampered with. It feels like he's swallowed the pale winter sky, not the sea-dark blue of the popsicle.

He wishes he were tired enough to fall asleep like Naruto used to on their missions: head, pillow, unconsciousness. There's luck in the world, but it doesn't belong to Sasuke.

Insomnia curls in his traitorous body like a deep cerulean fog. The nights he doesn't spend training to fight blind he spends clenched in violent, stifled arousal, and when he comes his world is a shower of brilliant blue sparks.

eight hundred

Sasuke can hold his liquor, but only to a certain point. The girl plies him with too much alcohol, so that when he finally says against her soft ear, "I want information," his words are slightly slurred and his throat doesn't quite work.

"Of course," She giggles, and beyond the dingy sweep of the bar her voice comes from a distance. "Come upstairs."

Beneath his hands her hair is soft and her body is yielding, and some part of Sasuke says Wrong even as he lets her slip him tongue, her eyes clouded with pleasure and half-shut into the kiss.

The numbers she whispers into the pillow and her clear blue eyes are the only real memories Sasuke has of the night, and when he tells Orochimaru that he could have gotten the data from any momentary henge, the bastard's mouth angles into a smile and says nothing.

nine hundred and seventeen(. zero)

Naruto is glinting gold and shining lapis and everything Sasuke remembers, only taller, and between the hot rush of Naruto's breath against his ear and a moment of coarse hair against his neck Sasuke barely remembers: indifference, killing, breath.

one

"Perhaps we should bring back some clones for Sasuke-kun to manage his anger," Orochimaru says.

"I have bodies," Kabuto offers.

"You have one hundred and seventy-eight days to teach me how to kill my brother," Sasuke says.

Orochimaru asks, mist-grey: "If you fail? What if you fail, Sasuke-kun?"

It doesn't matter what Naruto has to say. Nothing is different, but in the night Sasuke wakes soaked in sweat and a name choked against twisted sheets, and the nightmares are new and perplexing.

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1152 words

Thank you for reading! Reviewing makes Avengers happy. Or angsty. As angsty is probably the default setting of Avengers anyway.

… in any case, reviews make authors happy. So, please?

Loko