The next forty-eight hours blurred into a haze of Outlook calendars and Keurig pods. Naruto swapped his orange hoodie for a button-down when investors' assistants appeared, but kept it draped over his chair like a security blanket.
In the design studio—a glassed-in fishbowl of monitors and harsh lighting—Sai moved like a ghost, leaving only ink trails and post-it notes as evidence. They worked at the conference table, Naruto hunched over his laptop, Sai contorted on an ergonomic stool.
"Your protagonist's jawline is inconsistent," Sai said without looking up, his stylus dancing across the touchscreen.
"So fix it," Naruto grunted.
"I thought you'd appreciate feedback." Sai retorted back.
"Not in front of everyone," Naruto muttered, toggling between slides. Despite his irritation, he couldn't deny Sai's talent—the visuals transformed his story into something cinematic, all jewel tones and sweeping lines.
"You're cropping too much dragon," Sai said, leaning over. His arm brushed Naruto's as he reached for the mouse. "It ruins the scale."
Naruto froze. "You could just tell me." But Sai didn't move away, only made two quick adjustments. The heat of his body lingered until Naruto finally jerked his shoulder—a silent plea for space.
Sai's mouth quirked in a knowing, unreadable way. He withdrew his arm and returned to the sketch pad, fingers moving in measured, practiced flicks. "Did you sleep last night?" he asked, not unkindly.
Naruto blinked at the screen, caught off-guard. "Yeah, sure. Four hours. Maybe less."
Sai nodded, as if this confirmed a theory. "You should eat something. According to 'Life Hacks for Productive Millennials,' food enhances cognitive function by up to thirty percent."
"Yeah? So does Adderall, but I'm trying to cut back," Naruto said. His voice was drier than intended.
Sai cocked his head. "You are not as funny as you think you are. But I like that about you."
The line fell into the silence with a soft, off-kilter weight. Naruto felt his cheeks warm, so he redirected his attention to the next slide, ignoring the way Sai's eyes stayed on him a little too long. It wasn't the first time; over the last month, Sai's comments had shifted from purely professional to something that hovered on the edge of inappropriate, but never enough to report, never enough to risk the drama. Naruto told himself it didn't matter. He had work to do, and if he flinched every time Sai got too close, the whole presentation would go to hell.
"Coffee?" Sai asked, rising from his stool and stretching in a way that showed off the long line of his torso.
"Sure," Naruto said, because refusing felt more awkward than accepting.
Sai returned with two mugs, both of them black and scalding, and set one in front of Naruto with a gentle, almost reverent touch. "You're shaking," Sai said, watching the way Naruto's fingers trembled around the cup.
Naruto blamed his trembling on adrenaline. Sai placed his hand over Naruto's to steady the cup, his touch lingering. "Too much caffeine causes heart palpitations and existential dread."
The phone rang. Naruto pulled away and answered.
"You dead or ignoring me?" Jiraiya boomed through the line, uncorking what sounded like wine.
"Prepping slides," Naruto replied tersely.
"Pitch moved up an hour. Come early for a run-through. Legal wants Sai's signature on those release forms."
Sai produced a manila envelope before Naruto could finish relaying the message.
"Anything else?" Naruto asked.
"Get a good nights rest." Jiraiya hung up.
"Your mentor is unusual," Sai observed after Naruto set down the phone.
"One way to put it."
They worked silently until the printer jammed. Naruto escaped to the window, watching rain streak the glass. Footsteps approached.
"You seem distracted," Sai said.
"Is it the pitch?" Sai continued. "Or something else?"
Naruto weighed the options, his gaze fixed on a water stain on the ceiling. "It's a lot. I just want to get it right."
Sai nodded. "You will." He hesitated, then added, "If you want, I can stay late. We can run through the slides together."
Naruto's stomach knotted. He counted three heartbeats while calculating the cost-benefit: Sai's hand on his shoulder (minus ten points), Sai's expertise with the graphics (plus fifteen), the inevitable moment when Sai would lean too close and smell like expensive cologne (minus twelve), but also the difference between a mediocre presentation and one that might actually work (plus twenty). Math didn't lie.
"Sure," he said. "I'd like that."
That evening, the office emptied, the design studio's lights left on for just the two of them. Sai paced Naruto through every page of the deck, never flagging, never raising his voice, but always leaning closer than necessary. When Naruto's shoulders slumped at slide thirty-seven, Sai disappeared, returning with a protein bar and bottled water. "Your blood sugar is dropping," he said, placing both items beside the keyboard. By ten o'clock, Naruto's head ached, eyes blurry with fatigue, but the slides were as perfect as they'd ever be.
"Let's call it," Naruto said, saving the file to a USB stick.
Sai was silent for a moment, then reached out and tucked a stray hair behind Naruto's ear. "You've been rubbing your temples for the last hour," he said, his voice softer than usual. "Do you have medication for your migraines at home?"
Naruto nodded, unable to meet his eyes. "Yeah. Thanks, Sai."
Sai lingered in the doorway as Naruto packed his things. "Text me when you get home safely," he said, then vanished into the dark corridor, leaving the smell of printer ink and coffee and something metallic behind.
Naruto sat for a minute, breathing in the empty quiet, then shut off the lights and left.
That night, the apartment was a tomb. The only sounds were the hum of the heating system and the erratic clicks of Naruto's keyboard as he rewrote and reordered every slide in the pitch deck. He circled his desk with the restless energy of a caged animal, checking and rechecking the concept art, the talking points, the handouts for the investors. At some point he realized he was hungry but couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. He had a vague memory of Iruka's bagels and a stronger one of Sai handing him coffee like a communion wafer.
He FaceTimed his mom, her red hair filling the screen before she adjusted her phone. "You look terrible," she said, squinting. "Those circles under your eyes..." Her voice softened. "What's going on, sweetheart?"
He started with a practiced lie about being fine, but something in her patient silence made his shoulders slump. "It's just... everything at once." She nodded, waiting. "I'm scared I'll mess this up," he admitted.
Her eyes crinkled with concern. "You always push too hard. Remember what happened sophomore year?" He nodded, throat tight. "I'm here if you need me," she said. "Always." "Love you," he whispered. She blew a kiss before hanging up.
By midnight, his eyes burned and his fingers were stained with ink from the annotated printouts. He slouched in his chair, feet propped on the windowsill, and let exhaustion finally drag him under.
He dreamed, as he always did, of the past. This time, the dream was a montage of Christmases—childhood tree forts, snowball fights with Kiba, the taste of hot cocoa and burnt marshmallow, the flash of Sasuke's face at a hundred angles: the smug quirk of a smirk, the dead-eyed glare of a fight, the softness that came only in sleep. The dream flickered and glitched; one moment they were fifteen, bundled in matching scarves, then eighteen and back at the graduation party, the world still bright and burning.
The scene changed. Naruto stood in a hotel corridor that stretched impossibly long, the carpet pattern shifting beneath his feet like quicksand. He knocked on a door that seemed to pulse. It swung open, and there was Sasuke, his features blurring at the edges, eyes too dark, too deep. The corridor lights behind Naruto dimmed, casting Sasuke's face in shadow.
"You shouldn't have come," Sasuke said, voice echoing as if speaking through water.
Naruto tried to step back, but his feet were rooted. The walls began to close in.
"I never wanted you," Sasuke continued, his mouth barely moving but the words slithering into Naruto's ears. "Not then. Not now. Not ever."
Naruto's throat closed. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't scream.
"You disgust me," Sasuke whispered, his face suddenly too close, breath ice-cold against Naruto's cheek.
Naruto jerked awake with his mouth still forming words of protest that dissolved into the darkness. Sasuke's voice lingered like frost on a window, the dream's tendrils refusing to release him completely.
He sat up, groggy and cold, his sweat-dampened t-shirt clinging to his back. His apartment was dark but for the blue glow of his laptop screen, where the final slide of his presentation waited like a taunt. He checked his phone: 6:02 a.m.
He showered under water that never quite reached the right temperature, dressed in the one suit he owned, and ran a comb through his hair twice before giving up and letting it be its usual mess. The hickey on his neck was gone, replaced by a faint shadow, but he covered it anyway with concealer borrowed from the marketing girls.
At eight sharp, he arrived at the conference room Jiraiya had reserved for the pitch. The long table gleamed, every chair perfectly aligned. On one side, Jiraiya and the legal team shuffled pages and made small talk. On the other, three empty seats, waiting for the investors.
Naruto paced the corridor outside, breathing deep and slow. He ran through his talking points, then promptly forgot them. He checked his phone for texts, found none, then checked again, as if this time someone might have reached out.
At 8:45, the doors opened. Jiraiya beckoned him in. "Time to shine, kid."
Naruto straightened his tie, squared his shoulders, and stepped into the conference room, ready for the next disaster, or maybe, if the universe had mercy, the next miracle.
He never saw the investors' faces before they entered. He didn't know that one of them was already watching him from the hall, eyes narrowed, waiting to see if Naruto would flinch when the past finally caught up.
Naruto heard chairs scraping against carpet. His finger hovered over the projector button as he turned, smile already fixed in place. His gaze swept the table—suit, suit, gray hair, suit—until it collided with obsidian eyes he'd know blind. The room tilted. His lungs seized. The clicker slipped from suddenly numb fingers and clattered to the floor.
Sasuke Uchiha.