The hangover hit in the way of all good hangovers: late, messy, and with a mean streak that lasted long after the first cup of coffee. Naruto woke Monday to his phone vibrating between a set of dog-eared edits and an empty ramen bowl on the nightstand. He swatted it, barely registering the time, and groaned. He'd fallen asleep in his clothes again, the smell of bar grease and cheap cider mixing with the sharper, metallic tang of anxiety. For a while, he just lay there, staring at the ceiling and trying to piece together the fragments of Saturday night—the cold blue of Sasuke's eyes, the sticky vinyl of the bar booth, Lee's arm around his shoulders like a lifeline.
He got up, peeled off the shirt, and stood in the shower for longer than was strictly necessary. He let the steam drown out the persistent memory of Sasuke's voice: Some people work hard to forget. Was that what he'd been doing all these years? He jammed a towel over his head, scrubbed until his skin tingled, then threw on the first pair of clean pants he could find.
The subway ride was its usual blur—people packed shoulder to shoulder, heads bent over phones or books, a silent refusal to acknowledge the existence of anyone else. Naruto propped himself by the door, thumb-wrestling with the notifications on his phone. He tapped his calendar app, expecting to see the usual Monday morning "Creative Alignment" with Sasuke highlighted in red. The block was gone. So was Wednesday's "Content Review" and Thursday's standing call. Nothing from Sasuke at all. Not even a passive-aggressive calendar reminder. Just a silent, echoing blankness.
He arrived at the office before anyone else. The entry keypad stuck on the third number, as always, and the overhead light in the hallway buzzed with existential dread. His key stuck in the lock, and he cursed it, as if the universe had personally decided to make this Monday as off-kilter as possible.
Naruto threw his bag onto the desk and sat, rolling his chair back until it hit the cabinet and threatened to topple him. He leaned into the muscle memory of routine: laptop on, power button, wait for the fan to finish its first frantic spin. He braced for the usual barrage of red-flag calendar alerts.
None came.
He frowned, clicked into his inbox, and scrolled. There were a dozen new messages, all the usual detritus—urgent copy edits, a desperate plea from marketing for a tagline, Jiraiya's "Motivational Monday" meme (a cat, taped to a Roomba, captioned: 'Sometimes you must ride the chaos'). But nothing from Sasuke. Not even a "please confirm receipt" or a backhanded edit note.
He opened his calendar. The morning meeting block—usually reserved for Uchiha's precision strikes—was gone. All week, nothing but ordinary meetings: art team check-in, editorial sync, a Thursday all-hands that promised donuts and would deliver only disappointment.
His first thought was that he'd been fired. Or, more insidiously, that Sasuke had decided to cut him out entirely, moving the project forward without him. His gut clenched in that way it always did when waiting for the other shoe, or the whole closet, to drop. He refreshed his email. Nothing. He checked his spam folder, just in case. Still nothing.
He set the phone on his desk and stared at it, half expecting it to ring with a summons from Uchiha Corp. Instead, it just lay there, black screen, reflecting his own scowling face.
"Well," he said aloud to the room, "that's one way to start the week."
He started working. For the first time in months, he was able to spread out—manuscript pages fanned across the table, concept art tacked up with reckless abandon. He let himself sink into the story: line edits, reordering scenes, scribbling alternate dialogue on napkins and the margins of sticky notes. He lost track of time, barely registering when the other editors and designers started trickling in.
TenTen was the first to notice. She swung by his desk with two coffees balanced in one hand and a folder wedged under her arm. "You're in early," she said, sliding a cup his way.
He grunted his thanks, sipping the coffee. The bitter, watery taste hit his tongue—nothing like the rich hazelnut blend Sasuke always ordered from that overpriced place two blocks over. He caught himself mid-thought, surprised by the comparison, and quickly covered with, "You buy the cheap stuff again?"
"It's called frugality," she said, flipping open the folder and scanning a page. "You're not yelling at your laptop today. Should I be worried?"
He shrugged, gesturing vaguely at the wall. "It's quiet. Uchiha's not on my ass this week. Feels like a vacation."
TenTen raised an eyebrow. "You sure that's not a trap?"
"Probably is," Naruto said. "But I'll take it."
She tapped a finger on his desk, eyeing the spread of papers. "You look… good." She said it with the bafflement of someone noting a wild animal had learned to use cutlery. "Rested, almost. What's the occasion?"
He shrugged again, but a ghost of a smile tugged at the edge of his mouth. "Maybe I finally got my shit together."
She leaned in conspiratorially. "Or maybe you finally let yourself have a weekend off. I saw your Instagram story. Karaoke night?"
He winced. "I plead the fifth."
"Lee said you sang for four hours straight and tried to crowd surf in a room full of three people."
Naruto sipped his coffee, choosing dignity over rebuttal. "It's called performance art."
She snorted, closed her folder, and patted his shoulder. "Keep it up. If you finish those rewrites by Wednesday, I'll bring in real coffee. With whipped cream."
He watched her go, the bustle of the office picking up as more people arrived. He actually found himself humming as he worked, the earworm of last night's karaoke leaking out between muttered notes on dialogue.
Even so, every twenty minutes or so, he found himself glancing at his phone. It was a ridiculous, automatic tic—like the way you check the fridge for food you know isn't there. But the phone stayed silent, except for a single text from Lee ("Great singing last night! You are an inspiration!!!") and an email from his mother, which he archived without reading.
As the morning edged toward noon, the rhythm of the office grew louder. Phones rang, printers spat out reams of paper, the art team started arguing about color palettes in voices that carried through drywall. Naruto drifted into the kitchen for a refill, finding Kakashi already there, stirring sweetener into what looked like straight caffeine concentrate.
"You look alive today," Kakashi said, leaning against the counter. "Did the Uchiha finally break your spirit, or did you just give up entirely?"
Naruto poured his coffee, then leaned on the other side of the counter. "No meetings today," he said. "Maybe ever again. It's like he fell off the planet."
Kakashi's eyebrow did its signature rise. "Does that worry you, or are you finally at peace?"
Naruto hesitated, cup half-lifted to his mouth. "I thought it would feel like winning," he said. "But now it's just… weird."
Kakashi smirked. "Welcome to adulthood. Most of it is waiting for the other person to blink."
Naruto rolled his eyes, but the words stuck with him as he walked back to his desk. He sat, rolling the chair back and forth as he stared at the wall of notes. He should have felt triumphant—untethered from the micro-managing, free to edit and write without someone lurking over his digital shoulder.
Instead, the day ticked by with a kind of empty ease. He finished his rewrites ahead of schedule, sketched out a few ideas for the adaptation, even sent an email to Jiraiya outlining possible changes for the second act. No passive-aggressive replies, no redlined documents in his inbox. By mid-afternoon, the lack of confrontation was almost disappointing.
He caught himself staring at the phone again. Still nothing.
He shut his laptop early, for once, and walked home through streets already slick with the promise of rain. The city lights came on, one by one, the windows lighting up in irregular grids. He paused outside his apartment building, watching the sky bruise into evening. He thought about calling Lee, maybe even Gaara, but the urge died as quickly as it came.
Upstairs, the apartment was the same as always. He peeled off his shoes, tossed his bag in the corner, and ate dinner standing at the counter, microwaved leftovers and a can of cold beer. He turned on the TV, muted, and let the images flicker while he worked on new pages, doodling ideas in the margin of his notebook.
The phone buzzed. Naruto lunged for it, nearly knocking over his beer. His fingers fumbled with the screen, heart hammering as he swiped to unlock. Just a calendar alert for Thursday's meeting. He set it back down, palm lingering on the dark screen. "Whatever," he muttered, though no one had asked.
In the bathroom mirror, his reflection stared back: hair still wet from the rain, eyes a little less tired than usual. He brushed his teeth with unnecessary vigor, foam collecting at the corners of his mouth.
"Tomorrow," he told his reflection after spitting, "you're going to kill it."
He killed the lights instead, slipped into bed, and stared at the ceiling. His hand reached for his phone one last time, checking for notifications that weren't there. For the first time in a long time, Sasuke didn't follow him into his dreams.
By Wednesday, the silence had stopped feeling like a reprieve and started feeling more like a punishment.
For two days, Naruto rode the high of being left alone, unmolested by sudden calendar bombs or backhanded emails. He plowed through his rewrites, sent them to TenTen, and even got a rare "Nice job!" from Jiraiya, who rewarded him with a jelly donut from the hidden box under his desk. He slept well, for once. He stopped flinching every time his phone buzzed.
But by Wednesday morning, he found himself checking his inbox with increasing frequency. The first time, he told himself it was just to see if there were new edit notes. The third time, it was to check for lunch plans. By the sixth time, there was no excuse. Just a weird, gnawing emptiness, like a ghost limb that kept twitching even after it had been amputated.
Naruto scrolled through his contacts at lunch, thumb hovering over Sasuke's name. It glared up at him, smug and untouched, as if daring him to make the first move. He locked his phone, shoved it in his pocket, and buried himself in line edits, crossing out whole paragraphs with a Sharpie and re-writing them in the margin, angling his notes so no one else in the office could read them.
At 3 p.m., the copier jammed. The intern, face blanched with panic, called for backup. Naruto fixed it in two seconds—he'd spent enough time in publishing to know the quirks of every machine—but when he went to clear the error, he found himself staring at the "Out of Paper" warning, the last name on the order log: "Uchiha, S." For a second, his hand hovered over the screen, as if pressing it would bring Sasuke through the LCD glass. He shook his head, loaded the paper, and retreated to his office.
The rest of the day blurred, punctuated only by TenTen's steady updates and the occasional snort of laughter from the art team's group chat. Naruto tried to join in, but every meme felt like an inside joke he'd forgotten the punchline to.
That night, he cooked pasta, then threw it away after a single bite. He turned on a movie, but only lasted fifteen minutes before shutting it off. The phone sat on the counter, screen up, taunting him with its inertia.
He had dreams that night. Not the kind with clear narrative arcs, but the fuzzy, frustrating kind where he ran through empty hallways, always one door behind the person he was supposed to find. When he woke, his pillow was damp, his jaw sore from being clenched all night.
Thursday was worse.
Naruto got to the office early, but so did everyone else—design was launching a new campaign, and every conference room was packed. He tried to keep his head down, finishing layout notes and double-checking the stats for Friday's big contract meeting. The words "MANDATORY" and "All parties present" flashed in every email chain, highlighted in colors that made his temples throb.
Around 5 p.m., the office started to clear out, people drifting off to bars or home-cooked meals or whatever non-publishing humans did at night. TenTen poked her head in at six, saw Naruto still at his desk, and made a face.
"You're working late?" she asked, voice muffled by the sandwich she'd smuggled from the kitchen.
Naruto hunched over a pile of draft pages, circling and slashing with mechanical efficiency. "Got a lot to prep for tomorrow."
She nodded, but lingered in the doorway. "You sure you're okay? You've been… off."
He forced a smile. "Just want to make a good impression at the meeting."
She accepted that, but not before flicking her eyes over his disaster zone of a desk. "Don't stay too late. You get weird when you're sleep deprived."
He offered a salute, watched her leave, and let the smile slide off his face.
By 6 p.m., he was the only one left in editorial. The art team's lights were off; even the printer was in sleep mode. The only sounds were the fluorescent lights above, buzzing and flickering in unison, and the tick of the wall clock, each second punctuating his progress, or lack thereof.
Naruto laid out the latest draft, then immediately hated it. He gathered the pages, crumpled them into a ball, and tossed them at the trash can. Missed. He started over, handwriting new sections, crossing out entire scenes, then re-typing them so violently his laptop rattled on the desk.
He tried focusing on the technical stuff—the numbers, the deliverables, the bullet points he'd need to recite tomorrow in front of the Uchiha Corp panel. But every time he typed "Uchiha," his hand trembled a little. He replaced it with "Client" in every draft, as if that would make it less personal.
At 7 p.m., he checked his phone. Still nothing.
At 8, he opened his contacts again. Sasuke's name glared at him, stubborn as ever.
He set the phone face-down, then immediately flipped it back over. Still nothing.
He kept working. Draft, crumple, toss. Draft, crumple, toss. The trash can overflowed, the desk covered in a fine layer of graphite, pen ink, and spilled coffee from his third cup. He kept telling himself he was prepping for the meeting, but really, he was just stalling. If he finished too early, he'd have to sit in the silence, and that was worse than the noise.
At 9:30 p.m., the motion lights in the hall went dark. Only his office, lit by the overhead tube and the blue glow of his laptop, was still awake.
He checked his email one last time. There was a single new message, marked as high priority. His heart leapt; he opened it instantly.
It was from Shizune: "Please remember to include updated performance metrics in tomorrow's presentation. Thank you!" He almost laughed, the disappointment so intense it looped back around to absurdity.
As he moved to close his laptop, a calendar notification pinged. Naruto's pulse quickened at the sender's name: Uchiha, S. "Weekly Review meeting reminder: 10AM, Conference Room A." His finger hovered over "Accept" for only a fraction of a second before clicking. A smile spread across his face—the first genuine one all day.