Naruto drove home on his mind a mess, the imprint of Sasuke's mouth still searing the side of his neck. The cold stung, but not as much as the afterimage of that kiss—no, not a kiss, a detonation, a calculated breach of perimeter. He fumbled the key three times at his apartment door, let himself inside, and flicked the switch, then flinched at the harshness of the light. He yanked it back off, leaving the room in pre-dawn twilight. The pile of unread mail on the floor barely registered; he stepped on it, shoes leaving a wet print, then kicked them off at the threshold with one lazy, sideways motion.
Coat, bag, laptop—he shed them all, the coat missing its hook, the bag spilling its contents across the floor, and he left it all where it fell and crashed face-first onto his bed. The room spun as Sasuke's grip lingered on his skin—the press against the car, the teeth more than lips, the hunger—and his tongue found the swelling inside his lip: real, then. His pulse raced, then slowed to a thud he felt in his feet, spine, tongue; Sasuke's whisper ("I shouldn't") followed by breath, heat, the world tilting, his wrists aching from clutching Sasuke's jacket. He rolled onto his back, sheets twisting like restraints while headlights sliced across the ceiling and whiskey soured his breath, fingernail marks lining his arms where he'd tried to anchor himself, to keep from changing everything again.
He could still feel the ghost of Sasuke's hands, the way they'd fit to his hips, the pressure both warning and promise. His body was caught in a tug-of-war: part of him wanted to run a hundred miles in the opposite direction, and part of him wanted to turn around, march right back to that garage, and let Sasuke do whatever the hell he wanted.
Sleep teased him. His mind replayed the garage scene on loop: Sasuke's eyes, the heat between them, blood and peppermint. Work deadlines couldn't distract him. Everything circled back to that moment's gravity.
When exhaustion finally won, his consciousness blurred past and present. He slipped under, not into rest but a spiraling descent. Between heartbeats, the Christmas night memory surfaced, ready to be relived.
The dream began, as all the worst ones did, with the sound of laughter that didn't belong to him.
He was back at his parents' house—ceilings lower than he remembered, walls hung with twinkling bulbs and red-ribbon garlands. The air was thick with mulled cider and roast meat; he stumbled on the entry rug, clawing at the wall as relatives burst into song two rooms away. Holiday music thudded muffled through layers of drywall and tradition.
The house was packed, bodies wall to wall, but he ghosted through them—each face a blur: the aunt with the glass eye, the uncle with the crushing handshake, the girl from down the street. He staggered room to room, never quite seen, chasing something he couldn't name.
He was halfway up the stairs when Kiba intercepted him, barreling through a pair of toddlers with the grace of a runaway train. He grabbed Naruto by the elbow, nearly sending them both down the steps.
"Whoa, easy, man." Kiba's breath was spiked with rum and mischief. "You look like you're on a mission from God."
Naruto jerked his arm free. "Just looking for someone."
Kiba's eyes flicked upward, toward the landing. "It's not a good idea. He's already gone, dude. Been gone for an hour." He dropped his voice. "You're too drunk for this. You'll just make it worse."
Naruto shoved him away, a little too hard. "It's my life," he said, or thought he did—the words came out slurred, sloshing over the edges. "He can't just fucking disappear."
Kiba held up both hands in surrender, but his eyes were sad, the way they got whenever Naruto did something Kiba knew he'd regret. "Alright. But don't say I didn't warn you." He reached into his jacket and produced a mini-bottle of tequila, and pressed it into Naruto's palm. "For courage," he said, then vanished into the party.
Naruto stared at the bottle for a long time, then twisted it open and tipped it back in a single swallow. The burn chased away the taste of regret, but only for a second.
The front door stood ajar, spilling a wedge of golden light across the snow. A tall figure in a dark coat was silhouetted against it, one foot already over the threshold.
Itachi.
Naruto stumbled forward, catching himself on the banister. Itachi turned at the sound, his face half-shadowed, eyes reflecting nothing. The collar of his coat was already pulled up against the cold, car keys dangling from gloved fingers.
"Wait," Naruto called, voice thick with tequila. The word hung between them like frost. He'd never been able to read Itachi—too controlled, too watchful, a chess player three moves ahead.
Itachi paused, then stepped back inside. "If you're looking for my brother," he said, voice barely audible above the party's roar, "he's at the lake."
The cold punched him in the face, then—skip—he was already halfway to the lake, the house a distant glow behind him. The party sounds cut out abruptly, like someone had muted a television. The snow beneath his feet vanished and reappeared with each step, sometimes crunching, sometimes silent. Stars overhead blurred and sharpened in pulses, leaving trails across his vision.
He blinked and found himself at the dock's edge, with no memory of the final twenty yards. Sasuke's silhouette materialized at the far end as if painted there by his mind—knees drawn up, arms wrapped tight around them. Naruto tried to hold onto his anger, but it slipped through his fingers like water, replaced by something colder and heavier.
Sasuke turned, eyes catching the moonlight, and the dream skipped a beat—Naruto was suddenly on the dock, the boards creaking under his weight, the smell of lake water and cigarette smoke sharp in his nose. Sasuke stared up at him, face unreadable. For a moment, neither said a word. The wind howled, the trees shivered, the world held its breath.
Naruto's legs carried him forward, each step more difficult than the last, until he was close enough to see the tremor in Sasuke's hands, the way his jaw clenched as if holding back a scream. They sat there, locked in silence, two ghosts at the edge of the world, waiting for someone to speak.
The memory wobbled, the air between them vibrating with things left unsaid. Naruto opened his mouth, but what came out was not his own voice, not even his own words. The dream warped, the dock splintering, the stars smearing across the sky. He blinked, and the world spun, threatening to throw him into the freezing black below.
But he didn't fall. Not yet.
He was still on the dock, with Sasuke. And for the first time in years, the conversation they never had was about to begin.
Naruto's vision swam, the lake doubling and tripling before snapping back into focus. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth. Who the hell did Sasuke think he was, sitting there all hunched over like he was the wounded one?
"Hey," Naruto barked, the word slipping sideways out of his mouth. He stumbled forward, nearly pitching into the water. The dock tilted beneath him like a carnival ride.
Sasuke didn't even look up. "Go away," he spat, voice thick with something that made Naruto's blood boil hotter.
"Fuck you," Naruto slurred, jabbing a finger that missed Sasuke entirely. "I fuckin' love'd you." His tongue felt three sizes too big. "You—you hurt ME." The last word came out as a shout that echoed across the water.
Sasuke's laugh was a jagged thing. "You're so full of shit. You never called. You never texted. You never fucking—" His voice broke off, shattering into fragments. "You just disappeared."
Naruto's face burned, the world tilting like a ship in a storm. "How—how fuckin' dare you?" His feet carried him forward in a zigzag, knuckles white at his sides. Words spilled like marbles from his mouth: "Don't you—don't—" But Sasuke was suddenly standing, his silhouette doubling, tripling, merging back together. The bottle in his hand caught starlight, liquid sloshing inside.
"Blame me? Go 'head!" Sasuke's voice stretched across the water like taffy, echoing back wrong. "I woulda done any—anything for you. I was gonna—" His teeth sank into flesh, copper flooding his mouth, drowning whiskey.
The dock seemed to breathe beneath them. "You called it dis—disgusting," Naruto slurred, each word swimming up from somewhere deep. "You made me feel like I was—"
Sasuke's cry—"SHUT UP!"—shattered like glass, the echoes skipping across the lake's surface like stones. The space between them—six feet, then three, then none—collapsed in a blink. Naruto smelled whiskey and winter air, felt hot breath on his face, then the dock beneath them seemed to tilt. The trees beyond Sasuke's shoulder blurred, colors bleeding together.
"I tried to—" Sasuke's voice faded in and out like a bad radio signal, "—fix it. Next day. Your house but—" His face flickered, expression shifting between anger and desperation. "—gone. You were gone." The words slurred and stretched, some syllables swallowed by static. "Didn't even let—"
"Liar!" Naruto heard himself shout, though his lips felt numb, disconnected. His fists clenched of their own accord. "LIAR!" The word echoed back at him, distorted, in a voice that wasn't quite his.
Tears welled in Sasuke's eyes, but they didn't fall—they hovered, suspended, catching moonlight. "I said—things—" Parts of his sentence vanished into the night. "—didn't mean—them." His body trembled, the image of him flickering like a candle about to go out. "Never even—chance—"
Questions formed in Naruto's mind, but his mouth wouldn't work. The dock beneath them shrank, boards disappearing into mist until they stood on a platform barely larger than a postage stamp. Black water rose around them, hungry. Sasuke's face swam closer, features blurring then sharpening, bottle vanishing from his hand as if it had never existed. His trembling lips parted, hands rising—to push or to pull, Naruto couldn't tell.
"I loved you, idiot," Sasuke whispered, the words trembling on the edge of collapse. "I always did."
The world lurched. Naruto reached for Sasuke, fingers grasping at a shirt that seemed to dissolve beneath his touch. "Wait—did you really come looking—" The dock beneath them began to fade, boards turning transparent. Sasuke's face blurred at the edges, his mouth moving but the words growing fainter. "—need to know if—" Naruto's own voice sounded distant, underwater. He tried to hold on, but Sasuke was becoming mist between his fingers, the lake rising around them both as consciousness pulled Naruto upward, away from the answers he desperately needed.
Naruto surfaced from the dark with a gasp, the sound of his alarm shearing through the quiet like a surgical saw. He flailed for the phone on the nightstand, nearly pitching himself out of bed in the process. The screen glared 6:37 a.m., the time pulsing in frantic digital red. He killed the alarm with a jab, then lay back, sucking in air, heart hammering as if he'd actually been drowning.
The room was hot, sunlight already boiling through the blinds he'd forgotten to close last night. Sweat glued his shirt to his back and soaked the waistband of his boxers; his head throbbed as if every neuron had taken a personal vendetta against him. For a minute, he just lay there, sheets twisted around his calves, trying to grasp what was real and what wasn't.
He ran both hands through his hair, then dragged them down his face, pushing the heels of his palms into his eye sockets until fireworks went off in the dark. Had Sasuke actually said those things? Water, ice, the dock—those were real. But the words... Naruto's subconscious had always been a liar, especially when it came to Sasuke.
He sat up, elbows on knees, and tried to separate memory from wishful thinking. The party happened. The dock happened. But Sasuke's voice—raw and pleading—saying "I tried to fix it the next morning. I loved you, idiot"? That had to be his brain filling in what he wanted to hear. Dreams couldn't be trusted, especially not ones about Sasuke Uchiha.
Naruto hunched over, forehead nearly touching the tops of his thighs, and groaned. His phone sat on the nightstand, Sasuke's contact still pulled up from last night. His thumb hovered over the screen, then retreated. What would he even say? "Hey, did you actually come looking for me after graduation, or was that just my drunk brain making shit up?" The question felt pathetic in his mind.
Even if it was true—even if Sasuke had tried to find him—what difference would it make now? They'd both moved on. Built separate lives. One confession in a dream couldn't erase five years of silence.
He tossed the phone onto the rumpled sheets beside him. Bringing it up would only make him look desperate, like he was still that same lovesick teenager. And for what? Another rejection? Another chance for Sasuke to look at him with those cold eyes?
He shoved his face under the pillow and screamed. It did nothing to help.
After a while, he peeled himself out of bed, padding to the bathroom on feet that barely remembered how to work. He splashed cold water on his face until the skin stung, then stared at himself in the mirror: hair sticking out in every direction, eyes puffy and red-rimmed, lips swollen and bitten. He touched his lower lip, testing the faint ache from where Sasuke's teeth had caught it. The memory made his knees go weak.
He brushed his teeth, watching the suds swirl down the drain, then stumbled into the kitchen. The place looked worse in the daylight—a field of ramen cups and manuscript pages, nothing where it belonged. He flicked on the coffeemaker and leaned against the counter, eyes fixed on the phone charging by the sink.