Chapter 1
The hospital gave them one room because nobody trusted Sasuke alone, and nobody trusted Naruto not to climb out a window to go find him. So there they were: two beds, a curtain on a rail that nobody bothered to draw, and between them a nightstand with a single glass of water that neither of them could pick up without thinking about it first.
On the fourth morning Naruto reached for the glass with the hand that wasn't there. He felt the reach all the way to fingertips that had been left somewhere on the rocks at the Valley of the End, and then his bandaged stump bumped the edge of the nightstand and the whole lie fell apart. He stared at the bandage the way he used to stare at a Rasengan that fizzled out in his palm.
"Other one," Sasuke said, without opening his eyes.
"I know which one's the other one, bastard."
"Then use it."
Naruto used it. Half the water went down his chin and into the collar of his hospital shirt. Across the gap, Sasuke's mouth did something small and private that was almost certainly a smile, and Naruto decided, with great dignity, not to throw the glass at his head.
There was an ANBU at the door at all times. Naruto had learned to tell them apart by their shoes. Boar-mask shuffled when he got bored. Cat-mask didn't shuffle at all, which was worse. There was a seal on Sasuke's wrist, a black ring of script that pulsed whenever he tried to mould chakra, and a second seal Kakashi-sensei had painted over his left eye himself, carefully, the way you'd cover a lamp you weren't ready to blow out.
"It's a formality," Kakashi had said, crouched by the bed with the brush still in his hand. "The council likes formalities. They help the old men sleep."
"And you?" Sasuke had asked.
"Oh, I never sleep." Kakashi had capped the ink. "Ask Naruto. He thinks I nap on missions. I'm meditating."
Sakura came twice a day. In the mornings she came as a medic, all brisk hands and green light, checking the cracked collarbone on Naruto's left side and the torn chakra pathways in what was left of Sasuke's arm. In the evenings she came as Sakura, with dango she pretended were for herself, and sat on the end of Naruto's bed and talked about the village, which was still sorting its dead from its missing. She looked at Sasuke the way you look at a fire you've decided to stop putting your hands into, and Sasuke looked back at her like he knew exactly what that cost.
On the sixth day Tsunade came in with a scroll and a look Naruto recognised from every time she'd been about to win at cards.
"Hashirama's cells," she said, unrolling a diagram of an arm, which was a strange thing to see drawn out in ink like a weapon schematic. "Yamato's been a good sport about donating tissue. It'll take a few weeks to grow, and longer to work right. You'll have to learn chopsticks all over again."
"I'll take it," Naruto said, before she'd finished.
Tsunade turned to the other bed. "Uchiha."
"No."
"I haven't asked yet."
"No," Sasuke said again, and that was it. Tsunade rolled up her diagram, looked at him for a long moment with her honey-coloured eyes gone very old, and left without arguing, which was the most frightening thing Naruto had ever seen her do.
He waited until her footsteps were gone.
"Why the hell not?"
Sasuke was looking at the ceiling. There was a water stain up there shaped a bit like the Land of Fire if you squinted, and Naruto had squinted at it a lot that week.
"Because I want to remember," Sasuke said.
"Remember what? That you lost? I was there. I can remind you every day. I'll write it on a sign."
"That I did it." Sasuke turned his head on the pillow. With the Rinnegan sealed away his face looked younger, or maybe just tired in a different way. "Everything I did, I did with two hands. If I get a new one, it'll be like none of it happened. Like I get to start clean."
"Maybe you should get to start clean."
"No," Sasuke said, softly enough that it didn't sound like an argument. "I shouldn't."
The ANBU at the door shifted his weight. Cat-mask. Naruto heard it anyway.
They let Sasuke out of the hospital on the ninth morning, and out of the village, as far as anyone would say it out loud, the same day. Kakashi had argued for it in a room full of old men until his voice gave out; Naruto knew because he'd snuck out on the third night and sat on the roof of the council building listening through the vents until Sakura found him and hauled him back by his good ear. A journey. Atonement. Eyes on the world instead of a cell. Everyone used soft words for it. Naruto heard what was under them: Sasuke was leaving again, and this time Naruto had agreed to let him.
The night before, neither of them slept.
The moon came through the window in a long white bar that lay across both beds and the floor between them. Somewhere down the hall a monitor beeped with the patience of something that would outlast them all. Naruto lay on his back and listened to Sasuke breathe, and he could tell from the rhythm that Sasuke was listening to him do the same, and that was so stupid and so exactly like them that he laughed out loud.
"What," Sasuke said.
"Nothing. Just." Naruto rolled onto his left side, to face him, which meant lying on the cracked collarbone Sakura had told him twice to keep off. It hurt. He did it anyway. "Three years. I chased you for three years. I used to lie awake like this and plan what I'd say when I caught you. I had speeches, Sasuke. Good ones. Long ones."
"I remember. You shouted most of them at me."
"Yeah, well, you kept running away before I got to the good parts."
Sasuke turned too, then, onto his right side, and the gap between the beds was suddenly very small: the nightstand, the glass, an arm's length of moonlight. Sasuke's right hand lay on his blanket. Naruto's left lay on his own. They were the only hands either of them had left, and they faced each other like they'd been arranged that way.
"Go on, then," Sasuke said. "Tell me the good parts."
Naruto opened his mouth and found that every speech he'd ever made up had gone out of him like air from a slashed bag. He'd wanted, at thirteen, to tell Sasuke that he had no right to leave. At fifteen he'd wanted to tell him that he understood, that loneliness was a thing Naruto knew the shape of better than anyone. At sixteen, on that last rock in the rain, he'd thought he'd said it all with his fists.
"I don't think I need them anymore," he said at last.
Sasuke was quiet for a while. Then he reached across the gap.
He didn't get far. Eight days in a bed didn't do much for anyone's reach, and the chakra seal on his wrist flickered a warning at the effort. His fingers stopped short of the edge of Naruto's mattress, hanging in the white bar of the moon.
Naruto shoved. His bed was on wheels; nobody had locked them. It rolled a hand's width across the floor with a squeal that should have brought the whole ANBU corps down on them, and the nightstand rattled and the water glass tipped and, at last, went over, soaking the floor. Nobody came.
Naruto took Sasuke's hand.
It wasn't the first time. The first time had been on the rocks, both of them bleeding out, their two remaining hands pressed together to break the Infinite Tsukuyomi, which Kakashi-sensei later insisted on calling the Seal of Reconciliation, as if it had been planned. Naruto had been too dizzy then to feel much except the blood, slick and warm, and Sasuke's palm shaking against his. This was different. Sasuke's fingers were cold. They were calloused in places Naruto's weren't, from years of a sword grip, and there was a thin scar across the knuckles that Naruto didn't know the story of. He wanted to. He thought he might have years to ask.
"You'll come back," Naruto said. It wasn't a question. He'd stopped asking Sasuke questions like that at the Valley.
"I'll come back."
"And when you do, I'm going to be Hokage, and you're going to have to call me Lord Seventh."
"Absolutely not."
"I'll make it an order."
"Then I'll stay away longer."
Naruto grinned into the dark. Sasuke's thumb moved, once, across the back of his hand, and the grin went somewhere else, somewhere lower in his chest, where it sat warm and frightening like a swallowed coal.
"There's something in the drawer," he said. "Top one. My side."
Sasuke's eyebrows went up, but he didn't let go of Naruto's hand to look. Naruto loved him a little bit for that and didn't examine the thought too closely.
"It's your forehead protector," Naruto said. "From the first time. At the Valley. You left it on the ground and I picked it up and I've had it this whole time. I carried it around like an idiot. There's a gouge right across the leaf from where it hit the rocks. Or from me. Or from you. I don't know which of us did it anymore."
"You kept it for three years."
"I'm giving it back to you tomorrow. At the gate. In front of everybody, so you can't throw it in a river."
Sasuke made a sound in the back of his throat that Naruto had heard exactly twice before. Once on a bridge in the Land of Waves, when Sasuke had woken up from a death he'd thrown himself into for Naruto's sake. Once on the rocks, a few days ago, with their blood mixing on the stone. It was the sound of something cracking open from the inside.
"Hn," Sasuke said, and his hand tightened, and that was a whole speech.
At some point Naruto slept. When he woke, the moon had moved off the beds, and the water on the floor had dried to a pale ring, and Sasuke was still holding on.
At the door, the ANBU in the cat mask had turned to face the hallway. He stayed like that until the sun came up, and he never wrote any of it down.