Naruto sat in his dimly-lit room, surrounded by chaos: teetering stacks of comics and worn books, scattered pencil shavings, translucent ramen wrappers, and sticky notes—monuments to unfinished stories. The window was cracked open, allowing the distant drone of summer insects and the faint smell of approaching rain. The air simmered with a tense stillness.
His eyes were fixed on two envelopes laid before him. Their glossy whites shimmered in the lamp's glow—one thick with promise from a prestigious university's writing program miles away; the other thin, local—a college close enough for family dinners and Sasuke's familiar presence just over two miles away.
Naruto leaned forward, burying his face in his hands, feeling the familiar texture of his hair through his fingers. His room held a mix of graphite, forgotten laundry, and the sweet memory of one of Kushina's cookies, solidifying on the shelf behind him.
He picked up the prestigious envelope, its letterhead shimmering with an air of wealth. Naruto thumbed the embossed crest and traced the looping signature of the admissions director, before setting it aside. Then he picked up the city college envelope, noting its wrinkled corner and typo-ridden address. Prestigious. Local. Back and forth, he repeated the motion as if the physical act could alleviate the ache beneath his ribs.
His gaze drifted up to the corkboard above his desk, cluttered with photos charting the history of Uzumaki-Uchiha relations. One shot showed them in grade school—Naruto with missing teeth, Sasuke in an ill-fitting blazer, both offering dead-eyed stares as if reluctantly sharing a hostage photo. Another captured the sixth-grade science fair, with Naruto's Kool-Aid volcano erupting over Sasuke's sneakers; the back of the polaroid bore a threat: "Dobe, I will murder you in your sleep. —S." The latest photo was elegantly framed—a moment from last summer's road trip. Naruto mid-cannonball, a blur of tan limbs; Sasuke at the water's edge, his relaxed shoulders a rare show of contentment.
Naruto traced the frame, feeling the cool glass before looking back at the letters. He wondered if the prestigious college would care that his essay was about Sasuke, names changed but not the essence: boy with nothing meets boy with everything, their sum more complex than either alone. Did Sasuke know he was more than a sidekick in this narrative?
His father's voice cut through his thoughts. "Naruto! Let's get going, son!" Minato called from downstairs. Celebration dinner. Fancy restaurant. Sasuke. The words tumbled in his mind as his stomach knotted. Naruto's fingers trembled slightly as he took one last glance at the photo, his thumb unconsciously tracing Sasuke's outline behind the glass. He wiped suddenly damp palms against his pants, checked his reflection, and took three deep breaths before rushing downstairs, nearly missing the bottom step.
The restaurant was all glass and chrome, the kind of place that quietly judged with its overly starched napkins collapsing under a drop of soy sauce. Naruto had never seen waiters hover with such subtle precision, refilling water glasses like clockwork. He tugged at his still-starched shirt collar, wondering how long until someone noticed his orange tie was a jest.
Both families sat around a rectangular table, Uchiha and Uzumaki positioned like chess pieces: Fugaku at the head, imperious even with a sip of mineral water; Mikoto beside him, exuding quiet warmth; Kushina, her vibrant hair and voice nearly overpowering the muted decor; Minato, quietly proud with a constant half-smile. At the far end, Naruto and Sasuke sat elbow to elbow, feigning ignorance of their mirrored positions. Plates gleamed with intricate dishes—tiny parcels of duck with citrus glaze, risotto shaped into cylinders, salad leaves meticulously arranged.
Fugaku raised his glass with the gravity of a leader at a summit. "To the future of our families," he declared, his eyes scanning for unspoken acknowledgment.
Minato's smile broadened. "To new adventures," he echoed softly, his gaze lingering on Naruto with silent encouragement.
Kushina raised her glass. "To our boys!" Her voice filled the room as she nearly knocked over a dish reaching to clap Naruto's back. "Especially you. I knew you'd get your first choice."
Naruto mumbled thanks, face flushed. He stared at his plate, at a lone asparagus spear. Beside him, Sasuke sat rigid, jaw clenched, watching the adults like he was checking their math.
"Uchiha's business program is rigorous," Fugaku said. "Not everyone can handle it. But Sasuke has always exceeded expectations." The compliment came barbed.
Mikoto smiled. "He's always been dedicated. We're thrilled to have him close to home."
"Unlike Naruto," Fugaku added, "Sasuke has always known exactly what he wanted."
The table went silent. Kushina squeezed Naruto's hand under the table until it hurt. Minato cleared his throat, but the comment lingered like a bad smell. "Will you be interning Sasuke?" Minato asked changing the subject.
"I've accepted a position at the Uchiha office," Sasuke replied mechanically. "Strategic planning and market analysis. By September, I'll have a proposal to streamline costs across our subsidiaries."
Naruto listened to the words as if they were another language, letting them wash over him. What would it be like to have a life laid out in bullet points, with every move pre-approved? He wondered if Sasuke envied his chaos, or if that, too, was something Naruto had made up to feel special.
The conversation cycled back to him. Mikoto leaned in, her tone gentle but expectant. "And what about you, Naruto? The writing program—will you be leaving us for the big city?"
The question turned everyone's head. Naruto fumbled, almost choking on a mouthful of duck. "Uh, it's not official. Still weighing my options." His eyes darted to Sasuke, searching for any reaction—a tightening of the jaw, a flicker of disappointment, anything that might suggest Sasuke cared whether he stayed or left. But Sasuke's face remained placid, his gaze fixed on the far wall as if he'd found something fascinating in the negative space between the art. Only his index finger moved, tracing an invisible circle on the tablecloth.
Mikoto tilted her head. "They say the program is very selective," she said, and Naruto couldn't tell if that was pride or suspicion. "But if you stay here, you'd have your friends, your family. Stability."
Kushina spoke up before he could answer. "Our Naruto's got a wild spirit," she said. "He can handle himself anywhere."
"Indeed," Fugaku said, a sliver of sarcasm wedged between the syllables. Naruto glanced at Sasuke again, but his friend's expression hadn't changed—not even a blink to acknowledge the conversation about Naruto potentially vanishing from his life.
The food arrived with military precision. Naruto stared at his steaming risotto, calculating the distance to the writing program—sixteen hours by train, four transfers. He thumbed his phone, remembering Sasuke's text from earlier, the one that had made his chest tighten with something like belonging.
Around him, the adults dissolved into shop talk. Naruto drifted until movement caught his eye—Sasuke pouring sparkling water, light fracturing across the tablecloth. Their eyes met briefly, Sasuke's dark and unreadable. Naruto's lips parted, but before he could speak, Sasuke had already turned away, refilling his father's glass with practiced deference.
Naruto set his fork down and reached for his phone, pretending to check a notification. He scrolled through their last few texts, the digital trail of a relationship that existed in parentheses. Most of the messages were memes or homework questions, but the thread felt like a secret lifeline. He thumbed a draft message: "What would you do if I left?" but deleted it before the cursor even blinked.
Kushina nudged him. "Eat, sweetheart. You barely touched your food." She glanced at Sasuke, then back at Naruto, eyes narrowing in subtle calculation. "Are you nervous about something?"
He shook his head, a little too vigorously. "Nah, just tired." The lie felt heavy on his tongue.
Dessert arrived like modern art—mousse and sugar spun into geometry. Naruto poked a crater in his portion, then abandoned it. The adults slipped from formality into nostalgia: Minato and Mikoto swapping childhood stories, Kushina pantomiming tantrums, Fugaku offering terse anecdotes about Sasuke's precocious problem-solving. Naruto barely listened. Instead, he watched Sasuke's hands on the tablecloth—perfectly still except for a slight tremor in his right thumb.
The dinner dragged on. Naruto cataloged details like artifacts: candlelight on crystal, Sasuke's measured blinks, Minato's questioning laugh. He wanted to preserve everything before fall changed it all.
When the check arrived, Sasuke excused himself with mechanical precision. Naruto watched him disappear down the corridor, feeling hollowed out.
Rain transformed the windows into abstract paintings. As the families filed toward the exit, Minato squeezed his shoulder. Kushina whispered, "Whatever you choose, we're behind you."
Naruto nodded absently, eyes fixed on the hallway where Sasuke had vanished.
The next night Naruto and Sasuke found themselves in Naruto's room, where the usual chaos of scattered manga volumes, abandoned ramen cups, and discarded orange hoodies had been hastily corralled into semi-orderly piles. The desk was actually visible, its scratched wooden surface cleared except for a stack of textbooks and a fox-shaped lamp casting amber light across the walls. Even the floor had been vacuumed, revealing patches of carpet Naurto had forgotten existed—a ritual of reluctant tidying Naruto performed only when Sasuke was expected.
They'd been quizzing each other for hours. Naruto's notes were sprawled across the comforter, half the pages in his handwriting, the rest a neat, mechanical script that belonged to Sasuke alone. It was late enough that the streetlights bled through the curtains, painting barcode patterns on Sasuke's knuckles as he tapped a pencil in slow, arrhythmic bursts.
"Define 'hegemony,'" Naruto challenged, voice pitched low so as not to carry beyond the thin bedroom walls.
Sasuke didn't look up. "Dominance of one state or group over others. Example: Uchiha over everyone else." He deadpanned the punchline, but Naruto caught the flicker of a smile in the shadowed corner of his mouth.
"Ding ding," Naruto said. "Bonus round: 'bildungsroman'."
Sasuke actually snorted. "You only learned that word so you could use it in your application essay."
"Still counts," Naruto replied, flipping to the next flashcard. He leaned in, close enough that his shoulder brushed Sasuke's, and pretended not to notice. He could feel the heat radiating off Sasuke's arm, the static buildup that always preceded something—argument, laughter, sometimes even an accidental confession. "Okay, smart guy, what's the capital of—"
"—You're sitting on my notes," Sasuke interrupted, nudging Naruto's thigh with his knee.
Naruto made an elaborate show of shifting, but didn't actually move away. "You could just say 'please,' you know."
"That would imply you're capable of understanding basic human etiquette," Sasuke shot back, but his voice was softer now, the edge dulled by fatigue or something more tender.
Naruto set down the flashcards and let his hand hover over the gap between their knees. "Hey, if I end up at that writing program, would you, uh, visit? Like, on weekends or whatever?"
Sasuke raised an eyebrow, finally glancing away from his textbook. "It's two time zones away."
Naruto shrugged. "Yeah, but it's not like you've got anything better to do. And you love long train rides. You can stare out the window and judge the scenery." He grinned, hoping the joke would stick.
Sasuke was silent for a second too long. "We can just video call," he said. "It's not the Stone Age, dobe."
"Video's not the same," Naruto said, a little too fast. He reached for a notebook, pretending to search for a page, but what he wanted was to close the space between them, to anchor himself in the only thing that still made sense.
They worked in silence for a while. Naruto tracked every micro-expression: the way Sasuke's lips pressed together when focused, how he drummed his fingers on the page when stuck, the unconscious lean in his direction when reading a particularly dense passage. He let their elbows touch, then lingered when Sasuke didn't pull away. He wondered if this meant anything, or if Sasuke was just used to him, the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat after a while.
Naruto tried again, softer this time. "Do you ever think about, like, what it'll be like when we're not… here? Like, together. Doing this." He gestured at the bed, the mess, the world they'd made.
Sasuke blinked. "What are you talking about? It's not like you're moving to another planet. You'll be home on holidays. Besides, you're not even sure if you're going, right?"
Naruto bit the inside of his cheek. He wanted to ask, "Would you care if I did?" but the words congealed somewhere between his lungs and his tongue. Instead, he leaned closer, letting their knees press together. He could feel Sasuke tense, almost imperceptible, but not enough to move away.
He reached for the economics textbook at the same time as Sasuke, their fingers colliding. Naruto let his linger, thumb grazing the back of Sasuke's hand. "Sorry," he mumbled, though he wasn't.
Sasuke withdrew first, but not with the violence Naruto expected. He just folded his arms across his chest, eyes narrowed. "You're acting weird."
Naruto's laugh was too loud for the quiet room. "Yeah, well, maybe I'm just gonna miss you, bastard."
Sasuke looked at him for a long moment, and Naruto braced for a joke or a retort, but instead Sasuke said, "You should take the offer."
Naruto blinked. "What?"
"The writing program. It's better than anything here. You'd be wasting your time if you stayed," Sasuke said. His face was blank, but his right hand flexed restlessly, fingers digging into the bicep of his crossed arm.
Naruto swallowed. He wanted to argue, to say he didn't care about the program, or that nothing was a waste if it meant keeping this. But the way Sasuke said it—like it was obvious, like anything else would be stupid—made Naruto's chest ache in a way that wasn't entirely familiar.
"You really think so?" he asked, voice gone small.
Sasuke nodded once, sharp as a guillotine. "Yeah. You'd regret it if you didn't."
Naruto slumped back, suddenly exhausted. He fiddled with the edge of a notebook, tearing little bits off and rolling them into balls. "Guess that settles it, then," he said, though it didn't.
They studied for another hour, but something had shattered between them. Naruto's throat burned each time he swallowed. When Sasuke finally gathered his notes and stood to leave, Naruto couldn't bring himself to follow him to the door like he usually did. He just lay back on the bed, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars they'd stuck there together in sixth grade, now faded to barely visible smudges against his ceiling. Each breath felt like inhaling glass.
He heard Sasuke's footsteps pause in the hallway, linger for a heartbeat—just long enough to plant a seed of desperate hope—and then continue down the stairs. The door shut quietly behind him with a finality that made Naruto's eyes sting.
Naruto pressed his palms against his eyelids until colors bloomed in the darkness, but it didn't stop the hot tears from leaking out and sliding into his hair. "You'd regret it if you didn't." The words echoed, each repetition carving deeper into the hollow space where his heart used to be.