[Fic] "Rekindling" -- Naruto
May. 8th, 2016 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingbranchandroot said: Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke: tradition; Naruto and Sakura accompany Sasuke in some small family or festival tradition.Note: So this ended up much longer, more angsty, and trickier to write than I expected. Story of my life, apparently. *sigh* Anyway, this fic is an installment in my Summer Camp & Politics AU, in which the elemental countries are modern nation-states locked in an uneasy regional standoff, and Team 7 (plus others!) met as children at a summer camp and now, as adults, are trying to drag Fire Country into being a functional multi-party democracy instead of an oligarchy that flirts heavily with military dictatorship. It takes place about a year before Zero-Sum Fallacy, the UMCC/the Glasshouse is the unified military command council/its headquarters, and the rest should be clear from internal context. (2,775 words)
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost is now up!]
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Rekindling
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"You don't have to inconvenience yourselves," Sasuke said yet again as he and Sakura started to clear away the mess of dinner, stacking the bowls and utensils, carrying them from the tiny table across the tiny kitchen, and dropping them into the equally tiny sink. "I don't have to get up in the morning--"
"Couldn't wheedle your way off medical leave, could you?" Sakura interrupted with an I-told-you-so note in her voice.
Sasuke shot a half-hearted scowl over his shoulder and plowed on like she hadn't said a word: "But you both have jobs and it would be stupid and immature to go into work exhausted when this isn't even your tradition. Go home. Get some sleep. I'll be fine."
Naruto let his forehead drop to the slightly sticky table and groaned. He had never in his entire life met someone less willing to be loved than Uchiha fucking Sasuke, so of course he had to fall head over heels for the bastard. Knowing Sakura was in the same boat, paddling furiously right beside him, was only minimal comfort.
"Look," he said to the table, "we know you're a big, tough soldier. That's not the point. The point is that we like you, you dumbass, so if something's important to you it's important to us. Besides which, I've been looking forward to about four-thirty when you two should hit the drunk stage of sleep deprivation and I get to trick you into stupid party games. You've already deprived me of ramen tonight. Don't be mean and deprive me of that too."
"The first night vigil isn't meant for party games," Sasuke snapped, flinging a handful of soapy water across the kitchen toward Naruto. "It's to welcome the Eternal Flame into a new house. If you can't be respectful, go home."
Ha, got him.
Naruto lifted his head and grinned. "So if we are respectful, we can stay? Great! Thanks for inviting us. We accept."
Sasuke raised his scowl intensity a few notches, but Sakura was snickering into her drying cloth so Naruto figured he was just trying to save face.
He also figured he should probably help out a little, so he grabbed one of Sasuke's spare sponges (seriously, who needed that many sponges?), dunked it in the soapy dishwater, and started wiping down the table, stove, and countertops.
The kitchen looked pretty good, despite being practically dollhouse-sized. The rest of the apartment was similarly cramped, but big enough to hold all of Sasuke's bookcases and the saltwater fishtank he let Naruto and Sakura help him pick and purchase as a tacit promise not to refuse his promotion to the UMCC and disappear from their lives again. Hauling the fish and the books up six flights of stairs wasn't the most fun Naruto ever had, but he was with his two most precious people so, you know, also not the worst way he'd spent an afternoon.
And now he and Sakura got to stay the night and help Sasuke turn this shoebox apartment into a home.
He prodded absently at his link to Kurama, got the spiritual equivalent of a question mark in response, and sent a brief but heartfelt prayer: Hey, Fox, don't let me or Sakura screw this up for Sasuke. That mess with Itachi fucked him up worse than he's been in years. He needs to remember good stuff about his family instead of how they died.
Kurama sent back a bark of laughter and the feeling of a tail flicked against his forehead. But the laughter was warm, and the flick gentle rather than harsh -- more of a, 'calm down, kit; you'll do fine' than a 'no, and don't get presumptuous.'
Naruto smiled to himself and sent back the feeling of a hug. He cut the link before Kurama could stop sputtering.
Sakura broke him out of his thoughts with a finger flick to his shoulder. "Since when do you enjoy cleaning this much? And can I replicate the cause back at our house, before we drown in your unwashed laundry?"
"I'm just enjoying the company," Naruto said. "Also, I resent your insinuations. All the unwashed laundry belongs to you, because you said if I ran your bras through on the wrong cycle one more time, you'd use me as the primary in all your trainees' live exercises. I love you, but I don't love you that much."
Sasuke snorted as he put away the last of the now-clean bowls. "I'm fairly sure that was an empty threat. Inflicting you on a cohort of innocent baby ANBU agents has to count as illegal cruelty."
"Jerk," Naruto said fondly.
"I'm also fairly sure it can't be that hard to add a second set of laundry protocols to your repertoire of household skills," Sasuke added. "Then again, when I consider some of the things you did to the dishwasher back at camp..."
Sakura, the traitor, was laughing outright by this point.
Naruto held up his hands in surrender. "Fine, fine, whatever. It's not like I live in squalor or anything. I just don't see the point of dry-clean only clothes and dishes that melt in the microwave. Buy something simple and forget about it, that's my motto. Life's too short to waste time getting fiddly."
"Nice sound bite. You should work that into your reelection speeches," Sakura said, reaching up to ruffle his hair. "But it's getting close to sunset and we have a ritual to set up. Sasuke? What do you want me and this goofball to do?"
Naruto slung an arm around her shoulder and they both stared expectantly at their boyfriend, daring him to try sending them away again. For a moment he seemed to be considering that... but then he sighed, and shrugged, and said, "I'm going to set up the altar. One of you can grab salt and matcha from the cupboard and put some water on for tea, and the other can grab ink and brushes from my desk. We'll need red and black."
Naruto turned toward Sakura and jerked his head fractionally toward the kitchen door. She gave him an equally fractional nod in return, so he untangled them and crossed the tiny public room into Sasuke's combined bedroom and study, where he'd organized his brushes right next to his laptop in the same place most people would keep a mug of pens and pencils.
(What Sasuke had against ballpoint pens, Naruto would never understand. But hey, spiritual stuff worked better when people really believed it, and regardless of what they consciously thought, most people believed more when there was a bit of a show. If nice calligraphy made his charms stronger -- or, more relevantly, made this vigil more effective -- he'd break out the fancy brushes and smile.)
Back in the main room, Sasuke was drawing careful salt lines around his little collection of icons on a corner table: three sticks of charred wood tied into a triangle with red yarn, a sprig of dried cherry blossom lying on a square of white silk, and in the center a bronze chalice, still unlit, its wick reaching down into a deep oil well. It's not like Naruto didn't know Sasuke had started paying respects to Kurama and the Cherry Blossom Goddess back during his Academy years, but unlike Sakura, today was the first time he's seen hard evidence.
He stomped hard on the urge to wrap Sasuke up in a hug. Now was not the time.
"Hey, I found your ink kit and brushes," he said. "What do you want me to write?"
Sasuke pointed at the chalice, which on closer inspection had carvings all around the sides of the bowl: eyes, eyes, and more eyes, each with a different inhumanly stylized iris and pupil. "One of those above the door and each window. The irises should be red."
"Draw freaky eyes, sure, can do," Naruto agreed. "They may come out kinda streaky, considering ink isn't paint, but symbolism and practicality aren't always best friends. Do they all need to be the same freaky eye, though? And does it matter which I pick?"
Sasuke shrugged.
"Okay." Naruto picked up the chalice, after a glance at Sasuke to make sure his touch wasn't going to break the ritual or otherwise insult the spirit of the Eternal Flame, and twisted it until he found a few patterns he liked. "Back in ten," he said, and ducked into the kitchen to grab a stepstool and some water and get started on the window by the table. He and Sakura slid around each other in the doorway with a quick smile, and then it was time to concentrate on art.
He'd never been really good at representative stuff, but he wasn't half bad at geometric patterns if he said so himself (all those calligraphy lessons had to pay off somehow), and if Sasuke wasn't worried about voiding his damage deposit, Naruto was going to make sure his ritual eye glyphs looked as cool as possible.
"Done," he announced maybe fifteen minutes later, ink sticks and stone shut back in their case and brushes left drying beside the sink. "Also the sun's about gone. How exact do you have to be with this? Like, down to the second? Or can you take a couple minutes' leeway?"
"Accuracy shows respect," Sasuke said from where he and Sakura were setting out the tea supplies on a wooden tray. Looked like only one bowl, and shit, it had fire-damage bubbled all through the glaze, and was held together by about a thousand tiny gold lines. Which meant somebody -- maybe Sasuke himself -- dug it out of the Uchiha's clan compound after the... hang on, could he even still call it a terrorist attack now they knew Itachi was black ops instead of a traitor?
Nah, state terrorism was totally a thing. Even if it had been technically legal at the time, because Sarutobi hadn't been in any hurry to repeal the state of emergency after Naruto's own family got blown up.
Some days Naruto wished the old man were still alive so he could ask him what the fuck he'd been thinking. Other days, he was kind of glad his adoptive grandfather died before they could have a serious falling out. He knew he'd have kicked himself forever if they'd been fighting when Sarutobi died, even if the fight would've been totally justified.
He shook himself out of his thoughts and dropped to the carpet on Sasuke's left, near the little fox face icon on the altar. Sakura was already on Sasuke's right, sitting neatly in seiza. Sasuke obviously wasn't, because Sakura would kill him if he fucked around with his circulation so soon after needing approximately a billion transfusions. After a moment, Naruto sighed and mimicked Sakura, because rituals were rituals and he could deal with some pain to help Sasuke get this one thing as close to right as possible.
"Are we expected to participate, or is respectful silence enough?" Sakura asked as Sasuke hesitated, his fingers twitching like he was starting and aborting a dozen gestures at once.
"You can welcome your own spirits after I finish the main rite," Sasuke said. "Until then, silence is fine." He took a deep breath and reached for the bamboo scoop and the container of matcha.
It wasn't actually a tea ceremony, just a single bowl of thick tea mixed as briskly as possible without creating a mess. Sasuke held the bowl toward the altar, turned it slightly, and said, "Spirit of the Eternal Flame, be welcome within these walls. Drink deeply. Dance freely. Watch over our people as we watch over you. So long as I call these walls my home, I, Uchiha Sasuke, pledge to keep this fragment of your soul alight."
Just as Naruto realized there weren't any matches or lighters in the room, he felt a searing pulse in the same not-place he went to talk to Kurama.
The wick ignited.
Sasuke breathed out heavily and ducked his head for a second. Then he turned the tea bowl a full one-eighty degrees, took a sip, and set it aside. He closed his eyes, and his lips moved fractionally -- probably a prayer of some sort, and of course he was too private to share. Sakura was murmuring something to her goddess, too low to be intelligible. Naruto shrugged and tapped a finger against the charred sticks that sketched Kurama's face.
Hey, Fox, Sasuke says you're welcome in his house, he sent. Be polite and don't start shit with his patron spirit.
A little tongue of foxfire curled up from the wood, like a memory of the flame that coated it in char. For half a heartbeat, a fainter echo of that flame danced over Sasuke's bowed head: a blessing and a taunt wrapped into one. Naruto bit down hard to keep his grin from escaping. Really, what else was he expecting?
The chalice didn't flicker or change colors, though, so probably no harm done.
He waited, his feet going slowly numb, for the other pieces of his heart to finish their own prayers. Sakura wrapped up first -- not surprising; she'd never had that much interest in religion -- and finally Sasuke finished making promises or flagellating himself with memories (or both) and tipped backward onto the carpet with a sigh.
"You can drink the tea if you want," he said. "It's not officially part of the rite, but I think it was traditional to share the offering among family. I remember one of my second cousins used popcorn when we helped her move into her freshman dorm, and she let me try to catch some in my mouth."
Sakura lay down beside him and rested her head on his shoulder: a silent offer of comfort without any words for Sasuke to misinterpret as pity.
Naruto picked up the other line of attack. "You mean you can use anything for the offering? And you picked tea instead of, I dunno, cupcakes? I mean, obviously tea's good if you want to be formal, but if the goal is to create a welcoming home, I think providing something your family actually wants to eat should earn major points for sincerity of intent."
"That's what they're teaching in comparative religion classes these days?" Sakura muttered into Sasuke's shirt. "Waste of tax dollars. I demand an investigation."
Naruto flopped down onto the carpet and swatted at her over Sasuke's chest. She swatted back, and they had a brief mock-battle until Sasuke groaned and shoved their hands apart with his forearms.
"No fighting. Not tonight."
"Okay," Naruto agreed, Sakura's voice harmonizing half a breath behind.
"So when will you invite the Eternal Flame into our house?" she added.
Sasuke stared blankly at the ceiling, as if this question had never occurred to him. Tragically, it probably hadn't. Because he was a dumbass.
"I'm kind of surprised you haven't done it already," Naruto said, in his most annoyingly helpful voice. "I mean, our house is your house! I thought we made that pretty clear! If we didn't, I really don't want to know if you think that's how me and Sakura treat all our guests, because wow, rude."
Sakura, continuing her string of minor betrayals, was already laughing. Some strategist she was. Didn't she know they weren't supposed to laugh until after Sasuke started sputtering in denial? Which now he wouldn't do, just to be contrary. Argh.
"You really should make an altar there, though," she said through her snickers. "Who knows what horrors we might get up to without someone watching."
"And Kurama doesn't count. He'd only encourage our chaos," Naruto said, forestalling the most obvious counter-argument.
Sasuke pressed the heels of his hands to his eye sockets and breathed out heavily through his nose. Then he said, in a deceptively mild tone, "Fine. I'm still not going to move in with you idiots, but I can take a hint. Since I know you both hate to waste time and I'd like a few days to catch up on sleep before I report to the Glasshouse, we'll do the vigil tomorrow night. I hope you enjoy work the next day."
Naruto glanced over Sasuke's head, caught Sakura's gaze, and raised one eyebrow. She nodded. Yeah, they'd manage.
"Thank you, Sasuke. For letting us stay tonight, and in advance for tomorrow. It means a lot to have you back," Sakura said. She caught one of Sasuke's hands as he lowered them from his face, and drew it to rest between them.
"What she said," Naruto agreed, catching the other.
They lay together in the steady light of the chalice and waited for the dawn.
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Bingo at last! \o/
(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-09 12:51 am (UTC)*wibbles over them* Oh, sweeties. So much weight of things in the past, running under this (which, of course, it's /them/). The repaired tea-bowl!
(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-09 01:51 am (UTC)As for the tea-bowl! I mentioned matcha kind of off-handedly when I needed something for Sasuke to tell the others to fetch, and then I fell down a Wikipedia black hole doing some quick and dirty research on Japanese tea ceremonies, of which I only ended up using about three throwaway details. *shrug* (I also spent a fair amount of time being fascinated by Wikipedia editors' attitude toward Japanese culture, which is kind of... mmm... reverentially fetishistic might be the best description? Anyway, it is really weird, and I haven't seen that particular tone used for any other nation/culture.) And I just like the symbolism of kintsugi in general -- you can rebuild yourself after shattering! scars aren't inherently ugly! etc. -- so when I saw a place to make it applicable, I figured why not. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-09 12:37 pm (UTC)The kintsugi fit in /really/ well, though!