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Sasuke dies with the rise of the sun.
He takes Naruto’s soul with him, but leaves the body behind.
Let go, Naruto tries to tell Sakura when she begins mending his flesh and bones through her own weeping, let go of me. But his tongue is heavy and there is very little of himself left.
“Don’t die on me, don’t die on me, don’t die on me,” she sobs over him, blocking the sun. “Please, please. Naruto—”
She chokes up and there’s tears on her face and blood in her hands. The salt mixes with the iron. Naruto can taste both in his mouth: his own tears and blood.
He can’t reach Sasuke.
Let me go.
“Let me go,” he pleads. “He is gone—I—”
“You are here,” she interrupts, crazed with grief and rage. “You are here. I can save you. I will save you. Don’t say that again—don’t.”
The last of his strength leaves him and he passes away.
Naruto tries to kill himself the next morning, in the hospital room. They stop him, but not before he has left strangling marks on his own throat. “He is grieving,” he hears Kakashi say in the haze of sedatives. “We can only trust that it will pass.” Naruto thinks he doesn’t believe his own promises.
He tries to rip all the cables and tubes off himself. They put chakra-sealing cuffs on him. Kurama’s voice is suppressed with his chakra.
He tries to starve himself to death. They feed him with an IV.
When Sakura comes into the room, her face carved out of misery and eyes gorged out with sorrow, he tells her, “If you had let me go, I—”
She interrupts him this time too. “You wouldn’t have tried to kill yourself?” Her voice is rough, as if she’s burned her insides. “May as well say that if Sasuke was alive, you wouldn’t either. Just—shut up. You’re not yourself right now. You’ll get better.”
There will be better days, he had told her once, at a time where Sasuke was still alive even if he was not with them.
What a fool, that guy.
Naruto thinks he is the first one who ever said it.
It is shameful that Sasuke only heard it from him.
From a kid worth nothing.
As if he knew that those words had a way to be written, a stroke order—that they had some meaning. No, he didn’t understand much, a fool boy he had been. He simply shouted, at the peak of that night, with the moon looking down on their good nights, “I know you will avenge your clan.” Without contempt, without scorn.
Naruto, even as young as he was, recognized he was numbskull.
He didn’t think before opening his mouth. There must have been something bad in his brain, he was sure, a wiring error in how everything was girdled up there. Maybe his skull was filled with tonkotsu until it left him numb and empty of space for anything else. But Sasuke, smart and well engrossed, didn’t know that he had someone to rely on. Naruto too didn’t have someone to rely on until very late in his life. He understood what loneliness felt like. Though, probably, he didn’t truly understand the ache for revenge.
Reprisal.
Vengeance.
Settling a score.
What did Uchiha Itachi have after he killed all his clan? Only his life. Sasuke could only take Itachi’s life to retrieve the pain he caused him. One for hundreds. Naruto was stupid. Incredibly bad at math. But it didn’t sound fair, it didn’t taste sweet.
He once heard this joke: how many people are needed to light a bonfire? The answer was two-hundred-forty-two Uchihas. Then, how many dead Itachis are needed for the massacre to be mathematically fair? More than were alive.
Vengeance would not bring peace to the living.
But it might have let the dead rest.
Had Sasuke actually intended to die after killing Itachi?
Naruto cannot tell.
He’s always meant to die with Sasuke. It never occurred to him that he would be left behind. Or that he would be held back. People used to want me dead, he thinks. Why now that he is ready to give them what they want, they won’t let him?
Against himself, Naruto gets better. Physically. The world keeps spinning. The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, and the moon is high in the night, and the stars are burning away. Naruto is unfit for the world.
No one understands.
One week in, Sakura breaks. She collapses at work, he hears, exhausted to the bone and marrow. Kakashi takes her home. Naruto has not seen her for three days.
“Why can’t I leave?” he angrily asks his sensei. “I want out of this stupid room.”
Kakashi is annoyingly normal. He is sitting on the corner of the room, reading his porn novel as if everything is right, as if there’s time for anything now that Sasuke is gone. As if Sasuke didn’t die and took it all with him.
“That is a difficult question,” Kakashi says pleasantly. “Why can’t you leave? I wonder. But to answer: you are on psychiatric hold.”
Psychiatric hold.
The sentence for the mentally ill, for the people who are out of their mind, a danger to themselves and others. Naruto is perfectly reasonable. He is in control of all his remaining faculties. People always complained that he was too emotional, too impulsive, too reckless; he is none of those things now. Devoid of half of his soul, only one emotion remains.
That and resentment.
“This is hell,” he complains. “It’s not your place to keep me here, y’know. You cannot keep me here if I don’t want.”
“I am your most immediate guardian,” Kakashi replies. “When in psychiatric hold, you are not trusted to make your own decisions.”
If he could, Naruto would throw something at him.
Because he is as helpless as a worm, he can only sulk and choose to ignore him.
He feels like crying.
He won’t.
Most of the time, he sleeps.
In his dreams he is whole. Sasuke is with him, by the hand, under the eclipse.
“You are an idiot,” Sasuke says.
Naruto scowls. “Say that again, you bastard! I’m practically protesting in your name.”
“Is that so. For me and not for yourself.” Sasuke is clearly not impressed. Which, rude. Naruto isn’t lying. “I thought you dreamt of being Hokage.”
The world is dark and warm around them.
Like a womb.
Like they’re back to the beginning. Like they’re about to be born again and find each other in another life.
“I do,” he insists. Then, he looks away, to the sky. Sunlight crowns the moon. “But—what is a dream worth without you? If I could not save you, what is the point of anything?”
Sasuke, you were my goal.
But he is just a dream now too.
“I don’t know about that,” Sasuke says quietly. “Only you know. I am only in your mind, after all.”
“We’ll meet again,” Naruto promises. “Believe it.”
“But do you?”
Naruto wakes up and cries himself to sleep one more time.
“Why do you keep on involving yourself with me?”
“Cause you are my friend.”
Why did he say that? Why couldn’t he tell the truth? He should have died with him. Even if only to finally let Sasuke know how much he meant to him.
Sasuke, you fed me even when you were told not to. You risked stalling your goal just because I was hungry. No one else would have done that. Sasuke, you understood my loneliness first. You knew what it was like to be lost, to be left behind, to be no one’s. All I ever wanted was a family. I thought that if I became Hokage, then the whole village would be my family. I thought that if I became strong enough, they would come to me , rely on me. If I gave enough of myself to them, they would complete me. Sasuke, you chose to protect me with your own body. You decided I was worthy of being saved, that my life was just as valuable as anyone’s. Sasuke, you gave meaning to my life. You were my reason and my goal, my dream and my future, my heart and my soul, my one and only.
“They don’t want us to hold a funeral,” Sakura admits. She seems better, infinitesimally. There’s color to her skin, but it only accentuates the darkness underneath her eyes. “We’ll do so anyway, but it will be a small affair.”
Naruto wants to hear none of it.
He can’t bear it.
Still. “Cremate him,” he tells her. “He wouldn’t want us to bury him. Plant his ashes with his family.”
The last of the Uchiha, gone.
The Uchiha are dead. There is nothing left of them. Nothing but memories. If Naruto dies, Karin remains. Naruto has failed too much already. He failed Jiraiya, he failed Itachi, he failed Nagato, he failed his parents.
He failed Sasuke.
Sakura’s eyes are blurry. He can’t tell if it’s him or her who breaks into crying first. It might have been him. But then she is sobbing into his chest and he wraps his arms around her. He had thought he didn’t have the strength to hold someone else. Just for this moment, Naruto thinks of a world without Sasuke and how he might go on.
He makes his last choice then.
I’m sorry, Sasuke. Wait for me.
“Tell the world of what Konoha did to the Uchiha,” he tells Kakashi. “Tell them or I swear I will find a way to finally kill myself.”
“That was a stupid thing to do,” Shikamaru says during the party for the end of the war. Apparently, they held it off until the day Naruto was dispatched from the hospital. They waited far too long.
He smiles faintly. It tugs painfully at his face and heart. “Trying to kill myself or letting the world know of what the elders did?”
“Both,” Shikamaru sighs. “Kakashi won’t tell you, but it’s a possibility that the other Kages Will distance themselves from Konoha. I don’t think there will be a war, per se, but certainly there will be tension. Apparently, no one likes a village that murders its own.”
It wasn’t murder, Shika.
"It was genocide," Sasuke grunts.
“Good,” is all that Naruto says.
Shikamaru glances at him. “You’ve grown up,” he says tactfully. “For what it’s worth, I think it was the right thing to do. But being right doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.”
“Well, I’ve been told I’m very stupid.”
“You aren’t,” Shikamaru says simply. “You are mad.” Then he walks over to Temari.
Naruto releases the breath he didn’t know he was holding. From the corner of his eye, he sees Sasuke leaning to whisper in his ear. “Well done. Maybe you haven’t lost your mind after all.”
Sasuke, the Elders are dead now. Sasuke, are you resting? Sasuke, are you waiting for me?
“When Dan died, I thought I would die with him from heartbreak,” Tsunade tells him plainly through the grey veil of cigarette smoke. “To be honest, I thought I was dead, that I would never live again. When they told me the Uchiha brat died, I imagined you would have followed.”
She offers him a cigarette. Naruto takes it, but doesn’t light it, instead choosing to roll it between his fingers.
“I would have,” he says. “I wanted to.”
“Wanted?” she replies.
“I still do,” he admits. “I understand now, granny, what it’s like to live on afterwards.”
“Life goes on. You might not move on, but life will.” She looks at the sunset that bleeds into the horizon. “You can only hope to catch it before your legs tire. If you’re lucky, you’ll find another reason to not give up.”
I already did. And I lost it.
He doesn’t say it; he just lights the cigarette and brings it to his mouth.
If he’s lucky, the smoke will kill him in a few years.
“We have to live with it,” Tsunade says, half to convince him, half to convince herself.
“Kakashi told me you’re leaving tomorrow,” Sakura says, leaning at his kitchen door. She seems weary, but there’s life in her eyes and she stands with her head high. “What will you do?”
“Some of this, some of that,” he says vaguely.
Sasuke reclines in the chair opposite to him. “So you didn’t tell her.”
What a bastard. Couldn’t he see that Naruto was fighting here?
Meanwhile, Sakura stares at him for long before saying, “I couldn’t have saved you, could I? I mean—was there truly nothing I could have done?”
Naruto lights a cigarette to gain a few seconds. “Just tell her the truth,” Sasuke says. “She wouldn’t be here asking you if she couldn’t live with it. You are the ones who always said she’s stronger than she looks, anyway.”
“No, I don’t think there was nothing you could have done, Sakura,” he finally tells her. “It’s not your fault.”
“I know,” she says quietly. She steals his cigarette, takes a drag of it, and gives it back. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“Saving you,” she answers sadly.
He can’t say it’s okay. “Thank you for having faith in me.” Even if he didn’t deserve it.
She leans in to kiss him on the forehead. “I know you won’t come back, but please take care of yourself.”
“I will come back,” he says, smiling warmly. “One day. You’ll see when I’m done.”
When the last statue is built and even just one more person knows of Sasuke’s story, then he will come back.
The tree where they buried Sasuke’s ashes has grown beautifully, full of life. The wood is dark and strong, and the leaves are a resplendent green. He’s spent hours sitting under it.
“Chakra is a person’s life force,” Sasuke says, sitting next to him. “The greater a person’s reserves, the better fertilizer they make.”
Naruto makes a disgusted face. “That sounds horrible.”
“Does it?” Sasuke replies, bored. “I thought you would find it beautiful. You used to see the good in even the worst of people. I never really understood that.”
There’s good in everyone, he would have liked to say that. “There’s good in most people.”
“Not everyone?” Sasuke prods. “I find it hard to believe you would say that.”
“Why is it hard to believe?” He just wants to hear Sasuke’s voice as much as possible.
Sasuke turns his beautiful face towards him. His eyes are dark but they gleam, as if reflecting heaven’s light. Naruto wants to drink in his face for the rest of his life. And he will. Today, he goes with him.
“Because you are the sun,” Sasuke says and his voice alone could sustain Naruto for another lifetime, but now is time to rest, “and the sun shines even during the night.”
Naruto’s heart is eating itself.
“I have not seen or felt the sunlight in two years, three months and five days.”
Sasuke’s face is painfully patient. “Then find the moon. It will always be there for you, even in the darkest hour.”
But when Naruto tries to reach for him, Sasuke fades.
He is alone again, so he closes his eyes and waits.
Naruto dies with the rise of the moon.