It ends like this:
Naruto’s at his desk when Sakura punches clean through the door, glaring at the ANBU stationed in the shadows until they slip out the window and what used to be the door. Hinata’s behind her but it’s not because she’s hunched over and meek like she usually is—there’s a fire in her eyes and her mouth, for all that it trembles at the edges, stays resolutely firm in the middle. It’s a strange entourage made stranger by the three children who trail in last, Sarada huffily shoving her glasses higher up on her face while Boruto glares sullenly at Naruto and Himawari cries silently behind her brother, but there’s no sounds beyond her soft hiccups and softer sniffles.
At least, until Sakura places a hand on Naruto’s table.
“Hinata here was shopping one fine day,” Sakura begins, voice deceptively sweet beneath her iron glare, “and she heard the most interesting thing in the next booth over.”
There’s splinters in her knuckles, Naruto idly notes, but then that fist is sinking itself into his desk when Sakura hisses, “What’s this about your escapades with my husband, hmm?”
“Boruto told me before,” Hinata pipes up without a peep of her usual stuttering in sight, “but I didn’t believe him. I thought…”
“Just friends,” Boruto mutters then, stuffing his hands deep into his pockets and glaring at Naruto all the while. “You said just friends. He was meant to be my mentor and you—”
“I told mom when I saw,” Sarada interjects almost disinterestedly, examining her nails with a flat gaze that’s at odds with her finely trembling hands. “You weren’t exactly subtle about it, you know.”
And it was a mistake, Naruto thinks, remembering the press of hot lips against his neck. Remembers the hand roughly jerking at his cock, the harsh pants in his ear, that low rasp which undid him in the end when he should’ve pushed him away and left for home—
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Sakura asks, pulling her fist out and staring at him with an unnaturally pale face.
But so what if it is? Naruto wants to ask her. The words echo in his head, blurring over all other thoughts until he’s seeing red instead of green—and for a moment it’s black hair and pale skin and pink lips hitched up on one side and stretched tauntingly wide but then—
“Why?” Himawari sobs, “Why, daddy?”
He doesn’t answer her. He can’t answer her.
So in the hail of heated questions, amidst the cold glares boring into his skin, Naruto stands up and substitutes himself with a twig on the footpath outside.
It ends like this, because it’s truly the end this time:
Sasuke closes his eyes for one moment and opens them to a shock of yellow, stark and unnatural in the relative grey of the cave. He can see three different poisons seething beneath tanned skin, more bruises and cuts than actual skin, and the blue eyes that stare back at him are far darker than he’s used to.
They know falls in the air between them and it joins his heart on the floor before his feet.
All it takes is a hand pressed between Naruto’s shoulders and the flood pours out, Boruto told Hinata and Sarada caught us last time jumbled in the sobs and gulps that wrack the body beneath his palm. I just wanted to do what was right and Sasuke thinks, me too. Thinks everything and nothing as he pushes that broad back, presses that tear-stained face against his collarbone and stays perfectly silent while Naruto breaks apart against him.
It’s duty and love, in the end. There’s no sake to purge their thoughts from their heads, no proprietor to chivvy them back into the world outside, and Sasuke turns his face to the sky obscured by rocks and lets his own tears fall.
There’s rumours already. She wants a divorce. My children hate me now.
It’s the same for me, he wants to say.
But you’re here, a traitorous part of his mind whispers, you’re here.
All those words and Sasuke holds Naruto tighter. Doesn’t say anything that passes through his mind, stays silent until Naruto steps away and disappears in a puff of smoke, and…
It ends with Naruto’s resignation after more than a decade in office, ends with Sasuke reinstated as a missing-nin despite his pivotal role in the Fourth Shinobi war, and two of the most influential ninja in the Elemental Countries as the laughingstock of the nations.
And that is the end of that.
I hate you.
I love you.
Two men clasp hands beneath the moonlight and take their first steps outside Fire Country as comrades, as friends, as—
“It was never meant to be like this.”
“No. But can you regret it anyway?”