Tree sap, natural dye, and ramen
They were going home, back to Konoha, away from the wonder and strangeness of the wide world and back to the familiarity of trees, and walls, and shinobi running every rooftop. The others were excited, Sasuke could see it in the way they looked ahead in the direction of the town they were born to. He could see it in the way Naruto wouldn’t shut up about Ichiraku ramen, and Sakura wrapped and rewrapped the souvenirs she’d got for her parents. They’d enjoyed their adventure, but they were also looking forward to home, to family, and friends, and old familiar haunts. Gai sensei’s team also, he found them harder to read than his own teammates, but he could see they were glad to be going home.
The jounin were harder to read. Kakashi sensei especially, he never showed a thing he didn’t want people to see. Sasuke suspected he might actually have to consciously decide when to have expressions. But even so, from the way Gai sensei kept declaring youthful challenges centred around jounin drinking nights, and Kakashi sensei didn’t argue about it, there must be some fond thoughts of home hidden behind that mask.
Everyone else was happy to be going home, but Sasuke just couldn’t bring himself to feel it. Home was bloodstained walls, and empty houses, and a thousand ghosts that would haunt him for as long as his older brother slept under the same sky as him. Home was being watched, always, with expectations that he would live up to his brother’s brilliance, and fears that he would live up to his madness. Home was secrets that couldn’t be said out loud, and questions that he didn’t know if he wanted answered and was too afraid to ask anyway.
But then, maybe he wasn’t the only one dreading their return. He looked again at Gai sensei’s team and while Lee and Tenten looked happy enough to be going back to Konoha, Neiji looked more like a man walking to his own execution. Hyuuga eyes and ice cold composure made him almost as hard to read as the jounin, but Sasuke wasn’t an Uchiha for nothing. He could see every surpressed flinch, every line of tension in Neiji’s body, and maybe it was a little creepy to be scrutinising his comrades with the sharingan, but it was effective. He could see that Neiji might well be no happier about going home than he was.
He wasn’t sure why he cared. Maybe it was Naruto’s influence rubbing off on him. Maybe it was just that he’d spent enough time partnered with Neiji on missions this last couple of months that he felt a little responsible for him. Or maybe, while they were out of the village and therefore honest with themselves, he would admit it was because the unexpected moment of kinship, of realising he wasn’t the only one afraid to return, made him feel just a little bit less lonely.
“What do you want Uchiha?” Neiji reminded Sasuke a little of a cat actually, all standoffish pride and composure, but it was obvious he secretly liked the attention. Sasuke tried very hard not to think about the fact that Naruto had probably used the same description for him at some point.
“You’re not looking forward to going back to Konoha are you?” There was a time, not too long ago, when Sasuke would have bitten his own tongue bloody before asking about someone else’s feelings, before leaving himself open to them asking him about his own, but things changed, and over the last few months he’d come to believe that sometimes, just sometimes it was worth the risk of speaking out loud the words that usually caught and died at the back of his throat.
“And what would you know about such things.” Neiji’s eyes were unreadable, but Sasuke could hear an edge in his voice that would have been tears in Sakura, incoherent shouting in Naruto, a bitter snarl in himself. He’d hit a nerve.
“I know I’m not looking forward to it either.” Sasuke wondered idly whether he should blame Naruto or Kakashi for his recently acquired streak of brutal honesty. Probably Kakashi, Naruto was just a little more optimistic than Sasuke could ever bring himself to be.
“Oh.” Neiji snarled, with an anger that was the most honest emotion Sasuke had ever seen from him. “What are you saying? That we’re the same? That we’re both miserable to be going home and we should bond over that? You don’t understand a thing. You live alone, what do you know about being afraid to go home?”
“So tell me.” Sasuke couldn’t say why he cared so much except that Kakashi sensei had taught him to push and keep pushing, that sometimes the sharing of a truth could be so much more powerful than the keeping of a secret. He couldn’t say why he cared except that he and Neiji were far more alike than either of them was comfortable admitting, and so watching Neiji break the way he would if nothing changed, would be a little too much like watching himself break.
“When I’m there, it’s like everything I am, any dreams or hopes, or feelings I might have, don’t matter. All that matters is my ability to serve, the use I can be, and the person underneath that dies by inches every day I’m there.” He gave a smile then, as bitter and broken as death itself. “After all, the branch clan don’t exist for themselves. They exist for the main clans convenience, to fight, and work, and die in their places. We don’t need to be people for that. In fact, it’s generally considered better if we aren’t.”
Neiji wasn’t looking away or avoiding eye contact of course, the byakugan saw in 360 degrees, there was no point. All the subtle codes of behaviour governed by the way eye contact was kept or avoided, just passed the Hyuuga clan by. The Uchiha had lived and died by those same codes, it was an interesting contrast. For all that outsiders viewed sharingan and byakugan as broadly alike, there were worlds of experience between them.
Neiji wasn’t looking away or avoiding eye contact, but if he had been anyone else, anyone but a Hyuuga he would have been. No-one but a Hyuuga could have spoken such awful secret griefs without looking away. Just as, if Sasuke had been anyone but an Uchiha he would have been making an effort to maintain eye contact, to make a connection, to make his intent clear. But Sasuke was an Uchiha and to an Uchiha direct eye contact was always a threat, always a challenge, so instead he kept his eyes fixed on a point on the horizon directly over Neiji’s shoulder, as he spoke, truth for truth, grief for grief.
“I live with ghosts.” He confessed. “Angry ghosts that died screaming and won’t let me sleep easy until I kill my brother. I live alone in the heart of a quarter that belongs to the dead. There’s blood on the walls of the house I sleep in, there’s blood on the streets I walk down every day, blood watered the vegetable garden where I grow my tomatoes. Sometimes it feels like their screams for revenge will drown me, will leave nothing but my duty to them, will leave nothing but that revenge.” That seemed to give Neiji pause, because when he spoke again the anger was gone from his voice, replaced by the kind of exhausted despair that belonged on a far older ninja.
“I suppose in a way, family is as cruel, and inescapable as fate.” He said, and it had been a long time since Sasuke had heard someone sound that defeated. That at least was something the two of them didn’t have in common, Sasuke had too much rage, too much of the Uchiha’s fire in him to fall in that way.
Itachi though. The memory came unbidden but Itachi had sounded that way, the day he’d destroyed Sasuke’s world. Sasuke had almost forgotten that Itachi had a water affinity, he might have been born Uchiha, but there was none of the fire that drove Sasuke in his heart, and a part of Sasuke couldn’t help but wonder if that was significant.
Sasuke wasn’t his brother though, and for once that felt more like a strength than a weakness, because Itachi would have let Neiji’s words stand unchallenged, but acceptance wasn’t in Sasuke’s nature.
“There’s more than one kind of family.” He said, with a meaningful glance off to the left, where Naruto and Lee were wrestling in a tangle of bright orange and green while Sakura and Tenten whispered commentary at each other and their sensei’s pretended not to watch. Neiji didn’t answer, but Sasuke could see the shift in posture that meant Neiji understood what Sasuke was trying to say.
…
Being back in Konoha was strange in ways Naruto hadn’t expected. Everything seemed so much smaller, the horizon confined by the high wooden walls, the buildings packed tight within their shelter. It made Naruto feel restless, and for the first time he could maybe understand why Jiraiya spent so much of his time away from the village.
Almost but not quite, because the familiar scents of tree sap from the Hashirama trees, and the natural dyes they used on Konoha shinobi uniforms, and Ichiraku Ramen, all said home, said his, said streets he knew, and people he loved, and the world outside might be wild, and wide, and exciting in ways he’d never truly grasped before, but Konoha was home, it was where he always wanted to come home to, and Naruto could see clear as day that Jiraiya of the Sannin did not feel the same. Hadn’t in a long time if Naruto was reading him right, and Naruto was good at reading people.
To Jiraiya, Naruto could tell, Konoha was no different to any other place he might stop and rest for awhile, aside from the bad memories that waited ‘round every corner. It made Naruto uncomfortable in ways that were hard to pin down, in ways that Kakashi’s willing desertion of his own village never did.
Maybe it was because, for all that Kakashi was an acknowledged traitor to Kiri, for all that he’d abandoned it forever and sworn himself to its enemy and never faltered, when he spoke of mist shrouded streets, and fireflies on the lake at night, it was obvious that he still cared. There was bitterness there, and grief, and old old regrets, but not indifference, never indifference, not the way Jiraiya felt for Konoha. Kakashi had loved Kiri, still loved Kiri, even if he’d learned to love Konoha too, even if that love hadn’t been enough to hold him there. Jiraiya felt nothing for Konoha, beyond the bad memories and the responsibilities that he’d been running from for longer than most Shinoci got to live.
It made Naruto uncomfortable in ways he couldn’t quite explain, but Kakashi sensei had said it would be a good idea to spend some time with Jiraiya, for a number of reasons, and Kakashi sensei was usually right about that sort of thing.
“See if he’ll teach you some useful jutsu.” He’d said with a sly smile that Naruto knew was permission to make as much of a nuisance of himself as he liked in pursuit of that goal.
Naruto was good at making a nuisance of himself. After a number of increasingly entertaining pranks, and the third time he’d managed to get Jiraiya caught spying on the women’s hot springs, he’d agreed to teach Naruto the ransengan, which according to Kakashi sensei was a big deal and definitely worth putting up with Jiraiya’s unreliability for. After all, it wasn’t like he was trusting Jiraiya to teach Naruto any moral lessons, in village training was for skills and jutsu and other physical stuff, and Kakashi had nothing but respect for Jiraiya’s talents in those fields. He was after all a Sannin.
It was indeed a very cool jutsu, and Naruto was glad to learn it. But he also couldn’t help but feel, that with every step he took towards perfecting it, Jiraiya was seeing him less and less clearly, seeing someone else standing in his place, and a part of him wanted, more than anything, to know just who that person was. Maybe then he’d be able to convince Jiraiya to see him. Naruto had spent most of his life with people looking through him, he didn’t need that from one of his own teachers, from someone who claimed to care.
But then, Jiraiya wasn’t someone to rely on. Kakashi sensei had warned him of that, and there was no sense getting upset when what Naruto had already suspected proved to be true. It was fine, he had other people to rely on. Sakura, and Sasuke, and Kakashi sensei, and Ebisu sensei, and of course Iruka sensei, who had been there for him when no-one else had. He didn’t need Jiraiya, even if a part of him did care about him.
Maybe he should invite Iruka sensei out for ramen sometime, now that he had actual wages to pay with.