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Entropy	By : ersatzbeta Category: Naruto > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 1332 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, nor do I profit from writing this or any other fanfiction.

Chapter List
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Chapter Nine
It was the last week of October, and the house was finished. Kakashi stood in the middle of the first floor, surveying the empty space critically. The afternoon sunlight made the room glow. Kakashi watched a particle of dust drift into a groove in the floor. He sighed, looking at the stack of shoji and fusuma that had yet to be erected. At least the upstairs was done and their bedrooms were, blissfully, walled off. They could argue about the division of the main floor later, once they had actually moved. It was a little hard to imagine where all their possessions would go. The room looked so big like this, the floorboards running off into infinity, the walls blank canvases. Kakashi looked up. Even the ceiling was impersonal. The smell of new wood permeated the air. He found it hard to breathe, suddenly, and so he went outside.
Kakashi nearly ran into Sasuke three feet from the door. Sasuke was just standing there, a hand shading his eyes from the sun as he stared up at the house. His chest barely moved with each breath, but Kakashi could see the pulse pounding at his throat, saw the flickering of red in his eyes. He looked stunned. Kakashi felt much the same, though probably for different reasons. Even if Sasuke could explain himself, Kakashi wasn�t sure he�d understand Sasuke's reaction laid out in logic.
He felt a sudden pity for the young man in front of him. Sasuke didn�t make changes easily, and now, suddenly being done with the house brought the hazy, far-off idea of someday living in it crashing down into the present. Kakashi stood beside him for a few minutes, watching the sun grow weaker behind the house. Hesitant, he reached out a hand, made to touch Sasuke�s shoulder and wavered. He felt the warmth of Sasuke�s body an inch from his fingers. Kakashi stretched himself out, instead, and hoped Sasuke hadn't caught his abortive gesture. He didn�t want pity or his reassurances, Kakashi was sure.
�Let�s go back to the apartment,� said Kakashi. �we�ll start packing in the morning.�
A chill breeze picked up. He thought he saw Sasuke shiver. Sasuke�s hand dropped to his side, away from his face.
�In the morning,� Sasuke said.
His eyes narrowed as he looked at the house one more time. He turned his back on the building.
It sounded like a death sentence, coming from him. Kakashi wanted to tell him to grow up, to get over himself, but it was at least nine years too late for that. Kakashi pivoted on one foot, putting Sasuke behind him. He couldn't convince himself that this move wasn't a rejection, in some way. Sasuke was suspiciously quiet. His eyes drilled into Kakashi the whole way back to town, and Kakashi felt no relief that night as he left Sasuke in the living room and closed his bedroom door.
The next day, Kakashi began packing in his bedroom. He opened his wardrobe. All his uniforms fit in one box. His civilian clothes filled less than half of another and, for a moment, Kakashi pondered trying to cram the clothes all into one box. His photographs and books and the contents of his desk went into a third box. He took down the art on the walls. He rolled it up together and stuck it in with his civilian clothes. Kakashi tossed in his alarm clock and, as an afterthought, carefully placed his potted plant in the box as well.
The room was bare, save for the still-made bed. He glared at the shuriken-print blanket. He�d have to get another box. It was an unprecedented event. When Kakashi had moved into this apartment, in anticipation of Sasuke�s release into his custody, he�d only needed two boxes for everything. He had twice as much stuff now in the bedroom alone. He felt smothered. Kakashi was sure it was somehow Sasuke�s fault. He sat on the floor and examined the dust bunnies under his bed.
Sasuke had had three boxes� worth of stuff already when he�d come under his supervision, and Kakashi was sure he had only added to it over time. Kakashi could truthfully say that most things in the apartment were not his. Sasuke owned many books, lot of pots and pans for cooking--and really, what was wrong with having just one pot?--and a veritable mountain of bedding. Kakashi didn�t remember Sasuke carrying an especially large bedroll on missions, but then, that was on missions. Carrying more than strictly necessary was tiring in a way no ninja on assignment could afford.
Kakashi slid under the bed with a rag, intent on eradicating the dust. He didn�t usually pay attention to the furniture, let alone what was or was not underneath it�not that he had much furniture to contemplate. There was the eating table and its two mismatched chairs. He had his desk and bed and the desk chair and a stray ottoman. More recently, he�d acquired a futon and a pair of end tables to make it look less insignificant while it floated in the middle of the living room�s space.
Now that Kakashi thought about it, the futon was Sasuke�s too. It was Sasuke�s bed more than it was a place for company to come and sit, for all that Kakashi had paid for it. During the day, Sasuke kept his bedding stored in a cupboard. Every night he straightened the frame and made his bed, and every morning he folded it all up again. It was amazing how the covers never dragged on the floor: they sat two feet high over the cushion even when Sasuke wasn't in bed.
Kakashi didn�t know how anyone could sleep like that. He himself had had the same, solitary blanket for years and years, long enough for him to have forgotten when he first slept under it. It was a long time. He�d had it all through his last apartment, but what about before then? He swiped at the dust with the cloth, stirring it up enough that he sneezed twice. It was so hard to remember what he'd done before his previous place. Kakashi hadn�t had the blanket while he had lived under his father�s roof. By the time he moved into his first apartment, he�d been busily working his way up to jounin status and that was all that stood out from those dark times. Kakashi wriggled out from underneath the bed and tried to ignore the way his hand was trembling and shaking dust from the cloth back onto the floor.
Kakashi tossed the rag and stretched. He tipped the alarm clock face-up in the box. He�d wasted half the morning on unpleasant memories, which was half a morning more than he�d intended to waste. Time to see how Sasuke was doing.
When Kakashi entered the living room, he was unpleasantly surprised. Everything looked exactly the same as it had the night before. The empty boxes were still stacked neatly by the entrance. Sasuke was, technically speaking, still in bed. He was stretched out, fully dressed, over the seat of the couch. His blankets were nowhere in sight, and Kakashi presumed they were in their cupboard. Sasuke cracked an eye open, fixing it on Kakashi.
Kakashi felt challenged by the look in that eye. It said �You can�t make me pack.� Kakashi itched to do it, to somehow force Sasuke to fill boxes. It was irrational, he knew, but he couldn�t stop thinking about it. There were jutsu designed to puppeteer, to manipulate, to convince and coerce. He could, in theory, invade Sasuke�s mind and make him think packing was his idea all along. Or he could leave Sasuke�s awareness intact and just pilot his body. That, though, would be crossing all kinds of boundaries, all of them bad.
As much as Kakashi wanted, he couldn�t force Sasuke to pack. So he settled for the next best thing: Kakashi started to do it for him. But, as soon as he had put a single book into the first box, Sasuke was behind him, holding a kunai to his throat. Kakashi let out a breath. The edge scraped the fabric of his mask. Anger and murderous intent radiated out from behind him. He idly wondered whether it was a good thing or a bad thing the kunai wasn�t as sharp as it might have been.
�Put it down,� said Sasuke.
Sasuke paused. Kakashi felt the blade at his neck shiver. He heard Sasuke�s knuckles creak. His grip on the haft firmed and the kunai pressed a little closer.
�Please,� Sasuke said. �Put it down.�
His breath washed unevenly over the nape of Kakashi�s neck. Kakashi dropped the box to the floor and, moving slowly, nudged it away with his foot. He was clear of it.
�I'm assuming this is what you wanted,� said Kakashi. �If you wouldn't mind��
Sasuke removed the kunai, easing the blade away from Kakashi's neck. The point caught on a fold of fabric and made a little slice. It was undoubtedly intentional and Kakashi resented it.
He made a strategic retreat to his room before he let his temper get the best of him. He could feel Sasuke still boiling in the living room, which was not especially out of the ordinary, even if the preceding act was. Kakashi sat down on his bed to think. He fingered the tiny hole in his mask and frowned. That Sasuke didn�t want to pack was obvious. Yet he seemed perfectly fine with the concept of living in the new house. Sasuke wasn�t an idiot. He had to have realized moving meant packing up at the old place and unpacking in the new.
The conclusion Kakashi suddenly came to was so obvious that he was amazed he hadn�t seen it earlier, kunai to the throat aside. Sasuke didn�t want him looking at (or touching) his belongings. This begged a new question: why? It wasn�t like Kakashi didn�t know almost everything there was to know about Sasuke�s possessions. He knew what Sasuke had brought with him in those first three boxes. He also knew what Sasuke had bought in the intervening months and there was nothing unusual there.
Kakashi poked his finger through the hole in the mask and sighed. He dug through his uniforms, found another mask. They had to be out of this apartment in five days. He needed to encourage Sasuke to pack. He would keep his eye peeled and see if he could figure out what it was, exactly, that Sasuke was hiding. Maybe Sasuke would slip up and give it away. Kakashi removed the old mask and put on the new. He was prepared to wait as long as it took, and Kakashi knew he could outlast Sasuke's patience.
He got off the bed and sat at the desk, resting his feet on a box while he thought. He knew that Sasuke kept kunai tucked into his pillowcase at night and that a garroting wire kept the edge of Sasuke�s collar stiff. Sasuke collected and burned the detritus from his personal grooming, which was intimate and strange when he thought about it, but Kakashi knew it anyway. He had the altered shape of Sasuke�s curse seal memorized, despite its being disguised with both genjutsu and physical means. He knew some of the forms Sasuke's nightmares assumed. In this life, Sasuke didn't have the luxury of secrets, not yet, not this early in his reintroduction to the society he'd spurned and tried to destroy. If he had hidden anything from Kakashi, anything at all, it had to be bad. Kakashi was uneasy with that thought and, try as he might, he couldn't put it aside.
A/N: I'm still not completely satisfied with this chapter. I'm not sure that I played up the tension in the confrontation enough, but I suppose that comes from my ambivalence over how big an incident it really was. On the one hand, it was important enough to detail, but on the other...it was a bit of a blip on the metaphorical radar, compared to what has happened before and what is yet to come.
Have I mentioned that, originally, this story was supposed to be a short-ish K/S get-together fic? I laugh my head off now, thinking about that. Ever since the beginning, I've been adding as much build-up and plot as I can. I was bored with the idea and kept asking myself "well, now what?" In fact, when I wrote the prologue--after something like ten chapters of the story proper--I got all excited about the possible plot avenues the prologue opened up. Also, you might be pleased to know that secondary characters are going to be coming in soon. I've found it very difficult to sustain this story for this long using only the interplay of two characters. I'm almost relieved to introduce secondaries. (I wonder how my choices will be received...)
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Entropy