Adult-FanFiction.org : Naruto

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 Eleven
Even though the house wasn�t very big, Kakashi and Sasuke still rattled around for a few weeks, trying to find places for things and for themselves. They each had a bedroom, and they shared the living room, bathroom, and kitchen. During the construction phase, Sasuke had argued for a week about which bedroom would be his: the one in the northeast corner. But, upon moving in, he decided that Kakashi�s was better and he took it over--when Kakashi had poked his head in, Sasuke had already staked his claim with packs of gear on the floor. Kakashi merely sighed and kept unloading crates from the borrowed cart.
For a while, the boxes went round and round, parading through the house as Kakashi or Sasuke changed his mind about what should go where. But everything found a place for the time being, and Kakashi and Sasuke now faced the task of carving out niches for themselves.
Sasuke spent almost all of his time in his room. When he wasn�t eating or showering, he sat on his bed or the roof above his room and stared into the perpetually dark forest. Kakashi was frequently in the living room, lounging across the couch and thumbing through the same books he'd been re-reading for years. When he tired of that, he went into the small cleared area in front of the house and made plans to develop a training yard there. The churned up dirt, left over from construction, had acquired grass and flowers and plants Kakashi didn�t care to identify.
Sasuke yanked up the plants. When Kakashi asked, Sasuke gave him a two-sentence lecture. They were weeds, and yards don�t grow weeds. Kakashi questioned the logic in this, seeing as most of the yard was in fact forest. Sasuke refused to stop pulling them up, and Kakashi decided this vigilante-ism was a tolerable character flaw. Besides, it ultimately helped his goal of a training yard. Those plants would all be plowed under anyway, Not that Kakashi was in a hurry. He savored the planning.
Today, Kakashi sat on a stump at the edge of the yard and surveyed the grounds for the hundredth time. He could feel Sasuke watching him from his spot on the roof. It was pleasant, silent camaraderie; Sasuke was quiescent, and Kakashi relished the calm. This sort of quiet morning was rare in his experience. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun, drank in what warmth filtered through the trees. Kakashi opened his eyes again and turned to look at the house. What sort of training yard would they end up building? Creating a training yard required nearly as much thought as that of planning a house. There were so many little intricacies to it.
Kakashi wanted it to be as naturalized as possible; in his travels, he�d seen indoor and outdoor facilities with varying levels of sophistication. He found the obviously artificial ones distasteful. Kakashi wrinkled his nose. What was the point of training in a space that would never, ever occur in the field? Kakashi wanted a visceral setting, one that punched him in the gut and declared its reality to his senses. He wanted the scents and sounds of nature around him, preferred the roughness of tree bark to the smoothness of a man-made climbing wall and sunlight to the incandescent floodlights of indoor arenas. He wanted to bake in the sun, freeze in the cold, and get genuine dirt all over himself as he tore through the forest while training. A chill wind picked up and his skin prickled as the sun passed behind a cloud.
All this was not to say that Kakashi wanted the training ground to resemble solely the forests of Fire country. He envisioned bits and pieces of foreign landscapes; the sand and rocky scarps of Wind country; the plains bordering Earth country with their six-foot-high grasses and deceptive horizons. Kakashi got to his feet and stood on the stump, as if he'd be able to see farther into the forest that way, to better see the possibilities hidden in the land. He knew there was no way he could replicate the mountains in Snow country, but he gave himself better than fair chances of success with the coastal marshes that led to the Water country archipelago. He also had vague notions of water features--slippery rocks to climb and leap across, water to walk on. The thought alone made Kakashi's heart pound harder with anticipated excitement. Briefly, he wondered if Sasuke had a favorite terrain.
These plans were time and energy consuming, which was, as far as Kakashi was concerned, good. There were plenty of other thing he didn�t want to think too hard about, not the least of which was the distinct lack of training he�d been doing lately. He sat again, frowning as a pain shot from his kneecap down into his foot. He rubbed his knee and the ache eased.
Kakashi was approaching ninja middle-age. Despite no lingering injuries or much permanent damage, the hard life he�d lived for nearly three decades was taking its toll. He woke up with stiff joints and odd twinges assaulted him at all waking hours. These faded away after stretching and working out for a short while, but they kept coming back. Rainy days left Kakashi feeling wrung out, more tired than he felt he ought to be.
Kakashi told himself that it was just the adjustment to a lack of adrenaline constantly coursing through him. His body missed the lack of exercise real training provided. He felt like he was walking underwater half the time, moving too slowly toward a future he couldn't see, even with his Sharingan eye open wide and calling to the scattering of Uchiha blood in his veins. He flexed his hands and fisted them tightly.
Recently, Kakashi�s left eye had started hurting again, like back in the early post-transplant days, when he had struggled to integrate it. The eye burned in the socket, seared into his skull and left him much weaker he liked to admit, even to himself. He tried very hard to ignore the un-ignorable parts of his life. Kakashi felt Sasuke leave the roof and go back inside. Exhaling, he forced himself to relax a bit.
He felt a certain amount of guilt these days, and it seemed to be increasing as he continued his policies of avoidance--just as he hadn�t been training, Kakashi hadn�t gotten within throwing distance of the memorial since Sasuke had come to live with him. He hadn�t had time. Or energy. Or something else necessary to do what he had to do, what he felt driven to do. Whatever it was that had been missing before, he was recovering it. The guilt was relentless and the urge to sit atop the memorial stones unremitting. Kakashi was half-surprised at the guilt he�d accrued over the past months and how heavily it weighed on him. Kakashi squared his shoulders but, almost before he took his next breath, he was slouching again.
All the things he'd been putting aside did more than just distract him a little. He could have been killed, literally killed, dozens of times over because of that carelessness--by slipping up with Sasuke; by hostile nin while he remained only half-aware in his fugue of self-recrimination; or even in accidents that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been preventable. Even now, in his own yard, he was only marginally aware of the locations of the four ANBU guards. He was getting sloppy, and it was a distasteful and disgraceful thing for him to be. As much as it pained him to admit it, Kakashi couldn�t keep ignoring his slide into decadence. He needed to go to the monument again. Kakashi nodded to himself. He gave the yard one last look and then went inside the house.
A/N: Oh man! Between spending the weekend away, forgetting my glasses (which I kind of need to avoid computer/reading related problems), and random power outages, I thought I'd never finish work on this chapter!
Personal problems aside, this chapter was tough, mostly because it is kind of montage-y. I had some trouble trying to bring it into the present, if you know what I mean. Also, it was entirely boring internalized expository narrative. I think it's still kind of rough, but at least I added in bits with Kakashi doing stuff.
In regards to the last chapter, I'm sorry if I confused any readers with the whole Sasuke-collects-stuff bit. I didn't mean to imply that Sasuke actually has the full-blown whatever psychological thing I was referencing (it may be some form of attachment disorder that I was thinking about.) I was just trying to clear things up for my own edification, really. (On a side note, Gollum!Sasuke for the win, msuzumaki!)
A reader, Yuliya, asked whether or not I was going to be doing any flashbacks to show more about Sasuke's trauma. Short answer: no. Long answer: I find flashbacks to be a cumbersome narrative tool and I don't like to use them. As the story progresses, we will learn more about what's going on with Sasuke, but it will not be from his perspective unless it is a dream scene (and it seems unlikely at this point that such a thing will happen.) Although I admit I am sometimes tempted to throw a Sasuke-perspective chapter in here and there, I worry it will interrupt the flow of the story too much.
Hope you're all enjoying the read! Next update: Wednesday/Thursday.
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- 13
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Entropy