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The wind whispered through the broken columns of the Valley of the End, silent witnesses to a battle that had transcended the physical to become a clash of ideologies, of souls.

The blood of both young men, Uchiha and Uzumaki, mingled with the stagnant rainwater, a turbid scarlet liquid reflecting the complexity of what had just transpired. There were no victors or vanquished; only an agonizing understanding, bought with pain and the loss of parts of themselves. They lay gasping, the whisper of the flowing river the only sound besides their ragged breathing.

It was in that silence heavy with agony, in that state of absolute vulnerability, that Sasuke found a courage hatred had never given him. With the last of his strength, he turned his head toward Naruto, his single eye clouded with a pain that wasn't physical.

"Naruto…" his voice was rough, a broken caress on the damp air. "All of this… this pain, this obsession to reach you, to destroy you… or to have you destroy me… it was never just hatred."

Naruto, his face bruised and body exhausted, looked at him, his blue eyes still alert despite the fatigue.

Sasuke inhaled deeply, as if the words burned him from the inside. "It was because you're the only person who ever got through, the only one who refused to give up on me. You're… the strongest bond I have. The only one that matters. And I don't want to… I can't keep pretending it's just a friend's rivalry. It's more. It's something much deeper."

The confession hung between them, fragile and monumental. It was the purest, most naked truth of Sasuke Uchiha, offered on the altar of their near mutual destruction. He expected an explosion, a denial, maybe even an equally torn reciprocation. But what he got was a weighted silence, and then, a quiet, devastating negation.

Naruto closed his eyes for a moment, as if searching for strength within. When he opened them, there was no anger or disgust, only a clear, sad resolution.

"You're wrong, Sasuke," he said, his voice serene but firm, cutting the air like the edge of a kunai. "It's not like that."

Sasuke felt his already teetering world crumble a little more. "What?" he managed to articulate, a syllable loaded with disbelief.

"You're my friend. My partner. The brother I chose. That's real," Naruto continued, his words measured, careful, and because of that, a thousand times more painful. "But it's not… it wasn't why I did all this. I did it because of the promise I made to Sakura-chan. I did it to bring you back, for her."

Each word was a nail in Sasuke's already shattered heart. Naruto didn't look away, bearing the weight of the devastation he saw growing in his friend's single eye.

"She… she loves you, Sasuke. With all her heart. And I… I love Sakura-chan. I have for years. And because I love her, I would do anything for her happiness. Even this. Even traveling the whole world and fighting to exhaustion against the man she loves, just to bring him back to her. Everything, absolutely everything, I did for that reason. For her."

The revelation was an icy void that expanded in Sasuke's chest. The bond he believed was unique, the connection that had transcended all reason, was reduced to a link in a chain of someone else's affections. He felt like an instrument, an object in the narrative of Naruto's love for Sakura.

"So then…?" Sasuke's voice was barely a thread of sound, broken by an emotion he couldn't contain. "None of this… I… mean nothing? Was it just a… a mission? A promise?"

The despair in that question was palpable, seeking crumbs of meaning in the ruins of his emotional world.

Naruto looked at him with genuine sorrow, but without hesitation. "It means you're my friend. My partner. That's not a lie. It's a bond I value more than my life. But not… not in the other way. Not in the way you're implying. I'm not willing to entangle myself with you like that. I don't desire you that way. I can't."

The final phrase fell like a tombstone.

"I don't desire you that way."

It was the most absolute denial, the most hurtful. It wasn't a rejection out of obligation or duty, but due to a fundamental lack of feeling. Naruto had fought for him with the ferocity of a thousand men, but not for him; for his shadow in another person's heart.

Sasuke froze. All the pain from his wounds paled before the black hole opening inside him. The last vestige of his clan, the last Uchiha, reduced to begging for an affection that had never been there. The hope that had blossomed, foolish and fragile, in the heat of his confession, withered instantly, leaving only ashes and a loneliness deeper and darker than any he had ever known before.

He stared at Naruto, and for the first time, he didn't see his counterpart, his rival, his salvation. He saw a stranger who had given him everything, except the one thing Sasuke, in his blindness, had come to believe was the hidden truth behind it all. And in that moment, he understood that the Valley of the End wasn't just the place where they had ended their battle, but where any possibility of something more had died, forever.

The silence that followed Naruto's words was more deafening than any blast from their jutsu. Sasuke looked at him again, and the world didn't just stop; it faded completely, reduced to the figure with jet-black hair and blue eyes who was denying him the only truth that mattered. The denial, so cold and rational, cut him like a sharp paper edge, severing emotional tendons even Madara himself wouldn't have been able to find. But from the void left by that cut, a desperate strength welled up, a final, wild torrent of need.

It didn't have to be the end. Not yet.

With a moan that was half physical pain, half soul-deep agony, Sasuke pushed himself up. He ignored the fire in his muscles, the furious throbbing in his wounded eye, and mounted Naruto, his weak legs pinning the blonde's waist, his trembling hand gripping the jinchuriki's torn shoulders.

"No… it's not true," he gasped, his voice a hoarse whisper laden with tears that finally dared to escape, tracing paths through dust and dried blood on his cheeks. "I know… I know I was wrong. That I got lost in the darkness. But you… you pulled me out. You showed me the light. You made me see! That has to mean something!"

His grip tightened, fingers digging into Naruto's flesh with a feverish urgency. The dignity of the last Uchiha, already in shambles, evaporated completely, laying bare a broken, pleading creature.

"I'll get better… I'll do everything right this time. I promise. Please," his voice broke into a sob, a heart-wrenching sound that had never before left his mouth. "Don't tell me no… not after everything."

And then, blinded by a need that consumed him, he leaned down and crushed his lips against Naruto's.

It wasn't a kiss of love, but of desperation, a clumsy, anguished attempt to transfer through physical contact the storm of feelings words had failed to convey. It was a struggle, an imposition laden with salty tears and the metallic taste of their shared blood. He wanted to convince him, manipulate him if necessary, to make the warm body beneath his desire him, to make those eyes see beyond the promise and find the man begging to be loved.

"See?" he murmured against his lips, in a ragged breath. "I can… I can do it. I'll do everything Sakura did. Like her, I'll… I'll beg you, if I have to. I'm begging you, Naruto… I'm begging for your love. Give me something. Any crumb! Just don't leave me empty again!"

Naruto, initially paralyzed by shock, reacted. Not with violence, but with a sad, overwhelming firmness. With his one weak but resolute hand, he pushed against Sasuke's chest, separating them with difficulty.

"Sasuke… stop," Naruto's voice was low, but charged with an uncomfortable, almost painful tension. "Don't do this. Don't debase yourself like this. Don't make this harder for both of us."

But Sasuke, like a shipwrecked man clinging to the wreckage of his sunken ship, lunged again. This time, his lips found Naruto's rough, dirty cheek, then the line of his jaw, descending to his neck, in a succession of wet, desperate kisses that were more like panicked caresses.

"It's not a misunderstanding," he pleaded between each feverish contact. "I can make you happy… I know I can. Let me try. Just… look at me. Look at me, not at her through me!"

It was then that Naruto's patience, forged in years of stubborn pursuit but always tinged with a fraternal love, finally snapped. It was no longer compassion burning in his eyes, but a fire of frustration and a necessary harshness.

"Enough, Sasuke!" Naruto's voice erupted, not in a shout, but in a low, cutting tone that reverberated in the valley's still air. It was a tone Sasuke had never heard him use before. "Do you even hear yourself? Begging? Debasing yourself to this? You are Sasuke Uchiha! Nobody's shadow! Do you think this is love? This is desperation! It's the fear of a man who doesn't know how to be alone and clings to the first rope he sees, even if it wasn't made for him!"

Each word was a hammer blow. Naruto stared at him, his expression a mix of rage and deep sorrow.

"I pulled you from the darkness so you could find your own light, not to become my satellite. Do you think I could love you like this? Watching you destroy yourself, humiliate yourself, become… this? That's not the man I fought for! I fought for the proud one, the strong one, my equal, not for this… this specter begging for crumbs! Love isn't begged for, Sasuke! And it can't be forced!"

The cruelty of the truth, exposed with brutal clarity, left Sasuke breathless. He collapsed onto Naruto, his body losing all strength, his head burying itself in the hollow of the blonde's neck, trembling uncontrollably. His crying was silent now, a convulsive shudder speaking of a wound far deeper than any other.

Naruto closed his eyes, breathing deeply. The anger dissipated as quickly as it had come, leaving only infinite weariness and a sea of guilt.

"I'm sorry…" he whispered, his voice back to softness, but laden with a monumental weight. "I shouldn't have said it like that. It was cruel. I'm sorry."

But even the apology was a knife. Sasuke didn't move. Only, after a long moment, in a final act of a desperation that transcended reason, he raised his head again. His tears had cleared small paths through the grime on his face. With agonizing slowness, he bent his head again and pressed his lips, cold now, against Naruto's cheek in a kiss that was pure defeat. Then another, in the same spot, a ghostly contact, an echo of his previous passionate torrent.

"Just… a little attention," he murmured, his voice so weak the wind almost carried it away. "That's all I'm asking for."

Naruto remained motionless, completely stunned. The ferocity, the proud resistance of Sasuke, had evaporated, leaving this vulnerable, almost childlike creature seeking comfort in the most basic physical contact. He didn't feel revulsion, not even discomfort now. He felt… awe. A deep and disturbing disbelief.

Is this… him? Naruto thought, his mind struggling to process the scene. The one who defied Kages, bijuu, and a Goddess? The one who challenged me to die with him? Reduced to… this?

He looked at the pale nape of Sasuke's neck, the fragility of his trembling shoulders, and a slow, cold understanding began to form in his mind.

This wasn't the Sasuke he knew. This was the product of psychosis, of adrenaline draining away after the most brutal battle of their lives, of the brutal confrontation of his essential solitude. It was the collapse of a mind pushed too far, wounded too deeply, seeking to anchor itself to any reality other than the void Naruto had unintentionally revealed.

It wasn't an act of love. It was a symptom of a fracture.

The harshness of his own words still resonated in the air, a poisonous echo Naruto regretted unleashing. He watched as Sasuke collapsed onto him, not with rage, but with absolute surrender, trembling like a leaf in a storm only they could feel. The silent crying, the spasms wracking the Uchiha's bruised body, were more eloquent than any scream. Naruto had fought tailed beasts, gods, and immortal men, but nothing had prepared him for this—the total destruction of his friend's spirit, wrought by his own hands, with truth as the weapon.

A deep, compassionate, and overwhelming pain flooded him. Frustration and anger dissipated, replaced by an immense sadness. This wasn't the proud Sasuke. This was a lost child, the same one he'd seen crying in their shared memories the night after his clan's massacre, but without the wall of hatred that had protected him all these years.

That wall was now dust, and only raw vulnerability remained.

"Sasuke…" Naruto whispered, his voice rough with emotion.

Slowly, with his one remaining arm, he wrapped it around him. It was an awkward movement, hampered by their wounds and his missing limb, but it was imbued with infinite tenderness. It wasn't an embrace of romantic reciprocity, but the embrace given to a mortally wounded brother, the comfort offered when words were no longer of any use.

Sasuke froze for a second, surprised by the contact. Then, a deeper sob escaped his throat, and he sank completely into that embrace, as if it were a lifeline in an infinite sea. The rigidity of his body faded, replaced by total limpness, by abandonment. For him, that simple act of compassion was misinterpreted as a surrender, an open door his desperate mind rushed to cross.

The happiness that flooded him was as intense as it was ephemeral and pathetic. He felt an atrocious void filling, even if only with crumbs.

He lifted his head, his dark eyes dull but filled with a feverish light, and sought Naruto's lips again. This time it wasn't with the violent desperation of before, but with a clumsy eagerness full of touching earnestness. He kissed as if he were learning, as if each contact could solder their broken souls together. It was awkward, their missing limbs clashed, their aching bodies protested, but Sasuke didn't give a damn. For the first time in an eternity, he felt complete. The outside world, Sakura, the Village, his legacy—everything faded into an unimportant mist.

Sakura… he thought, and the name slid through his mind leaving no trace. She had never been more than a friend, a persistent shadow. Now he understood it. All those childish jealousies, that irritation whenever she hung on Naruto's arm, weren't because her affection bothered him, but because it stole his attention. Naruto had always been the sun, and Sasuke, unconsciously, had yearned to be the only planet in his orbit.

He wanted to merge with him. For their bones to interlace, for his blood to mix forever with the jinchuriki's.

Every kiss, every brush of his skin against Naruto's, was a desperate attempt to achieve it. If Naruto had vouched for him before the world, he would vouch for this piece of heaven, for this comfort, even if it was hidden, even if it was a shameful secret. What did he have left? Nothing. He had never had anything, except this man with golden hair and a sun-like smile who had insisted on chasing his darkness.

I don't care, he thought with delirious clarity. I don't care that I've become this. If it's for him, I'll do it. If he uses me as his punching bag, his secret confidant, or anything else… it's better than nothing.

Being something for him is better than being everything for anyone else.

Naruto didn't respond to the kisses. He remained still, his one arm maintaining the embrace, but his head slightly turned, accepting the contacts on his cheek, his neck, his shoulder. Tears streamed silently down Naruto's temples, mixing with sweat and grime. He wasn't crying from revulsion, but from an abysmal sadness. He was witnessing the final shipwreck of Sasuke Uchiha, and he felt incapable of doing anything more than preventing him from drowning completely, even if that meant allowing him to cling to him in this distorted way.

He allowed everything. He allowed the wet, clumsy kisses, allowed Sasuke to rub against him like a wounded cat seeking warmth, allowed the ragged murmurs of "Naruto" and "please" to fill the air between them. It was the only thing he could give him, a raft in the ocean of his collapse. He knew, with a heart-splitting pain, that this wasn't the answer, that this would only sow more pain in the future. But in that moment, in the broken quiet of the Valley of the End, facing the shattered creature that had been his Goal and his brother, compassion won over reason. And he cried for him, for both of them, for the catastrophic price of their unbreakable bond.

The dawn began to tinge the sky with a pale, cold blue, a mournful mantle spreading over the Valley of the End, weakly illuminating the intertwined silhouettes of the two young men. The wind had died down, leaving a heavy silence, broken only by Sasuke's ragged breathing and the choked sobs Naruto could no longer contain. The blonde's initial compassion had transformed into a nightmare of powerless anguish, a pit he didn't know how to escape without pushing Sasuke into the definitive abyss.

Sasuke, intoxicated by the proximity he was allowed, by the heat of the body beneath his, moved his hips with an innocent, desperate clumsiness. The friction, even through their torn, soaked clothes, was a distant echo of what his confused, wounded body truly craved.

He didn't understand the nature of his own desire, he only knew he needed more, more contact, more fusion, more proof that he existed in Naruto's universe.

"Naruto…" he murmured, his voice hoarse and broken by crying and fatigue. "More… please. It's not enough."

Naruto closed his eyes, squeezing his eyelids shut. A warm tear escaped and was lost in his sideburn. He knew what was happening. He felt the insistent pressure against his thigh, the different tremor in Sasuke's body. Part of him wanted to scream, push him away, put an end to this painful farce. But the other part, the one that had sworn to bring him back at any cost, the one that saw the broken child behind the prodigy shinobi, resigned itself with a sadness that froze his soul.

"Sasuke…" he whispered, his voice barely a thread of sound. "What… what do you want?"

It was a rhetorical question, a last, weak hope that Sasuke would come to his senses. But the Uchiha only looked at him with his dark eyes, now glazed with an animal need that transcended all rationality. There were no words in his mouth, only a mute plea, miserable and vulnerable. His gaze lowered to Naruto's waist and then returned to his, asking for permission, begging for a confirmation Naruto should never give.

Naruto held his breath.

The world shrank to that instant, to the impossible choice between rejecting his friend and pushing him toward an irreversible fracture, or allowing this and fracturing himself in the process. With a sigh that was the surrender of his own innocence, with tears tracing his temples, Naruto, with his single hand, pushed his pants and underwear down to his thighs.

There were no words. It was an act of monumental sadness.

Sasuke looked at him, and for a second, there was a flash of something like fear in his eyes. But it was quickly drowned by blind instinct, by the overwhelming need to feel complete, to merge, to possess and be possessed.

He nodded, once, with a spasmodic movement of his head, and clumsily adjusted himself over him.

What followed was a brutal intrusion, not of malice, but of absolute inexperience and a desperation that turned the act into something mechanical and painful. Sasuke proceeded by instinct, guided by a primal impulse that understood nothing of technique or pleasure, only possession and connection. He used Naruto's body as an anchor, already exposed he masturbated with pathetic gasps and moans causing his dripping to increase, hurriedly spat on his member and without more entered his best friend's anus, thrusting with a clumsy, brusque eagerness that made the blonde clench his teeth to avoid screaming.

Naruto didn't look at him. He turned his head to the side, fixing his gaze on one of Hashirama's broken columns, his vision blurred by the tears now flowing free and silent. It wasn't physical pain making him cry; it was the emotional devastation, the deep tragedy of seeing his most precious bond perverted into this, into an empty, destructive act of consolation. — "Be gentle.... Sasuke... please."

Sasuke, in his frenzy, didn't see the tears. He only felt the heat, the proximity, the horrible, distorted realization of his fusion fantasy. It didn't last even fifteen seconds, the friction did its work, he saw stars and colors and white until, at the climax of his own orgasm, a heart-rending sob escaped his own chest. It wasn't just from pleasure, but also from a cathartic release of all the anguish, hatred, loneliness, and unrequited love of years.

He collapsed onto Naruto's chest, his body convulsing, crying with a bitterness that seemed to have no end.

Naruto, feeling the weight of Sasuke's broken body on his, the uncontrolled crying wetting his neck, did the only thing left to him. With a superhuman effort, he wrapped his legs around Sasuke's waist, creating a complete embrace, a physical containment for an emotional fracture he couldn't hold. With trembling lips, he kissed the Uchiha's sweaty, tear-damp temple.

"Shhh…" he murmured, his voice broken but soft. "It's over… Sasuke… it's over. I'm here."

They were empty words. Nothing was over, and everything had changed forever. But in that moment, they were the only balm he had to offer the poor, shattered soul lying on top of him, to his friend, his brother, the embodiment of a bond fate had twisted into something as beautiful as it was tragic. And as the morning sun began to rise, illuminating the tears on both their faces, they remained there, on the bed of their battle, trapped in the silence of a surrender that had cured nothing, but had opened a new, deeper wound.

Not far from there.

The first ray of the morning sun began to gild the highest peaks of the Valley of the End, painting the tragedy and forced intimacy lying among its ruins in gold. It was in that liminal moment, between night and day, that a silent figure appeared on the crater's edge. Kakashi Hatake, moving with the stealthy elegance that characterized him, had arrived following the trail of a familiar chakra that had alarmingly faded.

His eyes, usually lazy or inquisitive, widened behind his mask. — "But... What?...."

The scene unfolding below was so surreal his brain, trained to process chaos, took several seconds to comprehend it. There lay his two students, his two most precious pupils, intertwined in a way that transcended the fraternal. Sasuke, pale and covered in dried blood and dirt, was on top of Naruto, his hips still moving with an exhausted but insistent slowness, a mechanical, grim rhythm. His face was buried in the blonde's neck, and a phantom arm that no longer existed seemed to want to hold him. Naruto, in turn, lay with his gaze lost in the brightening sky, his one arm stroking Sasuke's tangled hair with an infinite, heartbreaking tenderness. Dried tears marked paths in his grime, but his expression was one of a resignation so profound it seemed carved in stone.

Kakashi needed no more details.

The tension in the air, Naruto's posture of total surrender and Sasuke's of desperate possession, said it all. It wasn't an act of passion; it was an act of desperation, of collapse.

A broken bond being mended with the wrong needle and the most painful thread.

His shinobi instinct screamed at him to intervene, to separate his team, to bring order to this chaos. But his sensei's heart, the one that had watched them grow, suffer, and fall, dictated otherwise. Interrupting that at that moment would be like uprooting a plant just transplanted into poisonous soil; it would die irremediably.

With a calm he didn't feel, Kakashi silently turned around. His back stood like a wall between that tragic intimacy and the outside world. Just then, he heard hurried footsteps and a voice broken by anxiety.

"Kakashi-sensei! Did you find them? Are they…?" — Sakura appeared panting beside him, her green eyes shining with tears of worry.

Kakashi interposed himself in her line of sight, blocking it completely. He placed his hands gently on her shoulders, turning her away from the crater.

"Sakura," he said, his voice surprisingly serene, a perfect disguise for the inner turmoil. "Yes, they are. They're alive. But…" he inhaled deeply, weaving the most crucial lie of his life. "…their injuries are severe. Very severe. I need you to go to the emergency medical camp they must be setting up east of here and bring help. Tell them we need stabilization stretchers and maximum-grade regeneration serums. Right now. It's vital."

Sakura looked at him, her medical training momentarily overriding her panic. "But can I see them? I can help, I—"

"Now, Sakura!" Kakashi's voice was firm, an edge of authority he rarely used with them. "Trust me. I'll stay here to stabilize them. But I need what I asked for. Run!"

The urgency in his tone spurred her on. She nodded, with tears of frustration and fear, and took off running in the indicated direction, her pink figure disappearing among the rubble.

Kakashi turned slowly, leaning his back against a nearby rock, closing his eyes. He became the unwanted guardian of a painful secret, protecting his pupils not from an enemy, but from the consequences of their own catastrophic connection. He left them alone, granting them a privacy they should never have needed.

Down in the crater, the world had shrunk for Sasuke to the caress in his hair and the warmth of the body beneath his. The movement had ceased, replaced by an exhausted, sated lethargy. Every stroke of Naruto's fingers on his scalp was a blessing, a confirmation that this was real, that he was desired, he was loved. He had sunk into an absolute placidity, ignoring the pain of his wounds, the morning cold, the reality waiting beyond Naruto's arms.

"Naruto…" he murmured, his voice a thread of sound, sleepy and satisfied.

"Shhh… rest, Sasuke," Naruto responded, his voice soft, but with a sadness that seeped into every syllable.

Naruto was shattered inside.

He knew he had crossed a line from which there was no return, that he had allowed something that would complicate their lives forever. But seeing Sasuke, so fragile, so peaceful for the first time in an eternity, he felt his own sadness was a price worth paying. If his complicity, his own broken heart, could give Sasuke a moment of peace, then he would give it.

He tried to make him happy, or at least, give him the illusion of happiness he so craved.

"Don't go," Sasuke whispered, clinging to him with weakened strength.

"I'm not going," Naruto lied, knowing they would eventually have to get up and face the world. "I'm here."

And for Sasuke, that lie was enough. It was everything. The whole world could burn. Konoha, his legacy, his redemption, it was all insignificant dust. Only the heat of this body, the caress in his hair, the voice of the man who had moved mountains and defeated gods for him mattered. Whatever came, condemnation, ostracism, incomprehension, he didn't give a damn.

Only this. Only Naruto.

It was a selfish, pathological feeling born from the deepest wound, but for Sasuke Uchiha, in the arms of his unrequited love, it was the only truth he had left. And he clung to it like a shipwrecked man to his last breath.

The cold morning light now bathed the Valley of the End completely, mercilessly exposing the crudeness of the scene. The air smelled of dust, dried blood, and something more intimate and salty that clung to their skins. The stickiness between their bodies, a physical reminder of what had occurred, was uncomfortable and embarrassing for Naruto, who tried, in vain, to ignore the sensation. It was in that agonizing silence that a familiar presence roared in the depths of his mind.

NARUTO!

Kurama's voice exploded in his consciousness, not with its usual gruff tone, but with a colossal fury, reverberating with horror and disbelief. The Nine-Tailed Fox, a forced witness to every heartbeat, every breath, every tear of his jinchuriki, had fully awakened and had seen… had felt everything.

What… what have you done? What have you allowed? — it roared, and Naruto's mental landscape seemed to shudder. FOOL!! INSENSATE!! Is this how you care for your body? Your soul? Allowing this… this BROKEN UCHIHA TO USE YOU LIKE A…!

Kurama's anger was a hurricane of reproaches, so visceral Naruto felt a physical pain in his chest he didn't know what to say, anyway he couldn't have. But the bijuu's fury wasn't directed only at him. Its mental attention, laden with contempt, turned toward the figure lying exhausted next to its host.

And you! Damned Uchiha scum! Is this how you repay the loyalty he held for you? Violating his trust, his… his compassion? You wallow in your misery and drag him down with you! You're as selfish as ever!

Naruto, mentally, didn't try to defend himself. He only projected toward Kurama a wave of his own sadness, his infinite exhaustion, the image of Sasuke broken and pleading. There was no justification, only the raw reality of an impossible choice.

Kurama stopped.

Its roar died down into a low, dangerous growl. It felt the profound devastation in Naruto's heart, the grief that wasn't regret but a tombstone of pain. It wasn't approval, far from it. The fury was still there, boiling beneath the surface, but it yielded to the overwhelming misery of its jinchuriki. It snorted, a sound like the echo of an earthquake in Naruto's mind.

…Idiots. Both of you. Now get out of here. You reek of tragedy and stupidity.

The mental silence that followed was almost as oppressive as the shouts.

Sasuke, feeling the sudden tension in Naruto's body, moved slowly. With a groan of pain, he separated from him. Physical reality, cold and uncomfortable, returned with full force. He avoided looking Naruto in the eye while, with clumsy, painful movements, he dressed in the rags that remained of his clothes. Naruto did the same, his one arm making the task difficult, feeling the dryness and grime stuck to his skin like a second guilt.

When they were more or less presentable, or at least, as presentable as two men who had been on the brink of death could be, they sat together on the cold ground.

Sasuke settled near Naruto, his shoulder brushing the blonde's, a proximity now charged with a new, toxic and necessary meaning. Now, with the adrenaline fading, clarity began to filter into his mind like a slow poison.

He knew the gravity of what he had done.

He knew it was wrong, that he had taken advantage of his friend's state, his compassion, to satiate his own desperate need. But that knowledge paled before the overwhelming happiness he felt at being by his side, at having his tacit permission to be close. The world could judge him. He didn't give a damn.

He had his crumb of heaven, and it was enough.

It was then that they heard deliberately loud footsteps approaching from the crater's edge. Both instantly went on alert, their aching bodies tensing for a fight that didn't come. Kakashi's figure appeared, standing at a respectful distance. His gaze, usually casual, swept over them both with an all-seeing intensity. He saw the rigid posture, the palpable discomfort, the way Sasuke leaned imperceptibly toward Naruto. He said nothing. He only nodded once, a gesture filled with immense weight, and then made a hand signal.

"This way. They're injured," his voice said, neutral, professional, hiding the knot of pain and worry he felt in his chest seeing the aftermath of what he had witnessed.

Shortly after, the rescue team arrived. Sakura burst onto the scene, her green eyes scanning frantically until they found Sasuke. A wave of relief so intense it nearly knocked her over flooded her.

"Sasuke-kun!" she shouted, running to him and falling to her knees at his side, her hands already glowing with the green chakra of her healing technique. "You're alive! Thank God!"

She began healing his wounds immediately, her concentration absolute on her work. Naruto watched the scene, and despite everything, a small sigh of relief, a shadow of his old, simple happiness, crossed his face upon seeing Sakura so focused and relieved.

It was a flash of the child Naruto, the one who loved Sakura and wanted her happiness.

But that flash didn't go unnoticed. Sasuke, who had his head inclined toward Sakura as she worked, saw that small smile on Naruto's face. And something twisted inside him, green and poisonous. Jealousy, the same he had always felt toward her, sprouted with renewed force.

She had his attention, his smile, his unrequited but constant love. He only had this silent, dirty complicity. His hand, the one he had left, clenched into a fist on the earth. He clutched the edge of Sakura's sleeve, not in gratitude, but in a possessive, bitter act, as if claiming a comfort he didn't want from the one who stole Naruto's gaze.

Kakashi watched everything from a few steps away, his arms crossed. His heart, already heavy, sank a little further. He saw Sakura's relieved happiness, ignorantly healing the man she loved; he saw Naruto's sad smile, laden with a pain only he understood; and he saw the dark possessiveness in Sasuke's eyes, watching Naruto from another person's lap. It was a tangled knot of toxic affections and broken loyalties, and he, the sensei, felt completely powerless to untangle it.

The road home would be long, and the wounds they carried with them were much deeper than any physical scar.

The hospital room in Konoha was a cubicle of artificial peace. The smell of antiseptic and cleanliness tried, unsuccessfully, to mask the smell of trauma and secrets the two occupants carried with them. The evening light filtered through the window, bathing the two separate beds in a melancholy orange tone. Naruto lay in his, bandaged, with the stump of his right arm exposed, staring at the ceiling with a vacancy more worrying than any complaint of pain. In the adjacent bed, Sasuke remained seated, immobile, his eyes fixed not on the window, but on Naruto's profile.

The silence was thick, charged with the weight of the unsaid, of what had been done in the valley.

Sasuke, fueled by the dark certainty that act had given him and by the voracious jealousy he had felt toward Sakura, broke the stillness. He rose with the feline elegance that never entirely abandoned him, despite the bandages and exhaustion. He crossed the few steps separating the beds and, without asking permission, slid under the sheets next to Naruto.

Naruto didn't even flinch. He just closed his eyes, as if he could block out reality simply by not seeing it.

"I'll accept Sakura," Sasuke announced, his voice low but clear, a statement of fact, not a proposal. His one arm rested on Naruto's chest, stroking him. "I'll make her happy. I'll be the man she deserves. It's what everyone wants, isn't it?"

He paused, leaning in so his lips brushed Naruto's ear, and his next phrase was a whisper laden with a toxic, absolute possessiveness.

"But you… you will be mine. Always. She will have my name and my facade. But you… you will have this. You will pay for having given me this. You belong to me."

It was then that Naruto's eyes opened, but they weren't his eyes. They glowed with a sinister red, and a grave voice, full of an ancestral hatred, roared from his lips, distorting them.

"ENOUGH, UCHIHA!! FILTHY PARASITE!! How much more will you defile my jinchuriki? Get your disgusting body away from him or I'll burn you from the inside out!!"

Kurama, using Naruto's voice, spat its fury. The room seemed to vibrate with the pressure of malignant chakra.

Sasuke didn't retreat. Not an inch. His Sharingan eye ignited instinctively, confronting the fox's crimson gaze. "Shut up, monster," he spat with glacial contempt. "This is none of your business. He is mine. He gave me the right. Don't interfere."

The battle of wills lasted an instant. Then, the red in Naruto's eyes faded, replaced by the watery blue of his own hopelessness. He took control of his voice, which sounded broken, exhausted, devoid of all emotion.

"Never… ever… will I love you, Sasuke," he said, looking directly at the ceiling, refusing to see him. "What happened… was pity. Nothing more."

Sasuke looked at him, and a sad, almost demented smile played on his lips.

"I know," he responded, as if Naruto had said the sky was blue. "But it's too late for that."

And then, with a determination that chilled the blood, Sasuke began to remove his hospital gown, his excitement already visible. His movements were clumsy from the lack of an arm, but not hesitant. Naruto didn't move. He didn't protest. He didn't scream. He just closed his eyes again, resigned, listless, a spectator in his own body.

It was a surrender so absolute it was more terrifying than any resistance.

Sasuke, with a strength owed more to obsession than physical recovery, moved Naruto. He put him on his hands and knees, his back to him, a position that denied any intimacy, any eye contact. He pulled Naruto's pajama pants down to his thighs with a single brusque movement. Tears welled in Sasuke's eyes, not of pleasure, but of a fierce pain, from the rejection Naruto had just uttered and which he refused to accept.

They were tears of rage and possession.

"Mine," he gasped, and without further preamble, he penetrated him.

Naruto held his breath, a small, pained moan escaping his lips before he could bite it back. Then, silence. He remained completely still, like a rag doll, enduring the clumsy, painful thrusting. He made no sound, didn't move, his fists clenched on the white sheets, but otherwise, he was a statue of hopelessness.

Sasuke, in contrast, was noisy. Ragged gasps, moans that were more whimpers of effort and emotional release than of pleasure. For him, sex had never mattered, had never been more than a distant concept. But this… this wasn't sex. It was an exorcism. A way to mark, to possess, to merge with the only person who mattered, even through pain and rejection. Each thrust was a silent scream of "I'm here!", "Look at me!", "We are the same!". He moaned, sweated, and the tears continued to fall onto Naruto's bandaged back, mixing with sweat.

Naruto didn't respond. He just endured. His mind had disconnected, floating somewhere far away, a place where pain and betrayal couldn't reach him. Kurama raged in the depths of his being, a storm of impotent fury, but contained by his jinchuriki's own nihilistic desire to simply… be done.

To let Sasuke take what he wanted and, perhaps, then, be satisfied.

It was a Dantesque scene. The sterilized room, lit by the soft evening light, witnessed a slow, silent rape, where the aggressor wept for the love he would never have and the victim offered himself in sacrifice for a peace he knew would never come. And all of it, wrapped in the grotesque disguise of a love that was never, and would never be, reciprocated.

The moon had replaced the sun, bathing the silent corridors of Konoha's hospital in a cold, silvery light. Sakura, taking advantage of her night shift and driven by a restlessness that hadn't left her since the valley, crept quietly toward her companions' room. Something about the way Kakashi-sensei had shooed her away, about the palpable tension emanating from the closed door, gave her no peace. She wanted to see them, assure herself with her own eyes that they were okay, that the strange energy she felt was just a product of her worry.

The door wasn't completely closed. A crack, a careless oversight by a tired doctor or perhaps by cruel fate, allowed a sliver of the room to be seen. Sakura approached, her heart beating with a dire premonition. And then, she saw it.

Her world stopped.

The scene unfolding before her eyes was so surreal, so grotesquely out of place, that her brain refused to process it at first. There was Sasuke, her Sasuke, the man she had cried for, waited for, and fought for for years, moving over another figure with an animal urgency. His low but perceptible gasps filled the night's silence like an obscene mantra. And beneath him, motionless, lying on his side with his face hidden but with that characteristic blonde hair, was Naruto. Inert. Accepting.

A scream choked in her throat, turning into a silent, dry heave.

Her hand flew to her mouth, pressing hard to make no sound. Her green eyes, so full of hope hours before, instantly flooded with tears, clouding her vision of the nightmare before her.

And then, as if a key turned in a rusty lock, everything clicked into place. Kakashi-sensei's evasiveness. The strange proximity between them in the valley. The look of dark possession in Sasuke's eyes even as she healed him. The profound sadness in Naruto's. It wasn't just the bond of comrades.

It was this. It had always been this.

Why didn't Kakashi-sensei want me here? she thought, and the answer hit her with the force of a fist. To protect me from this.

To protect us all.

Tears ran hot and silent down her cheeks. She looked at Sasuke, at his face contorted in a grimace that wasn't of pleasure, but of anguish and a desperate need, and something inside her broke forever. She understood, with a clarity that shattered her soul, that Sasuke loved Naruto in a way so deep, so obsessive, and so destructive that there would never, never, be space for her in that abyss.

Not in the way she yearned for.

But then, another thought, twisted and venomous, rose from the ashes of her broken heart. If this was how Sasuke loved… if this was how he connected… then she would accept it. If being loved by Sasuke meant being used, possessed, even hurt in that distorted intimacy, she would accept it. It was better than nothing.

It was better to be a substitute in the darkness than never to be chosen in the light.

Team 7 has its secret, she thought, and the phrase resonated in her mind like a sentence. A grotesque and painful secret that would bind them together forever in a chain of lies and suffering.

Sakura saw herself, not outside the door, but in the bed. She imagined her own body under Sasuke's, her own tears mixing with his, her own pain being the price for feeling his hands on her. And to her own horror, she found solace in that image. If she couldn't have his pure love, she would have his broken version. It would be enough.

It had to be enough.

Sasuke moaned, a sound laden with a raw emotion impossible to fake. It was a sound directed at Naruto, and only at Naruto. Sakura looked at him, and knew, with absolute certainty, that he would never make that sound for her. He would never desire her with that fierce, desperate intensity.

She just wanted to be loved.

And if the price to obtain even a miserable fraction of Sasuke's love was to become an accomplice to his lie, a secondary actor in his tragedy with Naruto, then she would pay the price. She would accept the lie. She would play the role of the girlfriend, the future wife, the perfect facade. And in the intimacy of her mind, she would imagine that every cold glance from Sasuke, every absent caress, was an echo of the passion he reserved only for the man lying motionless in the next bed.

With her heart in pieces and a terrible decision carved into her soul, Sakura withdrew from the threshold. She walked away silently down the corridor, her tears drying on her face, leaving behind the room and the secret that was now, irrevocably, hers as well. She would accept everything for Sasuke. Even her own emotional annihilation.

Because in Team 7's dark new world, that seemed to be the only kind of "love" that existed.

— "Nhg.... Ahh.... AH......" — Sasuke's final spasm was a choked, hoarse cry that tore through the oppressive silence. It wasn't a cry of ecstasy, but the final explosion of an unbearable emotional tension, the violent discharge of a lifetime of anguish, obsession, and unrequited love. His body, already exhausted from the battle and now from the act itself, convulsed over Naruto, trembling uncontrollably, as if every muscle protested in unison. He gasped, stuck to the blonde's sweaty back, while the aftershocks of the orgasm—more physical than pleasurable—racked his torso in brief, exhausting spasms.

— "G-good... it was... perfect...." — With a superhuman effort, he raised his head enough to look down. And he saw it. The silent, involuntary evidence of Naruto's physiology, a small white puddle on the rumpled sheets. A bitter, empty triumph seized him. It hadn't been just him. Naruto's body, treacherous to his will, had responded. For Sasuke, in his distorted reality, it was a validation, a tacit signature on the perverse contract he had just forged.

Renewed by this distorted perception, Sasuke thrust a few more times, slow, possessive, deep, savoring each one as if he were carving his mark into Naruto's very core.

Then, with an agonized groan, he pulled away.

Immediately, as if fearing the distance meant the end of their connection, he lunged at Naruto again, but this time to hug him from behind with his one arm, with a strength bordering on desperation. He began to rain wet, feverish kisses on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his spine, every inch of skin he could reach.

"Mine," he murmured between kisses, his voice a hoarse, spent whisper. "All mine. You always have been. You did well… you did so well…"

His words were possessive, trying to envelop Naruto in a web of false intimacy and affection. He rubbed his face against the blonde's back, inhaling his smell mixed with sweat and his own, intoxicating himself with the illusion of belonging.

Naruto didn't respond to the kisses, the words, the caresses.

He remained immobile for what seemed an eternity, simply holding his breath, waiting for the weight on him to leave. The moment Sasuke's embrace relaxed a little, an instant of post-coital exhaustion, Naruto moved.

— "I have to go to the bathroom..." — It was a quick, fluid movement, devoid of all emotion. He slid out of bed like a shadow, avoiding any further contact. Without a backward glance, without a word, he walked straight to the small attached bathroom and closed the door behind him. There was no slam, just a soft, definitive click.

Sasuke lay in the bed, on the mess of rumpled, stained sheets that bore witness to what had occurred. His body, aching and exhausted, sank into the mattress. He didn't feel rejected at that moment; he was too intoxicated by his own narrative of victory.

He heard the sound of the shower turning on, a white, purifying noise trying to wash away what he had done.

And Sasuke smiled. A small, weary, but genuinely happy smile in its distortion. He curled up in the space still warm from Naruto's body, burying his nose in the pillow where his scent remained.

The water ran, a soundtrack that for him wasn't of cleansing, but of acceptance.

I have him, he thought, closing his eyes, hugging himself in the empty bed. In the end, he belongs to me. He accepted the deal. His body did, even if his mind resists. That's enough.

For Sasuke Uchiha, broken beyond all repair, the sound of the shower wasn't the sound of Naruto fleeing. It was the sound of a treaty being sealed. A tacit and horrible agreement in which he was the sole beneficiary, and Naruto, the tribute. And in the quiet of the hospital room, with the echo of his own act still vibrating in the air and the sound of water washing away the evidence, he felt, for the first time in his life, complete and victorious.

His happiness was a monument to his own madness, and he was determined to live in it forever.

Three weeks had passed since the battle in the Valley of the End and the subsequent events in the hospital. The air in Ibiki Morino's office, austere and functional, smelled of old paper and contained tension. The midday light filtered through a high window, illuminating the scars on Ibiki's face and the tired but alert gaze of Kakashi Hatake, who was acting as interim Hokage and representing the village's interests.

Sasuke Uchiha, standing with a posture that pretended indifference but couldn't hide a deep fatigue, listened to the sentence. His clothes were simple, borrowed, and his single arm hung at his side. In front of him, Naruto and Sakura stood, flanking him as they always had, but now the distance between them was an invisible abyss laden with secrets and pain.

"…The sentence is two years of confinement in a maximum-security cell, with chakra-suppressing seals and constant surveillance," declared Ibiki in a voice that brooked no appeal. "Your conduct will be reviewed monthly. You will have no access to missions, advanced training, or most privileges of a Konoha shinobi during that time. Do you understand the terms, Uchiha?"

Sasuke nodded slowly, his dark eyes, now without the active Sharingan or Rinnegan but no less intense, settled not on Ibiki, but on Naruto. "I understand them," he said, his voice clear and cold.

Two Anbu agents, with fox and raccoon masks, approached. With efficient, impersonal movements, they placed heavy special steel handcuffs on his single wrist and began painting the kanji for chakra suppression on his skin, right on the nape of his neck and over his heart. The process was uncomfortable and humiliating, a physical reminder of his new status.

Prisoner.

It was amidst this silence, broken only by the scratch of the ink brush and the metallic click of the handcuffs, that Sasuke spoke again.

His voice cut the air like a knife.

"I have a question," he said, making everyone look at him. "As a prisoner… do I have the right to conjugal visits?"

The silence that followed was absolute. Ibiki stopped the brush in mid-air, his impassive gaze turning slightly perplexed. Kakashi, who was leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, straightened up abruptly, his one visible eye widening.

The tension in the room became palpable, electric.

Naruto, who had been looking at the floor with his one hand in his pockets, visibly paled. He felt the floor give way beneath his feet. Conjugal? The word resonated in his mind like a blow. He knew exactly what Sasuke was referring to, and the message was as clear as it was cruel.

The deal is still on. You're mine, and I'll make it known.

Kakashi shot a warning look at Sasuke, but it was ignored. His immediate concern shifted to Sakura. She was there, standing, listening to everything. How would she react? Would she break down?

Sasuke, completely ignoring the commotion he had caused, gently freed himself from the Anbu's grip and took a firm step toward Naruto. Everyone watched, paralyzed, as he stopped in front of the blonde, who seemed to have rooted to the spot.

"Naruto?" Sasuke asked, his tone almost conversational, but his eyes burned with an intensity that chilled the blood.

Before anyone could react, Sasuke leaned in and captured Naruto's lips in a brief but possessive kiss, a bold, defiant mark of ownership in front of the village authorities. It wasn't a kiss of love, but of reclamation. A seal upon the unwritten contract he had forced.

"I'll be waiting for you," Sasuke murmured against his lips, in a whisper only Naruto could hear, but that everyone felt.

Then, he turned and returned to the Anbu agents, extending his wrist for them to continue with the sealing, as if nothing had happened.

The room was in shock. Ibiki stared at Sasuke with a mixture of disbelief and a recalculation of the prisoner's dangerousness. Kakashi's jaw was tight, his mind frantically calculating the collateral damage, his gaze going from Naruto, who was petrified and pale, to Sakura, expecting the outburst of pain.

But the outburst never came.

Sakura had watched the scene with her large green eyes. For an instant, pain and betrayal had clouded her gaze. But then, something broke inside her in a different way. Instead of crying, her lips curved into a wide, forced, and overly bright smile.

"Sasuke-kun!" she exclaimed, with a laugh that sounded false and metallic in the tense room. "What a terrible joke! You and your dark humor! 'Conjugal visits'! Ha!" She brought a hand to her mouth, laughing, but her gaze didn't reach her eyes, which seemed glassy. "Just because I kissed you once when we were kids, you think we're a couple now! How silly! Kakashi-sensei, Ibiki-san, don't mind him, he's joking to lighten the tension!"

She ignored the previous scene as if nothing had happened.

Her performance was clumsy, transparent as glass to anyone who knew her, but it was brave. It was her way of grabbing the lie Sasuke had offered her—the facade—and clinging to it with tooth and nail.

She denied reality to be able to survive it.

Kakashi looked at her with deep pity. He knew it wasn't a joke. He knew exactly what he had just witnessed. But he admired her strength, even if it was the strength of self-deception.

"Yes…" Kakashi murmured, regaining his composure with effort. "A… very peculiar sense of humor, as always. Let's go, Sasuke. The procedure continues."

The Anbu agents, confused but professional, finished applying the seals and led Sasuke out of the office.

He didn't look back. His message had been delivered.

Naruto remained immobile, the kiss still burning on his lips like a branding iron, Sakura's false smile cutting his soul deeper than any kunai. The price of Sasuke's "deal" was already being collected, and everyone in that room was now his hostage.

Swallowing saliva heavily and very fearfully, he turned toward the woman he loved.

The door closed behind Sasuke and the Anbu, leaving a heavy, charged silence in Ibiki's office. The air seemed thick, hard to breathe. Naruto, still with the ghost of Sasuke's kiss burning on his lips and Sakura's forced smile etched on his retina, swallowed saliva again with difficulty. His heart beat hard against his ribs, a drum of guilt and confusion.

"Sakura-chan…" he began, his voice a tense, broken thread. "I… I have to explain… that wasn't… it's not what…"

He didn't know how to finish the sentence. How to explain the inexplicable? How to describe the monstrous tacit agreement Sasuke had forged between them in the darkness of his desperation?

Sakura didn't let him continue. Her artificial smile faded, but it wasn't replaced by the anger or pain Naruto expected. Instead, a serene, almost mature sadness covered her features. She looked at Naruto directly, her green eyes no longer shining with tears of illusion, but with the bitter clarity of one who has seen the truth head-on and has decided, even so, to move forward.

"I already know, Naruto," she said softly, interrupting him. "I've known since that night in the hospital."

The admission was as simple as it was devastating. Naruto felt the floor give way beneath his feet. She knew. She had seen. She had understood everything. And yet, she had smiled. She had lied.

Shame flooded him, hot and suffocating.

From his corner, Kakashi let out a deep, weary sigh. He passed a hand over his face, under his mask. The weight of being Hokage, of being sensei, had never felt so overwhelming.

"It seems Team 7 has specialized in keeping secrets no one should have to bear," he murmured, his voice grave, full of a profound resignation. "This… this is a disaster none of the academy manuals teach how to handle."

But he made no move to intervene. He knew this was between them. A knot only they could untangle, or in this case, accept was tangled forever.

Sakura approached Naruto. Not with furious steps, but with a quiet, tragic determination. To Naruto's astonishment and Kakashi's growing discomfort, Sakura extended her arms and enveloped him in a hug. It wasn't a passionate or romantic embrace; it was an embrace of consolation, of forced complicity, of shared grief.

"Thank you, Naruto," she whispered near his ear, her voice firm despite everything. "Thank you for everything you've done for him. For bringing him back. For… for enduring this."

Then, she pulled away just enough to plant a soft, cold kiss on his cheek. A kiss of farewell to innocence, to her old unrequited feelings, to the normality they would never have.

"I just want the three of us…" she continued, her voice trembling slightly. "to find a way to… coexist. To be a team. Somehow. It's all we have left."

Kakashi couldn't bear it any longer. The scene was too surreal, too painful. Seeing Sakura, the youngest, the one who should have been the most protected, accepting such a grotesque situation with a maturity that broke his heart, was more than he could process.

"I have… matters to attend to," he murmured, his voice hoarse. "Ibiki will need my signature for the confinement papers."

And he almost fled the room, leaving the two young people alone with the monstrous pact that had just been sealed not with a handshake, but with a treacherous kiss and a surrender embrace.

Naruto looked at her, astonished. His mind couldn't reconcile the image of the Sakura he had always loved, full of life and temper, with this serene, broken woman before him.

"Sakura-chan… what are you saying?" he managed to articulate.

She looked at him, and for the first time, a tear escaped her eye and traced her cheek, but her expression didn't break.

"That Sasuke-kun deserves your attention in every sense, including those conjugal visits," she repeated, as if declaring an irrevocable fact. "It's the only thing that will keep him… stable. The only thing that will give him something to live for during those two years. And you…" her gaze hardened slightly, not with anger, but with an iron determination. "…you promised him, didn't you? Somehow. I know it."

Naruto felt cornered.

Not by Sakura, but by the web of circumstances he himself had helped weave. His compassion, his promise to Sakura, his inability to reject Sasuke at his most vulnerable… it had all led to this point. Refusing now would shatter Sasuke and, worse, shatter the fragile peace Sakura was building upon the ruins of her own heart.

He saw the determination in her eyes. She wasn't asking him; she was telling him. She had accepted her role in this tragedy and was now passing the responsibility to him.

The pressure was unbearable. The weight of everyone's expectations—Sasuke's, Sakura's, the village's—rested on his shoulders. How to say no? How to break this chain now?

With his soul shriveled and a bitter taste in his mouth, Naruto lowered his head. Defeat, bitter and total, flooded him.

"Alright," he whispered, his voice so low it was barely heard. "I'll… I'll do it."

It wasn't a promise made out of love, or desire. It was a capitulation. An acceptance that his life, his body, and his emotional freedom were now currency for the stability of those he loved. And in the silence of Ibiki's office, with Sakura looking at him with a gratitude that broke his soul, Naruto Uzumaki sealed his own fate, not with a roar, but with a whisper of surrender.

And time passed, so quickly.

Sasuke's first month of confinement had passed with agonizing slowness. Each day was a replica of the last: four cold walls of reinforced steel, the persistent dampness seeping from the earth's depths, and the silence, broken only by his own footsteps and the breathing of the invisible guards outside his cell. But the worst was the absence of chakra. The suppression seals not only blocked his access to his energy but also dulled his senses, plunging him into a gray, oppressive fog. His doujutsu, another omnipotent extension of his being, lay dormant, blinding him in a way that went beyond the physical.

He was blind to intentions, to nuances, to the reality unfolding outside his prison.

That's why, when the heavy door of his cell creaked open that day, his heart gave a brutal lurch against his ribs. It was the day. The monthly visit. Naruto. A primitive, raw, and hopeful emotion flooded him. He straightened up on the hard cot, trying to appear calm, a pretense he didn't feel.

But the figure that entered the cell, after a humiliating and exhaustive security scan Sasuke could only imagine from the whispers and flashes of light under the door, wasn't the one he expected.

It was Sakura.

Dressed in simple clothes, with a tense, sad smile painted on her face, carrying a small basket with plain food.

The shock on Sasuke's face was instant and evident.

The light of hope that had illuminated his dark eyes was extinguished at once, replaced by a disappointment so profound it was almost a physical blow. His posture, which had straightened with expectation, slumped slightly.

"Sakura," he said, and his voice sounded flat, devoid of the emotion it had held a second before.

Sakura saw it. She saw it all. The fall of his features, the instant withdrawal. It hurt more than she was prepared for, but she clung to her role, to the lie she had accepted. "Hello, Sasuke-kun," she said, striving to sound cheerful. "I brought you some food. It's not much, but it's better than here, I'm sure."

She approached and placed the basket on the small metal table bolted to the floor. Sasuke didn't even look at it.

"Where's Naruto?" he asked directly, without preamble. His voice had an edge of impatience, an anxiety beginning to grow in his chest.

Sakura froze for a second, then forced a wider smile. "He's very busy! You know, with the reconstructions and… and his training to become Hokage. He asked me to come. He says next time he'll come!"

The lie sounded hollow even to her own ears.

Sasuke finally looked at her, and his gaze wasn't angry, but held a slightly irritated pity. He didn't believe her. But he had made a promise, a facade he had to maintain, damn it.

"I see," he murmured, looking away toward the wall. "That's… good for him."

An uncomfortable silence filled the cell. Sakura tried to fill it, talking nervously about the village, the progress, the patients she was treating at the hospital. Sasuke nodded occasionally, but his interest was palpably nil. His answers were monosyllables. "Yes." "No." "I see."

Sakura, hurt by his indifference but determined not to give up, took courage. With flushed cheeks and trembling hands, she moved a little closer.

"Sasuke-kun… if… if you want…" she stammered, looking at her hands. "I… I can… you know… be here for you. Like… like a wife should."

The offer hung in the air, fragile and laden with a desperation she tried to hide. It was all she could offer, all she believed he might accept from her.

Sasuke looked at her then, and for the first time, his expression softened a little, not with desire, but with a kind of distant pity.

"No, Sakura," he said, his voice soft but firm, irrevocable. "It's not necessary. Don't bother with that."

It wasn't a rejection out of courtesy. It was an absolute denial. He didn't desire her. He didn't want her comfort. He didn't want her intimacy. The only body he wanted in that cell, the only comfort he would accept, was Naruto's.

Sakura held her breath, the pain of the denial sharp and stabbing. But she nodded, swallowing her pride and her wounded love.

"Alright," she whispered. "As you wish, Sasuke-kun."

The remaining hour of the visit passed in mostly uncomfortable silence, with Sakura attempting trivial conversation and Sasuke responding with minimal effort. The other four hours proceeded the same way. When she finally left, promising to return next month, the door closed behind her with a final clang that echoed in Sasuke's soul.

And then, alone again, the emotion that flooded him wasn't relief, but a cold anger and an abysmal sadness. He stood up and punched the steel wall, again and again, until his knuckles bled and the physical pain briefly overshadowed the emotional pain.

He was supposed to come. He promised. He lied to me.

Anxiety seized him, an icy claw around his heart. What if he didn't come next time? What if it was Sakura again next time? What if no one came next time?

Sasuke Uchiha's deepest fear, the child who had lost everything and clung to vengeance to avoid feeling alone, resurfaced with brutal force: the fear of being abandoned.

Of being forgotten. Of becoming a ghost in a cell, irrelevant to the only being that mattered.

Naruto had the world at his feet. He had the village, his friends, his dream of Hokage. What did Sasuke have? A cold cell and the broken promise of visits that were his only tether, his only proof that he still existed in Naruto's mind.

He let himself fall onto the cot, burying his face in his arm. The cell, already oppressive, felt like a tomb. And for the first time since sealing his "deal," Sasuke Uchiha felt terribly, irremediably, alone.

And he knew that if Naruto forgot him, it would be a condemnation far worse than any prison.

Naruto's new home was everything he had dreamed of during his cold, lonely childhood. It wasn't a clan's enormous mansion, but a spacious, modern, and cozy house, built with part of the inheritance and recognition granted to him after learning the truth about his parents, Minato Namikaze and Kushina Uzumaki. With enough space for a family of five, it had a large kitchen, a living room with big windows that let in the sun, and an incipient garden that Naruto cared for with timid affection.

It was a warm place, full of light and peace, the perfect antidote to the ghosts of his past in that tiny, shabby apartment.

One afternoon, as Naruto tried to concentrate on preparing an especially elaborate ramen—an attempt at normality and self-care—the insistent, furious sound of the door being pounded on shattered the tranquility. Upon opening it, he found Sakura. But it wasn't the Sakura with the tense, resigned smile of recent times.

This Sakura had bloodshot eyes, disheveled hair, and a furious desperation in every line of her body. "Why haven't you gone? Months have passed, you have to go!" she blurted, without even a greeting, pushing the door to enter. "It's today! The visit! You promised!"

Naruto blinked, the wooden spoon he was holding still in his hand. The aroma of the ramen broth, which usually comforted him, now seemed sour and out of place.

"Sakura-chan… not now, please..." he said, trying to stay calm, stepping back. "I'm… I'm not well. Not today."

It was the first time he had openly refused. The first time he put his own well-being ahead of Sasuke's constant demand.

The refusal made Sakura's fury explode. "You're not well?" she shouted, advancing toward him. "And him?! Do you think he's well in that cell, waiting for you, wondering why you've abandoned him?! After everything you did to bring him back?! You abandon him now?!"

"I'm not abandoning him!" Naruto retorted, and for the first time, his own voice rose with genuine anger toward her. The spoon fell to the floor with a dull sound. "I just need a break, Sakura! I need… one day! One single day without having to… that! Is it so hard to understand?"

Sakura looked at him as if she didn't recognize him. The exhaustion, the stress, the pressure of maintaining the farce and seeing Sasuke waste away in his absence had pushed her to the limit.

"Yes, it is hard to understand!" she shouted, and suddenly, tears began to stream down her cheeks, mixing with the rage. "Because you've always been able to handle everything, Naruto! Always! You faced Pain, you saved the world, you brought him back! You're the hero who can do the impossible! And now you can't handle this?!"

She grabbed the lapels of his jacket, shaking him with a strength he didn't know she had. "You're my best friend! And I need you! He needs you! Don't fail me now! Don't fail us now!"

And then, in an act of total desperation, of pure emotional manipulation born from her own unbearable pain, she stood on her toes and crushed her lips against Naruto's. It wasn't a kiss of love or desire. It was a kiss salty with tears, rough, full of anguish and a brutal demand.

She pulled away panting, staring intently into his eyes, her own face contorted with pain.

"Make him happy, Naruto," she whispered, her voice broken and full of a pain that pierced through Naruto's anger like a knife. "It's our duty. Mine for loving him, and yours for… for being you. For being the one who saved him. It's the only way. Please."

Naruto looked at her, petrified. The anger vanished, replaced by a deep disturbance. Seeing Sakura, the strong, resilient girl he had always admired, reduced to this—begging, manipulating, destroying herself for a man who would never love her—was a blow more effective than any punch.

He understood, with a horrible clarity, that it wasn't just about Sasuke. It was about Sakura. It was about not seeing her suffer anymore. It was about being the "hero" everyone always expected him to be, the one who carried everyone's problems, even at the cost of his own soul.

Sakura's tears continued to flow, silent now, and each one was a reproach, a burden added to his shoulders.

With his heart clenched in a fist, with the salty taste of her tears and desperation still on his lips, Naruto lowered his head.

The fight left his body. The aroma of ramen had become the smell of his own surrender.

"Alright," he murmured, his voice so low it was barely heard. "I'll go."

He didn't say it for Sasuke. He said it for her. For the friend crying in his kitchen, asking him to save the man who was destroying them both. And in that moment, he understood that his new home, warm and bright, would always have a cold shadow coming from an underground cell, and that the peace he had dreamed of would always be intertwined with this torturous duty.

He accepted. Because, in the end, he was Naruto Uzumaki, and that was what was expected of him.

Six months. Half a year of confinement in a cell that smelled of rust, dampness, and silent hopelessness. Six months of monthly visits that were a bitter reminder of his solitude, not a relief. Kakashi, with his somber attitude and carefully measured conversations, trying to be a bridge to a normality that no longer existed. Sakura, with her tense smile and eyes full of an unrequited love that became more pathetic with each visit.

Sasuke endured them, not out of courtesy, but because they were the only tenuous link to the outside world, but each one left a more bitter aftertaste than the last. He felt abandoned. Naruto's promise, sealed with a forced kiss in Ibiki's office, felt like a cruel mockery. Was this his punishment? To be forgotten?

Hope, a faint flame that had been kept alive with fierce obstinacy, began to extinguish, suffocated by the certainty of abandonment. The day of the visit had arrived again, and Sasuke, instead of waiting anxiously on the cot, remained standing by the cold wall, looking at the door with disdain and resentment. He would hear the creak, see Sakura or Kakashi enter, and disappointment would corrode him a little more.

The metallic creak sounded at the exact hour. Sasuke clenched his fists, preparing for the mask of indifference. The door opened heavily.

But the figure that entered wasn't the expected one.

It was Naruto.

He looked uncomfortable, out of place. He wore casual joggers and an orange sweatshirt, but seemed to want to shrink inside it. His steps were hesitant as he crossed the threshold, and his blue gaze avoided Sasuke's directly, fixing on some point on the wall behind him.

There was a palpable tension in his shoulders, a reluctance in every fiber of his being.

The surprise was so violent that for a second, Sasuke felt nothing. Then, the accumulated emotion of six months of abandonment, hurt, and rage, erupted to the surface, but distorted into venomous sarcasm.

"Well," he said, his voice icy and cutting like the edge of a kunai. "The great hero of Konoha finally deigns to visit the prisoner. Run out of important missions? Or did you simply get lost?"

Naruto blinked, the provocation reaching him, but he didn't take the bait. He took a deep breath, maintaining his calm with visible effort.

"If you don't want me here, I'll leave," he responded, his voice flat, devoid of his usual energy. He turned toward the door.

The gesture of leaving, the real possibility that he would leave, instantly shattered Sasuke's armor of sarcasm. Panic, raw and visceral, shot through him. Before Naruto could take a second step, Sasuke lunged forward. His one arm hooked around Naruto's torso, holding onto him with desperate strength.

"No!" the word was a choked cry, a broken sound that didn't seem to come from him. "Don't go! Please… don't go…"

All the resentment, anger, and sarcasm evaporated, laying bare the wounded, terrified creature beneath. He buried his face in Naruto's back, trembling.

"I've missed you so much…" he murmured, his voice now a vulnerable whisper, laden with six months of anguished solitude. "I thought you'd forgotten me."

Naruto stood still, surprised by the intensity of the reaction. He felt the tension in Sasuke's body, the desperation in his grip. Slowly, with a hesitation that betrayed his internal conflict, he raised his new hand and placed it on Sasuke's arm that held him. It wasn't an embrace, but a timid caress, a gesture of consolation.

The contact, simple and gentle, was like melting a block of ice. Sasuke sank even more against him, a dry sob escaping his chest. He allowed it, letting that minimal show of affection calm him like a miraculous balm.

"Why?" Sasuke asked, looking up, his dark eyes shining with unshed tears. "Why didn't you come before? Was it to punish me?"

Naruto looked down, finally facing Sasuke's reality. He saw the pain, the raw need, and his own anger and humiliation receded, replaced by a deep and complicated pity.

"No… not exactly," he admitted, his voice low. "I… felt… used. Like an object. And a part of me… a small, mean part… wanted you to feel bad too. To feel something of what I felt."

He paused, swallowing. "But Sakura-chan… she came to see me. She cried. She begged me. She said that… you were wasting away in here. That you needed me. And I…" his eyes met Sasuke's, full of a resigned sadness. "…I couldn't see her cry. Not again. So I came."

The truth was hard and unflattering. He hadn't come out of desire, or love, but because of another person's plea and to alleviate his own guilt. But for Sasuke, in his state of absolute need, it was enough. Naruto was there. That was all that mattered.

Outside, in the hallway, the Anbu guards assigned to surveil the "conjugal visit" exchanged a significant look behind their masks. They knew what day it was. They knew why Naruto Uzumaki specifically came to that cell on that day of the month. No one commented. No one smiled. They simply stepped aside and allowed the private, painful drama of the friends to unfold behind the steel door, in the complicit silence of a village that preferred not to see the torn seams of its heroes.

The price of peace was sometimes paid in secrets and in the hearts of its protectors.

Naruto's new arm, a marvel of medical engineering and the genius of Tsunade and Sakura, moved with a still-perceptible clumsiness, but with growing fluidity. The fingers, once Zetsu's and now made of cultivated cells, interlaced gently in Sasuke's thick jet-black hair as he lay with his head reclined in the blonde's lap. The cell, normally a cubicle of cold despair, had been transformed in those moments into a bubble of distorted peace. The daylight, filtered through a small high grate, settled on them like a spotlight on an intimate and tragic play.

They had five hours.

Five hours stolen from the rigor of imprisonment, five hours of a borrowed normality they both knew was a farce, but which they clung to with desperation. Naruto talked. His voice, deeper than before but still charged with his characteristic enthusiasm, filled the space between the four steel walls. He talked about the reconstructions in the village, about the new jutsus he was perfecting, about the low-rank missions he supervised as part of his training for Hokage.

Sasuke listened.

Not just heard; he absorbed every word like a thirsty man in the desert. His eyes closed, his features relaxed in an expression of peace rarely seen on him, betrayed a deep, almost childish happiness. He commented with brief assents or laconic but sharp opinions, demonstrating that his mind, despite the confinement, remained as perceptive as ever.

He was the companion, the equal, the confidant he had always been at heart.

"…and Kiba is still just as rowdy, but he's a loyal guy," Naruto continued, a timid smile on his lips. "Even Shikamaru goes out more, even if it's just to complain about work. It's… funny. Now everyone greets me, they know me. Even the old folks at the market sometimes give me free fruit. It's weird, after so long being… you know."

The popularity, the village's affection, were things Naruto had yearned for all his life. Now he had them, and he mentioned them with a mix of pride and genuine amazement.

It was then that Sasuke opened his eyes. The peace broke in his gaze, replaced by a dark, familiar shadow. He looked up at Naruto's face bathed in the faint light, and his expression became possessive, intense.

"Forget them," he said, his voice low, but with a steel edge. "All of them. You don't need them."

Naruto stopped stroking Sasuke's hair, confused. "What? But Sasuke, they're my friends. They're important for—"

"No," Sasuke interrupted, his tone becoming colder, more demanding. "Be only mine. As we agreed. Here, and outside… you always will be. You don't need anyone else."

The declaration, so crude and absolutist, made Naruto's blood run cold. The bubble of false normality burst.

"Sasuke, that's not fair," he protested, removing his hand from Sasuke's hair. "I have the right to have friends. To… to love other people, even. To meet someone someday. You have Sakura-chan, don't you?" The mention of Sakura was a clumsy attempt to balance the scales, to remind him of his own facade commitment.

It was the wrong mistake.

Sasuke's eyes ignited with a green, venomous fire. He sat up abruptly, separating from Naruto's lap. The proximity that had been comforting before became oppressive.

"I don't want Sakura!" he spat, his voice rising for the first time, charged with contained rage. "That's the lie you helped create! She means nothing! You are everything! And I won't allow anyone else to touch you, anyone else to have you! Not friends, not lovers, no one!"

The possessiveness, the control he demanded, was suffocating. Naruto looked at him, and the pity he felt began to transform into something else, into anger. An anger contained by months of submission and guilt.

"That's insane, Sasuke!" he retorted, also rising from the bed, confronting him. "I'm not your property! I'm not an object you can keep in a box! I've spent my whole life fighting to be accepted, to have bonds, and now that I have them, you want me to throw them away?! Why?! For your whim?!"

"Because you're mine!" roared Sasuke, advancing until their faces were centimeters apart. His breath was hot and furious. "You belong to me! You promised me! Here, in this very cell, we agreed you would give me your body, your silence! You don't give that to anyone else! Never!"

The mention of that humiliating night in the hospital was the last straw for Naruto. The flush of shame and anger rose up his neck.

"That was a mistake!" he shouted, his voice trembling with rage and pain. "It was pity! It was because I saw you broken and didn't know what else to do! It wasn't love, Sasuke! It never was!"

The words fell like hammer blows in the space between them. The silence that followed was deafening. The cell, which minutes before had been a refuge, was now a battlefield where Team 7's deepest wounds were open and bleeding. For the blonde, the conjugal visit was over, and only the raw reality of a bond poisoned by need, possession, and a love only one of them felt remained.

Naruto's fury was a tangible wall between them, a barrier Sasuke, in his blinding panic of losing him, had erected with his own words.

Seeing the fire in those blue eyes, so familiar but never directed at him with such resentment, terrified him more than any cell or suppression seal. The specter of absolute solitude, of Naruto leaving and never returning, seized him with icy claws.

The anger in his own chest extinguished at once, replaced by absolute panic. He took a step back, his arrogant, demanding expression fading, revealing the vulnerable fear of the child he had always carried inside.

"Naruto… wait," his voice, which moments before had roared, was now a broken whisper. "I'm sorry. I… I'm truly sorry. I didn't mean… that."

Naruto looked at him distrustfully, his own anger still throbbing in his temples. The apology sounded sincere, but he knew Sasuke's emotional twists and turns too well.

"They were just… jealousy," Sasuke continued, fumbling for words, something that felt unnatural to him. "Stupid, childish. Seeing you talk about others… about a life that doesn't include this cell… drives me crazy. But it's no excuse."

He lowered his gaze, defeated. "Please… don't leave like this."

Naruto studied his face. He saw the genuine anguish, the fragility that only he had the power to provoke in the last Uchiha. His anger, though justified, began to yield under the overwhelming weight of the compassion and responsibility he felt for this broken man. He sighed, a sound laden with a weariness that went beyond the physical.

"Sasuke…" he murmured, the fire in his voice gone, leaving behind the ashes of resignation.

Without saying anything else, he turned and sat down heavily on the edge of the hard cot. The message was clear; he wasn't leaving. But the tension hadn't completely dissipated.

Sasuke watched him, relieved but still unsure. The air remained charged.

Then, with a grim determination, Naruto began to remove his orange sweatshirt. There was no passion in the gesture, no desire. It was a mechanical movement, almost bored, like someone carrying out an unpleasant but inevitable task. He wanted to get this over with. He wanted the five hours to pass quickly. He wanted to fulfill his part of the horrible deal and leave.

Sasuke, interpreting the action as a truce, as a tacit acceptance, approached. With his one hand that trembled slightly, he helped Naruto remove his clothes, his fingers brushing the blonde's skin with a reverence that contrasted grotesquely with Naruto's coldness.

When both were undressed, Naruto's discomfort was palpable. He remained seated on the bed, looking straight ahead, his body tense, waiting.

Sasuke knelt before him, his gaze pleading now, not demanding.

"Naruto…" he whispered. "Please… don't… don't be just a rag doll. Touch me. Look at me. I want… I want to feel that you're here with me. Not just your body."

It was a desperate request for a real connection, for something that transcended the empty physical act. Naruto finally looked at him, and in Sasuke's dark eyes he saw the same abysmal loneliness that had always moved him, even now, angry and resentful.

He sighed again, more deeply this time. The fight left his body. "How?" he asked, his voice flat, but no longer hostile.

"However you want," Sasuke responded quickly, almost eagerly. "Just… make me feel that you desire me. Even if it's a lie."

The crudeness of the request hit Naruto, but it also freed him. It gave him a minimum of control in a situation where he had always felt managed.

With a sudden movement that took Sasuke by surprise, Naruto grabbed him by the shoulders, lifting him and turning him, throwing him onto the cot on his back. Sasuke fell with a slight gasp, his face instantly flushing, a mix of shock and something else… expectation. This wasn't the passive submission he was accustomed to.

Naruto positioned himself over him, not with violence, but with a firmness that was new. His hands, with the regenerated arm still a bit clumsy but strong, settled on Sasuke's broad, pale chest.

"Like this…" Naruto murmured, more to himself than to the other. "Is this how you want it?"

Sasuke, with his head sunk in the thin pillow, nodded vigorously. "Yes…" his voice was muffled, but full of an emotion bordering on relief. "Yes…"

It was the deal. A twisted negotiation in a prison cell. Naruto would provide the illusion of desire, of control, in exchange for Sasuke accepting this dynamic, for not demanding more than Naruto could give. And Sasuke, hungry for any crumb of real or feigned affection, accepted. Because for him, even a lie from Naruto was better than the truth from anyone else. And so, in the cold cell, the farce continued, a painful dance between one's need and the other's resignation.

Naruto's silent preparation before the visit had not been in vain.

Unlike the first time, an act of violent desperation and painful clumsiness, this time there was a cold intention behind it. It wasn't desire, but a calculated strategy to survive the five hours, to fulfill the deal in the most efficient and least painful way possible, for both him and Sasuke. He had accepted the inevitable physical reality of these encounters and had decided, with a deep sadness, to take tacit control over them.

Sakura had even given advice beforehand.

That's why, when he took the initiative, it wasn't with the brusqueness of their first time, but with a serene, melancholic determination. He moved over Sasuke with a learned grace, a cadence that sought to minimize his own discomfort while administering the dose of physical connection Sasuke needed to not fall apart. His body, tanned by the sun of Konoha and molded by constant training, arched with a slender, powerful strength. The muscles of his abdomen tensed, his chest, now broad and defined, moved with each controlled thrust, drops of sweat tracing the golden skin.

— "This time we'll both enjoy it, not just one." — He took Sasuke's semi-flaccid penis and pumped it gently, waiting little by little as it stiffened and let out pre-seminal fluid while the Uchiha moaned like a cheap prostitute.

Sasuke, lying on his back, looked at him with a devotion bordering on religious. His dark eyes, usually cold or full of a somber intensity, were clouded by a delicious, vulnerable ecstasy. For him, Naruto wasn't just a man; he was a sun god riding his darkness, illuminating him from within. Every movement of Naruto's body was a work of art in his eyes, the way the light reflected off his bronzed skin, the way his muscles defined under the effort, the expression of serene concentration on his face, oblivious to pleasure but profoundly beautiful.

He liked it. He loved it. He desired it with a ferocity that consumed him.

"Naruto…" he gasped, his voice a broken thread of sound. "There… right there… don't stop... don't stop..." — He couldn't contain himself. The moans, the gasps, and the slight screams that accompanied his adolescent sensitivity escaped his lips without his permission.

Naruto guided his own penis, already covered by the raven-haired man's own semen, to his prepared entrance, entering slowly while also moaning from the intrusion, with clouded eyes, and his own penis now erect. He gasped as he sat on Sasuke's cock, and with impatient hip movements that made the cot creak in a grotesque manner, Naruto moaned and began to ride him while clinging to the Uchiha's shoulders.

— "N-Naruto.... AHHH...... NGH.... AAHHH..." — They were sounds of total surrender, of absolute surrender to the pleasure and emotion only Naruto could provoke in him. The acoustics of the steel cell amplified every sound, every moan, every ragged syllable of his name, until it penetrated the massive door.

"Yes…" Sasuke's voice was a broken whisper, muffled by the thin pillow. His body arched slightly, a total surrender. "Please, Naruto… don't stop." — He raised his hips, meeting the clash of their skins, and the obscene sound filled the place, sounding like wet applause so rapid that Sasuke let his tongue and saliva hang out, not caring about anything.

It was the signal.

Naruto began to move faster, and with the first controlled, deep movement, reason began to blur. It was no longer a task, a cold strategy. The carnality of the act, the sound of Sasuke's ragged breathing, the smell of sweat and familiar skin, lit a fuse inside him. Sasuke's need was a mirror of his own, a mutual addiction that transcended forgiveness and resentment.

Sasuke, for his part, came undone. Under Naruto's weight and movement, his armor of pride and cynicism shattered.

"Ah! N-Naruto!" he cried, his voice, usually so contained, tearing through the cell's cold air. "There! Just… just there! Sage…!"

His moans were loud, uninhibited, a cascade of broken sounds narrating his ecstasy. Each gasp was a plea, each moan a praise.

"More…" he begged, his voice interrupted by the thrusts, he had arched so much that his toes were curled. "Don't stop! I beg you!"

— "S-Sasuke.... Ah... Ngh..." — Naruto, driven by those sounds, by the absolute surrender he felt under his hands, plunged deeper into the current of sensations. His own breathing became heavy, his own moans joining the fray, a guttural rhythm that mixed with Sasuke's cries.

— "Is… is this?.... Ngh...." — Naruto grunted, his voice rough from effort and a raw emotion he could no longer contain. "Is this what drives you crazy? My strength… is this what calms your darkness, Sasuke?"

"Yes! Your strength! Your heat!" Sasuke moaned, writhing beneath him, his fingers clutching the blonde's hips with desperate strength leaving deep marks. "You are… you are so bright! Always… always so bright! You blind me!"

Naruto lowered his head, his lips near Sasuke's ear without stopping his riding, his breath hot. Each word was a savage gasp, a hoarse whisper that only increased the intensity.

"Then moan..." — he ordered, his voice a vibration that ran down Sasuke's spine. "Scream my name. Let this whole damn prison know who makes you feel like this. Let them know it's me. Only me."

The order was like releasing a dam. Sasuke screamed, a long, strangled sound laden with absolute fullness.

"NARUTO!" His voice echoed against the steel walls, an echo of pure satisfied need. "Yours! I'm all yours!"

The crudeness of the declaration, the intense surrender, pushed Naruto over his own edge. His own control cracked. A deep, guttural growl escaped his throat, a primal sound of possession and culmination. His body tensed like a bow, before collapsing onto Sasuke with a weight that was both exhausting and comforting.

The stillness that followed was broken only by the sound of their panting breaths, trying to recover their breath even as he was being thrust into by his best friend who hadn't yet reached climax. The air was heavy and charged, saturated with the smell of their bodies and the echo of their voices.

Naruto didn't move immediately. He remained there, on top of Sasuke, feeling the Uchiha's frantic heartbeat against his own chest being used as if it were a blow-up doll. The anger was gone. The resignation too.

In its place was a dense, satisfied fatigue, and the unsettling understanding that, in the distortion of their relationship, this was another thread binding them irrevocably.

Sasuke, beneath him, was far from placid and malleable. A trembling sigh escaped his lips.

"No one… Ngh..." — he murmured, his voice barely a thread of sound, hoarse from the screams. "No one makes me feel like this. Only you, Naruto. Only you… Ahh...."

Outside, in the hallway, the two Anbu guards with badger and fox masks remained motionless as statues. But behind the porcelain masks, their faces were tense, embarrassed. They exchanged uncomfortable looks, adjusted the grip on their weapons, looked at the ceiling. Listening to the intimate, passionate sounds of the village's hero and its most notorious prisoner was a violation of their professionalism and their morals. It was a grotesque reminder of the dirty secrets lying beneath the surface of the peace they fought for. But their orders were clear: do not interfere. Protect the privacy of the "conjugal visit." So they endured, ashamed and silent, while the echoes of the act filled the underground corridor.

Inside, time lost all meaning. After the main act, there was more. Slow, exploratory touches, shared baths in the small water basin, whispers (mostly from Sasuke) and caresses (mostly from Naruto, executed with an almost clinical precision). Naruto was determined to exhaust Sasuke physically and emotionally, to leave him so satisfied and exhausted that there was no room for more demands, for more jealousy, for more dramas.

Finally, when the five hours were coming to an end, they lay intertwined on the narrow cot. Sasuke was turned toward Naruto, his head resting in the hollow of the blonde's shoulder, his one arm encircling his torso with a possessive but exhausted strength. His breathing was deep and regular, his body relaxed, bathed in a deep, undoubtable happiness.

A small smile, rare and genuine, played on his lips. He was satisfied. Completely and willingly.

Naruto held him, his arm around Sasuke's shoulders. He looked at the steel ceiling, his expression inscrutable. He didn't feel Sasuke's happiness, but a deep void, a fatigue of the soul. But there was a minimum of solace in knowing that, for now, the beast of Sasuke's need was appeased. He had complied. He had kept his part of the horrible deal.

"Don't go…" Sasuke murmured, half asleep, burying himself deeper into Naruto's side.

"Not yet," Naruto whispered in response, his voice soft but empty.

And they stayed like that, in an embrace that was both a prison and a comfort, a testimony of a bond as unbreakable as it was deeply damaged. Sasuke fell asleep with Naruto's smell in his lungs and the illusion of being loved in his heart.

Naruto remained awake, listening to the guards' footsteps outside, wondering how many more times he would have to play this role before his own heart broke completely.

The daylight filtering through the high grate was beginning to wane, tinged with the orange and purple hues of dusk. In the cell, the air, still charged with the sweetish smell of sex and sweat, was beginning to cool. Naruto, now fully dressed, was adjusting the cuffs of his orange sweatshirt with precise, somewhat mechanical movements.

Each gesture was a step closer to normality, to the outside world where this claustrophobic pact didn't exist.

Sasuke, lying on the cot and covered only to the waist with a rumpled sheet, watched him with half-asleep eyes full of a deep placidity. Happiness, that rare and fragile emotion, clung to his features, softening them. For him, this moment was the perfect culmination of the previous hours, seeing his "partner" preparing to leave, but with the promise of a return. His gaze, drowsy and satisfied, drifted toward the door, slightly ajar, where the impassive silhouettes of two Anbu guards waited silently, respecting the last moment of intimacy but reminding them that the visit time had expired.

They were the shadow of reality, waiting to reclaim Naruto.

But Sasuke's happiness had a time limit. When Naruto finished dressing and turned toward the door, a shadow of sadness crossed the Uchiha's face. The sheet suddenly felt colder, the cell emptier.

"Naruto..." he called, his voice soft, still hoarse from fatigue and contained emotion.

Naruto stopped on the threshold, turning to look at him one last time.

"Come back soon," Sasuke said, and though he tried to sound serene, he couldn't hide the yearning in his tone. "I'll… I'll be waiting. Anxiously."

The declaration was simple, but loaded with all the need and dependency that defined his existence now. Naruto nodded slowly, once more. There was no smile, but there was no rejection either. It was an acknowledgment, a silent "message received."

It was at that moment that a taller, broader figure blocked the light from the hallway. Ibiki Morino, with his scarred face and habitual expression of relentless severity, planted himself in the entrance. His presence immediately filled the space, adding another layer of formality and crudeness to the already tense farewell.

"Uzumaki," he nodded toward Naruto, then his gaze fell on Sasuke, who was still reclining on the cot. "Uchiha."

He paused, letting his gaze sweep quickly over the cell, taking note of everything without judgment.

"I've spoken with the Hokage," he announced, his voice a low rumble that brooked no doubt. "After evaluating the… behavioral progress of the inmate during these visits, it has been decided to extend the privilege."

Sasuke sat up a little more, intrigued, though trying not to appear too hopeful.

"The conjugal visits," Ibiki continued, pronouncing the words with deliberate neutrality, "will be authorized twice a month, instead of once. It is considered that maintaining this… bond… is beneficial for the inmate's emotional stability and long-term rehabilitation."

Ibiki's words were cold, clinical, reducing the complex and painful dynamic between Naruto and Sasuke to a "bond" and a "benefit for rehabilitation." It was the village's way of washing its hands, of formalizing the unformalizable.

Naruto blinked, clearly surprised. His eyes met Kakashi's, who must have approved this. Why? Was it a reward? A way to ensure Sasuke's cooperation? Or simply a pragmatic acceptance of a situation they could no longer control? A wave of internal conflict swept through him. Twice a month. It meant double the trips to this cell, double the performances, double having to disconnect from his own humanity. But it also meant Sasuke would be calmer, more stable, and perhaps… perhaps Sakura would suffer less.

With an internal sigh he didn't show on his face, Naruto lowered his head in a gesture of acceptance.

"Understood," he said, his voice clear and neutral, the voice of a shinobi accepting a mission, however repugnant.

Ibiki nodded, satisfied with the response. He turned on his heel and left, his footsteps echoing down the hall. The Anbu guards remained at their post, waiting.

Sasuke couldn't believe it. Surprise and then a silent ecstasy flooded him. Twice. Not just one crumb, but two. He looked at Naruto with shining eyes, a gratitude and happiness so intense they were almost painful.

Naruto held his gaze for a second more, then turned on his heel and left the cell without another word. The steel door closed behind him with a creak and a final clang that sealed the new agreement.

Inside, Sasuke let himself fall back onto the pillow, a real, wide, and rare smile illuminating his face. Outside, Naruto walked down the torch-lit corridor, the weight of Kakashi's decision and his own acquiescence adding another slab to the burden he carried on his shoulders. Sasuke's rehabilitation was progressing, but at a price only Naruto seemed to be paying, visit after visit, in the cold solitude of a cell and in the even colder solitude of his own heart.

The year had passed with a somber punctuality.

Naruto hadn't missed a single visit, marked on his calendar like gloomy reminders. Every fifteen days, like an unavoidable ritual, he descended to the depths of the prison complex, fulfilling his "duty" with a precision that reminded him of the most arduous missions, but with an infinitely greater emotional cost.

That day, he arrived a little earlier than usual, absorbed in his thoughts, mentally rehearsing the excuse he would give Sasuke for his brief delay the previous visit. Upon opening the cell door, he stopped short. The scene he found wasn't the usual one of Sasuke waiting alone, impatient or sunk in his thoughts.

Sakura was there.

Not the desperate, crying Sakura from his kitchen. This Sakura was dressed up, her long pink hair brushed with care and falling over her shoulders like a soft cascade. Simple but elegant makeup accentuated her green eyes, which now shone with a nervous but expectant light. She was sitting in the cell's only chair, talking to Sasuke, who, to Naruto's surprise, seemed to be listening with a neutral but not hostile attention. There was a slight openness in his posture, a flash of the normality everyone yearned for but that felt so out of place in that steel cubicle.

"…and Gai-sensei's regeneration therapy is going very well, I think soon he'll be able to…"

Sakura interrupted herself upon seeing Naruto enter. Sasuke, following her gaze, turned his head. Instantly, the neutrality on his face transformed. His eyes lit up with a genuine and profound joy, so intense it was almost painful to see.

"Naruto," he said, and his voice sounded clearer, more alive than it had in months. "You're here. I missed you."

He rose from the cot to approach him, with the clear intention of hugging or touching him, as he had come to do during these visits.

But Naruto, uncomfortable as never before, took an almost instinctive step back. His gaze fixed on Sakura, then on Sasuke, then back on Sakura. The flush of shame and discomfort rose up his neck.

"Sasuke, wait…" he murmured, averting his gaze. "Sakura-chan is here."

It was a warning, a tacit plea to keep up appearances, to protect the fragile lie the three of them upheld.

Sakura, instead of seeming hurt or apologizing and leaving, bit her lower lip. A strange determination shone in her eyes.

"Actually…" she said, her voice a bit tremulous but firm. "I wanted… to stay. Today."

Naruto looked at her as if she had just spoken in an unknown language. "Stay? For what? What do you mean?"

"I want to be… more intimate with you both..." she confessed, and an intense blush covered her cheeks, but she didn't lower her gaze. "I want… to see. Be part of this. Truly."

Sasuke, who had been observing the exchange with curiosity, shrugged with an indifference that chilled Naruto's blood.

"I don't mind," he said, as if they were deciding what to eat. "She can stay. If she wants to see, let her see."

For Sasuke, whose obsession with Naruto had erased all normal boundaries, Sakura's presence was irrelevant. Naruto was here. That was all that mattered. If she wanted to be a witness, welcome.

Naruto, however, felt as if the floor had opened beneath his feet. Disbelief turned into indignation and horror.

"What? No!" he exclaimed, his voice rising, full of visceral disgust. "Don't even think about it, Sasuke! That's… that's indecent! It's cruel! Sakura, you don't know what you're saying!"

But Sakura didn't back down. Nervous excitement, the morbid curiosity of years of unrequited love and the desperation to be included in some aspect of Sasuke's life, however twisted, drove her on.

"Yes, I do!" she retorted, rising from the chair and approaching Naruto, putting a hand on his arm to stop his protests. "And I agree! I want this! Please, Naruto! Don't exclude me! Let me stay!"

Her touch was supplicating, but her eyes begged to be a participant in an intimacy she knew would never be hers in any other way.

Naruto was paralyzed. He looked at Sakura, his friend, asking his permission to witness his own humiliation. He looked at Sasuke, who was already beginning to remove his simple prisoner's tunic with a terrifying naturalness, as if undressing in front of his former teammate was the most normal thing in the world.

"No… I can't…" Naruto stammered, feeling the world spin around him.

Sasuke, already half-naked, looked at him. "Why not? She doesn't bother."

Sakura, embarrassed but electrified, wasn't looking at Naruto.

Her eyes, hungry and fascinated, were fixed on Sasuke, on his pale, slender body, on the intimacy she had only imagined in her most secret fantasies. She sat back down in the chair, like a spectator in the front row of a play that would destroy her.

Naruto stood in the center of the cell, dressed, feeling more exposed and vulnerable than ever. Sasuke approached him, completely ignoring Sakura, and began to unbutton his jacket.

"Come on," Sasuke murmured, his breath hot in Naruto's ear. "She wants to see. Let her."

Naruto closed his eyes. The weight of both their madness, of his obsession and her desperation, fell on him like a slab. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to escape this nightmare where love, friendship, and decency had been twisted beyond recognition. And in the cold silence of the cell, with Sakura's eyes fixed on them and Sasuke's hands reclaiming his body, Naruto Uzumaki felt more alone than ever in his life.

The air in the cell had become thick, charged with a tension that was no longer just uncomfortable, but electric and perverse.

Sasuke, with the characteristic impatience that surfaced when it came to Naruto, was the first to strip completely. The rough tunic fell to the cold floor with a whisper, exposing his pale, slender body, marked by the scars of his battles and confinement. There was no shame in his attitude, only a defiant possessiveness, like a cat displaying its prey.

From her chair, Sakura gasped audibly. An intense blush, burning from her neck to the roots of her hair, flooded her face. Her green eyes, usually full of concern or medical strength, were now wild, fascinated, and astonished, roaming every line of Sasuke's body with an intensity that was almost tangible. It was the realization of a thousand adolescent fantasies, but in a context so distorted and crude that the emotion she felt was tinged with a guilty vertigo.

He's so big, she thought, shifting uncomfortably.

Naruto, still dressed, felt as if he were trapped in a fever dream. His gaze went from Sasuke, naked and expectant, to Sakura, seated and enthralled. Shame consumed him, a hot wave of humiliation that made him wish the earth would swallow him. He was the spectacle. His intimacy, his surrender, was becoming theater for the woman he had once loved.

"Sakura-chan…" he managed to articulate, his voice a thread of embarrassment. "Are you… really sure? Is this… okay?"

It was a last, weak attempt to appeal to sanity, to give them both an out. But Sakura, caught in the vortex of her own morbid curiosity and painful love, smiled at him. It wasn't a smile of happiness, but a nervous, excited smile, full of an emotion she couldn't—or didn't want to—control.

"Yes," she whispered, and her voice sounded strange, hoarse. "Yes, Naruto. It's okay. Please… continue."

Naruto's surrender was palpable.

His shoulders sank. With eyes downcast, avoiding both their gazes, he began to remove his clothes with clumsy, slow movements, as if it were the first time again, exposing himself not only to the man who used him, but to the woman whose respect and love he had always yearned for. Each garment that fell was another layer of his dignity stripping away. When he was finally completely naked, he stood there, trembling slightly, feeling the weight of Sakura's gaze on his skin like a scorching caress.

Sakura looked at him, and another gasp, softer this time, escaped her lips. She saw his body, now mature and powerful, the golden hair on his chest, the defined musculature of his legs. An even deeper blush, if possible, burned her cheeks, and she couldn't help her own gaze from straying, equally embarrassed. Naruto, catching her look and her blush, also reddened, creating a circuit of shame and twisted excitement that filled the cell.

It was too much for Sasuke. Seeing Naruto and Sakura exchanging those looks, that shy complicity, even amidst the shame, ignited the fuse of his pathological jealousy. He felt ignored, displaced in his own drama.

"Naruto," Sasuke's voice was a cold edge that cut through the sexual tension in the air. "Look at me."

He advanced and grabbed Naruto's chin, turning his face toward him with force. His dark eyes burned with a possessive intensity.

"Only me," he ordered, and his tone brooked no discussion.

Naruto, tense as a bowstring, nodded weakly, forcing his gaze to focus on Sasuke. The familiar dynamic resumed, but this time with an audience. Sasuke, excited by having Naruto's complete attention back and perhaps, perversely, by being watched, initiated the act with a renewed urgency.

Naruto remained rigid, every muscle in his body protesting against the situation. His mind struggled to disconnect, to go to that distant place where humiliation couldn't reach him, but Sakura's presence kept him anchored in the horrible reality.

And Sakura… Sakura couldn't look away. Seated in her chair, with her legs tightly pressed together, her hands gripped the edges of the seat. Her breathing had become shallow and rapid. As she watched, hypnotized, how Sasuke moved over Naruto, how his hands roamed the body she knew so well from healing but never from touching in that way, one of her hands slid furtively toward her lap.

She began to rub her thigh through the fabric of her dress, a small, nervous, almost unconscious movement at first, but that became more insistent, more urgent, as the scene unfolded before her. Her hand went under her dress. She was flushed, electrified, and completely trapped in the perverse web the three of them had helped weave.

The cell no longer smelled only of desperation and sex, but also of guilty excitement and the voyeurism of a love that had found the most twisted way to realize itself.

Time, inside the cell, had lost all meaning. Three hours had passed in a whirlwind of sweat, ragged gasps, and the electric tension of an intimacy turned spectacle. When Sasuke and Naruto reached their climax, it was with a choked moan from the Uchiha and a deep sigh, almost of relief, from the blonde, both trembling, clinging to the other's body. The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by their panting breaths. For a long moment, they remained intertwined, exhausted, forgetting completely the presence that had witnessed everything.

It was the movement, a soft moan and the persistent, wet noise, that drew their gazes.

Sakura was no longer sitting upright in the chair. She had come undone. Her posture was an image of total abandonment and private ecstasy. Her shoes lay on the floor, and her bare feet were on the edge of the seat, her knees bent and open at a revealing angle. Her dress, that elegant outfit she had put on with such care, was unbuttoned and pushed up to her waist, exposing her pale, trembling legs. Her blouse was open, and her breasts, free of a bra, were exposed, pink and erect, rising and falling with her agitated breathing.

But the most shocking thing was what she was doing with her hands. One hand squeezed and massaged one of her breasts with urgency, fingers sinking into the soft flesh. The other hand was buried between her legs, hidden from view but not from sound. The noise, low but unmistakable in the cell's silence, was that of wet, rapid friction, the sound of her fingers moving inside and over herself with a desperate need. Her face was turned toward the ceiling, eyes closed, mouth slightly open in a grimace of intense, concentrated pleasure. She was completely lost in her own world, undone, sweaty, and radiant with a guilty, profound happiness.

Naruto, still lying in the bed and half-covered by the sheets, blushed intensely upon seeing her. The initial shame was replaced by a wave of heat and a strange fascination. Seeing Sakura, always so contained and strong, in a state of such total and crude abandonment, was both disturbing and deeply intimate. She opened her eyes at that moment, and her gaze met Naruto's.

Instead of shame or panic, a slow, satisfied, and slightly embarrassed, but genuinely happy smile spread across her lips.

She was glad he saw her. Very glad that Sasuke saw her.

Sasuke, who had separated from Naruto, sat up in the bed. His gaze, usually so fixed on Naruto, now roamed over Sakura's limp, excited body with a clinical curiosity and, perhaps, a flash of possessive satisfaction. He stood up, naked and imposing, and approached her. With a calm that was almost surreal, he extended his hand and stroked her head, sliding his fingers through her sweaty pink hair. Then, his hand went down to caress her burning cheek, a gesture that could have been tender in another context, but that here, amidst the wet sound of Sakura's self-stimulation, was deeply perverse.

— "You're doing incredibly, keep going Sakura..." — Sasuke murmured, his voice hoarse but clear, full of an approval that made Sakura moan louder, arching toward his touch.

She didn't stop moving, her fingers continued their work between her legs, the wet sound intensified, an obscene counterpoint to Sasuke's caress.

Naruto, from the bed, watched the scene. His own shame and conflict began to dissipate, replaced by a wave of… acceptance? Resignation? He looked at Sasuke, caressing Sakura with a possessiveness that now extended to her as well. He looked at Sakura, finally getting a crumb of the attention she had always desired, even in this twisted way.

— "Don't worry, I promise to be the man you need, and thank Naruto.... as long as I have him, I will be part of your world Sakura...."

— "S-Sasuke-kun...."

And then, an insidious and soothing thought made its way into his exhausted mind.

The three of us are here. Together. As we should always have been.

It was a grotesque rationalization, a way for his mind to find comfort in the horror. If this was the price to keep his team together, for Sasuke to be stable and Sakura to stop suffering, then perhaps… perhaps it wasn't so bad. Peace, that peace he had always yearned for for everyone, had a monstrous cost, but at least they were paying it together.

A feeling of distorted calm, of complete resignation, took hold of him.

He lay back on the pillow, a hint of a sad smile on his lips, watching how his two best friends—his obsessor and his unrequited love—found a twisted way to connect, while the wet sound of Sakura's fingers marked the rhythm of their new and horrible normality. At least he didn't feel so alone in the nightmare anymore.

Team 7, after all, always found a way to be together, even in the absolute corruption.

The hallway outside the maximum-security cell was a place of shadows and silence broken only by the occasional creak of the guards' armor or the whisper of a radio. The two Anbu assigned to surveillance, with their badger and fox masks, had been witnesses—against their will—to the evolution of the prisoner Uchiha's "conjugal visits."

At first, it had been a torture of discomfort and secondhand embarrassment. The sounds—the gasps, the moans, the Uchiha's possessive and plaintive words—filtered through the steel door like a constant reminder of the surreal reality unfolding on the other side.

But a year is a long time. Familiarity, even with the grotesque, eventually imposes itself.

Now, the guards barely batted an eye. They remained at their post, motionless as always, but the stiffness of discomfort had disappeared. In its place was a professional resignation, almost boredom. They exchanged occasional looks that were no longer of shock, but of a weary "here we go again" when the visit day arrived. Sometimes, they even used the shift to mentally review reports or plan their next guard duties.

However, even for an Anbu's hardened tolerance, the events of that particular afternoon had been too much. The sounds didn't only come from the Uchiha and the Jinchuriki. A female voice, high and interspersed with moans that weren't of pain, had joined the cacophony.

The noises had reached a three-part crescendo so explicit and prolonged that even the most stoic of shinobi would have sweated inside his mask.

It was after that particular visit that one of the guards, the one with the fox mask, broke the unwritten protocol. At the end of the shift, he approached the officer on duty and, with the completely neutral voice Anbu training provided, made a request:

"A level 4 soundproofing seal is required for the door of cell 7-B. Reason: to preserve concentration during surveillance and avoid… auditory distractions."

The officer, a veteran with scars that spoke of a thousand battles, looked at him for a long moment. There were no questions. No mocking smiles. Just a slow nod and a:

"It will be installed by tomorrow."

And so it was. The next day, a fuinjutsu specialist applied a series of complex kanji around the steel door frame. When activated, the seal didn't block all sound—that would have been a security risk—but it efficiently dampened the higher frequencies, the voices, the gasps, the moans, the wet sounds of intimacy. What filtered through now was a low murmur, indistinct, like the rumble of a distant river.

When Naruto, Sasuke, and, to the guards' surprise, Sakura Haruno herself arrived for the next visit, they noticed the difference immediately.

The exterior silence was deeper, more encapsulated.

Inside, now free from the—now obvious—inhibition of knowing they were being heard, the three members of Team 7 sank into their twisted dynamic with an even deeper abandon. The sounds that had embarrassed the guards now resonated freely in the cell, a private echo of their shared corruption.

Outside, the guards with badger and fox masks remained at their post. There was no longer tension in their shoulders, no need to avoid looking at each other. The low, constant hum of the soundproofing seal was a white noise that allowed them to concentrate on their duty, or simply on not thinking at all. Privacy, however monstrous, was now guaranteed.

And Konoha, and its security machinery, continued to function, perfectly efficient, perfectly indifferent to the secrets it guarded. The hell of some was, after all, just another guard shift for others.