Five years had passed. Naruto's apartment stood above a bustling avenue and a busy commuter rail line, yet the real clamor came from within. The kitchen counter was a chaotic display of mugs, each sporting a different slogan—his current favorite: BELIEVE IT!—all stained with the same instant coffee brand. What should have been an open-plan living room was merely a one-bedroom with a wall removed; its space crammed with more books than furniture. Writing manuals mingled with dog-eared genre paperbacks, while spiral notebooks adorned with colorful tabs lined up like soldiers awaiting their turn.
A half-packed suitcase lay sprawled on his mattress, clothes strewn in a state of organized chaos. Naruto squatted beside it, searching for his "Ramen Addict" T-shirt. It lay entangled beneath a heap of red-marked manuscript pages and socks. As he rolled the shirt into a tight cylinder, his phone lit up from across the room, edging precariously near the table's surface alongside a worn copy of DUNE. He instantly recognized the ringtone—a nostalgic theme from an old childhood anime, reserved for only one contact.
He hesitated. He could ignore it and claim he was writing, meeting someone, or lost in thought. But Kushina Uzumaki was relentless; if he didn't answer now, she'd call again, then switch to FaceTime, escalating to voicemails that crescendo in urgency.
As the phone started its second vibration cycle, Naruto lunged for it, snatching it just before it danced over the edge.
"Mom," Naruto said, trying for nonchalance, but it came out winded.
"Sweetheart! You sound like you're running from the law," came Kushina's voice, as warm and blunt as ever.
Naruto glanced at the three empty coffee cups clustered on the windowsill. "Just packing," he said. "I've got a flight at six a.m., remember?"
"Of course I remember," she huffed. "If you didn't come home for Christmas your father would file a missing person's report and then bribe the airline for your location."
Naruto grinned in spite of himself. "That's probably not legal."
Kushina laughed. "Since when has legality ever stopped your old man? Anyway. We're excited to see you! The house is already covered in tinsel and cat hair, and your old bedroom has been cleaned—well, mostly. I threw out three pairs of gym shorts with holes in the crotch."
Naruto squeezed the T-shirt so hard the print wrinkled. "Tragic."
"Don't be smart," she said, but the fondness in her voice was impossible to miss. "This year's party is going to be huge, Naruto. Everyone's coming—even Tsunade, and you know how hard it is to get her out of that high-rise of hers. Oh! And the Uchiha are coming too."
The shirt slipped from his grip and fluttered to the floor. For a moment, Naruto was aware of only the city noise outside and his own breath, which had gone shallow and ragged. The word "Uchiha" was a loaded gun, the kind of thing that emptied rooms.
"Really?" He tried for breezy, but it landed somewhere between skeptical and strangled. "They actually RSVP'd?"
"Of course they did," Kushina said. "Fugaku and Mikoto never miss a chance to network. And rumor is that Sasuke's coming this year, too. Isn't that wild? He hasn't been home for the holidays in, what, five years?"
"Yeah," Naruto replied, voice carefully blank. "Wild."
He could feel her listening, weighing the silence. She'd always been able to read him over the phone, even through bad reception and adolescent lies. "It's been a long time," she said, more quietly. "Maybe it'll be good for you to see him. Move past what happened, finally. You're not kids anymore, honey."
Naruto laughed, brittle and bright. "Yeah, I guess not."
She let the pause linger, then barreled through. "Well, I'll make your favorite—extra miso, no mushrooms. And this year you're not allowed to ditch the dinner table to play Switch in the den. Your father says if he's sitting through the Fugaku PowerPoint on 'Modern Market Dynamics,' you are too."
Naruto felt something in his chest ease, just a notch. "He's still using slides? I thought they invented the AI for him."
"Not according to Fugaku. And Naruto, don't worry about the rest, okay? No one cares about ancient history but you. Just be yourself."
He didn't answer right away, just picked up the T-shirt and tried to rub the wrinkles out. "Sure. I'll be myself." There was an odd echo in his own words, as if he was speaking through glass.
Kushina let out a long, theatrical sigh. "Listen, I have to go—the cat's trying to eat the centerpiece and your dad's hiding from me in the crawlspace. But text me when you get to the airport, okay?"
"Will do."
"Love you, kiddo," she said, and hung up before he could say it back.
The phone screen dimmed to black. Naruto stood still, clutching the shirt, feeling his chest tighten momentarily. He tossed it onto the bed and turned to the window. The city's lights bled into the night sky, casting a glow that obscured the stars. He watched as headlights drifted along the street, his own reflection blending into the glass like an incomplete sketch.
Eventually, he picked up the shirt, rolling it carefully this time into his suitcase. Stacks of manuscripts teetered as he shoved them aside, zipping the suitcase with more force than necessary—its sharp sound slicing through the air.
Restless, he paced the room. He paused at his tiny kitchen table, eyes tracing over the worn linoleum. Then he wandered to his desk, a chaotic altar of half-finished dreams. Three spiral notebooks lay open, each marked with a brightly colored sticky note: "Rewrite," "Abandon all hope," and "THIS IS THE ONE." Manuscript pages were spread across like cards in a game of uncertainties, each annotated with angry red ink—from Naruto himself and Jiraiya's late-night emails.
Above it all, framed book covers lined the wall. His debut, with its golden title still sparked a flutter of pride. Nearby hung printouts of reviews—some biting, some praising—each dissected with Naruto's own Sharpie notes. A corkboard below overflowed with tangled plot maps and character sketches, pushpins clustering like an outbreak.
He traced a finger along a frame's edge before sinking into his chair. The apartment buzzed with potential and unfinished ideas. The thought of seeing Sasuke—sharing space and breath—made his skin prickle with unease. Sasuke's voice echoed in his mind: "I could never love someone like you." Even after five years, those words burned like fresh scars.
Naruto placed his phone at the desk's center, resisting the urge to check for messages. As he glanced at his half-packed suitcase and chaotic desk, he imagined striding into the Christmas party—poised and unbothered by their past. As if he'd risen above it all.
He didn't believe it for a moment.
Packing became impossible; each item felt like kindling for old memories. Pressing down the suitcase lid strained against him, almost snapping his wrists. The absurdity made him grin—explaining such an injury to his publisher: "Occupational hazard," he'd joke. "My wardrobe's vicious."
He straightened his orange hoodie, the one salvaged from his college days, smoothing the fabric with careful hands. The familiar scent of budget detergent and dust transported him back to that cramped dorm room, its cinderblock walls a drab gray and a window overlooking dumpsters. His roommate had shown up with a snowboard, a couple of hangovers, and zero interest in Naruto's literary dreams.
The campus library became his haven—an escape where he thrived during the late hours when dim lights and the soft hum of printers cocooned him. That's where he drafted his first real story, published by a tiny journal that couldn't pay but sent him a free T-shirt (size medium, of course). The acceptance email arrived at 3:12 a.m., and he celebrated so fiercely he nearly injured himself on the bookshelf.
Flash forward to his first publication party: an off-campus bar with sticky floors. Naruto squeezed between fellow writing majors who'd snuck in prosecco. Jiraiya appeared uninvited, sunglasses perched inside, proclaiming Naruto "the next Hemingway, but less suicidal." Instead of cake, there were stale onion rings and drinks courtesy of someone else. The following day he sprawled on his futon, listening to the city buzz and wondering if he was finally becoming someone new.
Graduation was a blur—Naruto in a wrinkled gown, the dean butchering his name as he crossed the stage. He spotted Jiraiya's wild gray hair in the crowd, mouth open in a silent whistle. Photos on the quad captured Naruto's forced smile, diploma held like a white flag. He wondered if Sasuke ever had anyone cheer for him at his own graduation or if his prestigious school awarded degrees with little fanfare.
His hand paused over his notebook. The draft of his debut novel was marked with sticky notes highlighting every plot hole and lost character. That winter was spent writing through double shifts at the campus coffee shop, burning fingers on espresso machines. Even with a lagging secondhand laptop, he typed relentlessly, as if each word could fill the void Sasuke left behind.
The book launch unfolded in a basement bookstore with more leaks than customers. Jiraiya brought flowers wrapped in old newspapers, dubbing them "a symbol of fleeting literary success." Naruto signed eight copies; three buyers mistook him for another author. But when a blue-haired staffer asked him to write "Believe it!," Naruto clung to that small triumph all the way home.
He packed another pair of jeans into his suitcase and glanced at photos taped by his desk. One showed him joking at a signing table with teens waiting for autographs—one wore an Uchiha sweatshirt. For a moment, Naruto stared at it as if that black-and-red logo might reach out and consume him whole.
The memories cascaded now, raw and unfiltered—a rapid montage of past dates. The poetry girl who labeled his ramen fascination as "quirky." The barista obsessed with cold brew, who corrected every pronunciation he made of Italian pastries. The student union guy, perpetually in beanies, chain-vaping blueberry nicotine even in July.
There was the coffee shop fiasco—Naruto arrived thirty minutes early, nervously fiddling with sugar packets and crafting fake texts to mask his anticipation. His date showed up late, fixated on his watch, offering apologies while scrolling through notifications under the table. He asked about Naruto's writing without absorbing a word, leaving Naruto calculating the quickest escape.
Next came the movie outing. His date (towering, laughter like a drainpipe) spilled popcorn into Naruto's lap before the indie drama even began—full of intense close-ups and unspoken tension. When a particularly biting line hit the screen, Naruto glanced over for a shared smirk but found only thumbs frantically texting in the dark.
The restaurant was the worst. Naruto wore a button-up and polished shoes, eager to impress. His date critiqued everything—from menu fonts to the chef's "overreliance on fusion." Near the meal's end, he remarked, "You're not very ambitious for a city kid, are you?" The words echoed a painful memory, dragging Naruto back to a time when Sasuke had said something similar—but with warmth that dulled the sting.
Naruto left early, bitterness lingering longer than any aftertaste from the meal.
Naruto shook his head, dispelling thoughts like unwanted ghosts, and snapped the suitcase shut with a decisive click. The zipper stuck momentarily, its defiance short-lived under his determined tug.
Standing in the room's center, he clutched the suitcase and tried to shed the past as if shedding rainwater. His reflection in the apartment window stared back: older but bearing the same uneven grin, eyes still shadowed by unhealing ache. Five years hadn't erased Sasuke's presence; his name lingered, haunting every silence.
He let the suitcase fall with a muted thud and moved to his desk. Opening the laptop, he typed a note to himself: "Get it together. Just one party. You can do this." The cursor blinked, a silent judge. He shut the laptop with a snap, slung his orange hoodie over his shoulder, and picked up the suitcase.
The room felt smaller, walls closing in like memories. He spun slowly, committing each detail to heart—the frayed couch, coffee cups stacked like forgotten towers, the wall peppered with stories lived and imagined—before flipping the switch to darkness, letting city lights claim the space.
Not once did he glance back as he left for the hallway, yet memory's pulse accompanied him all the way to the elevator.
The airport was all echo and halogen, the kind of light that made even healthy people look haunted. Naruto sat at gate 27B, knees bouncing, laptop open but untouched on the tiny metal table. He stared at the blank document, watching his own reflection instead of the cursor, the glassy screen warping his features just enough to make him look like someone else—a version of himself that was older, sharper, almost convincing.
Around him, people murmured into cell phones, crammed bags into overhead bins, and huddled in knots over charging ports. A kid played with a plastic dinosaur on the carpet, dragging it through an imaginary landscape. Naruto watched the scene as if he were behind glass, an extra in a movie about strangers who never quite intersected.
His phone vibrated with a message from his mom: "Boarding soon? Don't forget to bring a scarf, the forecast is freezing." He replied with a thumbs-up emoji, then immediately felt guilty for not adding a heart. He hovered over the text, debating a better response, but the intercom crackled and snapped him out of it.
They were calling his group. Naruto closed the laptop and slipped it into his backpack, shouldering the weight as he joined the slow shuffle of passengers inching toward the gate. The line was long and contemplative, a parade of anonymous faces, all of them rehearsing their own arrivals, their own reunions.
He tried to picture his own. The Christmas party, the table groaning under the weight of food, the rooms humming with forced cheer. He imagined walking in, seeing Sasuke across the room, maybe nodding in acknowledgment—two adults, nothing left unsaid. In the fantasy, Naruto was easy and unbothered, a model of post-teenage maturity. They'd exchange a handshake, a witty remark about the weather or the state of the world, and that would be it. Closure.
In reality, Naruto had no idea what he'd say. Or what he even wanted.
He found his seat, wedged between a man in a business suit who immediately began snoring and a woman with a stack of crossword puzzles. As the plane vibrated into life, Naruto pulled his notebook from his bag and flipped to a blank page. He hesitated, then wrote:
It's been five years. You've moved on. He means nothing.
He underlined it twice, the second line pressing through the paper.
Out the window, the city was a pinball board of lights, the airport a cluster of electric veins. As the plane lifted, Naruto pressed his forehead to the plexiglass and watched the world shrink to a scatter of points. He tried to imagine a future where he wasn't haunted by the past, where the words Sasuke had said didn't echo in every empty space.
When the cabin lights dimmed, he leaned back and closed his eyes, repeating the line in his head until the sounds of the plane washed over everything else.
By the time they were above the clouds, Naruto almost believed it.