Naruto had imagined this moment so many times in the last twenty-four hours that, standing outside the penthouse door, his body went through the motions on autopilot. The elevator had deposited him into a vestibule finished in the kind of marble that looked like it cost more than his annual rent. The air was aggressively climate controlled, not a single molecule out of place. He set his duffel down, flexed his fingers, and let them hover over the stainless steel call panel.
His thumb stuttered—once, twice, three times—before he finally pressed the buzzer, the digital chime inside echoing in his teeth.
There was no answer at first, just the silence of engineered luxury and the dull roar of his own pulse. Naruto shifted his weight from foot to foot, the duffel suddenly stupid and heavy at his side, and waited.
When the door did swing open, it was so fast and quiet he startled, nearly losing grip on the handle. Sasuke stood there in a monochrome turtleneck and slacks, hair damp at the edges as if he'd just run his hands under cold water. For a moment, he looked through Naruto, not at him, and Naruto almost turned around, ready to excuse himself and never look back.
Then Sasuke's eyes snapped into focus, and the change—relief, raw and undiluted—flooded his face so quickly Naruto had to look away.
"You're here," Sasuke said, the words weightless but the exhale behind them seismic. He stepped aside, body rigid, the universal gesture for you can come in, or you can walk away.
Naruto's sneakers squeaked on the polished entryway, an accidental vandalism of the silence. Sasuke closed the door with a soft click and immediately put two meters of distance between them, as if the space itself could buffer the volatility. For several seconds, neither spoke.
The penthouse was exactly as Naruto remembered—immaculate, bare, the sharp lines of glass and steel softened only by the faint gold of the winter sunset bleeding through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The city below was a silent diorama, cars inching like toys, river black and lazy. Naruto's duffel looked like a blood clot on the perfect white of the entry rug.
Sasuke motioned him toward the living area, the movement efficient but strangely careful, as though guiding a wild animal to a trap. The couch—wide, deep, built for conference calls or the loneliest kind of movie night—waited in the center of the space, and Naruto sat at the farthest edge, hands balled in his lap.
Sasuke hovered at a polite distance, then took the matching chair opposite, legs crossed, ankle over knee, one hand tracing a line along the armrest. He looked at Naruto the way a person might look at a ticking clock, trying to will it forward.
"I didn't expect you," Sasuke started, then stopped, mouth flattening into a grim line.
"I didn't expect myself," Naruto replied, and was surprised to find it true. Last night, after Sakura had left—her perfume clinging to the cheap upholstery, the taste of her story curdling in his throat—he'd sworn not to see Sasuke. But something about her honesty had made the silence more unbearable than the fight itself.
They let the words die between them. Naruto's gaze flicked to the familiar details: the single bonsai on the window ledge, the glass coffee table with a stack of architectural digests, the faint outline on the wall where a painting had once hung and then been exiled to the closet after a single snide comment from a visiting CEO. It was all so Sasuke—clean, composed, every detail curated to within an inch of its life.
"Coffee?" Sasuke asked abruptly, already halfway to the open kitchen.
Naruto shook his head. "I'll throw up."
Sasuke froze, then returned to the chair, perching on its edge. His hands stayed busy—knuckles white, thumb rasping over the bones of his wrist. The silence stretched and snapped, then stretched again, thinner each time.
Naruto inhaled, let the breath fill every corner of his chest, and spoke. "I don't want to talk around it." He flexed his fingers against his knee, grounding himself in the sensation. "What happens here—what we say next—decides everything."
Sasuke's chin dipped, just a fraction. "Agreed."
Naruto watched the other man's eyes, searching for that cold flicker of calculation that always preceded a lie. He saw only exhaustion, the bruised crescent under each eye darkening with every second.
"Before we start—" Naruto's voice wavered, but he pressed forward. "I need you to tell me everything. Not just the good parts. Not just the pieces that make you look like a hero."
A tiny, almost imperceptible tension appeared at the corner of Sasuke's mouth. He nodded, folding his hands together so tightly the knuckles gleamed white.
Naruto deliberately left out any mention of Sakura. He wanted Sasuke's version raw, unscripted, unfiltered by the absolution Sakura had already offered. He wanted to know if there was anything left worth salvaging, or if the last three months were just an elaborate performance for an audience of one.
He leaned back, bracing himself for the storm. "Start from the beginning," Naruto said, voice steadier than he felt. "Don't leave anything out."
"We met in undergrad. She was in the accelerated medical program, second year. Smartest person in the building, but always looked like she was one day away from a nervous breakdown." Sasuke's voice was clinical, stripped of any unnecessary inflection. "She helped me through Chem 201. We weren't friends, exactly, but she was the only one who didn't treat me like a ghost or a cautionary tale."
Naruto watched Sasuke's hands: the way his thumb traced the knuckle of his index finger, the way his nails pressed white crescents into his own skin. He thought about what Sakura had told him—the desperation, the threat, the years of hiding—and waited to see how much of it survived the retelling.
"After my brother left the company, my parents put all their chips on me," Sasuke went on. "You already know that part. But they also expected me to form alliances—social ones, not just business. They started pushing for marriage prospects the second I graduated."
Naruto grunted. "Because heaven forbid you actually date someone you like."
Sasuke ignored the jab, but his jaw flexed. "They had a list. Sakura was on it. Her father was on the board at one of the hospitals we're affiliated with, and apparently there's a whole subculture of parents who think merging their kids is how you run a city." His lip curled. "I dodged most of it, until Sakura reached out. Said she needed a favor."
Naruto tensed, the memory of Sakura's voice still sharp in his head: I blackmailed him, not my proudest moment.
"She asked me to go along with the engagement," Sasuke said, the words measured, precise. "She told her father she was dating someone in my family, and the only way to get him to stop interfering was to make it look official. I agreed, because…" He trailed off, then shrugged. "Because I knew how it felt to have your life dictated by people who don't care what you want."
Naruto studied him, searching for any hint of the threat or coercion Sakura had confessed to. Sasuke's face was blank, his voice even, but his fingers betrayed him: now they twisted the seam of the couch cushion, picking at the upholstery in tiny, frantic movements.
"She promised it would be over after her residency. Three years, max. I figured I could stomach the lie for that long, since it wasn't real." He met Naruto's eyes, finally, and the fatigue in them was so stark that Naruto felt his anger falter. "I wasn't planning on you showing up and making it not a lie anymore."
Naruto's chest ached with the contradiction. He remembered the lake, the words that had broken them, the years spent trying not to think about what it meant to be replaced by a list of mergers and alliances.
He pressed his palms to his thighs, grounding himself. "Why didn't you just tell me?" His voice was smaller than he'd intended.
Sasuke swallowed, gaze falling away again. "I thought I could keep you out of it. That I could fix everything before you ever found out."
"By doing what, exactly?" Naruto demanded, the old frustration creeping back in. "Playing CEO until the lie expires?"
"I was getting out," Sasuke shot back, the first crack in his composure. "I got the shares. I set up the exit plan. Once I had control, I could cut the tie to her father, and nobody would care who I—" He stopped, breath hissing through his teeth. "I thought you'd be happy. That's why I didn't say anything until it was finished."
Naruto's laugh was bitter. "You thought I'd be happy to find out from your father, at my parents' brunch, in front of everyone, that you were engaged to someone else?"
Sasuke's hands stilled, the knuckles gone bloodless. "I miscalculated."
The words hovered in the air, heavy with the weight of every time Sasuke had run his life like a chessboard, moving people around for the sake of some distant checkmate.
Naruto inhaled deeply, forcing his lungs to expand, forcing his heart rate down. "You do this every time. You decide what the problem is, and then you solve it without telling anyone what's actually going on. Even when it's my life, too."
There was a tremor in the set of Sasuke's shoulders, but he said nothing.
Naruto leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I spent three days thinking you never wanted me. That all of this—" he gestured around the room, the memories embedded in the furniture, the couch where they'd spent hours entangled—"was a joke I didn't get."
"It wasn't," Sasuke said, so quietly Naruto almost missed it.
"I know that now," Naruto replied. "But you can't just… fix everything from a distance. I'm not a business asset you can liquidate and then buy back at a discount."
He felt the anger start to splinter, making way for something rawer: the sense of loss, the years wasted, the fear that none of it had ever really belonged to him.
Sasuke's voice, when it came, was smaller, stripped of any CEO bravado. "I'm sorry."
Naruto let the words linger, waiting to see if there was more. There wasn't.
He watched the slow, deliberate rise and fall of Sasuke's shoulders, the way his hands trembled when he thought no one was looking. He thought about what Sakura had told him—how she'd forced Sasuke's hand, how much of it had been desperation and how much pride.
He wondered if he'd ever really know the full story, and something cracked inside him—not breaking, but shifting, like ice in spring. His chest ached with the weight of wanting to believe Sasuke, even as his mind replayed every moment he'd spent curled around his phone, waiting for an explanation that never came.
But maybe that was the point: he could spend forever trying to piece together what had happened, or he could decide what happened next.
Naruto exhaled shakily, felt his own hands unclench. His voice came out rough, thick with everything he wasn't ready to let go of yet. "If we're going to try this again—and I'm not saying I forgive you—you have to tell me the truth. All of it. Even when it's ugly. Especially then."
Sasuke's shoulders dropped an inch, then two. His eyes—those dark, guarded eyes that had always hidden more than they revealed—suddenly glistened in the half-light. The mask of CEO composure cracked completely, and something twisted in Naruto's chest at the naked relief washing over Sasuke's face. It made him look younger, almost like the boy Naruto had first fallen in love with, before everything went wrong.
Naruto rocked forward, elbows digging into the denim at his knees, hands clasped so tight the knuckles creaked. He drew a line down the carpet with his toe and stared at it, as if the future could be mapped in the nap of synthetic fibers.
"Okay," he said. The word was more exhale than syllable, but it was a beginning. "Here's the deal, and it's non-negotiable."
Sasuke nodded, alert now, the barest flicker of challenge in his eyes—the way he always braced for the terms of a surrender.
Naruto looked up, met that gaze, and smiled, thin and real. "No more surprises. Not ever. Unless it's my birthday, and you'd better clear it with my mother first."
The smallest curve appeared at the edge of Sasuke's mouth—a twitch that might've been a smile if it were on anyone else's face.
"Deal," Sasuke said, and for once, there was no hesitation or hedging.
They left the words alone, letting them sink into the quiet. Sasuke leaned back, one leg hooked over the other, fingers steepled in thought. For a long time he just looked at Naruto, something vulnerable and alive behind the polished composure.
Then, in a movement so deliberate it almost seemed slow-motion, Sasuke closed the gap between them. He reached across the blank tundra of couch, fingers skimming the air before landing on Naruto's hand—cool, dry, precise, the kind of contact meant to be noticed and remembered.
The effect was electric. Naruto startled, skin prickling at the place where Sasuke's hand met his. He didn't pull away, just watched their joined fingers as if they might reveal some secret to how this all worked.
For several seconds, they sat like that—hands entwined, bodies angled toward each other but not quite touching. The moment stretched, charged and weightless, until Sasuke finally moved.
He slid closer, his thigh pressing against Naruto's, arm curving around Naruto's shoulders. The smell of him—sharp and clean, with a trace of the same shampoo Naruto remembered from high school—hit like a freight train of memory. Sasuke's cheek brushed Naruto's hair as he pulled him into a tight embrace, the hug not gentle or cautious but desperate, as if he'd been starving for contact since the world ended.
Naruto's first instinct was to go rigid, to armor himself against the old reflex: don't give in, don't make this easy, don't let him think he's forgiven.
But the feel of Sasuke's arms, the solid reality of their bodies slotting together, was more persuasive than any argument. Naruto relaxed in stages, muscles unclenching one by one as Sasuke's grip shifted from iron to something more tender. Naruto rested his forehead in the hollow above Sasuke's collarbone and let out a long, shaky breath.
"I missed you," Sasuke said, and the words were so simple and so true they bypassed every defense Naruto still had.
They stayed like that, clinging to each other while the late afternoon light slid across the glass and painted them in gold and shadow. Naruto let himself feel it all—the pain, the relief, the stubborn, idiotic love that had survived their worst moments.
Outside, the world went on: the city breathed, the traffic crawled, lives intersected and diverged in a thousand apartments just like this one. But inside, they were building something new from the wreckage—a place where secrets were banished, where two people could be exactly who they were, and still choose each other every day.
It was enough. It would have to be.
And as Naruto let himself lean, just a little, into the warmth of Sasuke's shoulder, he realized it might even be more than that.
It might, at last, be home.