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Naruto blinked hazily, trying not to fall asleep. He couldn’t remember why, but Sakura always told him not to fall asleep after he hit his head, and he was pretty sure he’d hit his head earlier. His hair was matted and sticky with blood, and his skull was dented in at the back, so if he hadn’t hit his head, somebody else probably had. Was that the same thing? Naruto had no idea.
He wanted to get up and help Sakura, but he couldn’t move more than turning his head to stare at her. Her ribs were broken, one of them peeking through her shirt, but she was still holding up the ceiling of the cave they were trapped in. Did it count as a cave anymore, or was it just a pile of rubble? Naruto didn’t think it mattered. Sakura’s arms were starting to shake, and once they gave out, all three of them would be nothing but a pile of mush on the ground.
Sasuke was staring too, sharingan spinning sporadically, but his eyes were even less focused than Naruto felt. The blood pooling around him probably had something to do with that. Or maybe it was the stab wounds, gaping holes in his shoulder, back, and legs. Naruto had a faint feeling the two factors were related, but he couldn’t remember how.
It was too quiet, he decided. All he could hear was the sound of his teammates breathing, and neither of them sounded quite right. Kurama was yelling something at him in the back of Naruto’s mind, but the words were all garbled and he’d been tuning out the fox for so long that it didn’t really count as noise.
Man, but Sasuke did look really good covered in blood. Naruto preferred it when it was other peoples’, but the view didn’t change based on the source.
The thought made Naruto giggle, which prompted Sasuke to send him his patented “what the fuck is wrong with you” glare. It was an expression Naruto had seen many times over the years, and it was comforting in its familiarity, causing a loopy grin to form on his face.
This made Sasuke’s “what the fuck” face worsen, but Naruto wasn’t really bothered.
Sakura said, “Give him a break. The blood loss is making him delirious.” Then she coughed, and Naruto saw her ribs move. Gross.
Sasuke scoffed. “So? I’m bleeding more than he is, and I’m still not that fucking stupid.”
Sakura laughed a little, but the weight of the boulder acting as their ceiling pushed her from standing to her knees, and the smile melted off her face. Naruto understood why-when her arms gave out the rest of the way, they were done for-but he kind of missed the conversation.
Abruptly, inspiration struck Naruto. It was stupid, sure, and it was kind of an asshole move, but it would keep them talking for the ten minutes they had left alive. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? Even if they did get mad at him, or think he was weird and gross (well, weirder and grosser than they already knew he was), he would only have to deal with the consequences of his actions for about eight minutes.
“Hey, guys,” he said weakly, “what’s it called when you’re in love with two people at once?”
Sasuke buried his head in his hands, causing his wounds to spurt blood in a mildly comedic but ultimately disgusting fashion.
Sakura asked, “You mean polyamory?”
Naruto blinked at her, joke derailed. “You mean there’s actually a name for it?”
“Yeah, of course-” Sakura said, but Sasuke cut her off.
“Why the hell would you ask if you didn’t think there was a name for it?”
“Jeez, someone’s grumpy,” Naruto huffed.
“We’re all about to die, dumbass. I can be as pissed off as I want.”
Naruto stuck his tongue out at him. “I’m the one who should be grumpy. You ruined my joke.”
Sasuke rolled his eyes. “Thank god for that.”
Sakura laughed a little, which made Naruto pout, but her tone seemed genuine enough when she asked, “What was the joke supposed to be?” that Naruto decided he would deign to answer her.
Deign was a fancy word, actually. He wasn’t sure where he’d learned it from? Sasuke, maybe? Trying to remember things made Naruto’s head hurt.
Abruptly, he remembered he was supposed to be telling a joke. “Oh! Yeah, anyways, it was going to be really funny, you know. I was going to be all ‘What’s it called when you’re in love with two people,’ and you guys were supposed to say, ‘I don’t know, what is it called,’ and I was gonna say, ‘it’s called Naruto,’ and then you were gonna, like, freak out on me, you know?”
Sakura stared at him, and he could see the gears turning behind her eyes as she tried to process what he’d said. He could also still see her ribs grinding against each other which was, again, gross as hell.
Sasuke seemed to have caught on to the rest of Naruto’s plan, though, because his “what the fuck is wrong with you” face had escalated to a Level Four, at least. That was especially interesting because Naruto and Sakura’s previous scale stopped at three levels.
“Wait, what?” Sakura asked, before another coughing fit almost caused her to drop the ceiling.
Naruto tried to get up and help her, but all he managed to do was pick his head up and drop it back against the wall with a thud and a squelch. He giggled, the pain more distant and dull than it probably should be, and said, “Ew.”
Sakura got her breath back, and said, “When the hell did you find the time to fall in love with people? You only ever spend time with us.”
And yeah, it hurt more than whatever the hell was happening to the back of Naruto’s skull to be reminded that Sakura would never even think of him as a romantic prospect, but Naruto pasted on a smile anyways. Sakura deserved one.
“Yeah, duh,” he said.
Sakura said, “What the fuck are you even talking about?”
Sasuke still hadn’t said anything, which meant he’d probably figured it out. He was glaring at Naruto, sharingan spinning with a vengeance, which was probably bad.
Naruto ignored him, focusing on the teammate who wasn’t mad at him yet. “It’s you two, obviously. Who else would it be?”
Sakura ground her teeth, looking for a response and not finding one, and she looked madder than Naruto had ever seen her. He hadn’t thought she’d be jumping for joy at his confession, but he hadn’t thought she’d be this mad, either.
He chanced a glance at Sasuke, but he just clenched his jaw and spat, “Fuck you. Asshole.”
Naruto dropped his head down to his chest so he wouldn’t have to look at them, ignoring the hot, uncomfortable trickle of blood down the back of his neck and the way Sakura, whose bones were sticking out of her every which way, made a horrified sound when she saw the back of his head.
“Yeah,” he said, “sorry about that.”
“What the fuck?” Sakura said, sounding more strained by the minute, “What the fuck are you saying right now? Who apologizes right after they confess?”
Naruto shrugged as much as he could, which wasn’t very much, eyes still downcast. “I don’t know. Sorry.”
Sasuke broke his silence to ask, “Why?”
Naruto said, “Because you’re mad at me?”
“No, why would you tell us right now?”
Naruto brightened a little, remembering the upsides to his plan. “Well, I was just going to not tell you ever, but then I realized that if I told you right now, you could only be mad at me for like, five minutes, tops, you know?”
Sakura was staring at him like Naruto was the stupidest person she had ever seen in her life. Sasuke was opening his mouth to say something else when she shifted, moving to bat Naruto upside the head. She stopped herself just in time to stop their whole pocket of air from collapsing on them, but not quite fast enough to stop a rock from falling onto and crushing every bone in Naruto’s leg.
Everything went white for a little while after that, so painful Naruto could barely breathe, and for a minute he thought he was dead.
He heard Sakura crying as he came to, and Sasuke saying, “Wake up, usuratonkachi. Idiot. Dumbfuck Naruto, don’t you dare die right now.”
He didn’t feel like opening his eyes, but he was pretty sure his friends thought he was dead, so Naruto worked up the energy to say, “Rude. You should be nice to injured people, you know.”
Sakura’s crying turned into something closer to a relieved sob, and Naruto could practically hear Sasuke’s shoulders untense. He didn’t get why they were so relieved, though. His internal clock was pretty shit even when he wasn’t dying, but he doubted they had more than two of their original ten minutes left.
As if on cue, Sakura made an awful, punched-out noise as she crumpled inwards, her whole body shaking like a leaf as the ceiling dropped a few more inches. It was starting to squish Sasuke, his cheek pressed uncomfortably against the ceiling, and it would’ve been enough to make Naruto start giggling again if the scrape of stone against the top of his head hadn’t been quite so painful.
Sasuke rasped, “It’s okay to let go, Sakura. There’s no point in making yourself suffer if we’re going to die anyway.”
Sakura, always more willing to die than to quit, said, “You sound like Pein.”
Naruto was pretty sure that was the exact opposite of what Pein’s whole deal was, but he was too loopy to be sure. He opened his mouth to say so, but instead all that came out was, “I really love you guys, you know?”
Sasuke said something in response, but Naruto didn’t hear it over Sakura’s scream and the world going black.
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Naruto decided to attribute how long it took him to figure out he wasn’t actually dead to the painkillers and the brain damage rather than the fact that he had just assumed he was going to wake up in the Pure Land. What he saw when he first woke up wasn’t too different from how he imagined it, after all. He was comfortable in bed, with Sakura and Sasuke near enough that he could see them even through barely-open eyes.
The pain, medicated or not, was what made Naruto realize he was decidedly not in the Pure Land. His head was pounding like… something, and it hurt too much to think of a comparison. The pain in his leg wasn’t exactly worse, but it was different in a way that made him feel nauseous when he paid too much attention to it.
He could have just laid there, floating forever, but eventually the blobby figure of Sakura shifted where it sat next to Sasuke’s, yawning blearily. Naruto made the mistake of blinking, trying to clear his vision enough to actually see her, and she zeroed in on him instantly. She shook Sasuke hard enough that he woke up with his sharingan spinning, which usually happened when he woke up from a nightmare and thought he was under attack.
Their faces were coming into focus now, but their words weren’t. Sakura was gesturing, speaking emphatically, and Sasuke looked like he was about to cry. It jogged Naruto’s memory painfully, and his last words and desperate confession came crashing back to him in haunting, embarrassing detail.
He was fairly certain he could have dragged himself back to consciousness enough to have a real conversation about that, but he didn’t. The painkillers might have been helping with whatever happened to his body, but they wouldn’t do anything for the sting of rejection.