Afternoon light poured through the high windows, liquid gold spilling across the Uchiha study's tatami floor. The air swam with notes of parchment and lacquer. Naruto and Sasuke drifting in their own academic delta, textbooks and highlighters streaming across the low table, their study materials meandering dangerously close to flooding the pristine mats below.
"Hey, loser," Sasuke said, his tone so flat it was almost gentle, "are you planning on finishing that problem or just using it as a napkin again?"
Naruto leaned on his hand, glaring at his calculus worksheet. The numbers refused to make sense no matter how hard he stared. Instead of solving the problem, his mechanical pencil drifted to the margin where he'd been drawing a spiral that grew bigger with each minute he couldn't focus. He'd already added two whisker marks on either side of the spiral with his blue pen, accidentally creating a doodle that looked just like himself.
Naruto squinted one eye shut and held his pencil like a magic wand. "If I stare hard enough, maybe the math gods will take pity and write the answers in invisible ink only I can see," he said, then attacked his paper with such vengeful erasing that the rubber head popped off and ricocheted off his forehead into his lap. "Great. Now even my school supplies are committing seppuku."
Sasuke reached for his own pencil, a dark graphite tool sharpened to a surgical point, and in one deft, unhurried movement wrote the correct answer in the blank space beneath Naruto's attempt. He didn't bother to look up; his eyes stayed fixed on the page, as if turning his head would expend unnecessary energy.
"Maybe if you spent less time drawing ramen bowls and more time reading the question, you'd get it right the first time." His lips twitched—not quite a smirk, more like an involuntary muscle spasm betraying satisfaction.
Naruto clutched his chest like he'd been mortally wounded, then flicked the ruined eraser across the table. It struck Sasuke's wrist and bounced harmlessly onto the page. "Not everyone's a genius like you, bastard," he shot back, voice echoing in the still room. "Some of us mere mortals have to actually study instead of absorbing knowledge through our perfect Uchiha pores. What's your secret anyway—do you photosynthesize textbooks while you sleep?"
A dignified silence from Sasuke, who set down his pencil with the finality of a judge's gavel and finally looked over. His dark eyes caught Naruto's, and something shifted in them—a flicker of warmth that vanished as quickly as it appeared. The tips of Sasuke's ears reddened slightly as he held the gaze a beat longer than necessary, fingers absently tracing the edge of his textbook.
Naruto broke the stare first, heart skipping as he returned to his worksheet with a performative sigh. He could still feel Sasuke's attention lingering on the curve of his neck, just a second too long, like the afterburn of staring into a lightbulb. "You got the first step right," Sasuke said quietly, his voice dropping to a tone he seemed to reserve only for Naruto. "But you keep forgetting the constant."
Naruto felt the correction like a touch he both craved and resented—Sasuke's voice sliding under his skin, making his stomach tighten with something that wasn't quite embarrassment. "The constant," he repeated, rolling the words in his mouth while avoiding Sasuke's eyes. His fingers fidgeted with his pencil, twirling it once, twice. "Right. I'm nothing if not consistent at forgetting stuff."
Sasuke snorted, the tiniest huff of amusement. "True." He returned to his own work, and Naruto tracked the movement—how Sasuke's fingers curled around the pencil, how his shoulders relaxed by a millimeter when he thought Naruto wasn't looking. Every time Sasuke shifted, Naruto felt it like a change in air pressure. When Sasuke's sleeve brushed the table, Naruto's skin prickled. When Sasuke tucked a strand of hair behind his ear, Naruto's breath caught.
Naruto stared at his own notebook—a graveyard of crossed-out calculations with exactly one completed problem in forty minutes. He blamed the room. The light here was too nice, demanding naps on tatami, not math. But mostly he blamed Sasuke, whose mere presence made focusing impossible. He found himself counting Sasuke's breaths, memorizing the rhythm of his pencil strokes, wondering if Sasuke's heart raced too when their knees accidentally touched beneath the table.
Naruto cleared his throat. Sasuke didn't look up. He coughed louder, drumming his fingers against the table. Nothing. He tapped his pencil against his teeth, clicked it repeatedly, even hummed the first bars of some commercial jingle. Sasuke's eyes remained fixed on his textbook, midnight hair falling just so over his forehead, casting shadows that sharpened the cut of his jaw. Naruto balled up a scrap of paper, aimed carefully, and flicked it at Sasuke's head. It bounced off without earning even a glance. Finally, Naruto reached across the table, nudged the corner of Sasuke's textbook with two fingers, and said, "Bet you can't do three problems blindfolded."
Sasuke didn't miss a beat. "Bet you can't do one with your eyes open."
A little hum of triumph bloomed in Naruto's chest, the way it always did when he got Sasuke to play along. He grinned, all teeth. "Yeah? Prove it."
Sasuke glanced over, the corner of his mouth twitching upward for a fraction of a second before he could suppress it. His pencil stilled against the page. "If I do three in under a minute, you owe me lunch."
"And if I do one, you have to go with me to the arcade tomorrow," Naruto countered, already knowing he'd lose but wanting the excuse anyway.
Sasuke's eyes lingered on Naruto's hopeful face a moment longer than necessary. He sighed softly, like someone surrendering to an inevitability. "Fine."
Naruto barely registered the math problems. Instead, he watched Sasuke's eyelashes fan against his cheeks as he closed his eyes, the slight tension in his jaw as he concentrated, the way his fingers moved across the page with precise, elegant strokes. Sasuke's shoulders rolled once before settling, and Naruto caught himself counting the seconds it took for Sasuke's breathing to slow into its focused rhythm. Forty seconds later, three perfect solutions appeared on the page. Naruto pretended to be annoyed for show, but couldn't tear his eyes from the satisfied twitch at the corner of Sasuke's mouth.
"All yours," Sasuke said, passing the textbook back. Their fingers brushed—skin to skin—and while Sasuke's expression remained unchanged, Naruto felt electricity surge through his entire body. He fought the urge to either snatch his hand away or, more dangerously, let his fingers linger against Sasuke's pale skin just a moment longer.
He was eighteen, for god's sake, not twelve. But eighteen was still too young to have learned how to quiet your pulse when it thundered in your ears at the slightest touch. Naruto wondered if Sasuke could hear it too, or if that perfect Uchiha composure meant he never felt such things at all.
Naruto tried his problem. He still got it wrong, but less wrong this time. The constant. He underlined it three times in neon yellow, and next to it, drew a little ramen bowl for luck. "See?" he said, shoving the paper across the table. "I'm improving."
Sasuke leaned over the paper, his dark hair falling forward as he tilted his head. His finger traced the neon yellow underline, lingering on the tiny ramen bowl before he looked up through his lashes. "Congratulations. You've gone from completely hopeless to merely disastrous." The corner of his mouth quirked upward, eyes glinting with something warmer than mockery. "Maybe by graduation you'll be able to do fractions."
Naruto stuck his tongue out. "Hey, a passing grade is all I need. No one ever asks a novelist to prove the quadratic formula."
Sasuke's eyes flickered up, just a brief, searching look. "But you still want to get into that university in New York, right?"
Naruto blinked. "Yeah. I mean, I'm not gonna let my old man down." The words sounded foreign in his mouth, a half-truth he'd rehearsed so many times it no longer felt like a lie. He leaned forward slightly, searching Sasuke's face for the tiniest flinch, a tightening around those dark eyes, any sign that might say: stay. But Sasuke had already dropped his gaze to his textbook, fingers curling around the edge of the page as if preparing to turn it.
"Then you need to pass math," Sasuke said, his only response.
Naruto looked away, teeth digging into his lower lip. His fingers tore another corner from his worksheet, rolling it between thumb and forefinger until it formed a perfect little sphere. He lobbed it at Sasuke's forehead, watching with held breath. This time, the other boy caught it without looking up, crushed it in one hand, and deposited it neatly into the trash bin beside his chair. Not even a glance. Not even a flicker of annoyance or amusement.
"Impressive," Naruto said, shoulders slumping as he turned back to his textbook, pencil tapping against an empty margin.
They settled into a rhythm, or rather Naruto did. Sasuke's rhythm was always the same: quiet, relentless, impossible to disrupt. Naruto scribbled notes, occasionally getting distracted by the way the sun lit up dust motes in Sasuke's hair, or how the lamplight traced the outline of his jaw when the sun dipped behind a cloud.
"Hey, um, Sasuke..." Naruto's voice trailed off. He swallowed, throat suddenly dry. Sasuke didn't look up, just continued working through his problem set with methodical precision. Naruto's fingers drummed against the table. "Never mind."
The room darkened by degrees as the sun sagged lower. Outside, cicadas began their evening chorus. Naruto opened his mouth twice more, each time closing it before sound emerged. He stared at Sasuke's bent head, willing him to look up, to notice, to ask what was wrong. But Sasuke just turned a page, completely absorbed in his work, oblivious to the words building pressure behind Naruto's teeth like steam in a kettle with no release valve.
Eventually, Sasuke closed his notebook with a decisive snap. "You've got another hour before dinner, right?"
Naruto glanced at his phone to seem like he wasn't just staring at Sasuke. "Yeah. My mom's on some kind of culinary warpath tonight. New recipe." He flicked his wrist in a mock-stabbing motion. "If I'm late, she'll gut me with whatever fancy knife she bought this week." He let the sentence hang there, suddenly aware of how much space his words were taking up, but Sasuke's eyes softened just enough to show he understood.
Sasuke tilted his head exactly 23.5 degrees—Naruto had measured once with a protractor during history class—and asked, "Will the parental units be in attendance?"
Naruto's grin erupted like a supernova. "Oh yeah! And Dad already polished his lucky chopsticks." He leapt to his feet, hunching his shoulders to mimic Fugaku's posture. "Minato, that call was clearly interference!" Then he straightened, flipped an invisible ponytail, and pointed finger-guns. "Fugaku, my friend, perhaps your eyesight requires the same attention as your batting average!"
Sasuke's left eyebrow performed its signature microscopic twitch as he aligned his papers with vampire-like precision, tapping each corner three times. "You're an idiot," he said, but the words floated between them like dandelion seeds.
Naruto replied, "but I'm your idiot."
He watched Sasuke's face for any reaction—a twitch at the corner of his mouth, a softening around his eyes, anything. Sasuke paused, his hand hovering over his textbook. For a heartbeat, something flickered across his features—surprise? Discomfort? Something else entirely? But then it was gone, replaced by that familiar mask as he shook his head and continued packing his bag. The sun had nearly disappeared, leaving the room dim except for the lamp on the table. In this half-light, their knees almost touching under the cramped desk, Naruto's throat tightened around words he couldn't quite form. He opened his mouth, then closed it, settling instead for a smile as he bent his head and packed his belongings.
Tomorrow, he thought. Maybe tomorrow he'd figure out how to say it.
But for now, this was enough: the warmth of the fading light, the easy back-and-forth, the way Sasuke didn't need to look up to know exactly what Naruto was thinking.