Naruto sat at his desk, the overhead light a cold white that made every flaw in the Formica surface stand out. He'd spread his textbooks in a deliberate fan, hoping the geometry of study would trick his brain into focus. Chemistry here, calculus there, the battered comp notebook open to a page of illegible scrawl. He clicked his pen, read the first line of the first assigned problem, then immediately forgot what the question was asking.
He read it again. And again.
It didn't help.
Across the room, Sasuke's bed was still made with military precision, the navy comforter tucked in tight, nothing out of place except the impression where Sasuke had sat to tie his shoes. The desk—Sasuke's side—was bare except for a single closed laptop, the screen black, the reflection in it a distorted fish-eye of the room. Naruto looked at his own reflection, the wild shock of hair, the hollow eyes ringed with fatigue, and then looked away fast.
He glanced at his phone for the fifth time in as many minutes. No new notifications. No text, not even the meaningless ping from Kiba's meme thread. The silence of the phone stung more than anything else.
He tried to write an answer in the notebook, but the pen slipped in his fingers and the words that came out were "what if he never comes back" in tiny, cramped letters.
He scratched it out, then pressed the pen to the paper and waited, staring at the little black dot until it bled through the page. He waited for the dot to become a hole, a void, something to climb into, but nothing happened.
He picked up his phone again. No new messages.
He set it down, looked at the door, looked at the window, and then back at the door. Sasuke had been gone twenty minutes, thirty tops. The plan was to meet Itachi at one, but what if he'd gotten there early? What if something had happened, some leftover trap from Orochimaru or Obito, some knife-in-the-dark scheme that took Sasuke out before he even—
The thought made Naruto's heart jerk in his chest, a brief, sick lurch that left his hands shaking. He dropped the pen, flexed his fingers, and forced himself to breathe.
He tried again with the chemistry, made it through a whole paragraph this time before the words started to swim. He was halfway through copying a formula when he realized he'd written Sasuke's name instead of the variable. He scratched it out so violently the paper tore.
A voice in the hallway startled him—a cluster of girls from down the hall, laughing too loud, one of them shrieking about the state of the communal showers. Naruto's ears pricked up, suddenly hyperaware of every footstep, every distant slam of a door. He listened for Sasuke's return, but all he got was the echo of laughter receding down the corridor.
The silence after was total, heavy. It made his own pulse sound loud in his ears.
He gave up on the textbooks, shoved them into a pile, and slumped forward with his head in his arms. The surface of the desk was cool against his forehead, the smell of wood and old coffee grounding him just enough to keep from spinning out. He thought of Kurama, his brother's hair flashing in the fluorescent light of that awful cell, the way it felt to hold those strands in his fist like a lifeline. He thought of Sasuke, the set of his jaw, the haunted edge in his voice when he'd left..
He didn't realize he'd drifted until the sudden blare of the fire alarm shot him bolt upright.
The sound was a physical thing, a banshee scream that drove itself into his skull and set his nerves jangling. The overhead light strobed red, then white, then red again. For a second, Naruto's only thought was a deep, irrational anger: Who the hell pulled the alarm at this hour?
He waited for the noise to stop, for the false alarm to resolve itself, but the wail just grew louder. Then, pounding footsteps in the hall, and their RA's voice, desperate and hoarse: "Evacuate! Everybody out, now! Leave your stuff, just go!"
Naruto froze, caught between Sasuke's explicit instructions to stay put and the wailing alarm. The thought of Sasuke's face if he burned to death out of sheer stubbornness flashed through his mind—that particular blend of fury and devastation that only Sasuke could manage. "Idiot," ghost-Sasuke would hiss at his grave, "I didn't mean die waiting."
He snatched his phone and jacket, muttering curses under his breath as he stepped into the corridor. A thin stream of students flowed toward the stairwell—most were in class or out with friends at this hour. Naruto hung back, letting the last stragglers pass before following at a distance, the space between him and the others a small comfort in the chaos.
Naruto kept his head down, elbows tight to his sides. The noise was overwhelming—a wordless, rising din, punctuated by the blare of the alarm. He tried to check his phone, but his fingers fumbled on the lock screen and it nearly slipped from his grip. He crammed it back into his hoodie and focused on not getting trampled.
Naruto paused at the mouth of the stairwell, watching the last students shuffle down the steps. For a fleeting second, he considered retreating to his room and locking the door. The RA probably wouldn't notice one missing student during headcount. His hand tightened on the doorframe, but he forced himself forward.
Naruto halted at the stairwell's highest point and peered over the railing. Far below, the first wave of evacuees clogged the exit, their bodies forming a human bottleneck. With a frustrated exhale, he fished his phone from his pocket and pulled up Sasuke's contact. His thumb hovered over the screen, ready to explain the situation, when he felt it—the unmistakable prick of metal against his neck.
He jerked, dropping the phone. The sensation was so alien, so out of context, that for half a second his brain refused to register what had happened. Then the fire alarm and the crowd and the world all seemed to tilt. Naruto's vision swam, lights blooming like afterimages behind his eyes.
He reached for the railing, but his fingers didn't obey. He twisted, tried to see who was behind him, but his body felt suddenly slow, as if he was running underwater.
A hand, gloved and impersonal, gripped his shoulder, steadying him. He wanted to scream, but his mouth wouldn't open. Another hand wrapped around his waist, pinning his arms to his sides.
A spike of terror drove through the fog as his body sagged. He tried to call out for Sasuke, but the word got lost somewhere between his brain and his tongue. His last clear thought was a curse: I promised I'd stay safe.
His phone clattered against the concrete steps before tumbling over the railing. Somewhere below, a voice shouted, "Hey!" The sound barely registered as his body went slack. Strong hands seized him before he could crumple completely, hoisting his deadweight with unsettling ease. The stairwell tilted in his vision—harsh fluorescents bleeding into darkness, floor tiles stretching like taffy, shadows creeping inward from all sides.
The darkness swallowed everything.
—
By the time they reached the campus gates, Sasuke was winded, pain slicing at his lungs, but he pushed harder. Itachi kept pace, never so much as panting. They rounded the Administration building, then cut diagonally across the quad, ignoring the posted "Keep Off Grass" signs. The sky above was the ugly orange of light pollution, a faint drizzle starting to mist the air.
Sasuke skidded to a halt at the dorm entrance. A crowd of students milled about the front steps and spilled onto the lawn—far too many for this time of day. His eyes darted frantically from face to face, searching for that familiar shock of blond hair.
Nothing.
He cut through a trio of Alpha athletes, their jackets clashing in neon, ignoring their muttered "watch it, man." He pushed up on the toes of his sneakers, scanning, desperate. Itachi's hand appeared at his elbow, anchoring him for a half-second. "We need to figure out what is going on," Itachi murmured, low and razor-sharp. "Focus."
Sasuke shook him off. "I am focused. I need to see him." He started down the sidewalk again, veering hard toward the entrance of their building, where a pack of Betas was staging an impromptu snack trade-off. "Move!" Sasuke snapped, elbowing through, ignoring the stares.
A single RA, clipboard in hand and eyes bloodshot behind thick lenses, stood at the top of the stoop, counting heads as students filtered back inside. Sasuke scaled the steps three at a time, grabbing the sleeve of the first student he recognized—a girl from the floor above. "What happened?" he demanded, the force of it making her stumble back.
She looked startled, then rolled her eyes. "False alarm. Somebody pulled it as a prank, probably those assholes on sixth. We were outside for like thirty minutes. I just want a shower." She wrenched her arm free and vanished inside.
Itachi watched, face unreadable, eyes never resting. "If he was evacuated, he'd be out here," he said, mostly to himself.
Sasuke scanned again, this time methodically, quadrant by quadrant, but the only blond head belonged to a Beta boy from the baseball team. Sasuke's heart hammered with a thin, sour terror. He looked at Itachi, who seemed to be calculating probabilities, then turned and headed for the doors, pushing past the next wave of returning residents.
Sasuke's chest constricted, each heartbeat a hammer against his ribs. His eyes darted wildly from face to face, searching for that familiar blond hair, that stupid grin. Where are you? The thought tasted like copper in his mouth. His fingers trembled as panic clawed up his throat, threatening to strangle him from within.
Inside, the stairwell stank of damp rubber and burnt popcorn. Sasuke hesitated, staring up the flights—should he check the room first, or retrace the evacuation route? He took a step, then paused. Something small and bright orange lay at the base of the stairs, half-hidden by a radiator.
Sasuke's heart stuttered as he dropped to one knee, snatching up the object with trembling fingers, his breath coming in short, desperate gasps. Please don't be what I think it is, he thought, even as recognition crashed through him like a physical blow.
Naruto's phone. The stupid orange case with the ramen bowl sticker that Sasuke had mocked a hundred times. His lungs seized mid-breath. No. No no no. His fingers trembled violently as he jabbed at the power button, a silent plea hammering in his chest. The screen flickered to life beneath a spiderweb of cracks.
Sasuke's vision tunneled to a pinprick of light, the world beyond the cracked screen falling away into darkness. His hands shook violently, a cold sweat breaking across his skin as bile rose in his throat. Itachi was beside him in a heartbeat, his brother's steady presence the only thing keeping him from collapsing as raw panic clawed through his chest.
Sasuke started up the stairs, taking them two at a time, every motion pure adrenaline. He reached the third floor landing, then sprinted the length of the corridor to their room, the echo of his steps a gunshot in the stillness. He jammed his key into the lock, twisting so hard the metal nearly bent.
The door swung open on a vacuum.
No Naruto.
The textbooks on the desk were undisturbed, the bed still a mess of rumpled sheets. Sasuke stared at the empty room, seeing for the first time just how sterile it really was—how easily a person could vanish from it, leaving only artifacts behind.
He punched the wall, once, hard enough to split the knuckle.
Itachi followed, closed the door behind him, and stood in the center of the room, letting his gaze crawl over every surface. He picked up the pen still sitting on the desk, the ink bleeding through the paper to the wood below. He examined the trash can, the clothes on the floor, the books. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at Sasuke with the flat, animal calm of someone who'd lived through the worst already.
As Sasuke looked over the room, his eyes snagged on each piece of evidence that Naruto existed—the dog-eared textbooks splayed open on the desk, the faded orange shirt hanging off the chair, the rumpled sheets still holding the indent of their bodies. His throat closed up, a vise of grief squeezing until he couldn't breathe. Then something inside him cracked open, flooding his veins with liquid fire. His hands curled into trembling fists as the panic crystallized into something harder, something that burned cold and sharp in his chest. Rage.