The car ride back to the college was silent. Gaara sat pressed to the left window, the glass so cold his breath frosted it with every exhale. Kiba slumped in the middle, arms crossed, his leg bouncing so hard the seat rattled beneath him. Sasuke sat on the right, his hands flat on his knees, knuckles white and aching.
Itachi drove with military precision, headlights cutting through the dark as they wound back down the mountain. The dashboard clock read 12:42 a.m. Every few miles, Itachi's eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. Sasuke met them once, held the look for a beat, and looked away.
They pulled to a stop at the edge of campus. The security shack was deserted, only the dull yellow glow from inside spilling across the sidewalk like a half-hearted welcome. Itachi didn't cut the engine. The silence in the car stretched, tense and brittle.
"We'll be in touch soon," Itachi said, gaze on the windshield. "Don't do anything stupid until then."
Kiba snorted, but even he sounded exhausted. "Isn't that, like, your whole family motto?"
Itachi almost smiled. "No. That would be 'do the thing, take the consequences.' But if you have any sense, you'll keep a low profile. Especially you." He met Gaara's eyes, and Gaara nodded, unreadable as always.
Gaara slid out first, barely making a sound as his boots hit the pavement. "I need to get home," he said, voice quiet, "let Temari and Shikamaru know what happened." He glanced at Sasuke, and for the first time his eyes looked hollowed out, tired. "Text if you hear anything."
Kiba lingered, half-twisting in his seat to look at Sasuke. "If you see anything weird," Kiba said, "anything at all, call me. I gotta check in at my place before my sister calls the cops, but—" He hesitated, then just said, "Don't do anything alone."
Sasuke nodded, the motion mechanical. "I won't."
Kiba clapped him on the shoulder and slipped out after Gaara, both disappearing into the dark, their footsteps muffled by a fine dusting of snow.
For a moment, Itachi and Sasuke sat in the blue-lit silence of the car. Itachi reached into the glove box and pulled out a white envelope, thick with folded pages. He set it on the center console without a word.
Itachi's voice dropped to barely a whisper. "Everything we have on Orochimaru. There's years of intel in there. Call me if you get stuck."
Sasuke pocketed it. "Thank you."
Itachi finally turned, his face drawn and colorless. "This is dangerous, you could get hurt. You understand?"
Sasuke's jaw clenched. "Yes."
Itachi nodded, then shifted the car into drive and rolled away, tail lights vanishing into the black.
Sasuke stood alone for a minute, watching his breath fog the air, then walked up the long path toward the dorms. Each step felt heavier than the last. The entire campus was asleep, windows dark except for the far-off glare of the library lights and the halo above the Alpha dorm, which was never allowed to go fully dark.
By the time Sasuke reached his building, the clock on his phone said 1:04 a.m. He keyed in the door code and stepped into the echoing hallway. The institutional lights were so bright they made his head hurt, turning every smudge on the linoleum into a starburst.
He walked to the third floor, and stopped dead at the top of the stairwell.
Two men stood at the end of the hallway, right in front of his dorm room.
Sasuke recognized them instantly. He'd seen their faces on Naruto's desk, framed together with an awkwardly smiling thirteen-year-old version of Naruto wedged between them, arms thrown over their shoulders. Iruka was shorter, round-faced, his hairline just beginning to recede and his mouth set in a straight line. Kakashi was tall and spare, with silver hair and an air of effortless detachment. His visible eye was narrow and unreadable, the other obscured behind a black cloth mask.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, hands stuffed deep in their jacket pockets, saying nothing.
Sasuke's chest tightened, a slow ache that radiated out from the base of his sternum. He'd known this was coming, but had hoped for more time.
He started down the hallway, footsteps loud on the polished floor. At the sound, Iruka straightened, hope flaring in his expression before draining away when he registered Sasuke.
Kakashi was first to speak. "You live here?" he asked, gaze raking Sasuke up and down assessing him.
Sasuke nodded. "I'm Sasuke. Uchiha. I'm—" The word "roommate" stuck in his throat like a fishbone. "I live with Naruto."
Iruka's voice trembled, barely more than a whisper. "Do you know where he is?"
Sasuke shook his head. "No. I'm…" He couldn't get the words out.
Kakashi's visible eye narrowed, searching Sasuke's face for lies. After a long moment, he relaxed slightly and offered an almost-smile. "Why don't you open the door, Sasuke? Maybe we can help each other."
Sasuke fumbled the key from his pocket, hands shaking more than he wanted to admit. The lock stuck, then turned with a heavy thunk. He braced himself and pushed the door open, lights flicking on automatically.
Iruka hovered by the threshold, gaze darting everywhere—Naruto's battered sneakers on the floor, a pile of unfolded laundry by the closet, the swirl-marked mug of instant ramen balanced on top of a stack of dog-eared manga. The place still reeked of Naruto: orange-scented body wash, sugar cereal, something sharp and adrenal that had nothing to do with cologne. Sasuke felt it in the back of his throat and had to swallow hard.
Kakashi, by contrast, barely seemed to look at anything at all. His eye—just the one—scanned the room once, then settled on Sasuke. For a long second, Sasuke felt himself weighed, measured, classified. He recognized the look: the unblinking stare of a man who had spent too many years waiting for bad news.
Iruka broke first. He stepped into the room, hands knotted together, and stared at the empty bed across from Sasuke's. "He didn't call. Six p.m. everyday, he checks in. We waited an hour, then two. He always calls."
Sasuke nodded, all too familiar with Naruto's daily check-ins. He'd seen it firsthand—Naruto suddenly glancing at the clock mid-kiss, extracting himself from Sasuke's arms to grab his phone. "Five minutes," Sasuke would mutter, reaching for him. Naruto would just shake his head with that stubborn look, already dialing. "They worry," he'd whisper, and Sasuke would fall back against the pillows, knowing there was no point arguing once Naruto's mind was made up.
Kakashi drifted to the bathroom, casual as a ghost. Sasuke watched him slide open the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, scan the shelves, then close it just as silently as he'd opened it. He wondered what Kakashi was looking for—Naruto's prescription, maybe, or evidence he'd left in a hurry.
Sasuke lowered himself onto the edge of his bed, palms pressed against the sheets. Iruka remained standing, shifting his weight from one foot to the other before finally sinking down onto Naruto's unmade bed, the mattress dipping beneath him like it was exhaling.
Eventually, Kakashi dragged the chair over so he could sit beside Iruka, their knees touching. He took Iruka's hand in both of his, holding on tight enough that Iruka's knuckles blanched. They looked at Sasuke together—Kakashi's gaze steady and expectant, Iruka's wavering at the edges.
Sasuke's jaw ached from clenching it. He realized he hadn't unclenched it since the yesterday when Naruto vanished. "This is worse than I thought it would be," he said. His voice barely made it out of his own chest. "I didn't expect it to feel so empty here."
Kakashi waited, just a hint of a nod. "Start wherever you want," he said. "We aren't leaving until you're done."
Sasuke closed his eyes, ground the heels of his hands against his eyelids until white sparks bloomed there. He drew in a breath, tried to find the words, and said, "I think he was taken."
Iruka's head snapped up, hope and suspicion knotted together in his face. "That isn't funny," he said, each word trembling with a threat of tears.
Sasuke shook his head. "I'm not joking. Not about this."
Kakashi looked at him, eye gone soft, and said, "Why do you think that?"
So Sasuke told them everything. His voice grew hoarse as he described their random room assignment, how Naruto had slowly trusted him with fragments of his secret. He described the lab break-in with growing desperation—the haunting emptiness of rooms that should have held answers, the acrid chemical smell that burned his nostrils and made his eyes water, the sickening realization that someone had methodically erased every trace. His hands shook violently as he recounted their frantic search for Kurama, the hollow ache in his chest growing with each dead end, each new horror uncovered about Shukaku and the others.
Throughout it all, Sasuke swallowed back the words he couldn't bear to say aloud—the electric shock of their first kiss, the night Naruto's suppressants had failed and Sasuke had seen raw terror in those blue eyes, how marking Naruto with his pheromones had felt like claiming a piece of his own soul. The memory of Naruto's warmth on that narrow dorm bed made his voice falter completely.
Kakashi's eye had grown darker with each word. He let out a slow, pained breath. "When was the last time you saw him?"
Sasuke's throat tightened. The timeline had been playing on repeat in his mind since everything happened. "Noon," he said finally. "We were in here talking. I was nervous about meeting Itachi, and Naruto..." He looked down at his hands. "He told me not to go if something felt wrong." The irony twisted in his chest. "I left at 12:30. Told him to stay put and pick up if I called. But the wrong feeling—it wasn't about Itachi at all."
Iruka buried his face in his hands. Sasuke stared at the orange hoodie draped over the chair, wanting both to clutch it to his face and to hurl it across the room. His fingers twitched toward the ramen mug—Naruto's favorite, still crusted with soup residue—then retreated. The broken phone on the desk seemed to mock him with its spider-webbed screen, evidence of his failure and his only remaining connection to Naruto all at once.
Sasuke's voice faltered. "My brother and I talked for less than an hour. Then something felt wrong." His fingers curled into fists, nails biting into his palms. "I called Naruto. No answer. Just voicemail, over and over." He swallowed hard, remembering the growing panic with each unanswered ring. "By the time I made it back here, students were filing into the building. Someone had pulled the fire alarm—a prank, they said." His eyes drifted to the shattered phone on the desk. "I searched every face in that crowd. He wasn't there. All I found was his phone, abandoned in the stairwell. The room was empty."
Iruka's eyes widened, his hands gripping his knees. Kakashi pushed himself up from the chair and began pacing the small room, his footsteps measured and deliberate. After three circuits, he stopped and fixed Sasuke with that penetrating one-eyed stare. "You're not telling us everything," he said quietly. "Roommates don't typically go to these lengths. What exactly is Naruto to you?" Kakashi asked, "Are you and Naruto… together?"
For a second, Sasuke's throat closed completely. He nodded once, watching their expressions shift—Iruka's eyes widening with parental concern, Kakashi's lone eye softening with something like recognition.
Iruka lowered his trembling hands. "But why?" His voice cracked. "Why would anyone take him?"
Heat prickled behind Sasuke's eyes as he forced himself to meet their gaze. "It's my fault," he whispered, the words like glass in his mouth. "Orochimaru has been fixated on my family for years, and I—" His voice failed him. The memory of Naruto's skin against his lips, the intoxicating scent that had driven him to claim what wasn't his to take.
"You what?" Iruka leaned forward, desperation etched into every line of his face. Beside him, Kakashi settled back down, his hand finding Iruka's knee in a gesture so intimate it made Sasuke's chest ache with longing.
"I marked him." The confession tore from Sasuke's throat. "He was struggling with his Omega pheromones, and I thought—" His voice broke. "God, I just wanted to protect him. I thought my scent would shield him." His fingers curled until nails bit into palms, drawing blood. "Orochimaru took Naruto because he couldn't have me."
The silence that followed felt like drowning. Sasuke watched Iruka's face crumple as understanding hit—they were more then just together. Shame burned through Sasuke's veins like acid. "I'm so sorry," he choked out, the apology pathetically inadequate against the void Naruto's absence had left.
Iruka crossed the room in two quick steps. His arms closed around Sasuke with a force that nearly knocked the air from his lungs. The hug was awkward—Sasuke's arms pinned to his sides, Iruka's chin pressed into his shoulder, and for a moment neither of them moved. Sasuke felt, more than heard, the tremor in Iruka's chest and the way his own pulse pounded against the pressure. Then Iruka stepped back, grabbing Sasuke by the forearms, squeezing them until the pain cut through the shame.
"Don't you dare say it's your fault," Iruka said, his voice suddenly sharp, the kind of tone that could have cowed a classroom of thirty hormonal teenagers. "Naruto gets himself into trouble. It's what he does. If you hadn't been with him, who knows what could have happened?"
Kakashi was watching over Iruka's shoulder, his visible eye narrowed in appraisal, but when Sasuke looked up the older man's gaze softened by a fraction.
Iruka's grip loosened. "Naruto's… different. Always has been. That's why we love him, right?" Iruka gave a short, watery laugh. "He's survived worse than this. He'll survive this too."
Sasuke nodded, the pressure in his chest easing just a little. He realized Iruka was shaking, barely perceptible, the way a spring shivers when it's wound too tight.
Iruka took a careful breath. "Do you know where they took him?"
Sasuke shook his head. "Not yet. I have people looking." The envelope from Itachi pressed against his ribs, a concrete weight in his jacket pocket. "If I find out, I'll let you know. I promise."
He saw the moment Iruka decided to trust him, the way the lines around his eyes softened and his shoulders dropped. "Don't do anything reckless," Iruka said. "Don't go alone."
Kakashi reached out, placing a hand on Iruka's back. "We're not amateurs," he said quietly, "though I suppose you could say we're out of practice." He lifted his chin at Sasuke. "We'll get word out. There are people who owe us favors—military, registry, even the college." He glanced around the room, eyes landing on the orange hoodie. "We'll keep this quiet for now. The fewer who know, the less likely Orochimaru will get spooked."
Sasuke nodded again. He felt impossibly tired, body and mind stretched thin enough to see light through the cracks.
Iruka hesitated at the door. "If he gets a chance to call, tell him we're not mad," he said, voice breaking just a little, "just that we miss him. That's all."
Kakashi gave a brief, two-fingered salute. They slipped into the hallway and Sasuke listened to the fading footsteps, the echoing click of the stairwell door, and finally, silence.
The room felt different now—emptier, like someone had carved out his insides and left the shell behind. Sasuke closed the door and leaned his forehead against it, each breath catching in his throat as if his lungs had forgotten how to work. His pulse thundered in his ears, drowning out everything but the absence where Naruto's voice should be. When he finally turned to face the room, the silence hit him like a physical blow—not just quiet, but dead air, the kind that follows after someone has flatlined.
Sasuke kicked his shoes off and collapsed onto Naruto's bed, burying his face in the pillow. His fingers clutched the fabric so tightly his knuckles turned white. The scent—ramen, citrus, something uniquely Naruto—hit him like a physical blow. His chest constricted as if crushed beneath an invisible weight.
"Damn it," he whispered, voice cracking. His throat burned. One tear escaped, then another, until they flowed unchecked down his face. The pillow muffled sounds he'd never let anyone hear—raw, guttural sobs that tore from somewhere deep inside him. His body shook with each ragged breath, memories flashing behind his closed eyelids: Naruto's laugh, his ridiculous grin, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners.
Sasuke's fingers found the small tear in the pillowcase—the one Naruto had been meaning to fix—and something inside him shattered completely. This wasn't just about his omega being taken. This was Naruto. His best friend. The only person who had ever seen past his walls. The realization crashed through him with devastating clarity: he loved him. Not as an Alpha loves an Omega, but as a person loves their other half. When he got Naruto back—and he would, even if he had to tear the world apart—he would never let him go again.