fireun | "Metamerism" 3/? Naruto.

Title- Metamerism 3/?
Naruto

It would be cliché to say it was like a kick in the gut, but as Naruto’s innards roiled with the same acidic confusion as his thoughts, he had a sort of understanding as to where that particular cliché had come from.

Dark eyes met Naruto’s own blue, mirroring the shock that must has been splayed across his face.

“Damn…”

It wasn’t quite a moment of epiphany, but there was something close to it in the way the stranger stared, in the way he seemed to be examining everything at once. Naruto had the odd sense he was being measured against a scale he had not been made aware of, a standard he hasn’t known existed. And it rankled. Shock smoothed to a scowl, posture straightened to aggression, and it triggered a shadow across the stranger’s expression. Scrutinizing shifted to disdain, and the stranger’s attention flicked away as if Naruto no longer existed.

Naruto shoved his hands into his pockets, fiddling with a bit of change in a hidden bit of nerves, and stalked into the gallery. It was interesting, the way patrons shifted away from the kid in the street clothes, and then huddled in as they actually looked and caught a familiar set of features, a particular posture…

Naruto didn’t particularly like crowds and definitely didn’t like how this one was centering around him, chattering and smiling like a flock of trained parrots. The same words came out of a dozen mouths, all asking how he knew the artist, what he thought of color schemes or compositions…

Sasuke watched them descend upon his unexpected visitor and took the time to regain control of the situation.

His ghost was real.

He knew every quirk of those lips, the furrows in that forehead. He could almost smell the mint that should be on that breath. Knew the shape the tattoo he could see peeking out between jeans and shirt, had traced it into wet acrylics, salt spilled on the table, in the dirt with the toe of a shoe…

His ghost was real, and too damn close.

“What are you doing here?”

There was too much familiarity in that phrase. It jangled along Naruto’s nerves before settling and souring his temper. “You’re the obsessed stalker. Shouldn’t I be the one bitching at you?”

Mint on the breath, a bit of gum chewed to smother the last bits of a spicy lunch. Sasuke leaned forward, not to breath in cheap cologne and cheaper gum. He leaned forward; eyes narrowed, voice a placid façade, to finally make his demand. “Leave me alone.”

The whirling spiral twisted through the fury in bright blue eyes, twisted through errant bits of hair and got tangled in a nasty scowl. “Stop painting me, you sick bastard.”

The spiral twisted through the anxiety tying Sasuke’s stomach in impossible knots. Stop painting? He had tried. But that…bastard…those eyes, that damn whirling bit of insanity, refused to let him alone.

It was only as his antagonist stepped back, face slack with something distressingly close to shock, that Sasuke realized he had spoken aloud.