Word Count: 3,487
Minor Revisions: 9 May 2010

Shoot Your Mouth Off
Hades' Phoenix

2.

Sex wasn't really a foreign concept to Naruto. That wasn't so surprising, considering he'd never had a guardian that cared whether or not he was starving, let alone restricting him to age-appropriate material. And with the casual regard that shinobi tended to have about sex, it was only natural that Naruto was able to develop his Sexy no Jutsu long before he ever hit puberty.

And really, expecting a teenage boy that could turn himself into a woman—a very sexy woman at that, with all the appropriate bits and sensations that came along with the position—to never get acquainted with his new self was like expecting Sasuke and Itachi to kiss and play house.

Any lingering innocence or vagueness he might have managed to retain about intimacy was soundly sacrificed during his training with Jiraiya like a virgin at the hands of a demon. Icha Icha Paradise was still as boring as he'd thought it was when he was twelve, only now, it was because he'd been there for Jiraiya's 'research' missions. Somehow, merely reading about getting a face full of bouncing beach ball-sized boobs just wasn't the same as the actual experience.

Now, Naruto warily watched Sasuke on the either side of the training grounds. Both were crouched, bleeding from various wounds and orifices and their muscles feeling like they'd been pounded with a meat tenderizer. He was rather smug to see the bastard favoring his right side, where he'd failed to block one of Naruto's powerful side-kicks and likely gotten a rib or three cracked.

"What's the matter, asshole, can't keep up?" Naruto jeered loudly, studiously ignoring the fact that yelling made his own lungs burn.

"Careful, idiot," Sasuke returned lowly. While normally he sounded about as emotive as a toaster, the adrenaline had lent him an air of unholy and anarchic glee. "Don't challenge people you obviously can't beat."

Naruto growled, feeling fire in his blood and that peculiar shift in his vision that came with his pupils narrowing into foxy slits. With a loud war-cry underlined by the deeper roar of the Kyuubi, the blond threw the last of his energy into charging across the clearing to plant a fist in the bastard's face.

"Sasuke! Naruto! Where the hell are you?"

Sasuke's lips were twisted back into a snarl as he copied Naruto, forcing his legs to move as fast as they could, leaping into the air at the last possible second to avoid Naruto's earth-shattering punch and bringing his chokutō down point-first to pierce the other's heart. But Naruto turned with the blade, feeling it slice through his mesh shirt and graze his flesh as he caught Sasuke's arm and redirected his momentum.

Sasuke's breath hissed out when his back collided with the ground and was summarily swallowed by Naruto's mouth, which was suddenly pressed over his own and biting viciously at his lips. Reacting blindly, Sasuke's knee dislodged Naruto just enough for him to pull back and dig his teeth into the blond's shoulder until he tasted warmth and copper.

"Sasuke? Naruto?"

Outside stimulus slammed Naruto back to earth. He kicked himself away from Sasuke and somehow found his feet, wavering with sudden exhaustion that came from hard sparring for… He glanced at the sun. They'd been fighting since Sasuke had woken him up in the early hours of that morning with a surprise attack, and it was now nearly lunch.

"What the fuck are you doing, you bastard?" Naruto had howled, clinging to the ceiling in his ratty cotton boxers and the weird sleeping cap that looked like something was gnawing away at his scalp. Sasuke stared up at him from the bed where he had pounced like a rabid cat, and was doing a damn good impression of one with the way his Sharingan eyes were unerringly focused on Naruto in the dark bedroom.

"You're training to be an ANBU, moron," he'd replied flatly, as though ambushing sleeping teammates at four in the morning was routine and Naruto was retarded for not understanding that. Naruto just gave him an incredulous look and demanded to see his release papers from the local mental hospital, which had sparked into their current fight.

"Sakura-chan?" Naruto blinked at the young woman. The shift from must-kill-Sasuke-now to oh-hey-pretty-girl was making his head feel a little lightheaded. Though that might've been the blood loss.

Sakura looked from Naruto to Sasuke and back again, mouth gaping wordlessly. Sasuke had moved to lean against his elbows but otherwise remained lying on the ground like some kind of fucked-up model. He was apparently unperturbed with his bloodied, scratched state and that his dark yukata had fallen off one pale shoulder in such a way that an outside observer—in this case, Sakura—might understandably come to the wrong conclusions.

Sasuke was well aware of this and didn't care. Naruto, of course, was completely oblivious.

"Sakura-chan?" Naruto tried again, reaching out to gently touch her shoulder. She twitched, found her self-control, and was suddenly dragging Naruto away from the training grounds.

"C'mon, you," she muttered. "We're going for ramen."

Had it been anyone else, this would have sent Naruto into 'paroxysms of delirious exuberance,' whatever that meant, but past experience told him that Sakura only ever bought him food when she wanted something from him.

He whimpered, and it wasn't just from the bruises that were beginning to ache.

…

"Itadakimasu!"

Naruto plowed his way through a sixth bowl, not having realized how hungry he was after a hard workout and no breakfast. Sakura poked at her own ramen, still on her first bowl, and waited with forced patience until Naruto had slowed down enough to speak in something resembling a normal human language.

"Naruto," she said suddenly in a quiet voice, "what's going on between you and Sasuke?"

Noodles were nearly forcibly ejected through the blond's nostrils. He coughed and gasped, "W-what?"

She gave him a hard look that promised pain in his very near future if he didn't talk. Swallowing his mouthful, he muttered, "Uh…I don't know."

His near future was looking rather grim indeed, judging from the way Sakura's gloves creaked when her fists tightened. Naruto quickly held up placating hands, not thinking that his head would be able to take much more abuse that day without some serious medical repercussions.

"Ne, ne, Sakura-chan, I ain't lying!" he babbled. "What do you mean, anyway? He's a bastard with his head up his ass and he deserves a fist down his throat, everyone knows that."

Sakura's stare was boring into him like power drill and Naruto was getting distinctly uncomfortable. One part of his mind was terrified that he was going to be eating the road behind them within the next few seconds, and another part was surreptitiously checking out the cleavage that Sakura had finally managed to develop. It was a good thing for his health that she was too distracted to notice.

"I saw you two…kissing."

"Eh?" he squawked in surprise. Naruto's eyes squinted as he thought back, dimly and belatedly realizing that he might've heard someone's yell while he and Sasuke were fighting. And he really had kissed Sasuke, hadn't he? In the broadest, most general sense of the term, at least. Caught up in the need to see that son of bitch just give up for once, he hadn't really thought about what he was doing.

"Um, it was an accident?" he ventured, and squawked again when Sakura's fist thudded onto the counter. She was distinctly Not Amused, and the very small part of Naruto that had more sensitivity than a rock made its grand debut.

"Ne, Sakura-chan, you remember when Kiba said that Sasuke probably didn't have a cock and Shikamaru said that he just didn't have the time to act on his hormones, what with his whole 'I'm an Avenger' bullshit, and then Ino said that maybe he was gay or something and you tore a hole in the wall—"

Sakura's face said that not only did she remember that particular occasion, but that Naruto had better make his point very quickly.

"—and I said they'd better shut up if they didn't have the balls to ask him themselves?"

Sakura's anger swiftly deflated into incredulity. "Naruto, you actually asked him?"

"Well, yeah. He's my best friend. Er, rival." Naruto frowned thoughtfully.

"And you're still alive?"

"Hey, it takes more than an Uchiha to bring down Uzumaki Naruto!" he cried, and secretly grinned when he saw a reluctant smile tugging at Sakura's expression.

"Well, what did he say?"

Naruto frowned at her. There was a certain measure of breathlessness in her voice, though she'd claimed to have gotten over the worst bit of her crush. And although Naruto would do anything for her—she was one of the two most special of his Special People, after all—Sasuke was too, and he didn't want to break Sasuke's confidence. Then again, Sasuke generally couldn't care less what people thought of him, and this was Sakura, who'd been the only other person that never gave up on that asshole.

"He said sex was boring." The thought boggled Naruto's mind. He'd been intimate with a few women in his travels with Jiraiya, and for a kid that grew up without much healthy physical contact, there was something awe-inspiring at the thought that his touch could bring pleasure to another person. He'd taken it as a personal challenge.

(What he didn't know was that one or two of the women had later told his sensei that they'd never known a customer to be so generous and eager to learn in bed. Like a puppy, they said with teasing smiles)

"…That's it?"

Naruto leaned alongside the ramen counter to peer closely at her face. "Ne, I said something about bondage but he was all 'meh' about it, and then he insulted me. Then he kissed me and said I was boring, too, and tried to walk away."

"Then what?" There was something inscrutable in her features, and although she and Naruto had gotten close over the years and knew each other damn well, he wasn't sure what it was. But he wasn't in the habit of lying to her anyway.

"I grabbed him and kissed him, and then he kicked me in the face. And I beat the shit outta him for being such a bastard."

Sakura stared at him for a moment longer until he seriously wondered if he should've written a last will and testament before agreeing to lunch. Not that she'd given him much opportunity to refuse. Then she slowly started to smile, and before Naruto really knew what was happening she started laughing .

"Uh, Sakura-chan?" Maybe he should get her sanitarium-release-papers as well.

Her head fell onto his shoulder as she got herself under control again. "Naruto, never change," she said through her giggles and his dirt-streaked orange jacket.

"Um. Okay?"

Since she wasn't glaring or sulking or cackling, Naruto felt safe enough to finish that sixth ramen bowl. It was lukewarm now, but that was all right, because Sakura was a warm and familiar weight against his shoulder. The moment would've been complete if there'd been a dark and brooding presence on his other side, scowling into a lame-ass cup of tea, but he still smiled against the rim of the bowl and thanked the gods that there were people like Sakura in his life.

"So, what kind of kisser is he?" she said suddenly.

"Oi, Sakura-chan!"

…

Naruto had done a lot of spying in his three years of training. Mostly of the perverted kind, because Jiraiya said there was no enemy like a humiliated woman. Jiraiya had given him a healthy respect for young, wet, and curvy nubile bodies, while others like Sakura, Tenten, Sakura, Hinata, Tsunade, and especially Sakura had reminded him that having those curves could be just as dangerous as his Rasengan.

But Naruto had never tried to put those hard-won spying skills to use on guys. The mere thought of Kiba, his brother in a shared love for fart jokes and offending the girls with their sheer male idiocy, in any state of non-medical-examination undress made Naruto throw up a little in his mouth. Or Lee and Shino and the rest, for that matter, although Neji looked enough like a girl that a drunken Naruto had nearly smothered him, thinking he was Hinata. The blond nearly lost his use of chakra and an eyeball in return.

The point was that Naruto had never tried spying on other guys before, and there he was, trying to do that very thing on someone as lethal, and bloodthirsty, and unstable as Sasuke.

(Perhaps there was a reason he never seemed to beat Shikamaru at Go.)

Except for his face, Sasuke didn't look much like a girl. His hips were too narrow and his shoulders too wide for that, and although his fingers were long and thin, his palms were too large to be very feminine. He was graceful, but then, most shinobi were trained to be anyway, even Naruto; and his self-control smacked faintly of that aristocratic stuffiness Neji and even Hinata had. The distinct lack of boobs and the slightly different distribution of muscle and body proportions were obvious.

A woman he wasn't, and with a personality crossed from a rock and a mental patient, but he was still nice to look at. Especially wet.

There was some shadow on the bathroom ceiling that Naruto took advantage of to peer over the top of the shower curtain, although the shower steam was making him sweat uncomfortably. Sasuke didn't look like girl – except for his face, which Naruto always made sure to remind him about – but his pale skin was as lickable as a chick's in an onsen.

Huh. Well, whatever, it wasn't like Naruto was gay. It was just Sasuke, that asshole, so whatever.

One of those long-fingered hands twisted the shower handle, making the bathroom go quiet. Sasuke squeezed the excess water from his hair.

Then instinct kicked in and Naruto dropped to the floor on all fours, avoiding the shuriken that thudded into the ceiling where he'd been hiding. He jumped backwards awkwardly, slightly off balance, to avoid the kunai that tried to slash across his throat.

"Oi, oi, bastard, what kind of paranoid asshole takes his weapons into the shower?" Naruto cried from the floor of the doorway. Sasuke stood dripping on the mat, kunai in hand and as unashamedly naked as the day as he was born. He raised a slender brow, as though to point out that Naruto had been trespassing in his apartment, so it wasn't actually paranoia.

"Oh, shut up," Naruto muttered. He finally straightened from his defensive crouch, but kept a wary eye on the apparently innocent kunai. "You're getting slow, bastard. I coulda killed you, like, seventeen gazillion times before you noticed me."

"I knew you were there," Sasuke told him. "I was waiting."

Naruto knew he meant 'waiting for you to make a move,' but he said anyway, "Oh, Sasuke-chan, how kinky."

Sasuke frowned, though it was more because of the added suffix to his name than anything else, and expertly flicked the kunai. It bit point-first into the doorjamb when Naruto pulled his head back just in time. "Shut up, idiot."

"You've got some serious social issues, bastard," Naruto muttered, eyeing the kunai sticking out centimeters away from his right eye. "And put some clothes on, geez."

"Why should I?"

"Because you're wet, naked, and making me imagine things that you would kill me for. Put some fucking clothes on."

"No." Sasuke crossed his arms for extra emphasis, eyes narrowed challengingly.

"You look like a pissed-off cat that got stuck in the bathtub."

"Better than being beaten with the ugly stick."

"Hey! Bastard!"

His brow rose again, this time in smug victory. Naruto all but howled and threw himself at Sasuke, who cursed violently when the blond's hands slipped off his water-slick skin and sent them both tumbling off balance. The shower curtain was ripped from the wall under Sasuke's flailing limbs, and they tumbled into a struggling heap of aggravation and boringly white plastic.

"You know, we've really gotta stop meeting like this."

Naruto's voice was muffled. He was sprawled over the other boy with his face stuck uncomfortably in Sasuke's neck and their legs tangled awkwardly.

"Get off me."

Sasuke sounded disturbingly calm, all things considered, which meant he'd flown straight past irritation and smacked headlong into fury. Naruto considered this, then promptly ignored the command completely.

"You should seriously get one of those 'Slippery When Wet' signs tattooed on your ass."

"Get. Off."

"You sure?" Naruto grinned into the skin he was pressed against and gave it a languorous lick.

Sasuke twitched.

"Do that again and I'll slice it off."

The blond didn't know if 'it' constituted his tongue or his dick, but he got the idea. None too delicately extricating himself from Sasuke and the shower curtain, he sat back on Sasuke's thighs and didn't try too hard in keeping his eyes from wandering.

"You know, asshole, if you really meant that, you would've just done it."

Sasuke blinked up at him, once, the only sign of his surprise. If Sasuke had truly wanted him to stop, Naruto would have already been eating plaster. Pfff, and people thought the guy was hard to read.

Leaning down, Naruto braced himself with his hands on either side of Sasuke's head and paused with his lips a short breath from the other's. Sasuke was holding himself very still, muscles tense, in the way he did when waiting for Naruto's guard to drop.

"Ne," Naruto murmured, feeling the warmth of his own breath reflected back upon his own skin, "you aren't gonna try and rip my balls off, are you?"

This was a very important question, because Sasuke was lying between Naruto's legs and he was notorious for taking advantage of the slightest opportunities. The overhead fixture cast enough light to soften Sasuke's eyes into a more neutral grey. "So long as you keep it interesting," he replied evenly, "no."

Insert that insufferably challenging look.

Somehow managing to suppress the instinctive response to punch the bastard in the face, Naruto eyed him carefully. They were still nose-to-nose but they didn't touch; only genins and fools went into a battle without knowing the terms. It wasn't like Naruto was a stranger to casual sex or that he was in love with Sasuke, but fuck, this was Sasuke, who didn't do things by halves. No, he did things in leaps and bounds, just like Naruto but more cautiously, and Naruto wasn't going to let Sasuke treat him like one of those nameless canon-fodder Otonins.

Then again, since when had he and Sasuke ever decided on terms? If they couldn't decide whether they were friends-that-hated-one-another or enemies-that-loved-each-other, well, that wasn't anything new. And maybe it was better that way, because one couldn't play a false role if one didn't even know the proper script.

Naruto was good at bullshitting his way forward.

Finally, Naruto kissed Sasuke. It wasn't their first kiss, and there still weren't any fireworks or pithy violins, but Sasuke's lips were soft and warm from his shower, tasting like fresh water and…Sasuke. Nor was it like kissing a girl, because he refused to let Naruto lead anything for very long, and when the blond ran his tongue across those lips and pulled out a quiet moan, Sasuke found a new way to steal back control with clever thin fingers.

Having his friend-rival-lover lying nude underneath him appealed to a large part of Naruto's masculine pride, and he unashamedly ground his hips downwards. As if sensing the smugness, Sasuke's hands tightened around his shoulders and suddenly it was Naruto blinking, dazed, up at the ceiling. The ugly shower curtain crinkled under his head when he shifted.

"Bastard," he growled, and Sasuke just smirked. The brunet didn't want to waste his time fucking a sycophant or an enemy, didn't want to waste his time on someone too forgiving or too passive or too ignorant; but Naruto twisted him over this time, and then no one knew whose leg belonged to whom or who was winning, but there were better things to think about for a little while.

"This is totally better than ramen," Naruto said. Then he squawked, again, as a hand tightened a little too far on certain sensitive parts, but it was worth it when it made Sasuke huff under his breath in a sort of half-laugh. Maybe it wasn't always so boring.

And maybe Naruto needn't worry so much about the whole friends-or-rivals thing, because it was more interesting when you could beat the shit out of your best friend and then make it better with hot, sweaty, bruising monkey sex.