Crumble Flower

Summary: Naruto finds himself deep in debt and does something illegal to pay it off. Whether he would face the consequences or not - only time would tell about that. Warnings: sasunaru, AU high school, drugs, underage drinking, explicit violence.

Prologue: I've Been Bad

"Sasuke – what the damn hell?!" Naruto nearly shrieked while he quickly made his way around the wrecked car wrapped around a telephone pole down the street from where the brunette in the driver's seat had taken it. "You just totaled Kyuubi's car!"

Sasuke kicked open the door and stumbled out of the driver's side; Naruto felt relieved that he seemed mostly uninjured at least.

"Sorry."

"Sorry?" Naruto pressed on mercilessly while Sasuke swayed where he stood, clinging to the frame of the car beside him. "Are you drunk?"

Naruto watched Sasuke pull himself up as straight as possible to look back at him from behind narrow eyes; Sasuke had always been somewhat of a careless train wreck – not that Naruto was bragging about having his life together or any kind of bullshit like that, but at least he wasn't drinking and driving – underage.

"I'm sorry – are you my mother?" Sasuke shot back, slurring some of the heavier consonants together. "No, you couldn't be cuz my mother's dead."

"Oh, my god," Naruto breathed tiredly. "Y'know, we all have problems, Sasuke! Neji's parents are dead, Gaara's mom is dead and his dad is who-the-hell-knows where, Sakura-chan – broke a nail or something last week. Everyone has problems – the difference is you deal with everything like crap!"

"I don't care, you idiot."

"I know you don't care!" Naruto reassured swiftly. "Everyone knows you don't care about anything."

"Good."

"Yeah, good for you, Sasuke," the blonde agreed cynically. "You still have a brother, y'know?"

Sasuke avoided Naruto's gaze in shame. "I know."

"And a ton of people who really…give a crap about you," Naruto added stiffly in fear of sounding too chummy, "for some reason."

Sasuke responded with a thankful glance at his companion, but it was brief; red and blue lights lit up the area from down the street and both of them jumped, startled by the noise of the siren that accompanied it.

"Sasuke – get the hell outta here," Naruto advised, shoving him toward the wall of shrubbery nearby blocking the main road from the neighborhood sitting behind it.

"Naruto –"

"Hurry up and go, you drunk asshole."

Sasuke ducked behind the shrubs, hesitating for a moment in the shadows behind them.

"Get out of here!"

With one last glance of regret, Sasuke disappeared into the depths of the neighborhood, leaving Naruto behind to deal with the squad car as it slowly approached to investigate the scene of the accident.

A/N:

Hi all! Quick explanation on this story – this was something I started writing YEARS ago (like 8) and never finished. As a therapeutic break from the writing I'm working on in my career, I've been revisiting fanfiction, and, although I could salvage probably less than %5 of what I wrote back then on this story, I liked the idea I was going with. So here's a total rewrite of an old, old story.

This story will be sasunaru. The idea itself isn't too far off from my original, but the writing should (hopefully) be less cringe worthy this time around. Hope you all enjoy :)