What Dreams Are Made Of (SasuNaru)

11.

Sasuke was lying on his back in front of where Naruto was still sitting up against the inside of the trunk, legs bent. There wasn't a lot of room inside the tree trunk and when Sasuke had first lain down he'd inadvertently hit the back of his head against the opposite wall. Naruto had then grabbed his legs and pulled him down closer to him to give him more space, planting Sasuke's feet on the ground either side of where he was sitting. Whenever he shifted he could feel his knees bump against the underside of Sasuke's thighs. Cramped, yet cosy.

Now Naruto leant forward, hooking his arms around Sasuke's legs once more. He wasn't about to shift Sasuke's position again, but he liked feeling the reassuring warmth of the other person now more than ever.

He gazed toward Sasuke's dark outline stretched out in front of him and shrugged. "I don't know," Naruto told him.

Which was true, but Naruto had been thinking that maybe this attack was something more personally after Sasuke than him. The monster hadn't come out and said it, but it seemed pretty obvious even to him.

"And if this is really an attack on us, why has it taken this long to show itself?"

Naruto frowned. "Shouldn't you be thinking of ways to wake up instead of trying to work all this shit out?"

"I thought the answer might be in its motives. Now, answer my question."

Naruto was pretty surprised. Sasuke didn't ask him his opinion often and had never really seemed to care about the motives behind the dreams much either, so Naruto was doubly surprised to hear him change his tune now.

"The dream was probably meant to kill us off ages ago," Naruto told him. "Whoever's doing this probably got sick of waiting."

"That's not a completely stupid hypothesis actually," Sasuke told him, as though what he'd just said hadn't been as insulting as hell. "The monster and this new place only appeared just after you'd started mastering some of my little tricks. So maybe they feared the dreams wouldn't kill us on their own after all. But then, back to my original question: why block my abilities and not yours?"

"Well, you're stronger in the dreams than I am," Naruto admitted trying not to sound too annoyed by that. "It probably doesn't think I'm as much of a threat."

"Maybe," Sasuke responded. "But there's a lot I still don't get. Assuming all of that is true, and the dreams really were meant to kill us, what's with the changing scenery? Our dreamscape changes at random intervals and I don't really see how that fits."

That confounded him. Naruto thought it over for a few moments before realising that it wasn't the questions themselves that were really confusing him, it was Sasuke's tone. He was the one that had been caught off guard here. He hadn't been expecting trouble not even in this dismal place until the moment he'd been attacked. Considering this had, in the past, almost killed Naruto, Sasuke had never really seemed concerned about who was responsible until now.

"You never used to think the dreams were bad," Naruto guessed in shock. "Sasuke, the dreams almost killed me, they obviously weren't designed for us just so we could have a romantic getaway from the real world!"

"Keep your voice down!" Sasuke hissed. "And no, apart from what happened to you, it was too difficult to believe this was some kind of attack. Think of the things we've seen, the things we got to experience. For an enemy attack it was certainly a very nice one."

"Waking up in the hospital with a skull fracture isn't my idea of nice," Naruto told him hotly, but lowering his voice once more. "And of course it seemed nice before that because it was trying to make us addicted to them. Nobody would want to keep going back to a place that was horrible each night if they had a choice. This is the first truly horrible place we've been dumped into and you've had the choice taken away from you. Isn't that telling you something by now?"