Chapter Text
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese.
He spends the first month of the aftermath of war in the isolation of a dank prison cell.
Sasuke does not resist any punishment. He is a dangerous threat to the village, and he’d watch it burn into ashes and flick his clothes free of its dust if he could. While Naruto may have ripped his arm off in the Valley of the End, his lingering resentment and anger wasn’t magically stripped away with it. He understands, now, that there is no virtue in pursuing further revenge, in governing a shinobi world of his own making, where he would undoubtedly only destroy the remaining semblance of the man that he is now. There is only acceptance in his defeat. There is only waiting and thinking and sitting and trying not to feel manic at the absence of his chakra. A trial will be held soon, but it matters little to him. (He knows that Kakashi and the rest of team seven would not let him rot in here, their bleeding, bleeding hearts would sooner bleed out than abandon him.)
Sasuke stays silent as Naruto talks relentlessly about the most pointless things that are happening in the village, and grunts occasionally in affirmation that he is listening to the verbal spiel. He holds his breath as Sakura runs the warm glow of her chakra on his amputated arm, her hands ghosting over his skin. The gesture makes the innermost of his stomach twist.
“It’s healing well,” Sakura says quietly. There’s a quiet shuffling, the tapping of her heels against the cemented ground. He hears her step away from him and he is relieved.
He does not like it when she visits, to see him like this. Her presence in his vicinity is suffocating and gnawing and he knows, he knows that a large part of it is guilt, clawing and severe, the depreciating knowledge that he is undeserving of his team’s unwavering kindness, least of all hers.
“That’s good,” she continues. “I was afraid the guards assigned to you would purposely neglect your wound and not have any medic check up on you in case of an infection.” The seals binding his eyes and chakra prohibits him from seeing her face, but he knows without seeing that her eyebrows are crinkled in concern. He stifles a prolonged sigh.
“I’m fine,” he says. She tells him they are preparing for his trial, and that his detainment will be over soon. That Kakashi is taking over the hat. That everyone’s busy with rebuilding. Sakura tells him many things, and he nods to all of them.
Sasuke does nothing but stew in his thoughts. The T&I guards leave him well alone enough, wary of his power and reputation. He’s heard of prisoners being treated worse, and he could only stay quiet and comply with each round of questioning. About his time with Orochimaru, and then Team Taka, and then the Akatsuki. He considers, for a while, to remain difficult during interrogation, but in the end he decides to save Kakashi the inconvenience. It’s the least he could do for them now, considering all the trouble his team have gone through to get him back in the village for a trial.
He has no way to keep track of time without his vision, couldn’t see the rays of sun from the room’s tiny barred window, only relying on his daily meals, and after a few days he stopped bothering to tally. There’s hardly anything for him outside this prison cell, anyway — only a village that holds him in contempt and suspicion for his international acts of terrorism, and his former genin team that he betrayed time and time again and yet. And yet. They remained unflinchingly loyal to him at the end, and took him back without reservations.
He doesn’t know what to feel about that. At the back of his mind, the part that held the image of his genin team locked and shoved at the deepest recesses of his priorities, he has expected this of team seven. Team Seven, he thinks, remembering the glimmer of nostalgia that he felt when they had performed the new three-way deadlock, proving that they have gotten stronger in their own right and even surpassed their masters, and he remembers feeling even slightly proud of how far they’ve gone. He remembers the rush of adrenaline that he had felt fighting together with them against Madara and then Kaguya, and then the sheer relief when he saw Sakura walking towards them nearly bleeding to death, crying in her tattered war clothing. Thinking about it brings back the stone lumped in his throat, persistent and immovable.
She hasn’t visited him in weeks.
Neither did the blond idiot, but that matters little to Sasuke. His musings are interrupted by the sound of iron creaking against cement, and footsteps that belong to several people. He holds his breath.
“Yo.” Cool, airy, nonchalant. Sasuke breathes out, laying down his guard.
“How is my favorite student doing?” Kakashi begins, and the fact that his companions haven’t spoken at all means that they’re not Sasuke’s former teammates. Sasuke merely shrugs in indifference.
“I’m not,” Sasuke replies, his voice parched from disuse.
“Hmm?”
“Your favorite student. It was Sakura.”
Sasuke hears Kakashi chuckle. “Maa, she certainly gave me the least trouble compared to you boys. Until now, even.”
Sasuke doesn’t respond to that, and Kakashi clears his throat. “Well. You’re still as every bit chatty as before. But I actually came here to speak to you of your trial and living conditions after you have served this temporary detainment.”
“Aa.”
“Maa, sorry I haven’t come here sooner, the council was a pain to deal with and the transition to the position had me busy. Today is your last day here, you’ll spend a few hours in the hospital for an overall standard checkup procedure. The thing is, Sasuke, the rebuilding has left the village a small number of extra apartments, and the council has decided that you stay with a trusted war heroine for at least a couple of months. Until your name has been cleared, I imagine.”
Sasuke stiffens. Running his tongue on his teeth, he swallows drily.
“And she’s fine with it?”
“Of course she is. I ran it through her yesterday, and she has an extra bedroom in her apartment since she moved out from her parents. Unless, you’d prefer to room with Naruto?” Kakashi’s knowing tone makes Sasuke bristle in the slightest irritation. This old man hasn’t changed at all, either.
“The idiot probably has a rat infestation,” Sasuke says gruffly. “If Sakura is fine with it, then so am I.” The words leave his tongue against his will before he could even think about it.
“Hmm. That’s settled then!” Kakashi says cheerfully. There’s a foreboding sense of unease in Sasuke’s gut. Cohabitating in close quarters with Sakura shouldn’t be a problem, he’s spent enough time with her as a genin. And it’s better than living with Naruto. Hopefully.
The Uchiha compound stands reasonably unfazed on the outskirts of the village, wholly untouched by Pein’s attack. Its brick walls emblazoned with the symbolic red and white fan stand tall, years of dust and moss a glaring reminder of neglect, and yet it endures. The first time that he sets foot on his ancestral home since he left Konoha, Sasuke is eighteen, a pardoned war criminal, and the last of his blood — the scion of hundreds of years of greatness and power, now reduced to him.
He passes by his old aunt’s bakeshop, his uncle’s armory, his distant cousin’s grey apartment. At the front of the main house, there are still faint traces of blood on the wall, and Sasuke could still see the dent of the kunai that he saw Itachi throw in anger when their cousins confronted him about Shisui.
He stares right at it for more than a few seconds, turning into minutes, and nausea begins to build at the pit of his stomach, slowly climbing up towards his throat. He’s aware of his ANBU guards watching from a distance, and he refuses to give them a show. He drags his feet towards the main building — white, the largest in the compound, their house. The house he grew up in, where he learned how to walk, talk, laugh, and everything else in his childhood. The house where he had a loving family once, a beautiful mother, a stern father, and the best brother who he had adored without question.
His movements are mechanical and slow as he slides open the door.
This is also the house where his parents died. His mother on the floor, body atop his father’s, blood soaking through their clothes, from the deep wounds Itachi had inflicted. The red had swum in his vision, on the floor, everywhere, and his mind broke just as the sticky, warmth of his parents’ blood reached his feet. Dead, dead, dead. Red, red, red. Just as lifeless as the rest of his clan. Just as scarlet as the color of their insignia.
Sasuke numbly slides open the door to his parents’ quarters and stares at the dusty tatami floors. It has been tidied years ago, and yet the bloodstains remained persistent, and the cleaners assigned clearly hadn’t bothered to put more effort.
His parents’ blood is faint pink against the sickening yellow of the old flooring. It screams at him, violently, silently, and he feels sick. He looks right at it just as it bores a hole through his brain, and the room had gotten narrower, its walls inching closer towards him, the ceiling going down. He’s trapped, he’s aching, he’s alone. The weight of centuries of his clan’s legacy bears down on him, heavy and crushing.
He vomits the bile off his throat.
He stays silent on his trial, allowing his teammates to speak for him and defend him; Naruto loud as always and Sakura calculating and calm — and when it is over, he is dragged into a little celebration at Ichiraku’s. The old man and his daughter look the same, and the only reason he said yes to coming was that the ramen shop owners wouldn’t treat him differently as before, not with his former team as company. The old man quietly tells him that it’s good that he’s back, and that Naruto and Sakura must be thrilled, as he hands Sasuke his usual order from their genin days. Sasuke only swallows and nods shortly, ignoring Naruto’s loud chattering.
“I take it Kakashi already spoke with you,” Sakura says, smoothly breaking two pairs of chopsticks and handing them to the boys. Naruto declares a cheerful thank you, Sakura-chan! and Sasuke takes the chopsticks into his hand with a grateful nod.
“Aa.”
“About what?” Naruto asks, slurping on his noodles.
“My living arrangements,” he replies succinctly.
“What about it?”
Sakura shoots Sasuke a look.
“Well? Well? Why isn’t anyone telling me?” Naruto continues, arching an interested brow.
“He’ll be living with me,” she answers.
“Oh,” Naruto says. And then a second later, “—What!”
“Council mandated,” Sakura explains.
Naruto downs the last of his bowl before placing it down on the counter with a loud thump. “Lucky bastard! How is it you threaten to kill everyone and get rewarded instead!” he complains.
Sakura pinches Naruto’s arm. He yelps loudly in pain.
“Shut up, Naruto,” she hisses. “You can’t say that kind of thing in public!”
Sasuke tunes them out like they are twelve again and bickering about something insignificant and waiting for their late sensei to turn up. But he sees the flash of jealousy in Naruto’s eyes before the blond shuts it all down, and he sees Naruto’s obvious adoration of her in the way Naruto leans towards her, the way he looks at her like the she hung the moon in the sky herself. Sasuke chooses to ignore it. It does not matter to him what their best friend thinks of Sakura. It doesn’t matter to him what Sakura thinks of Naruto.
When they are finished eating, Sakura stands up and says, “Come on then, Sasuke-kun. Your things were brought in my apartment earlier.”
“Are you coming with?” She asks Naruto.
“Ahh, no,” Naruto grins, “I have to go say bye to Gaara and the others before they leave back to Suna,” he says. “See you later, teme, Sakura-chan!”
“Alright,” she concedes. She pecks Naruto’s cheek in goodbye like it’s an instinctive established ritual, as natural as breathing. Sasuke looks away.
Sakura’s apartment is at the center of the village, a ten-minute walk to the hospital, five minutes if you take the roofs. It’s one of the newer buildings. She walks beside him without speaking another word, and people look at them sideways in recognition. The apartment itself is bare, just some furniture. Several things are scattered about, yet the place looked hardly lived in. There’s a cold cup of tea on the side table, glasses on the sink, a cloak on the back of the sofa, books and scrolls on the counter, some on the floor. A picture of Team 7 hanging on the wall.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” she says peevishly. “It’s been a busy couple of weeks at the hospital.”
“Aa.”
“And here’s where you’re staying.” She opens a door to a decidedly regular room. It’s painted cream, has a bed, side table, a closet. “There are some clothes in the closet — I hope you don’t mind, but it’s from the Uchiha compound. And the bathroom is across this room. Umm… please feel at home.”
“Thank you, Sakura,” he says. She snaps her head back to meet his gaze, and she softens.
“Okay,” she pauses. “It’s no problem.”
She turns to leave. “Good night, Sasuke-kun.”
He stares at the white circle on the back of her red shirt. He couldn't remember when was the last time he slept under the same roof with her, the last time she told him good night. They were younger, then, and her hair was longer. “Aa, good night.”
Sleep is elusive to him, and his dreams are haunted by the memories of his past. Just as the sun rose, he takes a shower and dresses himself — his deceased father’s clothes, he thinks drily, and he figures out how to do the kage bunshin technique with only a single hand. The clone is useful to an invalid like him. He busies himself with tidying the entire apartment, washing the dishes, dusting the shelves while he hears her rummaging in the shower and getting ready for the day. There’s nothing inside Sakura’s cupboards, just a box of teabags. He frowns.
The bathroom door swings open and he is about to point out her lack of supplies in the kitchen when he sees her steps out in a flimsy bathrobe, her hair wet and dripping. He freezes.
“Oh, good morning, Sasuke-kun,” she says, distractedly wringing the ends of her hair. “You’re up early. I have work in fifteen minutes.” He nods. The skin of her thighs is porcelain white, droplets of water trickling down her bare lean legs.
Her bedroom door slams shut.
He wipes the counter with a rag.
“Sorry about that,” she says, putting on her shoes. “I always dress in my room and earlier I just forgot you were here too.”
“It’s fine,” he replies. He waits as she runs fingers through her hair and grabs her bag.
“You haven’t had breakfast,” he points out.
“I’ll have some at the canteen,” she says. ”How are you feeling? Is your arm fine?”
His arm is gone. There is an uncomfortable pang near his elbow, but she looks like she’s in a hurry to the hospital. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll walk you, I have to report to Kakashi anyway.”
She blinks at him, as if perplexed at the offer. A drop of water trails from a lock of her hair, gently, down her throat. “Okay.”
Itachi taught him how to cook when he was a kid, and he loved assisting his mother with whatever his small stature could do. Sasuke generally cooked for himself for years at Orochimaru’s hideout, and Team Taka had always relied on his rather domestic skills because he’s the only reliable one when it came to preparing meals.
Kakashi gave him considerable access to his trust fund, and he buys groceries from wary shop owners who are too terrified of him to be rude. It’s better this way, he thinks, and at least no fangirl is stalking him now.
He’s chopping vegetables with the aid of a Susanoo arm. Carrots, first. Then cabbages. Tomatoes. Onions.
The door swings open, “I’m home!” Shoes drop unceremoniously at the floor. “My shift ended earlier than I expected, god I am so tired I could sleep for days,” she says. “Some old rich man came all the way from the Land of Tea and his stuffy entourage was a pain to deal with, and – oh. Sasuke-kun, you’re cooking ?”
“It seems foolish not to when you have a perfectly working kitchen,” he says, frowning as he goes on to wash the cabbages. “I refuse to starve myself on my stay here.”
Sakura raises an amused brow. “Well, let me help you. What can I do?”
“Check the rice,” he orders. “And maybe set the table.”
“I see you bought groceries… thanks, Sasuke-kun,” she says, sheepish.
“All your cupboards have had was a single box of teabags,” he intones. “How do you feed yourself?”
“Ahh.. ha ha! Take outs, mostly,” she scratches the back of her head.
“You’re supposed to be a medic,” he says. “You should know better than that.”
“… Right,” she says, awkwardly tip toeing around him to gather bowls.
A sharp, throbbing pain lances through his arm, sudden and painful, and he accidentally lets go of the knife at his hand. It lands on the cutting board with a thump. He doubles over and hisses, clutching at the empty space on where his arm should be. Sakura is at his side in a second, arm around his back, voice alarmed. “Sasuke-kun, hey… hey. Take it easy, let’s sit down.”
She leads him to sit at her beige couch, and he is too delirious with pain to care about being helpless. He clenches his mouth as she slowly unfurls the empty sleeve of his left arm, and tries not to breathe in too hard. She smells the same way as she did when they were genin, like cherry blossoms and the strawberries of her shampoo, but now it’s added with traces of antiseptic and something distinctly feminine and musky. It creeps past his nostrils, embedding itself into his skull, inside the drawer at the corner of his mind that has all things related to her, and their genin days.
It’s sweet. It’s suffocating. It’s — annoying.
Her hands are a contradiction to her rough, unadulterated strength. Soft and tiny. Long, graceful fingers that have saved lives more than he could count. Smaller than his own, he dazedly thinks. The green glow of her chakra warms the stump of his arm, and it goes on for more than a few minutes — he loses count of the seconds and revels at the bliss her healing offers. The relief flows from her palm past the inside of his skin, lighting up his nerves, disentangling the remaining knots, synapses to synapses. He emits a quiet groan in appreciation, and just as he realizes what he has done, he shuts his eyes, mortified.
“Sasuke-kun, are you alright?” She snaps her head back from his stump and looks at him, eyes wide and earnest. Always eager to please. When they were younger, he knew that she would do anything for him. Does she still — now? If he asks her to move closer and kiss him, would she? They are alone, no blond tumor, no pervy sensei, no second rate uchiha substitute — no one would know, they would not even have to tell anyone, he could — they could —
He inhales deeply in resignation, digging his nails into his palm. This is ridiculous.
“I’m fine.”
“Really?” He has not met anyone with eyes as green as hers. In this room, they glitter. He looks away.
“I — It’s… painful. Sometimes,” he admits uneasily. It is against his character to divulge weakness of any kind, but as long as it takes her to stop looking at him like that, he’d do it.
“I see,” she says, moving her hands back to his stump, slowly pressing the surrounding skin. “It’s called phantom limb pain. It’s common for amputees. The only way to ease it for a while is through massage.” She massages his skin in fluid movements, her thumb slowly inching upwards. He swallows a hiss.
“Sakura, it’s alright,” he tries, but she interrupts him. “It’s not alright. You two— you are idiots, did you know that? Naruto’s arm is mostly healed now, but he has the Kyuubi and you don’t have the luxury of accelerated healing so let me help you now, however I could.”
The fondness in her tone at the mention of the idiot breeds a virulent question at the back of his mind. He knows that he left them, that of course she and Naruto would be closer than before than they were genin, with a bond that only they would have, and it is none of his business. But even still.
“Do you do this to the idiot as well?” he asks without thinking, tone derisive and harsh. He clamps down almost instantly, irritated at himself for showing too much reaction.
“I— huh? Of course, I’m his healer too, you know.”
“I see.”
She stops, halting her movements, wary of his change in demeanor. She sighs in exasperation. “I know you have this weird thing going on with Naruto, but you two are my friends, and if I want to heal the both of you because not only is it my responsibility as the best on-call healer, but also as your teammate, then I will.”
“I know,” he says, subdued. “Thank you,” he adds, feeling ashamed at his outburst. He already owes her too much… the least he could do was this.
She sighs. “Come on,” she holds out her hand. “Let’s finish making dinner.”
He stares at it absently, still and unmoving. “I’m hungry,” she complains, grabbing his wrist and leading him back to where they were working before.
In the end, dinner is overcooked vegetables over rice. Dinner is Sakura filling up the awkward tense silence with stories from the hospital, and her insisting that she’d wash the dishes. Dinner is him boiling water for tea after, like he’s done it a hundred times before.
A new routine is established. He walks her to her work, and he goes to the Hokage tower to report to Kakashi and the old man makes him do paperwork for him, since Sasuke still isn’t allowed to be on active duty. Sometimes Naruto drags him to Ichiraku’s for lunch. He doesn’t mind. The routine is mundane and peaceful and devoid of the incessant violence that he’s used to and he likes the simplicity of it. He eventually memorizes the schedule of her shifts. At dinner she does almost all of the chopping — she’s a surgeon, she says, she must do it since she’s incredibly amazing with a knife — and he does most of the cooking. She washes the dishes while he pats them dry. She checks up on his stump, then his eyes. It’s an easy pattern. It distracts him from dwelling on his miserable past.
The beginning — he is unsure of when exactly it started. Perhaps it was when she tried to stop him from leaving when they were twelve, or much earlier than that, when they had shared moments of relative peace — when most of team seven’s worries were the relentless work of trivial D ranks. He was aware that she was pretty even back then, but now, sitting across from her at Naruto’s apartment where their team and a bunch of people he cared little about had gone drinking in honor of the blond idiot’s birthday, her face flushed from the alcohol and giggling in conversation with her loud blonde friend who used to be another fangirl, this is what he knows: Haruno Sakura is beautiful.
He sits in silence next to Kakashi, sipping the sake around his hand, feeling out of place, his mind spinning.
When he tells her goodnight later, he lets himself tuck her hair behind her ear, her eyes wide and her breathing fast. The gesture is strangely intimate and personal, like removing a month long bandage off his skin. She doesn’t mention it the next day.
“Would you ever let anyone other than Naruto in?” she asks plainly, taking a bite off the onigiri she made for them both. He finds that like all things about her, her cooking has greatly improved from when they were genin. She brings a potted plant the next week and places it on the windowsill in the living room, telling him that maybe gardening would be a great pastime for. Cherry tomato, he notes, feeling a strange surge of warmth in his gut.
“You’re here now, aren’t you?”
She hums in response, and when they finish eating, she proceeds to check up on his stump, and then his eyes. Were she anyone else, he would have inched away. His eyes are the most powerful ocular prowess to exist and letting anyone close enough to render him vulnerable and strike him blind is something that goes against his inherent instincts as a shinobi. But this is Sakura — the best medical ninja in the world, his annoying teammate, and his friend.
He lets her hands pour her chakra on the sides of his face, with no choice but to stare back at her eyes. Today her eyes are dark green, her pupils slightly dilated. He swallows grimly. Perhaps it is her healing chakra, but he feels like he’s lit from the inside. Sitting there, pretending otherwise, he burns.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she says, sitting down on the grass beside him at their usual team training grounds. At the corner of his eye, he notices her skirt inch higher, revealing an expanse of more, unblemished fair skin. Something tugs at the bottom of his stomach, and his throat dries. He shoves it to the back of his mind.
“Hn.”
“I used to go here a lot, too. When you and Naruto were off training, and when shishou gave me a rare time off. I’ll just sit here and think. Or take a nap.” And then — “I missed you two very much.”
There’s a fluttering sensation in his chest, and it feels terrible to breathe. He wants to say something, anything, but he doesn’t know what, has no clue where to even begin. No one says anything for a while.
“Sakura… that night. When I left,” he swallows thickly, unsure of where he’s even going with this.
She looks at him sideways and gives him a light, self-depreciating smile. It stows another dash of guilt burning inside of him. “What of it?”
“I meant it. I really was … still am… thankful,” he says quietly.
She takes his hand into hers, slowly running her thumb on his knuckles. She relaxes. “Thanks for telling me that,” she murmurs. “I thought it was just something we’d never speak of again.”
He clears his throat. “When I was away, I thought about that night several times. When training was particularly grueling. But I never allowed myself to delve too much about it, or think of you, or team seven. I thought those memories were a weakness that were necessary to eradicate.”
She stays silent, but all her attention is now on him, and he could see the red of sunset gleaming on the face of her skin.
“You were right, though. We did have some fun times under Kakashi, didn’t we?” He continues, his tone almost nostalgic. Wistful.
“Sasuke-kun…” she looks like she’s about to cry, but she holds it in. She’s still a crybaby, he supposes that will never change.
He doesn’t say another word, and silence rings in between them, but it’s a comforting kind of quiet. She’s looking at the grass against her feet now, and he’s looking at her, and he feels — at peace.
Hours later, he stands on his feet, and holds out a hand to help her up. A blade of grass sticks into her thigh. “Sakura,” he says.
She takes his hand without a word. He runs a thumb across her freezing skin.
“Your hand is cold,” he tells her. “We should go.”
Dinner that night is tempura and some side dishes. They drink tea after, and he eyes her three spoon sugar laden tea in disdain. She kisses his cheek when the clock strikes ten, telling him good night.