Chapter Text
Sasuke decided some point during week 9 that he was in hell. It was an easier thought than his wife being 29 weeks pregnant and alone somewhere in the distant past.
He had no doubt that if this was reality she would survive. But the thought ached in his gut any time he considered himself to not be in hell. He still got hungry though, and still made enough enough fish for them both. Hope was like an infection that even death couldn't cure, he'd decided a few days before now.
He no longer looked for towns, no longer ran at all. He just walked, aimlessly. Every shade of pink that caught his eyes burned his soul. His wife and daughter, were they a dream? Was this a dream?
He had been so sure they would have a girl, he wonders if they did. If they will. If she did after he died.
When he senses her chakra above him while his meal cooks, his first thought is that this is heaven. Then the fall hurts her, he decides it's hell. But she's here and alive so maybe there's a third place. He catches her with his susanoo and sees it immediately but has not time to process.
"I finally found you!" The air and his lungs feel as if they're the same temperature, for a moment his body buzzes not unlike it does after the throws of passion but then she's running and he has to chase her.
He almost loses her in the trees and he decides this is definitively hell. His chest aches, his eyes burn. He feels the last rays of hope dying out like the signal fire he abandoned will if they keep running.
"Sakura, wait!" He calls when he sees her, voice as desperate as he feels. She turns and looks at him for just a step, and then pushes faster. Definitely hell.
"Please just stop!" He tries not sound annoyed but he is.
She pulls a kunai and spins on her heal. He slows as her face finally registers, and then her outfit. She's just a girl, barely 16 he guesses.
He stops 20 meters away and he replaces his sword as he walks tentatively towards her. She's all wrong and she's terrified and defending herself but she's her. He can feel her, and its worse than the first time he saw her before their journey together. He wants to embrace her immediately.
She tightens her grip on the kunai. He stops just a few centimeters away from the tip. His eye scrapes down from her forehead until they finally rest on her belly. Empty, flat. Not in her 3rd trimester at least, he gives himself the consolation.
His Sharingan activates and he traces her up and down again. She looks like she always did before her seal appeared. He reaches her face and freezes. She's terrified again. Shame pushes the sharingan out of his eye.
"Sorry," he murmurs. She gapes at him. "I had to make sure you were real. We're in the past, really far back."
He sighs and runs his finger through his hair. He fidgets under his wife's gaze as he often does now.
"I've been here for 2 months, I haven't found anything this whole time until I heard you screaming over here." He tries to keep his voice neutral, his body still screams to hug her. She's the one person he'd hoped to see again, where ever he is.
She grips tighter to her weapon and swallows. She doesn't move. Her face is still frozen in quiet horror.
"You should heal yourself, I was just making some fish." He pauses as he's turning away, an idea strikes. "I have one more serving of pickled plum left, if you want it."
Her favorite, since they were children.
She doesn't lower her kunai but she follows him. Heaven or hell? Still up for debate. He leads her back to his waiting dinner.
She sits opposite him, he can't see her over the fire. She eats with one hand, kunai gripped in the other. He can see the tip of it point around the fire. He smirks.
"How old are you?" He prods after a while.
She spits a bone into the fire before she answers. "16." Like he'd assumed.
He nods. "I was on my way to the Hidden Rain Village," he says casually, like it's his wife on any other night.
"You killed Danzo about an hour ago," she says the last 2 words with fish already between her teeth.
He chokes on his bite of food, and coughs a few times. He throws the rest of his food into fire. His mouth tastes of bile. He's not there anymore, he's under the bridge and he wants them all to die.
"Is your throat okay?" He asks as he throws another stick into the fire. He's barely back but this is the most important question.
"Why was there already enough food for both of us if you didn't expect me to show up?" She asks instead of answering. The question shocks him before it settles,
He laughs, of course his wife is more concerned with calculating right now than anything else. She looks around the fire, eyes wide.
He gets up, so she can look at him. He watches as she takes him in.
"Your arm- I mean… uh." She says it as she stands and approaches and then she falters, she looks like she's bracing for an attack. She's the only one holding a weapon, though.
He steps closer to her. "Gone," he says. He rolls up the sleeve so she can see the light pink bandage on it. Sakura carried the supplies to change them, and he hadn't cared enough to make any in the last 10 weeks.
She flutters her eyes back and forth between his eye and his missing arm, trying to understand.
"I lost it," he pauses, trying to explain without confusing her.
"When I found myself. It's okay though, I had the best doctor." He tries to make it sound light, like a joke. His voice responds to his body, which is responding to his wife being near him again. All he hears is heat, he curses himself in his head.
"This is really weird," she decides just as he's reminded himself that she's 16, that this isn't his wife. He laughs at the ridiculousness of it all.
"Agreed." He says. She gapes again.
"Who are you, Sasuke?" She asks, narrowing her eyes.
The question slams into him, he has no idea who he is. Not really, he used to say "avenger" automatically. Now, nothing comes to mind. "I don't know what I should tell you. You obviously don't remember this after but…"
"How about I ask and you answer," she offers. He nods and sits facing the fire. She sits next to him, he tries to ignore her blush and fails.
"Start with the fish," she says to the fire.
"I've been here 2 months, I haven't found anyone I recognize. I always hope that I will." How many nights had he stared at a fire and pretended she was next to him since he'd been here? How many nights before that?
"Who do you hope to see?" She doesn't sound hopeful for his answer.
One of the main goals of his life is to make the woman sitting with him happy. But he knows very little about 16 year old Sakura, so he picks an answer than would satisfy her as a genin or after the war.
"My wife." His keeps voice his carefully neutral, he watches her reaction carefully.
She looks away from him instantly and grips her stomach. The kunai drops to the dirt.
"You have nothing to do with why we're here?" She asks next.
He stammers and has to strain forward to see her face, she won't turn.
"I don't know why we're here, I haven't found anything yet Sakura." He says as gentle as he's practiced over the last year.
Her profile astonishes him with its sadness
"You were supposed to ask about my wife," he says when her face won't change.
She turns to him, her fists already balled. She looks angrier than he's seen her in a long time. The rage threatens to break her delicate features.
"I'm sorry," he breathes out. "I was trying to make you feel better, but you're more upset now?" Shame fills his chest, he's failed miserably. She seems more upset about this than about him trying to kill her.
She blinks and turns back to the fire and reaches for her throat as if reading his mind. The weight of the debt he owes her drags his head down and takes his breath.
"Why would any of that make me feel better?" She wonders out loud. "I'm glad you have hopes now," she adds in a feeble voice.
"Sakura." He puts every ounce of lust he's saved for his wife into his voice, the shock works. She's looking at him.
"I have spent 2 months looking everywhere for you." The heat is gone, he knows he only sounds desperate now. He doesn't care.
"Who is your wife?" She asks finally.
He smiles a true smile, hoping to add to the syllable he's going to utter.
"You."
It's as if the word has torn through her heart itself. As immediate as if injured, she breaks into sobs punctuated by only a few screams and gasps for much needed oxygen.
He's holding her before he can think about how that might make things worse for her, she only folds into him. She stays cradled and sobbing on his lap like a child for an hour. She screams and cries into the chest of his shirt until the wet fabric makes his skin itch.
He wants to run, but he doesn't. This is hell, and this is his well deserved punishment.
When she stops, it's from exhaustion. He lays back in front of the fire where he's sat the last hour. She doesn't comment when she lays her head on his chest, facing away from him.
He stares at the pink color of her hair as the sun sets, letting himself believe she's 20 and settling in for a night of domestication in the woods.
He doesn't sleep, he just stares at the shades her hair transforms to under the varying light of the night and morning. Without Sakura blossoms in this area, he'd nearly forgotten every shade.
This is definitely hell, but at least he can look at her hair.
___________
He sobers with the morning light, the familiar and very alive feeling of her sleeping on his chest tells him this is reality. She sobbed for at least an hour, while all he could do was hold her and watch. Because she knew it was reality too.
She'd met the monster yesterday and then immediately discovered the monster would never leave her alone. He is both unsure of what to say and silent out of shame. And silent out of respect for the first rational reaction Sakura has had around him since they were 17.
But now she's stopping and staring at him like she does when she's going to require that he speak.
"What's with the change from yesterday?" She asks, and her anger sounds like his wife. His chest aches for a moment.
This isn't his wife though, this girl is rightly terrified of him.
"You're horrified that the man who tried to kill you is your husband," he says because it's obvious. "It's a relief honestly, I was starting to think you had no sense of self preservation in my time," he says because it's a good thing.
She blinks. "Did you… did you just tell a joke?"
"Hn," he replies. His face falls, he hadn't meant to make light of it. "Sorry," he says again, he always ends up needing to apologize.
"I'm not horrified," she murmurs. She coughs away tears. "Okay I am, but at myself."
He steps towards her, his brow twitching in exasperation. "How incredibly annoying," he says. "Why?" Of course, of course she hates herself. This is hell, after all.
She looks like she's even having trouble breathing now.
"Naruto was right," she has to look away as she says it. She stares at her feet and digs at the dirt with her sandal. "You can still be saved. I agreed with everyone that you couldn't."
He doesn't think he's ever been so annoyed with her in his entire life. She had agreed with how to dispose of a criminal, he had wanted to burn every good thing into ash. She thinks these two are at the very least equal, perhaps she even thinks what she did was worse.
"You cried like that because Naruto was right?" He tries to hide the drunk tone in his voice, he's floating in and out of believing this is hell, that none of this matters anyway.
"I cried like that because if you can be helped then I should have helped you, instead I decided to kill you myself." She turns away from him and sits by a nearby tree.
The truth of it, and how close it is to what this girl will one day tell him, sobers him again.
"You couldn't help me yet." He looks at the girl he's broken in nearly every conceivable way. He wants to hold her again, to tell her everything will be okay.
"I could have done something other than plan to poison you with a kunai," she says sardonically.
He nods once and walks towards her, squatting so they're eye to eye. "I'm 21 now," he says after her cheeks turn a normal color. "And you've already done more for me than I will ever be able to repay."
He sees her in his mind now, his wife. She'd just started showing before he got here, she held her stomach often in those last days and she'd looked so incredibly happy. He just wants to see the face he loves smile again.
"But I-"
"Thank you, Sakura." It works, the girl smiles.