Chapter Text
“How long does a building stand before it falls?
How long does a contract last? How long will brothers
share the inheritance before they quarrel?
How long does hatred, for that matter, last?
Time after time the river has risen and flooded.
The insect leaves the cocoon to live but a minute.
How long is the eye able to look at the sun?
From the very beginning nothing at all has lasted.”
― The Epic of Gilgamesh
Sasuke remembers his life as a rogue ninja in stops and starts―patches of memory that flicker through his mind’s eye tinted in sharingan red. He remembers his first night in Orochimaru’s lair, the cold, dank air stifling and choking him with its oppression. He remembers slicing Orochimaru’s snake-like head from his body, the solid thump it made when it hit the floor. He remembers Suigetsu, Karin, and Juugo laughing around a burning fire, freshly caught fish roasting on twigs poached from the forest floor. He remembers Naruto. Naruto dressed in black and orange, Naruto screaming at him with tears in his eyes, Naruto glaring at him in an approximation of rage, Naruto begging him to return to the Leaf, beaten and bloody.
Some of these memories, Sasuke doesn’t remember pulling his sharingan out for and yet there they are, lined up like neat little cards filed away in his mind. Only their red tint gives their permanence away. He sees them swimming in his skull as the place where his arm used to be oozes sticky blood around him. Naruto is silent beside him, now that Sasuke has agreed to return with him, their blood mingling between them. He feels dizzy with both blood loss and the promise of change.
Eventually, the others find them and there is an awkward silence that fills the air as Sakura heals them as best as she can on that cliffside and as Kakashi looks on with exasperated disapproval. Sasuke isn’t sure where he is meant to be looking, so he averts his eyes to the sky, watching clouds dance in circles. On any other day, he might have closed his eyes and thought himself back to boyhood, on missions with his team and the weakness of his own loyalty to the village only an echo of a thought. Today, though, his eyes remain open. For every decade he felt he carried upon his shoulders, he is still an eighteen year old boy and bearing the weight of Kakashi’s stare is too heavy a burden.
But Kakashi, being who he is, has always understood Sasuke. Now that the war is over and Sasuke has seemingly switched alliances for good, he is willing to let sleeping dogs lie, if only for now. So, with a grunt of exertion that pulls at his sore muscles, Kakashi leans down and hefts Sasuke to his feet as Sakura pulls Naruto to his. Sasuke isn’t sure how he remains standing, knees wobbly like a newborn fawn, but he manages. Kakashi lets go of him immediately, choosing not to linger long enough to find out.
Sasuke, in numbness, allows himself to be maneuvered over to Naruto and once they have pressed their remaining palms together and released the jutsu that was still pulsing through the air, and the war was well and truly over, Sasuke went willingly back into Kakashi’s arms, wincing as the older man slings his arm over his shoulder. The shinobi world awakens from the jutsu in slow blinks, bodies tumbling from chakra trees and rinnegan eyes bleeding back to hues of brown, blue, green. Sasuke’s eye will always bear the stain of the rinnegan―the eye at once marking him as a traitor and a god.
And then, with little else left to do, they start walking. In the books Sasuke had enjoyed as a small child―the ones about the great shinobi wars―the writers never talked about the walk back to home, after the war. The oppressive silence and the weariness of one’s bones. There is no glory in that type of trek.
Naruto and Sakura are just ahead of them though moving just as slowly. Sasuke isn’t sure what he expects, but Kakashi’s casual voice breaking the gossamer threads of carefully maintained silence was not it.
“I had almost convinced myself that we’d lost you forever.” He offers in a tone that could have just as easily discussed the weather, a contemplated casualness to his voice.
Sasuke grunts, not quite sure how to address the statement, or if he is even meant to.
“They’re going to want to lock you away,” His eyes squint around smile lines. When he had left the village all those years ago, those lines hadn’t been there. “Though I’m sure you know that, already.”
Sasuke merely nods. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere, anyway.” He is confident that Naruto hasn't realized yet.
Silence for a moment. The quiet bickering of Naruto and Sakura just ahead of them is audible, starting quiet and then growing in volume as though the chill of the war was being shaken from their shoulders momentarily. As if this had just been another mission. Finally, Kakashi speaks, again, his arm tightening ever so slightly around Sasuke’s aching side. “Good.”
―
Sasuke wakes in a hospital room, all of eighteen years old and carved open for everyone to see.
He feels the uncomfortable pressure of foreign chakra stitching together split flesh, forcing his flesh to accommodate their energy, whoever they are. He closes his eyes to the sterile white of the room and dreams of the bubbling churn of the Naka River. He hasn’t pushed pale toes into its cold stream in a number of years but the slow pulse of the river will always be his home. The blue of the water swirls in his mind’s eye, water shifting and pulling in his memory until all he sees is blue. Blue, blue, blue.
In his dream, there is a heavy hand carding fingers through his hair. His mother? Itachi? Father?
(much more quietly: Naruto? )
―
After the damage had been assessed and the rubble swept into orderly piles, they put Sasuke in a prison cell. Though most of Konoha had been leveled in the attacks, the prison, located in the basement of what had once been the threatening tower of T&I is still the dank, oppressive place it had been when Sasuke’s father had been putting petty thieves and other disturbers of the peace there. Sasuke is the last, metaphorical puzzle piece of the war. The last evil that must be locked away for the conflict to truly be set aside. Really, he hadn’t anticipated it being any different, but Naruto had. The blonde had raged and screamed at the supposed injustice of it all and still bleeding from his wounds and missing an arm, they had dragged Sasuke down down down into the pits of T&I. Itachi’s eyes still freshly burning in his skull.
“I’m going to get you out of there, Sasuke.” Naruto had hissed, his watery eyes betraying his heartbreak. His swelling guilt which arose from a misplaced sense of responsibility for any wrong ever done to Sasuke on behalf of Konoha. That both Sasuke and Konoha cannot be arranged into neat piles of good and evil cannot be reconciled to him. Naruto was selfish that way.
Sasuke had merely grunted in reply and allowed himself to be chained like an animal. He allowed himself one last glimpse of blue before he was secreted away into the underbelly of the village that has already taken everything else from him.
―
Sasuke gasps awake in a Konoha prison to an understanding that reality is crippling and full of despair. Despite his own insistence at nearly every turn, Sasuke has never done well when left alone. The weight of his own self hatred is all consuming. It is a bitter truth too thick to swallow that Itachi gave his life to protect something as worthless and half-formed as him―in his prison cell, the weight of just how thoroughly he has failed to avenge his brother is overwhelming. He is grotesque, a weak limbed creature that Itachi had curled his body around until Sasuke had freed him from that burden. Sasuke has spent the better part of the last several years pushing away anyone who ever attempted to get close to him, and yet the prison cell is one of the first instances in a long time that Sasuke can recall being truly alone. He doesn’t do well with that knowledge.
Itachi’s eyes burn in Sasuke’s sockets. Kakashi had once told him, when he was still an impressionable child, that Obito had given him his sharingan so that they may see the future together. Now that Sasuke wears his brother's eyes, he can understand that―like always―Kakashi was full of shit. Sasuke wears Itachi’s sharingan like an ill fitting coat. They burn and they itch and they feel wrong . Every instant, every moment etched into Sasuke’s memory, is a moment that Itachi should have seen. Itachi, who had earned his sharingan vision and Sasuke whose willful ignorance only led him bumbling into it. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Sasuke shakes awake with a bitten off scream at a vision of Itachi reaching forward to tug his eyes from his skull―missing by a few inches and poking at his forehead, instead.
Itachi and he cannot see the future together. His brother is dead.
―
Sasuke lasts for approximately two months in that cell, eyes blinded and arm strapped to his side, before―for all intents and purposes―he loses what is left of his mind. His sense of time slowly trickles away with his sanity and before long, he has become numb to nearly everything around him save for the steady dripping of water from an unknown source. He knows that the dripping is intentional―his father had told him as much as a boy. It affects Sasuke, nonetheless.
He is aware that his refusal to move, or really make any noise at all, unnerves his guards. He is happy for it.
After the death of his brother, there were days that Sasuke thought he was drowning. The world still moved around him, people flowing through their lives as if Itachi’s death had no impact on them whatsoever. It wasn’t fair. That Itachi had given everything so that these people may carry on in such a careless manner. That he had saved them all and they would never know it. His death should have been world-ending. And not just to Sasuke. He recalls sitting in some nameless bar and listening to worthless Konoha jounin celebrate Itachi’s death over the sprawled pages of their bingo books. Only Tobi’s heavy hand on his arm had stayed his rage.
Now, sitting in his cell in the sort of forced calm that comes with periods of intense solitude, Sasuke is able to see Itachi’s death for what it really was: only world-ending because of its proximity, not its significance. Itachi is yet another name that will be carved on some stone in some village―or not―and no amount of perceived importance will make his name less of a name or his death less of a death. In some ways, Sasuke is glad for the blindfold. The way that it presses his eyelids closed and dry. Uchiha eyes had shed enough tears over this village to last a lifetime.
His sentence is a sort of reprieve from violence that Sasuke has not had since he was a small child. He passes the time by thinking of the Naka and the color blue. The way that the water in his mind’s eye is a pair of shining blue pinpricks in the distance―maybe not even water, at all.
He gets one visitor in those two months. He knows immediately who it is although he hasn’t had to listen for those footsteps in many years. Sakura’s feet had always been heavy and large, a constant source of dismay for her when she was still trying to force her muscular body into the facsimile of delicacy.
He is not gagged, and so he lets a single word drip from a dry mouth, the first word he has spoken in many days: “Sakura.” Her name feels like an apology that he is still too proud to utter. He regrets the casualty with which he had regarded her life, in the chaos of his own indignation. Now, her name curls on his tongue like something precious. Once, she had been a sure thing; vapid and simpering and everything that Sasuke despised about impesonality and weakness. Now, he recognizes the jealous beast for what it is.
He hears fabric shifting, her weight moving from foot to foot. The sort of noise that comes with the knowledge that this cell is no threat to her―she is safe nestled away in the underbelly of an upturned village in ways that Sasuke never will be. Not for the first time, he envies her.
She doesn’t say his name back, as if doing so would banish the calm from the room. As if it is a curse. “Listen,” she begins, instead. “I won’t stay for long. I just wanted you to know that…”
Here, she pauses. Uncertain.
“That I don’t forgive you.” She finally decides, her words ringing with a sort of finality that reverberates back to him as it bounces off of empty, dank walls. The water still drips and the air is still chilled and nothing is affected save Sasuke himself, drooping slightly with resigned acceptance. “I love you. I probably always will. But I don’t forgive you. And when you get out of here, because we both know that Naruto won’t rest until you do...if you leave again. If you leave him again. I won’t ever forgive you.” She shifts again. “So don’t fuck it up, is what I wanted to say to you. Because I want to be able to forgive you like he can, but I can’t right now so make me want to .”
Once the words are out, and he acknowledges the resolve that it must have taken to make it so, she whips around and hurries out of the room before Sasuke has a chance to respond. He supposes before he has the chance to say something that, in her mind, would prove his wickedness and unforgivable nature. He is very tired of being a villain, though he recognizes the deep hurt that he has inflicted upon her―how deserving he is of her distrust.
In the echoes of silence she leaves behind, Sasuke recalls the wildfire gleam of her grin and the rough tug of calloused hands, pulling him up from the side of a cliff or tugging his collar straight or lugging his unconscious body―riddled with curse mark poison―into the belly of a cave in a forbidden forest. He remembers a jagged haircut and lips curling in a swollen mouth and remembers how fiercely she had begged to stay by his side. He recalls these things, these feelings, and the brightening blaze of them in his memory is so intense that it abruptly warms his skin before sucking every drop of warmth from every cell in his body.
He misses her as soon as she’s gone. Misses her like he hasn’t allowed himself to in a very long time. The tiny little spark of a flame that was hers in his heart sputters. He never had a sister―his father had often remarked on the uselessness of daughters―but he imagined that in another world, another reality, maybe he might have had a sister in Sakura. At one point, in this world. In this reality. He had . He wants to earn her back, but he doesn’t know how. There are many things that Sasuke does not know how to do, and it is only in those fractal eternities of forced solitude that he is able to confront this most world-bending truth.
“And so it is…” He murmurs to himself. The guards may or may not be there, listening to him, but when has Sasuke’s grief ever been his alone? There is something familar about the weight of eyes on his slumped shoulders and the distressed way he holds his jaw.
Alone, in that dank and dripping cell, he continues to spiral. Like water down a drain. Like whirlpools. Eddys. The Uzumaki swirl. Spiraling downdowndown.
So much blue.
―
All Uchiha are proud, but Sasuke measures his pride differently. Measures it with the same cup which he uses to dish out punishments to himself.
They offer him his arm back. He tells them that he doesn’t want it, but in the end it doesn’t matter. They want him perfect. Perfect for Naruto. He is Naruto’s reward, after all, the prize to be presented to the villain of the village turned hero of the village. And what prize is more befitting than to be rewarded with the keeping of a villain, himself? Sasuke had always been everything to Naruto; the only thing he had to lose, really. Facing each other with a reckless death drive steering every bare knuckled blow, Naruto had declared Sasuke his goal. Now that his goal has been achieved, now that Sasuke had nowhere else to run to, Naruto would be presented with his prize―wrapped in bandages like a macabre gift.
The chakra funneling through his single arm is painful. Unbalanced. Lightning zapping through his veins before ricocheting out of his fingertips and sparking off of the falsified flesh of his replacement appendage. They ask him to repeat the motions, they want to make sure that he is able to. Sasuke finds the repeated motions, the repeated zap of chakra, pointless considering that his chakra points are going to be sealed shut after they verify their functionality. Only enough left to keep the arm attached is what Tsunade had told him with a bite in her voice that Sasuke couldn’t quite decode. Had she known about Danzo? About Itachi? Certainly she had. But then again, maybe not. Konoha was good at obscuring things like that. Tsunade had never been good at looking. Underneath the underneath, Kakashi had once instructed him.
He mentally thanks Sakura for her unending kindness. She could have been cruel even as she healed him―broken him to pieces even as she sewed him shut―but she is gentle and professional. Pitying, even. He hasn’t been on the receiving end of pity since he was eight years old and meeting the aging gaze of a useless hokage. He feels now, what he had felt then: a sick sort of warmth that leaves him equal parts nauseous and scrambling in the dirt on bended knee for a scrap more. It is a kind of sick warmth that, cold as he is, he tucks into his pocket for later.
She places the seals on his chakra points quickly and methodically. They will remain in place until he has earned their removal. As always, Sasuke must earn autonomy. It is an old hat, now. Once she is done, his blindfold is removed and he is left to face himself in the mirror for the first time in months. Maybe even ever.
His hair is beginning to brush the tops of his collarbones in a sleek spill only dulled by months in the dark. When he looks in the mirror, he sees his mother staring back. In the pauses between heartbeats, he grieves for her all over again. Her features are twisted on his face, wasted on a useless son. His eyes look sunken and his cheeks look gaunt. One eye is soulless-black. The other, even with his chakra locked away, is pulsing, noxious, vile rinnegan purple. They tug him away from the mirror.
If prompted, Sasuke Uchiha would describe his life as a series of crises unfolding onto each other. The crisis of his inevitable reunion with Naruto is unprecedented, however. He knows that the blonde will come, but he doesn’t know when. Is he outside the hospital room? Is he waiting beyond the hospital? Is he waiting by the Naka? Sasuke cannot fathom the possibility that he might not be waiting, at all.
Somehow, the sun shining makes Sasuke feel worse. It should be raining. The heavens should be weeping to mirror his own pain. How dare the sun continue to shine. How dare his suffering be made so insignificant. But then, just outside the hospital doors, there is Naruto. And Naruto was waiting for him. And Sasuke, somehow, feels ashamed.
“Sasuke!” Naruto greets with the same undaunted grin that Sasuke had dreamed about once, shaking in the barren caves of the Sound village.
Sasuke had imagined how their reunion might play out. Imagined he would see Naruto, again, and apologies and sentiments of shame would come dripping from his mouth like a leaky faucet. Instead, his tongue has managed to tie itself in knots and Sasuke has so much that he wants to say, so much that he wants to make sure Naruto knows, that he says nothing at all.
Beside him, his anbu guards are tense. As if Sasuke is a caged animal set loose. He wants to tell them that he is being released into Naruto’s (care, captivity, supervision) and since there is nowhere else he would rather be, they have nothing to worry about. He wants to scoff at the thought that they might be able to apprehend him, at all, chakra or no. He does neither of these things. Instead he drifts closer to Naruto like some spectral, floating thing unhindered in the wind.
Standing there, right in front of Naruto who is so sunshine-care-free, Sasuke, with his overgrown hair and his gaunt cheeks, feels distinctly ugly. An insecurity that settles in his bones uncomfortably unfamiliar. He doesn’t know what to say to Naruto without saying everything, and so he says nothing. Again.
Seamlessly, Naruto’s waving hand falls to the back of his own neck, abashed. “Kakashi-sensei explained everything, yeah? About living with me?” He pauses, eyes growing wide. “It's just temporary, of course! He might be hokage, but even he can’t just go against an unanimous council vote. Guess they figured you would need someone stronger than you to keep you from doing anything dumb.” He chuckles to himself, laughing at something that to him is a joke but to Sasuke is a length of rope tightening into a collar around his neck.
He represses war-weary anger at the mention of the council. In this, just as in other lives, an Uchiha life is a matter of bureaucracy. Immediately, Sasuke banishes the thought. He deserves it this time, after all. “Right…” he murmurs. Unbidden, the skin in his new arm feels too tight, stretched, and numb.
Crumbling is not an instantaneous act. Sasuke had managed to piece that together over the last few months. Instead, he recognizes that he’s been crumbling for some time. It is only standing there, staring into Naruto’s carefree eyes that Sasuke feels the weight of everything at last settle onto his shoulders. Naruto, who had every right to be just as jaded and weary and dull as Sasuke but who is not.
It's crazy, the things that Naruto will do in the name of friendship, and so when he takes Sasuke’s limp, vile hand and tugs him along, Sasuke does not shudder in surprise.
“It's going to be great!” Naruto declares, leading Sasuke through the wreckage of a former village only just managing to piece itself back together. Sasuke recognizes the spaces where buildings used to exist. There used to be a tailor just down the main street who would so carefully stitch blood red and snow white fans on navy blue cotton. At first for hundreds of people and then for just one and now, just none. The village has every opportunity to build anew, but Sasuke recognizes the structures of buildings being placed just where they had been before. “It’ll be just like old times! Oh, and even better, old man Teuchi is already running Ichiraku again! It’s just barebones, for now, but I’d never let that keep me from good ramen!”
Naruto continues on in that manner, pointing out organized piles of wood and stone that will soon become shops and apartment complexes. Along the way to wherever they are going, Sasuke notices the stares, the weight of empty disgust being directed solely at him. It’s an ironic reversal of how things were before Sasuke left Konoha―this time, instead of Naruto, Sasuke has become the symbol of hatred for the village. It is what he had wanted, in those crazed moments at the end of the world, but now that he can feel the weight of their eyes he wants to shake them off. He intensely hates how cracked open and exposed the stares make him feel.
In an effort to distract himself from his own spiraling, he asks: “Where is it that you’re taking me, anyways?”
Naruto’s palm, still scorching hot and cradling Sasuke’s, squeezes once. “To my new place. Crazy, huh? Me, a house of my own.” He grins and Sasuke’s heart stutters. “Kakashi-sensei asked if I wanted the old place to be repaired―it was really only barely damaged considering―but I told him not to bother. Wanted to start over fresh, ya know?”
Sasuke does know. He can imagine what that old apartment must have represented to Naruto. Years of spoiled milk and crumbling paint. An eternity of neglect and a category of intense hatred of which Sasuke had only relatively little experience with. Naruto had always been just as hateful as Sasuke, though quick to shake it from his shoulders. Sasuke wants to ask if he still hates them, too, but thinks better of it.
“So yeah,” Naruto continued as if Sasuke had asked him to, and maybe he had. He's had trouble holding onto time, lately. “So I told him I wanted something with more than one room. Can you imagine? Me in a two-bed-one-bath house. Though it's definitely going to be weird not eating in my bedroom.”
Without really realizing it (and how careless was that? To not even have traced their steps) Naruto pulls them to a stop in front of a small, wooden building. There is a gray, short stone wall stretched around the length of the small house and Sasuke can already see the hints of luscious green leaves poking out from around a wooden veranda. It looks like the home Sasuke had grown up in, only smaller and free from the burdens of a lineage.
Abruptly, Naruto lets go of his hand, as though he were nervous. “Unexpected, right?” he laughs, voice cracking ever so slightly. “I thought…well, I thought maybe you would be more comfortable in a more traditional house. I’ve never lived in one, and no one will listen to me about rebuilding the Uchiha district, so I figured why not?”
Sasuke blinks in surprise and turns his heavy gaze back to the house, reassessing it. He can almost imagine Itachi sweeping the smooth stones lining the front door. He can almost see tendrils of smoke escaping his grandfather’s pipe on the veranda. He despairs that he had not thought to configure their proximity to the Naka as they had been walking, but he knows that they are close. There are distinct differences between this house and the one Sasuke had grown up in, but they are similar. Distantly related.
“You did this...for me?” Sasuke murmurs in a quiet, awestruck whisper. “But, Naruto, it’s your house.” Not ‘dobe’ this time. He hadn’t quite earned that back, yet.
There’s a high flush on Naruto’s tanned cheeks. “Yeah, well, it’s yours now, too. If you want it to be.” What goes unsaid between them, is that Naruto has no basis for what a home should look like other than approximations based on others.
The Sasuke of two months ago might have struck out at the vulnerability like a poisonous viper. He might have sneered at Naruto. Might have mocked him for his weakness. The way he bares his heart so earnestly. But despite his best efforts, he hasn’t quite managed to kill off the soft parts of himself. And they’re alone now. It doesn’t seem to cost him quite as much to say: “Okay.”
“Okay?” Naruto whispers in response, as though Sasuke’s acquiesce hung between them on gossamer threads.
“Yeah. Okay.” He pauses, breathes deep. Imagines that he might cross the threshold of Naruto’s home and be transported back to childhood--might smell the jasmine of his mother’s incense or the quiet guaff of his gruff father. They had been a happy family before they weren’t. “Show me what you’ve done with the place.”
Naruto’s face lights up like a firecracker in the night. The sunset is a vermillion smear across the sky and Sasuke fleetingly wonders at the dangerousness of hope.
Naruto is a sweet, unsteady creature as he happily leads Sasuke through room after room of papered windows and fresh, wooden walls. If he closes his eyes and breathes deeply, the smell of fresh-cut wood is so suffused that Sasuke could almost imagine that he is standing in the thicket of forest that surrounds Konoha. The home has a distinct, unlived in quality to it that clashes with the traditional tatami of the floors.
Naruto ends his tour abruptly at a set of doors just down the hall from the doors that he identified as encasing his own bedroom. Naruto stands there for some time, just staring at the closed, sliding doors. Finally, words come to him.
“I’m not letting you go, this time.” Naruto’s raspy voice cuts through the silence like a knife, quiet though it is. “Never again. If you want to leave, you tell me and we’ll do it together , but you’re done doing things alone. You can believe that.”
Sasuke is too ashamed to meet his heavy stare and so his eyes (one cursed with the smear of purple that he sees even when his eyes are shut, though both were once his brother’s) trace the lines of wood in front of him, instead. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Naruto echoes, almost patiently.
“Yeah. Okay.”
Then, Sasuke steps forward, slides the door to his new bedroom open, and encases himself inside of it like a womb. When he again emerges, he has decided that he will be reborn: cut to fit in the spaces in Naruto’s side. It is what Naruto had asked of him and Sasuke doesn’t have the strength to commit to any other path. It might be nice to not have to be strong anymore.