Evidence of What You Cannot See (Repeated Ten Times)
Author: hungrytiger11
Title: Evidence of What You Cannot See (Repeated Ten Times)
Characters/pairing: Sasuke, some Sasu/Saku but mostly gen
Summary: Ten visitors to the same hospital room.
A/N: Written for indira14 who wanted more Sasu/Saku stuff. I don’t think this is exactly what you were talking about but I tried, and it's waiting for you to get back from your trip!
Also, first time writing all but two characters, so OOC warnings may apply.
I. Uzumaki Naruto
“-Did good, didn’t I?”
A voice: low in timber, a little gruff but vaguely familiar, and close, so close. It is the last thought that latches itself to his brain. Someone is close. Close, but who? He tries to open his eyes. A struggle. A blinding (blinding?) pain. Then, light.
He hisses, and squeezes his eyes back shut. So much effort for nothing; seemed to be the story of his life.
“Yeah,” another voice answers back, soft, feminine, if a bit throaty. Not Karin then. Before he can think of who it is, the voice continues, “Promise of a lifetime, right? We did good.”
Eyes slit open, more cautiously this time, and he sees a figure at the door, all golds and tans and oranges. Naruto his mind supplies, Naruto leaning against the doorframe, smiling a lopsided smile and looking anything but truly happy. Looking resigned.
Where is the child that was his best friend?
Disjointed images of a fight filter though his head, shuttering through his brain each one faster than the next and then- a hand picks up his. The skin against his is cool to the touch, or maybe his is just very hot, though he can’t think of why that might be.
“Is he waking up?” The man shifts off the door jam. No answer follows, but a cool fizzle shoots out through the hand holding his, into him, and up his arm. It feels a bit like licking a battery only not just at the tongue. He’d been surprised that one time he had licked a battery. Itachi hadn’t told him it would do that. His mind comes up blank as he tries to think of when that was. Sometime, he’s sure. He closes his eyes against the light, trying to focus on remembering when.
The conversation has gone on around him. His eyelids flutter in an effort to open again, to return to what these people around him are saying.
“-Get’s better?”
That’s Naruto. Grown-up Naruto is saying something, but Sasuke can’t quite make sense what. Naruto’s grown up. That must mean his licking a battery happened a long time ago. Itachi is dead, he thinks. That’s funny. Why didn’t he remember that before?
“-Even if we have to pound the health back into him!” Thin laughter follows this. He missed the joke, but maybe it just wasn’t a very good joke. Most jokes aren’t.
“You’re happy?” the Naruto-voice asks, and the other voice doesn’t answer back, or maybe it does and he just can’t hear it. His last thought is to wonder who that other voice is, and why it would matter. In his experience, no one is ever very happy very long.
II. Nara Shikamaru
-Narrowly slides out of the way of an incoming toad, and then he’s flying up. He thought any fight would be a replay of others, but this is anything but like at the Valley of the End, and Naruto’s screaming something at him, trying to convince him of something and Sasuke resists putting his hands up over his ears.
Does this guy ever shut up? He doesn’t care! He doesn’t care! He doesn’t care!
Hands flicker through signs, an explosion of light pushes him backwards, and for a moment all he can see is white, and he’s falling, working to right himself and-
With a gasp of breath, he shoots himself straight up, only to inhale smoke and start coughing. His eyes water and for a moment he can’t place where he is.
“A dream,” says a gravelly voice as a hand grips his shoulder. Sasuke turns and sees that’s true. He’s in a… hospital room, from the looks of things. Turning, he sees the hand belongs to a man in a Konoha-standard flak jacket. The shinobi is mostly unremarkable except for his beady eyes, and bushy hair that’d somehow been pulled straight up at the top of his head.
“Nara.” Sasuke recognizes him vaguely from his academy days, tries to dredge up any more information about him. Finally something- Kakashi told him about how he’d been clever during his prelim round and that Sasuke might face him in the Chuunin Exam’s final test. Nothing to really help him evaluate whether he’s going to end up dead in the next few minutes or not.
Though- probably not. He is in a hospital room after all. Why waste a hospital room on someone you were going to kill? The thought gives Sasuke some measure of self-assurance, enough to move in for answers.
“What am I doing here?”
“Until two minutes ago?” A cigarette dangles between the man’s fingers, as he pulls up to take another drag. Disgusting habit, though the man in front of him sure seems to be taking his sweet time with it. “Sleeping.”
Great. A smart aleck seems to be here in this hospital room (which is where? Konoha?) doing… what? Keeping guard, most likely. He moves to shift further up in his bed, maybe see if there was a window to leap out of, but finds he can’t.
“What am I,” Nara continues, seemingly unaware of Sasuke’s struggles to move. “Doing here is what you should be asking.”
Nara leans back in his bedside chair and Sasuke glares. “Why can’t I move? Whatever you’re doing, stop.”
“Whatever I am-“ The other man rolls his eyes. “And this is the great genius everyone was so excited about when we graduated. I’m part of the Nara clan, genius. What do you think I am doing? More importantly, why do you think I would stop?”
Finding no suitable retort, Sasuke settles on just glaring harder. Must be some clan specialty holding him, though after his family was killed Sasuke never spent all that much time focused on what other clans could do. Just on how to take down a Sharnigan user.
Beside him, Nara pushes up in his chair, sighing as if it’s some great effort to do even that much and continues on, “Look, I just have a few things to talk to you about, then I’ll release you from my shadow jutsu, so quit struggling. You won’t get out any faster.”
Sensing momentary defeat, or at least a time for tactical retreat, Sasuke relaxes back into his pillow, head resting against the headboard. No real difference from where he was five seconds ago, just that his muscles aren’t as tensed. But Nara seems to somehow feel the difference because he starts talking again.
“First off, you’re in Konoha. We’re not going to kill you. Possibly you won’t even be jailed. The ballot’s still out on that one, so how you act now is going to determine a lot. Got all that?”
He tries to nod his head, but can’t.
“Yeah,” he says instead.
“Good. Second, you need to know you owe not being executed to Naruto and Sakura-san. They hold a lot of clout. People like them. People listen to them. You hurt them again, and this shadow that’s got you trapped so you can’t even breathe without my permission? You’ll have this shadow around your neck before you even have a moment to so much as think of betraying the Leaf again. And that’s only if you’re lucky enough to have me be the first shinobi to reach you. Others will not be as nice.”
Sasuke manages to roll his eyes once at the melodrama of that unimpressive threat, till giant fingers slide up his torso and he sees a hand-shaped shadow crawling out from under his covers and up his throat.
“I’m glad you understand.” Nara says, tone conversational. The hand oozes back down. “The last bit is personal, my own bit of advice, so listen up- Stay away from Ino.”
“Who?” This whole experience seems to be getting weirder and weirder. He’s in a place he doesn’t expect, talking to a person he can barely remember, getting death threats over somebody he doesn’t recall at all.
“Yamanaka Ino. Long blonde hair. Mind-control jutsu. Had a crush on you.”
He flashes back to a school-life filled with sudden chokeholds as a girl draped herself around him. He didn’t get girls then; doesn’t get them now either, really. Why anyone would want to get near them is beyond him. There have been other things on his mind than figuring out the mystery that is the female sex.
Nara gets up to walk to the door, and pivots to face him at the last minute. Whatever jutsu he’s under turns Sasuke’s head, forcing him to follow the other man’s form.
“You don’t remember her? And after I went to all the trouble to talk to you. Fine. I don’t care. What I do care about is that you don’t get near her. You don’t get to make her cry again. Friendship, caring about people? Lost on you, I know, so maybe you won’t get why I’m saying this, but all you need to understand is to stay away. I’m not like you, big on revenge. But hurt my team and you’ll see I very, very much can be.”
The man takes another drag and throws his cigarette to the floor. Both hands free, he makes some sort of sign and Sasuke slumps, body released.
“Hey,” he calls out as the other man walks to the door. “That was all you wanted? So sure I won’t run I’m not even worth guarding or something?”
Once the words are out, he realizes maybe it’s stupid to point out a flaw he could use, but his pride stings and, if being truthful, isn’t sure he’d run even if they left him alone. Nara smirks over his shoulder and shakes his head. “Oh, you’ve got a guard, just not me. It’s a… friend who understood why I needed to talk to you. This,” he gestures to a tall blonde man who steps into view, “Is your guard. Yamanaka-san of the I&I.”
And without another word, the shadow-user is gone.
III. Yamanaka Inoichi
The door clicks shut behind Nara and for a moment there is no sound as each remaining man gauges the other. “Yamanaka-san of the I&I” is a tall, imposing man with blonde hair that, like so much else, seems vaguely familiar. With the same clan name as Nara’s teammate “Ino,” the girl with mind control abilities, Sasuke doesn’t have to guess what this man can do. Though what he could want from him is something of a mystery. In general, Sasuke is sure he wants information; it’s the specifics that are unclear. Information on Orochimaru? The now non-existent threat of the Sound village? About the Atasuki? Madara? Or is it Sasuke himself that is being evaluated as the threat?
After Nara’s little speech, he’s inclined to believe sentimentality might keep the Leaf from considering that last possibility too closely. That-might- be a mistake. Sasuke isn’t sure. He remembers his brother, fingers hitting his forehead for the last time and sliding down his face, a rememberance that makes him burn hot and cold in turns. He remembers sitting in the dark listening to a man in a mask spin a tale, and he remembers his own shifting hunger for vengeance. That should mean his old hometown is making a mistake in underestimating him, a mistake he should capitalize on.
Except, Sasuke feels there’s something else, something he doesn’t remember very clearly that’s stopping him. He doesn’t remember how he got in this hospital bed for one thing and he thinks -maybe- there’s something else too. If he keeps probing, it will all fall into place, but he doesn’t have that kind of time because Yamanaka is done staring him down and starts to speak.
“Uchiha-san, I am here to read the list of charges against you, to gather information, and to evaluate your mental health, your intentions, and your physical ability to carry them out. The Hokage has asked that I explain this before I begin. Do you understand?”
Sasuke nods. He was informed at the Sound three years ago when the third Hokage died, knew vaguely one of Orochimaru’s former teammates took his place, and later Danzou, who had had the Uchiha murdered, had been Hokage. Who the Leaf’s leader is now, and why he would allow this release of information to him is yet another unknown in a growing list of unknowns.
“Good. Uchiha-san, you have been charged with leaving the village’s service without an honorable discharge, with fraternizing with known enemies to the Leaf, with attempts of assassination on Leaf allies and Leaf-nin. You have been charged with conspiring against Konohagakure, the Land of Fire, and allies of the Leaf.”
Sasuke nodded again. Before he can ask anything though, before he can decide if he can or should ask anything, Yamanaka moves his hands and-
-The sting as the edge of a Rasengan slices his cheek open, too close! - Clouds bursting out in thunder with air around him hissing with heat- The rumble of ground crumbling beneath his feet as a fist strikes the earth- Karin screaming, in the smoke and dust he can’t see where- Blood on his fingers as he wipes at his eyes- Hands reaching for his eyes clawing their way closer- Orochimaru’s hand on the back of his neck, thumb brushing against his cheek bone- Narrow arms across his chest and a scent of cherry blossoms enveloping him- Smelling ramen again, the restaurant bright and loud- The tangy lemon scent of cleaner as he scrubs at stains in the living room of an echoingly empty house- His brother holding out a battery, the fizzle of electricity across his tongue- His mother kissing him good night-
He gasps, and opens his eyes.
A ceiling stares back down.
Turning his head slightly, he can make out the shape of a man in a chair and beyond him, a window showing bright sunlight breaking over city buildings. Time has passed without his realizing, it seems. Had it been night before? Is that why he didn’t notice the brilliant light streaming in from the window before now? Beside him, the man speaks.
“You might want to sleep some more. I hear getting your memories harvested can be exhausting and I still have more to do.”
“Is that what I’m remembering?”
“That’s what I’m remembering for you.”
Sasuke’s hands fumble to find the cool side of the pillow. Then he leans back into the memories he’s always remembering, the memories that, just for an instant, he wishes he could forget.
IV. Haruno Sakura
Chuunin guards are stationed outside his door the next morning, and nurses- he can’t tell if they are shinobi or civilian- bring food but don’t bother to check any vitals. Neither they nor the guards speak to him, though casual gossip is passed between the two groups. Too bad even the gossip is rendered unintelligible to him, having been gone too long to recognize most of the names. Naruto’s is mentioned several times in connection to something about toads. His summons perhaps? Sasuke puts together several likely scenarios out of sheer boredom.
About the time he’s cobbled together his wildest idea (That Naruto is being trained by toads), someone walks through the door. He has to remind himself it is day, not night, a hospital room, not a side street in the city, but the one thing he does not have to remind himself of is that this person is Sakura.
And it is Sakura, no mistaking that. Her coloring makes it too hard to mistake, but even discounting that, she has changed very little. He had seen her once or twice since joining Orochimaru, but never this closely or at a time to notice much. The face has thinned out a bit perhaps, she’s taller, sleeker, more toned…. things, woman things, were in places where there’d been nothing before. His face reddens and he turns away from her, scolding himself. Karin had things in- well, that is to say, she was a woman, and he’d never felt so… self-conscious looking at her. Maybe it was just noticing the change that made him so self-aware. Did he seem different at all to her?
He had to, of course. He’d grown for one thing, spent every second training, working for his revenge. Of course he was different. Besides, a part of him whispered, the last time he was home, he hadn’t been a missing-nin (yet). He hadn’t tried to kill his best friend (yet).
“Open up,” Sakura says, hardly the first thing he’d expect her to say.
“Wha-“ but before he can finish a thermometer gets shoved in his mouth.
“Make sure it stays in place, Sasuke-kun. I need to see what your temperature is. You had a fever when I left for a mission and from the looks of it, no one has been checking since I left.”
She turns to search for a pen, his medical files in her hand. The thing in his mouth beeps, and she whirls around to pluck it out, before going to write down the results and realizing she still doesn’t have her pen.
“It’s behind your ear,” he tells her. She reaches up gingerly and fingers the object stuck behind her ear.
“Oh,” she says, blushing a little. “Goes to show it’s been a busy day.”
Goes to show she’s nervous, Sasuke thinks. Nerves he can understand, but what is she doing here, what will she say to him?
Is it betrayal, he wonders, to follow an ambition you have never hidden? He supposes it must depend on whom you ask (on what you ask them).
“What are you doing here?”
Sakura turns on her heels and stares.
“I’m recording your temperature.”
He says nothing more, let’s his question stand. The lengthening silence makes clear that he does not consider that an answer. Sakura tilts her head, in a way that is almost…with pity.
“Sasuke-kun, I’m your medic-nin. It’s what we do. Relax. I’m not here to accuse you of anything. From the sounds of it, you’ve had quite a full day of that yesterday!” She smiles brightly. Sasuke shifts in his bed, a little unnerved by her expression. She looks back down at his chart, and continues softer, in a way that doesn’t need any reply, “Besides, would it change anything, if I did?”
She finishes checking his readings without making eye contact, or saying anything at all, the room charged with an air of discomfort. When she’s done, she leaves.
________________________________________________________________________________
The same routine continues. Towards the end of the day, just before dinner, Sakura comes into the room to check up on him. It’s all very professional, very formal. Sometimes they say something each other, sometimes they don’t. It takes him a several tries to get up the nerve to ask her about being a medic-nin.
“I started studying with Tsunade-shishou, after Naruto… well, I thought she would help me improve, and now here I am.”
“Is that how you did whatever it was you were doing out in the field that day?” It is the first time they have referred to his “capture” as the guards call it. He still doesn’t remember much about that day, though enough to satisfy Yamanaka, who has also made several, repeat visits. Some of that lack of memory might even be because of those night visits, but there’s enough of that day still lodged in his memory to recall the surprise at the earth-shaking actions this small woman performed.
He doesn’t get a straight answer though.
“I’m just really strong.”
That’s all she says, but she smiles as she says it. An inside joke he doesn’t get the punch line to? Or is she just happy they’re talking?
She leans down to press her chakra through his system to monitor any progress. As she does so, hair slides down across her face. Without thinking about it, he reaches out to brush it back, ignoring how still the face beneath his fingertips becomes.
“What happened to your forehead protector?” he asks.
“I lost it when the city was destroyed.” She leans up and away. Without seeing her eyes, he realizes, she’s a hard one to read.
“You wanted to do that once, didn’t you?” she asks him. Something crackles through him, harsher than the electric fizzle of a battery, harsher than chakra coursing through his veins. It feels like something getting broken, then augmented, then broken again.
“I notice Naruto doesn’t hang around you anymore. Lost a boyfriend?” The question doesn’t even make sense, really. No one’s said anything about Naruto and Sakura or Sakura and anybody, but he can tell by the rigid straightening of her spine, he’s hurt her back.
For a few seconds the only sounds are that of the guards’ chairs squeaking as they shift to watch the show and Sakura breathing heavily through her nose. He wonders for a moment if there is some truth to his words, and why, if that’s so, something hurts.
Before he can rationalize the hurt away, or even properly process it’s there, Sakura pushes her chair back and walks to the door. Without turning she says, “You are my patient Uchiha-san, so I will not punch your lights out. Ask your guards later and they’ll tell you; your medical infirmities just saved you an extra trip to the hospital. As for Naruto, I could let you think that it’s just you he’s not visiting. But I’m nicer than that. He’s away on missions. His dreams are coming true. Everyone respects him now. He’s a hero, and this village? It needs those right now. I have to leave, so I can go spend another all-nighter helping the Hokage work to fix this mess you made. Have a good night.”
She slams the door shut as she leaves and it cracks down the middle. No one makes any move to fix it in the following weeks; it remains broken, exposing him to anyone passing by.
V. Sai
Sakura returns two and a half weeks later, late in the day as always, as if she had never stopped coming. Conversation is somewhat stilted, but when he asks, she tells him where she’s been. Well, if she’s not lying to him anyway. It’s a little hard to believe when he thinks of the Sakura he knew at twelve, though this new Sakura seems very matter of fact about her mission.
She’s been to see the Raikage. Things are apparently still rocky with the Hidden Cloud village; they wanted (or still do want, he isn’t sure) his death in retaliation for his attempted assassination of the eight-tails.
“Luckily,” Sakura finishes. “The Raikage likes me, and respects me because of Tsunade-sama. It’s cause I can really pack a punch. So, no Sharnigan-filled corpse for the cloud-nin to tinker with today!”
She laughs and flashes a grin, before taking out a bento for her and, to his surprise, one for him.
“Mind if I eat?” she asks. “I got stuck with double shifts. My regular day at the hospital and then a full night manning the emergency room.”
“Why one for me?”
“Well, it seems rude to eat here and not bring you some too. Besides, I have a favor to ask.” Her tone seems light, if a bit forced, and Sasuke treads lightly around the question.
“What is it?”
“Well, some people want to visit you. Sai wants to meet you. I think he thinks there is some proper etiquette in asking first. And then Ino wants to see you too.”
And which of those did he want to tackle with a remark first? On the one hand, he’s bored out of his skull sitting in here day after day. On the other hand, Ino? How likely is it she’s suddenly managed to become tolerable in just three years? And-
“Who’s Sai?”
“Your replacement.”
“Um…”
His what?
“Good. I told him to stop by this evening. Ino should be around soon.” She stuffs the last of her food into her mouth in a not-unlike-twelve-year-old-Naruto way and shoots out the door with only an “ I’m gonna be late!” for a good bye.
He watches her race down the halls through the crack in his door.
__________________________________________________________________________
“You are important to Dickless and Ugly, though I’ve had difficulties comprehending why. However, it seems inevitable we will be spending time together, and I have read it is socially appropriate to introduce oneself to those important to friends. Would a nickname help to foster friendly relations?”
The man before him had begun this bizarre speech without preamble, and Sasuke is not entirely convinced this is the man he’s been told would be coming. For one thing, he looked about their age, and yet his face seemed totally unfamiliar, not part of any schoolyard memory. For another, whom is this man even talking about? He’s in a city where, if nurses can be believed, half the population wants to kill him and the other half wants to make him into some sort of stud bull. “Dickless” and “Ugly” could apply to everyone.
Giving the man a once over, Sasuke is thoroughly unimpressed.
“And your name is?”
The man holds out a hand, smile still plastered on his face, “Sai.”
Damn, he’d really been hoping this was not who he thought. After a beat he grabs the proffered hand, and ‘Sai’ continues, “So, how about Douchebag?”
“What?”
“For a nickname. Douchebag.”
“No.” His hand tightens around the other man’s, grinding each knuckle to bring home his point.
Sai’s smile falls from his face into a look of impassiveness. He doesn’t jerk his hand out of the tight grip though, and after a beat Sasuke pulls back his own hand. At least he isn’t easily intimidated; Sasuke reluctantly can give him that.
“Well, now that formalities have been observed, I’ve read it is acceptable to next come to my main purpose for visiting.”
“Naruto promised Sakura he’d bring you back. He promised because he loves her, and Sakura loves you. You’ve caused them pain for years. That promise has caused Naruto too much pain. Tell her you don’t love her. Let them have each other.”
Something hard is stuck in his throat, like a rock, a bone, stopping any breath. The guards are very deliberately not peering through the broken door.
Love is a word without meaning. The only people he’s ever loved he’s killed, or tried to, or watched as they’ve been slaughtered in the streets. Love is something Uzumaki Naruto preaches as toad summons rain down on you. It is an action he’s always leapt into without thinking first, and all that’s ever shown Sasuke is the heart is an organ that stops beating when someone is dead. But, Sai’s words makes it seem like he’s trampled right through an epic, someone’s favorite bedtime story, like he’s a character whose barged in from some other, less adored tale.
He makes it sound like his best friend didn’t love him.
Stupid Dead-Last, he thinks, anger unaccountably bubbling up at this man, and his former teammates, and even at the guards for listening to this stupid speech sprouting from this stupid man. He opens his mouth to retort when unexpected pain shoots through his eye.
He holds his hand to it, and grinds his teeth, bracing against the pain. It’s been happening more and more often, only a matter of time, though he hasn’t said anything to the nurses, or to Sakura. And the pain is only made worse for being experienced under the gaze of his replacement. His greatest indignity and weakness laid bare before someone who’s telling him he’s not needed.
Over the rushing pound of blood in his head, Sasuke can barely make out Sai’s voice, impossibly passive, calling out to the guards by his door.
“Get a medic in here. Now.”
“Are you in pain? ” he asks.
Sasuke presses the heel of his palm further in against his eyes, willing the pain to stop. It doesn’t.
“Not life-threatening,” Sai concludes, reaching out to try and peel his hands back. Sasuke presses back in harder still, refusing to let go. “I’ll leave you to the medics. Think about what I said.”
Footsteps sound, both in the room and out in the hall. Hands start grabbing at his again, blinding light shoots across his retinas, blood trickles down his wrists, and Sai’s voice floats out, distant over the medics’ noise. “Oh. And, think about that nickname. It’s what friends do.”
VI. Yamanaka Ino
“Sasuke,” Sakura asks after staring into his eyes for minute, flashlight in hand. “What happened to your brother’s eyes? After he died?”
The icepack she hands him feels cool against his eyes, and is about the only thing keeping him from snapping at the medic-nin. He’s been over the degenerating eyesight of the Uchiha family several times, for several different nin, and Sakura has been here for each one. Her flashlight aimed at his eyes made him feel like he walked naked down Konoha’s streets. He’d been completely exposed and all she’s giving him is clinical detachment.
“Madara took Itachi’s body.”
“Did he need the eyes too?”
He pulls the icepack down to turn and look at her. A little blurred, she’s a smeared outline. Her hair is like a halo, but her facial features are still distinguishable and, right now, are pulled into an expression far from detached. Perhaps some of the truth, the smallest bit, would be safe with her.
“Why would he need my brother’s eyes, when he already had his own brother’s?”
Before she can reply they are interrupted by the sound of sandals pounding the floor in quick beats.
“Knock, knock!” says a cheery voice. A tall blonde stands at the door, hair draping down her back. “What’s up, Forehead?”
Sakura rolls her eyes, but her voice is friendly when she speaks, “Ino-pig.”
Sakura stands up and starts to pack away her supplies, one methodic movement after another. Sasuke turns to take a better look at this kuionichi he’s been warned to stay away from. There’s a suggestive way she sways her hips as she walks, and he wonders if it’s on purpose. He wonders if her hips were why he was warned.
“Hey, you gonna make time to go see our other ‘guest’?” she asks Sakura in lieu of any further greeting.
“Yeah, I’ll head there now. How’s he doing?”
Ino shakes her head, but doesn’t answer directly, “You’ll see. Got time for dinner? Team Gai just got back from a mission, so Hinata-chan thought we might all celebrate. Me and the boys are off duty at seven; everybody’s meeting up then.”
“So long as it’s not the ramen shop, sure!” The girls smile at each, beam in a way quite out of portion to the mere idea of food, at least to Sasuke’s mind. Plans settled, Sakura walks to the door, hips decidedly not suggestive, gives an awkward half-wave and is gone. As Ino turns to him, he watches the happy expression fall off her face. She looks lighter without it, more honest, more real.
But the way she stares? No doubt whose daughter she is. He wonders vaguely if Konoha’s Investigation and Interrogation Unit employs her as well.
“You’re pretty lucky, you know,” she states baldly, before taking the seat next to his bed. Slipping the icepack back over his eyes, Sasuke doesn’t bother replying. What is it with all these Leaf-nin who felt the need to come and talk at him like this? So far his medic-nin’s the only one to have talked to him instead of staring right past, like he isn’t even there. But, then, Sakura isn’t just his medic-nin, really.
“You have this image, right? Like, even as a kid, you were cool, this lone wolf.” So that was what girls were always mooning about. Well, one mystery solved, though pretty fucking pointless to know. “You think of yourself like that too, don’t you?”
Keep it coming, Ino, he thought sourly. That’s what I really need. One more speech to tell me what I should think or need to think, what I should do or need to do. Haven’t been told that in forever.
“I was there, at your family’s funeral, you know.” Something stings, lower down in his chest, so that he doesn’t think he can blame it on bleeding eyeballs. He wishes, with sudden fierceness, this girl would leave, so he could sleep. “And I saw you there, just this kid like me-lonely. I think people can sense that, that little boy, that loneliness that’s still there under the skin. Are attracted to it, to trying to fix it. Anyway, end result is this kid who thinks he’s all alone ends up having all these people there, pulling for him.”
The ache is getting worse. Just a normal reaction, a side effect from his eyes, or is the annoying blonde to blame? “Does this have a point?”
“Just, you got a lot of people worried about you and pulling for you, considering you are, supposedly, some loner.”
“Sakura?” he questions, thinking of his replacement’s words.
Ino’s voice is soft as she answers, “Yeah. Sakura, and Team Seven. All the rookies really.”
Sasuke sincerely doubts that. After all, he’s already had a little visit from one of her teammates, and he’s yet to see any member of the original Team Seven except the one whose job it is to make sure he doesn’t keel over before his political (or-ew, reproductive) uses have run out.
“I thought that was what a crush was, when I was kid. Wanting to keep from being alone.”
“And?” If this whole visit was some sort of love confession he was going to run something through his eyes himself.
“It’s not. Loving someone is about not wanting someone else to be alone.”
It’s a startling enough statement that he pulls his icepack away from his face.
“Your team- both of your teams- love you a lot.”
He looks at the woman in the chair, taking in her face, which is soft. Even her searching eyes are soft.
“That’s why I’m here. The teammates you were captured with- ‘Team Taka’ they said - want to see you. That alright?”
He nods, tongue knotting up in his throat. His insides are twisting around (he hadn’t asked about them, but obviously they had about him), yet some part of him, that part that never stopped thinking, that was always searching to insure he survive, is a little stunned too. Not some teenaged love confession at all, or even some obscure way to torture him. She’s seen not past him but right through him; he had become so transparent as that. He presses the icepack back up harder into his eyes, feeling like a child with a child’s logic. If he can’t see the world, it can’t see him.
Did Sakura see through him like that?
Would Naruto, if he even saw him again? Would his team? Or had they already spotted that part of him stuck at eight years old and suddenly without family?
“You look like you must be in pain. I’ll see if I can schedule a visit for them in a few days.”
The sound of sandals scuffing the floor gets dimmer and dimmer and then the door closes and he can’t hear the sound at all.
VII. and VIII. Karin and Hōzuki Suigetsu
He hears them before he sees them. Loud voices, groans, and laughs reverberate against the walls becoming strangely amplified. They sound like wild animals to Sasuke’s mind, but it’s all deliberate. His team is giving him a chance to prepare himself. Both he and they are perhaps unwilling to let them see him as less than perfect.
Slipping into view first is the back of a burly nin with a mane of brown hair. The sound of voices still seems far off and this man’s footsteps almost silent, despite his size, so that his appearance takes Sasuke by surprise. The shinobi says something to the guards, who laugh and then he motions to people down the hall.
“Can we go in?”
“In that much of a hurry to see your Sasuke, Karin?” taunts a familiar drawl.
“N-no, that’s not it at all!” But despite any protests Sasuke sees flashes of read hair whip across the view through the crack and then Karin is opening the door and rushing across to his bedside.
“Sasuke!” Hands are reaching out as if to grab him, but stop mid-way before pulling first at her sleeve cuffs and then dropping limply to her side. “Are you alright?”
Her eyes shift down to her arms again and one hand reaches across to clutch at her elbow, either unwilling to offer what hasn’t been asked for, or forbidden from doing so. He isn’t sure which, and isn’t sure he cares. After all, going blind aside, he’s not in the hospital because he’s sick, at least not any more. He’s in the hospital because it is an easy place to keep an eye on him, and, if the council decides to give him amnesty, it will look better than if they had kept him in a cell. And as for going blind, chakra won’t help. Sasuke knows the only cure is one he won’t have. That decision was made on a day long before this day ever came.
“Yo,” Suigetsu flashes a sharp-toothed grin, elbowing Karin out of the way. Behind them, two other shinobi walk into the room.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, eying Ino and Nara, who lights up a smoke only to have the blonde snatch it out of his hands and stomp it out on the floor.
“You talking about our keepers?” Suigetsu grouses, collapsing into the seat by the bed.
“I was going to sit there!” Karin growls at him.
“Your keepers?”
Ino smiles and points first to herself and then Nara. “Mind control, shadow jutsu,” she explains cheerfully. “We’re better than a moveable prison! Aaaand, just in case you all want to make a break for it, Chouji is stationed outside. You’d be flattened before you made it to the stairs.”
“You two make laughable prison guards. We’re only still here because we want to be,” Karin says, sliding onto his bed. Karin always did have issues with personal space, Sasuke recalls, a fact made more obvious by how she scoots up a little farther every few seconds, as if playing at being sneaky. Or maybe she really thinks she is being sneaky. Good thing she has that special power of hers because Karin would make a terrible ninja, if that’s the case.
Ino hisses something about “style-confused bimbos,” but it is Suigetsu who beats her to the punch saying, “What Karin? Finding being on the other side of the bars hard? Maybe you should have stayed back at your own prison; you’re only queen of the castle there.”
Karin growls, and hits the water bottle Suigetsu’s got raised, sending it flying across the room. There’s a shout as Ino ducks to avoid it and it hits the wall, rolling down with a thud. Both Karin and Suigetsu’s arms are flung back, Suigetsu’s fingers still curled as if holding something. It takes Sasuke a minute to realize it’s not shock or adrenaline keeping their arms suspended.
“Stop it,” he says, speaking only half to his team. Their arms drop like puppets cut from their strings. “Where’s Juugo?”
“About two floors down,” answers a new voice, from the door. Sakura twists to maneuver around people, making her way across the room and over to his bed. “Most of his chest was pretty well pulverized, but he has insisted he’s more worried about his mental health than anything. We’re working on stabilizing some hormones in his blood.”
“Orochimaru-sama didn’t find any way to do that.” Karin glares at the medic-nin, oddly hostile. Juugo and Karin got along better than Suigetsu and Karin, but her reaction still seemed off. Why is she pissed?
“Maybe he wasn’t looking,” Sakura answers mildly though Sasuke doubts that’s the case. Orochimaru may have not cared about his toys breaking, but he did care about perfecting his curse seal, and that meant perfecting Juugo’s blood.
“I didn’t find any way,” Karin answers back, voice steely, reminding Sasuke of that first time they’d met. She had just been exiting some lab, peeling off bloody gloves, and Orochimaru’s voice had been as warm as his voice ever got, when introducing her. He’d been showing off his toys to one another.
Suigetsu stands and walks over to Karin’s side, so that instead of book ending Sakura, his teammates are standing by one another, facing off against his other, now-former teammate. A strange position for Suigetsu to take considering how much he resents having once been under Karin’s scalpel himself.
“You have about five more minutes, Birdnest,” Ino interrupts, causing Karin to blush.
“Stupid pig,” she spits back.
Nara mutters, “Déjà vu,” while slouching against the wall, looking annoyed. Ino smacks his arm.
“Is not,” she says, now blushing too.
Sasuke sighs, looking away from them all. Five minutes cannot come soon enough. His room has become a madhouse. Ignoring the bickering going on around her, Sakura takes the now-vacated seat beside him.
“Juugo’s alright though?” he asks her in an undertone.
She shrugs non-commitally, keeping half an eye on the two sitting on the edge of his bed.
“He should be. Shizune-senpai is heading most of the research on his blood. There’s a limit to what you can do without testing though; Orochimaru didn’t have the same compunctions we have, and he still didn’t find anything. Then there’s some other research taking priority right now, and Shizune-senpai and I, and most of the other researchers, also have other work do too. It’s a mad house,” she finishes, unknowingly echoing his mental word choice just seconds ago.
“What’s the other research?” Karin asks, cutting into the conversation.
Sakura doesn’t answer and even though he can’t make out individual facial expressions anymore, he gets the impression she might be looking anywhere but at him.
It seems a very deliberate ‘anywhere but him.’ He must not be the only person who thinks so either, because Suigetsu shoots the conversation off in another direction, by explaining where they are being kept, what needs to happen for him to get his swords back, how he can get them repaired. Sasuke says nothing; let’s his words wash over the room.
Not looking and looking are not the same thing obviously, except when they are. She means him. He’s the research. That makes sense. Konoha needs his eyes; this he knows. Therefore, Konoha will try to save his eyes. Too bad the only known cure is worse than the disease. But Sakura? She is not Konoha. She has no need for his eyes. So what does she need from him that she would try to save him?
His eyes hurt and he wants to close them, to drown in sleep for a awhile. She is tiring to look at, tiring to understand. Her face gives away nothing, too blurred to read, and when Ino pops back up from where she has been leaning against the wall and leads the group out Sakura goes too. Her back is the last thing he sees before closing his eyes.
IX. Hatake Kakashi
“It’s good you see your teammates.”
That’s the statement Sasuke wakes to several mornings later. A smear of greens and blacks and grays is sitting by his bed, looking at something in his hands. The man, for whatever reason, hasn’t turned on the lights. Sasuke doesn’t say anything.
“I’d have brought you something to read, but Sakura-chan said not too. I can’t decide if she thought I’d get you porn, or she worried you’d strain your eyes. So I brought this instead.” Kakashi’s voice has changed very little in the intervening years, Sasuke finds. He drops the gift into Sasuke’s lap. Fingers touch cool metal and light reflects off the glass as Sasuke lifts it up. A photo frame with a picture inside. How convenient for him: something else he can’t see. He sets the frame back down, not willing to hazard a guess as to what the picture could be and guess wrong and so expose his failing eyes.
“You’re late, Kakashi,” he says instead.
“I’ve been busy.”
Sasuke snorts.
“What? No ‘busy on the road of life,’ bullcrap?” His voice sounds scratchy and he wonders how long he’s been asleep. Sakura’s been tinkering with medication to slow down the degeneration his Mangekyo Sharingan triggers, but it messes with his sleep cycle, makes him feel out of control. Sasuke hates not being in control. Of himself at least. But coming back to Konoha, having it still stand despite all his wishes to the contrary, has been a lesson in losing control.
And he’s losing more everyday.
“You could say that, Sasuke-kun. The road to being Hokage, at least,” Kakashi drawls. “I’d have visited sooner, but things have been a little hectic. You know how it is. Still, no fun being shut up in a hospital room.”
Sasuke decides to ignore this statement too. He had not been surprised in the least his former teacher hadn’t shown up at his bedside. Even now, Kakashi’s first lesson is the white elephant in the room. Those who don’t care for their teammates are worse than trash. That is what Kakashi warned, and that is what he is. Trash. At least, he is, if he looks at things from his former teammates’ point of view. Naruto and Sakura, -he understood that about them, but does even Kakashi, with a dead man’s eye, see things in such absolutes?
Sasuke pushes that thought away. Instead, he focuses in on this new bit of information. Kakashi? Hokage? It’s not so strange, he supposes, just not what he’d have thought.
“This was a good day,” Kakashi continues picking up Sasuke’s discarded gift. Since today ex-teacher and ex-student are making awkward conversation as the latter goes blind, Sasuke’s going to assume Kakashi means the day the picture was taken. Because this day sucks and he’s only minutes into it. “You were all so cute! Just finished the bell test. Remember that? First team to pass. Never would have thought you guys would be the ones to make it.”
Sasuke remembers that not-quite-full feeling he’d had much of that day, having given his lunch away. He wonders if that is what Kakashi wants him to remember, and he decides if that’s so, he not playing that game. Memory lane has been a path too beaten lately anyway.
“There should be some water around,” he tells Kakashi, making it not quite a question, not quite a request. Kakashi stands to move to the water basin across the room, and Sasuke still can’t quite figure out why he’s keeping the lights off. He has an idea, of course, but he’s hoping it’s the wrong idea.
The sound of water running out a faucet takes the place of any conversation and then Kakashi walks back, holding out the water to him. Sasuke’s outreached hand goes through the glass’s fuzzy outline, and startled, he whips his hand back, knocking the unseen cup from his old sensei’s hands.
Water spills all over his lap and the glass hits the floor with a cracking sound.
“It’s not broken,” Kakashi says as Sasuke pulls back the now-soaking sheets. “I’ll get someone in here to help replace those; let you get back to sleep.” His voice sounds like the voice of someone who has lost something, and Kakashi, he knows, has lost many things. Yet his voice never sounded like this before.
“Wait.”
Kakashi stills, nothing more than a shadow silhouetted against the doorframe, backlit by a hall light.
“Turn on the light when you leave; I’m not going back to sleep,” he says instead of what he was going to say. ‘What did Obito know about the Mangekyo Sharingan’ was what he was going to say. ‘Tell me about Naruto’ was what he was going to say. ‘Does Sakura love me’ was what he was going to say.
‘Do you forgive me’ was what almost spilt off his tongue. Out of everything he could have said, most of all he doesn’t say that.
The shadow in the door moves out into the hall.
“The light’s already on, Sasuke,” he says, and shuts the door.
________________________________________________________________________
After his old teacher is gone, and the wet bedding replaced, he traces his fingers around the frame’s edge before putting it on the chair beside the bed. When Sakura comes in for his daily check-up, he shows it to her and asks, “What is this a picture of?”
“You can’t see it?”
Sasuke doesn’t say anything, which is answer enough. Admitting the weakness does nothing for either person in the room.
Taking the frame in hand, her fingertips ghost over something- the image most likely- tracing the changes between now and the time the photograph was taken. “It’s of us. The first Team Seven.”
“I thought so,” he replies. She sets it back down on the chair.
“I miss those days,” she says.
“I thought so,” he repeats and both notice he didn’t say ‘me too.’
‘But I like the look of tomorrow, too,” she tells him, and when Sasuke doesn’t say anything, she smiles and continues writing down her records, a thoughtful silence hanging between them both.
X. Uchiha Itachi
“And then nobody was expecting Pa Toad’s heart to give everybody a scare like that. We got this freaky note he was going to die! - Though, he didn’t- so we had to take a side trip to check up on things. Gaara’d never seen talking toads before. Boy, was that a sight. I think he actually had a facial expression! Still, hard to tell without the eyebrows, you know? But they helped us make up lost time, so we could go to the Hidden Rain. Traveled inside a toad. Believe it!!! Konan-san’s acting leader there. She said not many people knew about Nagato being Pain. Actually, they may think she’s Pain; she didn’t say. But it was a lot harder to get the city to open up to trade negotiations than anything. Hinata-chan’s dad and them stayed behind for that, but Konan did tell us where the Atasuki’s main base was. And-“
“Naruto, we’re all glad you’re back, but do we really need a play-by-play?” Sakura sighed, tapping a pencil against her clipboard. The bottom of his bed bounced around as Naruto squirmed. If he hand to guess (and he does have to guess, he can’t read their body language or see their thoughts running across their faces as they use to. Not because their emotions don’t rule his first teammates as they always have, but because it is Just. Too. Damn. Hard. To. See.), he would say, that Naruto is forcing is way through this conversation, the first Sasuke has had with him since his “return” to Konoha, faking his way into a façade of good times and victory. The oddest part is that it doesn’t seem to be for him.
He’s the one they’ve been chasing, the one who’s been gone. He’s the one their city nearly decided to execute, if Sasuke wanted to get right down to it, and he’d sat through more uncomfortable reunions than he cared to think about since first waking in this forsaken hospital bed. Yet, it’s not him they are dancing around. Naruto’s easy way he punches him in the shoulder and the easy way he makes jokes and the easy way he know when not to make jokes- it is more than absolution and more than love. It is as if Sasuke has not been gone. It as if there is nothing to forgive, nothing to mend.
Naruto takes him as he is, and even if Sasuke can’t see it, he knows Naruto smiles when he sees Sasuke and that he smiles genuine smiles. True, it’s been just one afternoon that since Naruto returned from his reportedly very eventful trip, but he can tell- they are genuine to the point it seems a little unreal that Sasuke worried they wouldn’t be.
No, Sakura and Naruto are dancing around each other. He can’t tell why they are dancing this particular dance of theirs. But it makes him want to draw Sakura closer, make her sit in the chair beside him, on the bed beside him, where he can put a hand to her shoulder to reassure. Which is ridiculous. What would that do?
“Aaah, Sakura-chan!” Naruto whines. “I’ve been gone forever! Dontcha want to hear what I’ve been up to?”
Kakashi chuckles from his perch on the sink, and Sasuke can hear the soft flip-flip of pages. Whether he’s forgiven or not is still a mystery to Sasuke, but his former-sensei-turned-village-leader has been, if not warm, then at the very least detached, indifferent, towards him. It is better than open hostility though, and with Hokage business keeping him away, Sasuke isn’t forced to think to often about what Kakashi isn’t saying.
Sakura, for her part, just sighs.
“Naruto, we both know there’s someone else who would very much love to hear each and every detail about your trip with her dad, but right now? I and Kakashi-sensei have both been up since five this morning and only want to know if you found it or not.”
Naruto mumbles something and Sasuke is pretty sure he’s blushing too. Who else does he even have to talk to? Iuka, Sasuke supposed, or maybe his replacement, but somehow, he couldn’t picture that douchebag caring anymore than Kakashi or Sakura. Wait…. She say Dad?
“You haven’t talked to Hinata-chan about her confession yet?”
Oh. That Dad.
“I’ve been busy,” Naruto says defensively.
“I think,” Sakura says and Sasuke finds he can picture one eyebrow uplifted. “That your not talking, might be giving Hinata-chan her answer whether you want it to or not. Get you lazy-ass in gear. Kami, you’re making Shikamaru look motivated.”
“Isn’t Shikamaru the only one of us who has a girlfriend? -Uff!”
Sasuke isn’t sure, but Naruto might just have been whacked by a clipboard. ‘I’m just really strong,’ she'd said. A vast understatement. Somehow, finding this out has got him replaying every conversations together, looking for facts he didn’t see because he’d assumed a twelve-year-old girl couldn’t be someone else completely at the end of three years.
“I told you! He’s not seeing Temari-san anymore,” Well, not completely someone else. Sakura still gossiped from the sound of it. “Look, just tell us! Did you get it or not?”
“Heh,” Naruto huffs. “Yeah. Gaara found him when we were securing the Atasuki base.”
Kakashi pushes himself off the counter and walks over to the bed where Naruto gives him-something. Something smaller than a man and larger than a key, like a key to cell or hospital room could ever be. The air seems too thin as Sasuke works to form a question into words.
“Who?” He can count the members of Atasuki- former or not- who are alive on one hand, and only one is not already in Konoha. That one is not a him, either.
“Uh,” Naruto trails off and scoots close enough Sasuke can see shadows across his face, giving a hint of where eyes and a mouth might be. “Sakura-chan sent a message. Said, uh, you, uh, might need them.”
And then he takes what Kakashi holds out and presses it into Sasuke’s empty hands. Sasuke very deliberately does not look down. Looking and not looking are not the same thing, except when they are. Sasuke’s smells formaldehyde and tries not think how different that smell is from the burnt-bone smell of a proper death.
“Are these my brother’s eyes?” he says.
“Sasuke-“ but that is all Sakura gets to say before he decides he doesn’t want to hear Team Seven explain.
“Please leave.”
“But Sasuke-“
“Leave. Please.”
They go and the remains of Uchiha Itachi stay behind in his brother’s hands.
____________________________________________________________________________
Naruto comes back first thing the next day. His childhood bravado, Sasuke finds, has melted away into the cool reassurance that you are in the company of someone completely transparent, who is wearing his heart on his sleeve. This fact makes the fact they don’t talk about it even more reassuring. Kakashi doesn’t come at all, hardly surprising, but both men’s actions speak plainly. The choice is his to make.
So when Sakura comes in, lacking that bustle and efficiency she wears like armor when stressed, Sasuke knows she knows that too. When she speaks though, it is not a friend’s voice, nor a medic’s professional tones. It is not even a voice somewhere between the two. It is something else entirely and in a distant way, Sasuke wishes she wouldn’t use that tone with him, with others, or ever at all. It pushes his heart up into his throat where it beats against his voice box and spinal cord, cutting off all breath.
“I haven’t been entirely up front with you,” she starts and she may be looking at him and she may not be. He can’t tell and that this point they are the same thing. “You shouldn’t even really be in the hospital anymore; you’re find except for your eyes.”
A large except.
“Medication isn’t working. Lately, I’ve been slowing it down with the regeneration justsu Tsunade-shishou taught me. But even that is not stopping the degradation of your eyesight, and quite frankly it is too draining a jutsu for me to continue indefinitely. So, when we were sent word that they’d reached Atasuki headquarters, I asked them to look. It didn’t seem to likely your brother’s body was still not cremated, but Madara had… preserved certain parts, for whatever reason.”
“Itachi did not want to see what I was going to.”
“Itachi is dead. He isn’t going to see anything at all.”
Sasuke does not reply to this, and the three years and the world stretches out between them. Sakura sighs and picks up the frame that sits on his bedside chair when one of his (mostly unwelcome) guests aren’t using it.
“Kakashi-sensei said it was your choice.”
Again he says nothing and she sits down. Even this close, he can’t see her face.
“Are you still going to see the same things you were going to?”
“I’m not going to see anything at all.”
“I’d like to see you smile.” A hand reaches out to hold his face, thumb brushing across his cheekbone, under his mostly-useless eye.
“I’d like to see you seeing you smile.”
“Would you?” he asks as his hand finds his way up to hers.
Shadows across his face are all the warning he gets before the breath of her next words brush across his lips. They fizzle on his skin like he licked battery. “Tell me tomorrow, okay?”
She doesn’t kiss him, and his face feels cold when her hand leaves his cheek.
“Does tomorrow still look good to you?” he asks. He misses the closeness where he could almost make out her face.
“Does it to you?”
And though he doesn’t, according to Nara, know what caring means, he understands it is written all across what she doesn’t say. She walks out; he could watch her moving down the hall through the crack in his door if he had his brother’s eyes. He doesn’t though, and so moves from the bed to the door, and then past the guards to watch what he cannot see and see what she does not say.
A guard’s hand guides him back to his room. It smells of formaldehyde, but it won’t for long. Looking and not looking become the same thing at some point, and he wants to see the same tomorrow Sakura and Team Seven do, that Team Taka will, that Konoha and the Leaf will. Who would have imagined that?
His brother, Sasuke thinks, hands reaching for the jar by the sink, that’s who. The room is dim, but tomorrow it won’t be and from there? Who knows? He might see things neither Uchiha brother ever expected to see.
Title: Evidence of What You Cannot See (Repeated Ten Times)
Characters/pairing: Sasuke, some Sasu/Saku but mostly gen
Summary: Ten visitors to the same hospital room.
A/N: Written for indira14 who wanted more Sasu/Saku stuff. I don’t think this is exactly what you were talking about but I tried, and it's waiting for you to get back from your trip!
Also, first time writing all but two characters, so OOC warnings may apply.
I. Uzumaki Naruto
“-Did good, didn’t I?”
A voice: low in timber, a little gruff but vaguely familiar, and close, so close. It is the last thought that latches itself to his brain. Someone is close. Close, but who? He tries to open his eyes. A struggle. A blinding (blinding?) pain. Then, light.
He hisses, and squeezes his eyes back shut. So much effort for nothing; seemed to be the story of his life.
“Yeah,” another voice answers back, soft, feminine, if a bit throaty. Not Karin then. Before he can think of who it is, the voice continues, “Promise of a lifetime, right? We did good.”
Eyes slit open, more cautiously this time, and he sees a figure at the door, all golds and tans and oranges. Naruto his mind supplies, Naruto leaning against the doorframe, smiling a lopsided smile and looking anything but truly happy. Looking resigned.
Where is the child that was his best friend?
Disjointed images of a fight filter though his head, shuttering through his brain each one faster than the next and then- a hand picks up his. The skin against his is cool to the touch, or maybe his is just very hot, though he can’t think of why that might be.
“Is he waking up?” The man shifts off the door jam. No answer follows, but a cool fizzle shoots out through the hand holding his, into him, and up his arm. It feels a bit like licking a battery only not just at the tongue. He’d been surprised that one time he had licked a battery. Itachi hadn’t told him it would do that. His mind comes up blank as he tries to think of when that was. Sometime, he’s sure. He closes his eyes against the light, trying to focus on remembering when.
The conversation has gone on around him. His eyelids flutter in an effort to open again, to return to what these people around him are saying.
“-Get’s better?”
That’s Naruto. Grown-up Naruto is saying something, but Sasuke can’t quite make sense what. Naruto’s grown up. That must mean his licking a battery happened a long time ago. Itachi is dead, he thinks. That’s funny. Why didn’t he remember that before?
“-Even if we have to pound the health back into him!” Thin laughter follows this. He missed the joke, but maybe it just wasn’t a very good joke. Most jokes aren’t.
“You’re happy?” the Naruto-voice asks, and the other voice doesn’t answer back, or maybe it does and he just can’t hear it. His last thought is to wonder who that other voice is, and why it would matter. In his experience, no one is ever very happy very long.
II. Nara Shikamaru
-Narrowly slides out of the way of an incoming toad, and then he’s flying up. He thought any fight would be a replay of others, but this is anything but like at the Valley of the End, and Naruto’s screaming something at him, trying to convince him of something and Sasuke resists putting his hands up over his ears.
Does this guy ever shut up? He doesn’t care! He doesn’t care! He doesn’t care!
Hands flicker through signs, an explosion of light pushes him backwards, and for a moment all he can see is white, and he’s falling, working to right himself and-
With a gasp of breath, he shoots himself straight up, only to inhale smoke and start coughing. His eyes water and for a moment he can’t place where he is.
“A dream,” says a gravelly voice as a hand grips his shoulder. Sasuke turns and sees that’s true. He’s in a… hospital room, from the looks of things. Turning, he sees the hand belongs to a man in a Konoha-standard flak jacket. The shinobi is mostly unremarkable except for his beady eyes, and bushy hair that’d somehow been pulled straight up at the top of his head.
“Nara.” Sasuke recognizes him vaguely from his academy days, tries to dredge up any more information about him. Finally something- Kakashi told him about how he’d been clever during his prelim round and that Sasuke might face him in the Chuunin Exam’s final test. Nothing to really help him evaluate whether he’s going to end up dead in the next few minutes or not.
Though- probably not. He is in a hospital room after all. Why waste a hospital room on someone you were going to kill? The thought gives Sasuke some measure of self-assurance, enough to move in for answers.
“What am I doing here?”
“Until two minutes ago?” A cigarette dangles between the man’s fingers, as he pulls up to take another drag. Disgusting habit, though the man in front of him sure seems to be taking his sweet time with it. “Sleeping.”
Great. A smart aleck seems to be here in this hospital room (which is where? Konoha?) doing… what? Keeping guard, most likely. He moves to shift further up in his bed, maybe see if there was a window to leap out of, but finds he can’t.
“What am I,” Nara continues, seemingly unaware of Sasuke’s struggles to move. “Doing here is what you should be asking.”
Nara leans back in his bedside chair and Sasuke glares. “Why can’t I move? Whatever you’re doing, stop.”
“Whatever I am-“ The other man rolls his eyes. “And this is the great genius everyone was so excited about when we graduated. I’m part of the Nara clan, genius. What do you think I am doing? More importantly, why do you think I would stop?”
Finding no suitable retort, Sasuke settles on just glaring harder. Must be some clan specialty holding him, though after his family was killed Sasuke never spent all that much time focused on what other clans could do. Just on how to take down a Sharnigan user.
Beside him, Nara pushes up in his chair, sighing as if it’s some great effort to do even that much and continues on, “Look, I just have a few things to talk to you about, then I’ll release you from my shadow jutsu, so quit struggling. You won’t get out any faster.”
Sensing momentary defeat, or at least a time for tactical retreat, Sasuke relaxes back into his pillow, head resting against the headboard. No real difference from where he was five seconds ago, just that his muscles aren’t as tensed. But Nara seems to somehow feel the difference because he starts talking again.
“First off, you’re in Konoha. We’re not going to kill you. Possibly you won’t even be jailed. The ballot’s still out on that one, so how you act now is going to determine a lot. Got all that?”
He tries to nod his head, but can’t.
“Yeah,” he says instead.
“Good. Second, you need to know you owe not being executed to Naruto and Sakura-san. They hold a lot of clout. People like them. People listen to them. You hurt them again, and this shadow that’s got you trapped so you can’t even breathe without my permission? You’ll have this shadow around your neck before you even have a moment to so much as think of betraying the Leaf again. And that’s only if you’re lucky enough to have me be the first shinobi to reach you. Others will not be as nice.”
Sasuke manages to roll his eyes once at the melodrama of that unimpressive threat, till giant fingers slide up his torso and he sees a hand-shaped shadow crawling out from under his covers and up his throat.
“I’m glad you understand.” Nara says, tone conversational. The hand oozes back down. “The last bit is personal, my own bit of advice, so listen up- Stay away from Ino.”
“Who?” This whole experience seems to be getting weirder and weirder. He’s in a place he doesn’t expect, talking to a person he can barely remember, getting death threats over somebody he doesn’t recall at all.
“Yamanaka Ino. Long blonde hair. Mind-control jutsu. Had a crush on you.”
He flashes back to a school-life filled with sudden chokeholds as a girl draped herself around him. He didn’t get girls then; doesn’t get them now either, really. Why anyone would want to get near them is beyond him. There have been other things on his mind than figuring out the mystery that is the female sex.
Nara gets up to walk to the door, and pivots to face him at the last minute. Whatever jutsu he’s under turns Sasuke’s head, forcing him to follow the other man’s form.
“You don’t remember her? And after I went to all the trouble to talk to you. Fine. I don’t care. What I do care about is that you don’t get near her. You don’t get to make her cry again. Friendship, caring about people? Lost on you, I know, so maybe you won’t get why I’m saying this, but all you need to understand is to stay away. I’m not like you, big on revenge. But hurt my team and you’ll see I very, very much can be.”
The man takes another drag and throws his cigarette to the floor. Both hands free, he makes some sort of sign and Sasuke slumps, body released.
“Hey,” he calls out as the other man walks to the door. “That was all you wanted? So sure I won’t run I’m not even worth guarding or something?”
Once the words are out, he realizes maybe it’s stupid to point out a flaw he could use, but his pride stings and, if being truthful, isn’t sure he’d run even if they left him alone. Nara smirks over his shoulder and shakes his head. “Oh, you’ve got a guard, just not me. It’s a… friend who understood why I needed to talk to you. This,” he gestures to a tall blonde man who steps into view, “Is your guard. Yamanaka-san of the I&I.”
And without another word, the shadow-user is gone.
III. Yamanaka Inoichi
The door clicks shut behind Nara and for a moment there is no sound as each remaining man gauges the other. “Yamanaka-san of the I&I” is a tall, imposing man with blonde hair that, like so much else, seems vaguely familiar. With the same clan name as Nara’s teammate “Ino,” the girl with mind control abilities, Sasuke doesn’t have to guess what this man can do. Though what he could want from him is something of a mystery. In general, Sasuke is sure he wants information; it’s the specifics that are unclear. Information on Orochimaru? The now non-existent threat of the Sound village? About the Atasuki? Madara? Or is it Sasuke himself that is being evaluated as the threat?
After Nara’s little speech, he’s inclined to believe sentimentality might keep the Leaf from considering that last possibility too closely. That-might- be a mistake. Sasuke isn’t sure. He remembers his brother, fingers hitting his forehead for the last time and sliding down his face, a rememberance that makes him burn hot and cold in turns. He remembers sitting in the dark listening to a man in a mask spin a tale, and he remembers his own shifting hunger for vengeance. That should mean his old hometown is making a mistake in underestimating him, a mistake he should capitalize on.
Except, Sasuke feels there’s something else, something he doesn’t remember very clearly that’s stopping him. He doesn’t remember how he got in this hospital bed for one thing and he thinks -maybe- there’s something else too. If he keeps probing, it will all fall into place, but he doesn’t have that kind of time because Yamanaka is done staring him down and starts to speak.
“Uchiha-san, I am here to read the list of charges against you, to gather information, and to evaluate your mental health, your intentions, and your physical ability to carry them out. The Hokage has asked that I explain this before I begin. Do you understand?”
Sasuke nods. He was informed at the Sound three years ago when the third Hokage died, knew vaguely one of Orochimaru’s former teammates took his place, and later Danzou, who had had the Uchiha murdered, had been Hokage. Who the Leaf’s leader is now, and why he would allow this release of information to him is yet another unknown in a growing list of unknowns.
“Good. Uchiha-san, you have been charged with leaving the village’s service without an honorable discharge, with fraternizing with known enemies to the Leaf, with attempts of assassination on Leaf allies and Leaf-nin. You have been charged with conspiring against Konohagakure, the Land of Fire, and allies of the Leaf.”
Sasuke nodded again. Before he can ask anything though, before he can decide if he can or should ask anything, Yamanaka moves his hands and-
-The sting as the edge of a Rasengan slices his cheek open, too close! - Clouds bursting out in thunder with air around him hissing with heat- The rumble of ground crumbling beneath his feet as a fist strikes the earth- Karin screaming, in the smoke and dust he can’t see where- Blood on his fingers as he wipes at his eyes- Hands reaching for his eyes clawing their way closer- Orochimaru’s hand on the back of his neck, thumb brushing against his cheek bone- Narrow arms across his chest and a scent of cherry blossoms enveloping him- Smelling ramen again, the restaurant bright and loud- The tangy lemon scent of cleaner as he scrubs at stains in the living room of an echoingly empty house- His brother holding out a battery, the fizzle of electricity across his tongue- His mother kissing him good night-
He gasps, and opens his eyes.
A ceiling stares back down.
Turning his head slightly, he can make out the shape of a man in a chair and beyond him, a window showing bright sunlight breaking over city buildings. Time has passed without his realizing, it seems. Had it been night before? Is that why he didn’t notice the brilliant light streaming in from the window before now? Beside him, the man speaks.
“You might want to sleep some more. I hear getting your memories harvested can be exhausting and I still have more to do.”
“Is that what I’m remembering?”
“That’s what I’m remembering for you.”
Sasuke’s hands fumble to find the cool side of the pillow. Then he leans back into the memories he’s always remembering, the memories that, just for an instant, he wishes he could forget.
IV. Haruno Sakura
Chuunin guards are stationed outside his door the next morning, and nurses- he can’t tell if they are shinobi or civilian- bring food but don’t bother to check any vitals. Neither they nor the guards speak to him, though casual gossip is passed between the two groups. Too bad even the gossip is rendered unintelligible to him, having been gone too long to recognize most of the names. Naruto’s is mentioned several times in connection to something about toads. His summons perhaps? Sasuke puts together several likely scenarios out of sheer boredom.
About the time he’s cobbled together his wildest idea (That Naruto is being trained by toads), someone walks through the door. He has to remind himself it is day, not night, a hospital room, not a side street in the city, but the one thing he does not have to remind himself of is that this person is Sakura.
And it is Sakura, no mistaking that. Her coloring makes it too hard to mistake, but even discounting that, she has changed very little. He had seen her once or twice since joining Orochimaru, but never this closely or at a time to notice much. The face has thinned out a bit perhaps, she’s taller, sleeker, more toned…. things, woman things, were in places where there’d been nothing before. His face reddens and he turns away from her, scolding himself. Karin had things in- well, that is to say, she was a woman, and he’d never felt so… self-conscious looking at her. Maybe it was just noticing the change that made him so self-aware. Did he seem different at all to her?
He had to, of course. He’d grown for one thing, spent every second training, working for his revenge. Of course he was different. Besides, a part of him whispered, the last time he was home, he hadn’t been a missing-nin (yet). He hadn’t tried to kill his best friend (yet).
“Open up,” Sakura says, hardly the first thing he’d expect her to say.
“Wha-“ but before he can finish a thermometer gets shoved in his mouth.
“Make sure it stays in place, Sasuke-kun. I need to see what your temperature is. You had a fever when I left for a mission and from the looks of it, no one has been checking since I left.”
She turns to search for a pen, his medical files in her hand. The thing in his mouth beeps, and she whirls around to pluck it out, before going to write down the results and realizing she still doesn’t have her pen.
“It’s behind your ear,” he tells her. She reaches up gingerly and fingers the object stuck behind her ear.
“Oh,” she says, blushing a little. “Goes to show it’s been a busy day.”
Goes to show she’s nervous, Sasuke thinks. Nerves he can understand, but what is she doing here, what will she say to him?
Is it betrayal, he wonders, to follow an ambition you have never hidden? He supposes it must depend on whom you ask (on what you ask them).
“What are you doing here?”
Sakura turns on her heels and stares.
“I’m recording your temperature.”
He says nothing more, let’s his question stand. The lengthening silence makes clear that he does not consider that an answer. Sakura tilts her head, in a way that is almost…with pity.
“Sasuke-kun, I’m your medic-nin. It’s what we do. Relax. I’m not here to accuse you of anything. From the sounds of it, you’ve had quite a full day of that yesterday!” She smiles brightly. Sasuke shifts in his bed, a little unnerved by her expression. She looks back down at his chart, and continues softer, in a way that doesn’t need any reply, “Besides, would it change anything, if I did?”
She finishes checking his readings without making eye contact, or saying anything at all, the room charged with an air of discomfort. When she’s done, she leaves.
________________________________________________________________________________
The same routine continues. Towards the end of the day, just before dinner, Sakura comes into the room to check up on him. It’s all very professional, very formal. Sometimes they say something each other, sometimes they don’t. It takes him a several tries to get up the nerve to ask her about being a medic-nin.
“I started studying with Tsunade-shishou, after Naruto… well, I thought she would help me improve, and now here I am.”
“Is that how you did whatever it was you were doing out in the field that day?” It is the first time they have referred to his “capture” as the guards call it. He still doesn’t remember much about that day, though enough to satisfy Yamanaka, who has also made several, repeat visits. Some of that lack of memory might even be because of those night visits, but there’s enough of that day still lodged in his memory to recall the surprise at the earth-shaking actions this small woman performed.
He doesn’t get a straight answer though.
“I’m just really strong.”
That’s all she says, but she smiles as she says it. An inside joke he doesn’t get the punch line to? Or is she just happy they’re talking?
She leans down to press her chakra through his system to monitor any progress. As she does so, hair slides down across her face. Without thinking about it, he reaches out to brush it back, ignoring how still the face beneath his fingertips becomes.
“What happened to your forehead protector?” he asks.
“I lost it when the city was destroyed.” She leans up and away. Without seeing her eyes, he realizes, she’s a hard one to read.
“You wanted to do that once, didn’t you?” she asks him. Something crackles through him, harsher than the electric fizzle of a battery, harsher than chakra coursing through his veins. It feels like something getting broken, then augmented, then broken again.
“I notice Naruto doesn’t hang around you anymore. Lost a boyfriend?” The question doesn’t even make sense, really. No one’s said anything about Naruto and Sakura or Sakura and anybody, but he can tell by the rigid straightening of her spine, he’s hurt her back.
For a few seconds the only sounds are that of the guards’ chairs squeaking as they shift to watch the show and Sakura breathing heavily through her nose. He wonders for a moment if there is some truth to his words, and why, if that’s so, something hurts.
Before he can rationalize the hurt away, or even properly process it’s there, Sakura pushes her chair back and walks to the door. Without turning she says, “You are my patient Uchiha-san, so I will not punch your lights out. Ask your guards later and they’ll tell you; your medical infirmities just saved you an extra trip to the hospital. As for Naruto, I could let you think that it’s just you he’s not visiting. But I’m nicer than that. He’s away on missions. His dreams are coming true. Everyone respects him now. He’s a hero, and this village? It needs those right now. I have to leave, so I can go spend another all-nighter helping the Hokage work to fix this mess you made. Have a good night.”
She slams the door shut as she leaves and it cracks down the middle. No one makes any move to fix it in the following weeks; it remains broken, exposing him to anyone passing by.
V. Sai
Sakura returns two and a half weeks later, late in the day as always, as if she had never stopped coming. Conversation is somewhat stilted, but when he asks, she tells him where she’s been. Well, if she’s not lying to him anyway. It’s a little hard to believe when he thinks of the Sakura he knew at twelve, though this new Sakura seems very matter of fact about her mission.
She’s been to see the Raikage. Things are apparently still rocky with the Hidden Cloud village; they wanted (or still do want, he isn’t sure) his death in retaliation for his attempted assassination of the eight-tails.
“Luckily,” Sakura finishes. “The Raikage likes me, and respects me because of Tsunade-sama. It’s cause I can really pack a punch. So, no Sharnigan-filled corpse for the cloud-nin to tinker with today!”
She laughs and flashes a grin, before taking out a bento for her and, to his surprise, one for him.
“Mind if I eat?” she asks. “I got stuck with double shifts. My regular day at the hospital and then a full night manning the emergency room.”
“Why one for me?”
“Well, it seems rude to eat here and not bring you some too. Besides, I have a favor to ask.” Her tone seems light, if a bit forced, and Sasuke treads lightly around the question.
“What is it?”
“Well, some people want to visit you. Sai wants to meet you. I think he thinks there is some proper etiquette in asking first. And then Ino wants to see you too.”
And which of those did he want to tackle with a remark first? On the one hand, he’s bored out of his skull sitting in here day after day. On the other hand, Ino? How likely is it she’s suddenly managed to become tolerable in just three years? And-
“Who’s Sai?”
“Your replacement.”
“Um…”
His what?
“Good. I told him to stop by this evening. Ino should be around soon.” She stuffs the last of her food into her mouth in a not-unlike-twelve-year-old-Naruto way and shoots out the door with only an “ I’m gonna be late!” for a good bye.
He watches her race down the halls through the crack in his door.
__________________________________________________________________________
“You are important to Dickless and Ugly, though I’ve had difficulties comprehending why. However, it seems inevitable we will be spending time together, and I have read it is socially appropriate to introduce oneself to those important to friends. Would a nickname help to foster friendly relations?”
The man before him had begun this bizarre speech without preamble, and Sasuke is not entirely convinced this is the man he’s been told would be coming. For one thing, he looked about their age, and yet his face seemed totally unfamiliar, not part of any schoolyard memory. For another, whom is this man even talking about? He’s in a city where, if nurses can be believed, half the population wants to kill him and the other half wants to make him into some sort of stud bull. “Dickless” and “Ugly” could apply to everyone.
Giving the man a once over, Sasuke is thoroughly unimpressed.
“And your name is?”
The man holds out a hand, smile still plastered on his face, “Sai.”
Damn, he’d really been hoping this was not who he thought. After a beat he grabs the proffered hand, and ‘Sai’ continues, “So, how about Douchebag?”
“What?”
“For a nickname. Douchebag.”
“No.” His hand tightens around the other man’s, grinding each knuckle to bring home his point.
Sai’s smile falls from his face into a look of impassiveness. He doesn’t jerk his hand out of the tight grip though, and after a beat Sasuke pulls back his own hand. At least he isn’t easily intimidated; Sasuke reluctantly can give him that.
“Well, now that formalities have been observed, I’ve read it is acceptable to next come to my main purpose for visiting.”
“Naruto promised Sakura he’d bring you back. He promised because he loves her, and Sakura loves you. You’ve caused them pain for years. That promise has caused Naruto too much pain. Tell her you don’t love her. Let them have each other.”
Something hard is stuck in his throat, like a rock, a bone, stopping any breath. The guards are very deliberately not peering through the broken door.
Love is a word without meaning. The only people he’s ever loved he’s killed, or tried to, or watched as they’ve been slaughtered in the streets. Love is something Uzumaki Naruto preaches as toad summons rain down on you. It is an action he’s always leapt into without thinking first, and all that’s ever shown Sasuke is the heart is an organ that stops beating when someone is dead. But, Sai’s words makes it seem like he’s trampled right through an epic, someone’s favorite bedtime story, like he’s a character whose barged in from some other, less adored tale.
He makes it sound like his best friend didn’t love him.
Stupid Dead-Last, he thinks, anger unaccountably bubbling up at this man, and his former teammates, and even at the guards for listening to this stupid speech sprouting from this stupid man. He opens his mouth to retort when unexpected pain shoots through his eye.
He holds his hand to it, and grinds his teeth, bracing against the pain. It’s been happening more and more often, only a matter of time, though he hasn’t said anything to the nurses, or to Sakura. And the pain is only made worse for being experienced under the gaze of his replacement. His greatest indignity and weakness laid bare before someone who’s telling him he’s not needed.
Over the rushing pound of blood in his head, Sasuke can barely make out Sai’s voice, impossibly passive, calling out to the guards by his door.
“Get a medic in here. Now.”
“Are you in pain? ” he asks.
Sasuke presses the heel of his palm further in against his eyes, willing the pain to stop. It doesn’t.
“Not life-threatening,” Sai concludes, reaching out to try and peel his hands back. Sasuke presses back in harder still, refusing to let go. “I’ll leave you to the medics. Think about what I said.”
Footsteps sound, both in the room and out in the hall. Hands start grabbing at his again, blinding light shoots across his retinas, blood trickles down his wrists, and Sai’s voice floats out, distant over the medics’ noise. “Oh. And, think about that nickname. It’s what friends do.”
VI. Yamanaka Ino
“Sasuke,” Sakura asks after staring into his eyes for minute, flashlight in hand. “What happened to your brother’s eyes? After he died?”
The icepack she hands him feels cool against his eyes, and is about the only thing keeping him from snapping at the medic-nin. He’s been over the degenerating eyesight of the Uchiha family several times, for several different nin, and Sakura has been here for each one. Her flashlight aimed at his eyes made him feel like he walked naked down Konoha’s streets. He’d been completely exposed and all she’s giving him is clinical detachment.
“Madara took Itachi’s body.”
“Did he need the eyes too?”
He pulls the icepack down to turn and look at her. A little blurred, she’s a smeared outline. Her hair is like a halo, but her facial features are still distinguishable and, right now, are pulled into an expression far from detached. Perhaps some of the truth, the smallest bit, would be safe with her.
“Why would he need my brother’s eyes, when he already had his own brother’s?”
Before she can reply they are interrupted by the sound of sandals pounding the floor in quick beats.
“Knock, knock!” says a cheery voice. A tall blonde stands at the door, hair draping down her back. “What’s up, Forehead?”
Sakura rolls her eyes, but her voice is friendly when she speaks, “Ino-pig.”
Sakura stands up and starts to pack away her supplies, one methodic movement after another. Sasuke turns to take a better look at this kuionichi he’s been warned to stay away from. There’s a suggestive way she sways her hips as she walks, and he wonders if it’s on purpose. He wonders if her hips were why he was warned.
“Hey, you gonna make time to go see our other ‘guest’?” she asks Sakura in lieu of any further greeting.
“Yeah, I’ll head there now. How’s he doing?”
Ino shakes her head, but doesn’t answer directly, “You’ll see. Got time for dinner? Team Gai just got back from a mission, so Hinata-chan thought we might all celebrate. Me and the boys are off duty at seven; everybody’s meeting up then.”
“So long as it’s not the ramen shop, sure!” The girls smile at each, beam in a way quite out of portion to the mere idea of food, at least to Sasuke’s mind. Plans settled, Sakura walks to the door, hips decidedly not suggestive, gives an awkward half-wave and is gone. As Ino turns to him, he watches the happy expression fall off her face. She looks lighter without it, more honest, more real.
But the way she stares? No doubt whose daughter she is. He wonders vaguely if Konoha’s Investigation and Interrogation Unit employs her as well.
“You’re pretty lucky, you know,” she states baldly, before taking the seat next to his bed. Slipping the icepack back over his eyes, Sasuke doesn’t bother replying. What is it with all these Leaf-nin who felt the need to come and talk at him like this? So far his medic-nin’s the only one to have talked to him instead of staring right past, like he isn’t even there. But, then, Sakura isn’t just his medic-nin, really.
“You have this image, right? Like, even as a kid, you were cool, this lone wolf.” So that was what girls were always mooning about. Well, one mystery solved, though pretty fucking pointless to know. “You think of yourself like that too, don’t you?”
Keep it coming, Ino, he thought sourly. That’s what I really need. One more speech to tell me what I should think or need to think, what I should do or need to do. Haven’t been told that in forever.
“I was there, at your family’s funeral, you know.” Something stings, lower down in his chest, so that he doesn’t think he can blame it on bleeding eyeballs. He wishes, with sudden fierceness, this girl would leave, so he could sleep. “And I saw you there, just this kid like me-lonely. I think people can sense that, that little boy, that loneliness that’s still there under the skin. Are attracted to it, to trying to fix it. Anyway, end result is this kid who thinks he’s all alone ends up having all these people there, pulling for him.”
The ache is getting worse. Just a normal reaction, a side effect from his eyes, or is the annoying blonde to blame? “Does this have a point?”
“Just, you got a lot of people worried about you and pulling for you, considering you are, supposedly, some loner.”
“Sakura?” he questions, thinking of his replacement’s words.
Ino’s voice is soft as she answers, “Yeah. Sakura, and Team Seven. All the rookies really.”
Sasuke sincerely doubts that. After all, he’s already had a little visit from one of her teammates, and he’s yet to see any member of the original Team Seven except the one whose job it is to make sure he doesn’t keel over before his political (or-ew, reproductive) uses have run out.
“I thought that was what a crush was, when I was kid. Wanting to keep from being alone.”
“And?” If this whole visit was some sort of love confession he was going to run something through his eyes himself.
“It’s not. Loving someone is about not wanting someone else to be alone.”
It’s a startling enough statement that he pulls his icepack away from his face.
“Your team- both of your teams- love you a lot.”
He looks at the woman in the chair, taking in her face, which is soft. Even her searching eyes are soft.
“That’s why I’m here. The teammates you were captured with- ‘Team Taka’ they said - want to see you. That alright?”
He nods, tongue knotting up in his throat. His insides are twisting around (he hadn’t asked about them, but obviously they had about him), yet some part of him, that part that never stopped thinking, that was always searching to insure he survive, is a little stunned too. Not some teenaged love confession at all, or even some obscure way to torture him. She’s seen not past him but right through him; he had become so transparent as that. He presses the icepack back up harder into his eyes, feeling like a child with a child’s logic. If he can’t see the world, it can’t see him.
Did Sakura see through him like that?
Would Naruto, if he even saw him again? Would his team? Or had they already spotted that part of him stuck at eight years old and suddenly without family?
“You look like you must be in pain. I’ll see if I can schedule a visit for them in a few days.”
The sound of sandals scuffing the floor gets dimmer and dimmer and then the door closes and he can’t hear the sound at all.
VII. and VIII. Karin and Hōzuki Suigetsu
He hears them before he sees them. Loud voices, groans, and laughs reverberate against the walls becoming strangely amplified. They sound like wild animals to Sasuke’s mind, but it’s all deliberate. His team is giving him a chance to prepare himself. Both he and they are perhaps unwilling to let them see him as less than perfect.
Slipping into view first is the back of a burly nin with a mane of brown hair. The sound of voices still seems far off and this man’s footsteps almost silent, despite his size, so that his appearance takes Sasuke by surprise. The shinobi says something to the guards, who laugh and then he motions to people down the hall.
“Can we go in?”
“In that much of a hurry to see your Sasuke, Karin?” taunts a familiar drawl.
“N-no, that’s not it at all!” But despite any protests Sasuke sees flashes of read hair whip across the view through the crack and then Karin is opening the door and rushing across to his bedside.
“Sasuke!” Hands are reaching out as if to grab him, but stop mid-way before pulling first at her sleeve cuffs and then dropping limply to her side. “Are you alright?”
Her eyes shift down to her arms again and one hand reaches across to clutch at her elbow, either unwilling to offer what hasn’t been asked for, or forbidden from doing so. He isn’t sure which, and isn’t sure he cares. After all, going blind aside, he’s not in the hospital because he’s sick, at least not any more. He’s in the hospital because it is an easy place to keep an eye on him, and, if the council decides to give him amnesty, it will look better than if they had kept him in a cell. And as for going blind, chakra won’t help. Sasuke knows the only cure is one he won’t have. That decision was made on a day long before this day ever came.
“Yo,” Suigetsu flashes a sharp-toothed grin, elbowing Karin out of the way. Behind them, two other shinobi walk into the room.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, eying Ino and Nara, who lights up a smoke only to have the blonde snatch it out of his hands and stomp it out on the floor.
“You talking about our keepers?” Suigetsu grouses, collapsing into the seat by the bed.
“I was going to sit there!” Karin growls at him.
“Your keepers?”
Ino smiles and points first to herself and then Nara. “Mind control, shadow jutsu,” she explains cheerfully. “We’re better than a moveable prison! Aaaand, just in case you all want to make a break for it, Chouji is stationed outside. You’d be flattened before you made it to the stairs.”
“You two make laughable prison guards. We’re only still here because we want to be,” Karin says, sliding onto his bed. Karin always did have issues with personal space, Sasuke recalls, a fact made more obvious by how she scoots up a little farther every few seconds, as if playing at being sneaky. Or maybe she really thinks she is being sneaky. Good thing she has that special power of hers because Karin would make a terrible ninja, if that’s the case.
Ino hisses something about “style-confused bimbos,” but it is Suigetsu who beats her to the punch saying, “What Karin? Finding being on the other side of the bars hard? Maybe you should have stayed back at your own prison; you’re only queen of the castle there.”
Karin growls, and hits the water bottle Suigetsu’s got raised, sending it flying across the room. There’s a shout as Ino ducks to avoid it and it hits the wall, rolling down with a thud. Both Karin and Suigetsu’s arms are flung back, Suigetsu’s fingers still curled as if holding something. It takes Sasuke a minute to realize it’s not shock or adrenaline keeping their arms suspended.
“Stop it,” he says, speaking only half to his team. Their arms drop like puppets cut from their strings. “Where’s Juugo?”
“About two floors down,” answers a new voice, from the door. Sakura twists to maneuver around people, making her way across the room and over to his bed. “Most of his chest was pretty well pulverized, but he has insisted he’s more worried about his mental health than anything. We’re working on stabilizing some hormones in his blood.”
“Orochimaru-sama didn’t find any way to do that.” Karin glares at the medic-nin, oddly hostile. Juugo and Karin got along better than Suigetsu and Karin, but her reaction still seemed off. Why is she pissed?
“Maybe he wasn’t looking,” Sakura answers mildly though Sasuke doubts that’s the case. Orochimaru may have not cared about his toys breaking, but he did care about perfecting his curse seal, and that meant perfecting Juugo’s blood.
“I didn’t find any way,” Karin answers back, voice steely, reminding Sasuke of that first time they’d met. She had just been exiting some lab, peeling off bloody gloves, and Orochimaru’s voice had been as warm as his voice ever got, when introducing her. He’d been showing off his toys to one another.
Suigetsu stands and walks over to Karin’s side, so that instead of book ending Sakura, his teammates are standing by one another, facing off against his other, now-former teammate. A strange position for Suigetsu to take considering how much he resents having once been under Karin’s scalpel himself.
“You have about five more minutes, Birdnest,” Ino interrupts, causing Karin to blush.
“Stupid pig,” she spits back.
Nara mutters, “Déjà vu,” while slouching against the wall, looking annoyed. Ino smacks his arm.
“Is not,” she says, now blushing too.
Sasuke sighs, looking away from them all. Five minutes cannot come soon enough. His room has become a madhouse. Ignoring the bickering going on around her, Sakura takes the now-vacated seat beside him.
“Juugo’s alright though?” he asks her in an undertone.
She shrugs non-commitally, keeping half an eye on the two sitting on the edge of his bed.
“He should be. Shizune-senpai is heading most of the research on his blood. There’s a limit to what you can do without testing though; Orochimaru didn’t have the same compunctions we have, and he still didn’t find anything. Then there’s some other research taking priority right now, and Shizune-senpai and I, and most of the other researchers, also have other work do too. It’s a mad house,” she finishes, unknowingly echoing his mental word choice just seconds ago.
“What’s the other research?” Karin asks, cutting into the conversation.
Sakura doesn’t answer and even though he can’t make out individual facial expressions anymore, he gets the impression she might be looking anywhere but at him.
It seems a very deliberate ‘anywhere but him.’ He must not be the only person who thinks so either, because Suigetsu shoots the conversation off in another direction, by explaining where they are being kept, what needs to happen for him to get his swords back, how he can get them repaired. Sasuke says nothing; let’s his words wash over the room.
Not looking and looking are not the same thing obviously, except when they are. She means him. He’s the research. That makes sense. Konoha needs his eyes; this he knows. Therefore, Konoha will try to save his eyes. Too bad the only known cure is worse than the disease. But Sakura? She is not Konoha. She has no need for his eyes. So what does she need from him that she would try to save him?
His eyes hurt and he wants to close them, to drown in sleep for a awhile. She is tiring to look at, tiring to understand. Her face gives away nothing, too blurred to read, and when Ino pops back up from where she has been leaning against the wall and leads the group out Sakura goes too. Her back is the last thing he sees before closing his eyes.
IX. Hatake Kakashi
“It’s good you see your teammates.”
That’s the statement Sasuke wakes to several mornings later. A smear of greens and blacks and grays is sitting by his bed, looking at something in his hands. The man, for whatever reason, hasn’t turned on the lights. Sasuke doesn’t say anything.
“I’d have brought you something to read, but Sakura-chan said not too. I can’t decide if she thought I’d get you porn, or she worried you’d strain your eyes. So I brought this instead.” Kakashi’s voice has changed very little in the intervening years, Sasuke finds. He drops the gift into Sasuke’s lap. Fingers touch cool metal and light reflects off the glass as Sasuke lifts it up. A photo frame with a picture inside. How convenient for him: something else he can’t see. He sets the frame back down, not willing to hazard a guess as to what the picture could be and guess wrong and so expose his failing eyes.
“You’re late, Kakashi,” he says instead.
“I’ve been busy.”
Sasuke snorts.
“What? No ‘busy on the road of life,’ bullcrap?” His voice sounds scratchy and he wonders how long he’s been asleep. Sakura’s been tinkering with medication to slow down the degeneration his Mangekyo Sharingan triggers, but it messes with his sleep cycle, makes him feel out of control. Sasuke hates not being in control. Of himself at least. But coming back to Konoha, having it still stand despite all his wishes to the contrary, has been a lesson in losing control.
And he’s losing more everyday.
“You could say that, Sasuke-kun. The road to being Hokage, at least,” Kakashi drawls. “I’d have visited sooner, but things have been a little hectic. You know how it is. Still, no fun being shut up in a hospital room.”
Sasuke decides to ignore this statement too. He had not been surprised in the least his former teacher hadn’t shown up at his bedside. Even now, Kakashi’s first lesson is the white elephant in the room. Those who don’t care for their teammates are worse than trash. That is what Kakashi warned, and that is what he is. Trash. At least, he is, if he looks at things from his former teammates’ point of view. Naruto and Sakura, -he understood that about them, but does even Kakashi, with a dead man’s eye, see things in such absolutes?
Sasuke pushes that thought away. Instead, he focuses in on this new bit of information. Kakashi? Hokage? It’s not so strange, he supposes, just not what he’d have thought.
“This was a good day,” Kakashi continues picking up Sasuke’s discarded gift. Since today ex-teacher and ex-student are making awkward conversation as the latter goes blind, Sasuke’s going to assume Kakashi means the day the picture was taken. Because this day sucks and he’s only minutes into it. “You were all so cute! Just finished the bell test. Remember that? First team to pass. Never would have thought you guys would be the ones to make it.”
Sasuke remembers that not-quite-full feeling he’d had much of that day, having given his lunch away. He wonders if that is what Kakashi wants him to remember, and he decides if that’s so, he not playing that game. Memory lane has been a path too beaten lately anyway.
“There should be some water around,” he tells Kakashi, making it not quite a question, not quite a request. Kakashi stands to move to the water basin across the room, and Sasuke still can’t quite figure out why he’s keeping the lights off. He has an idea, of course, but he’s hoping it’s the wrong idea.
The sound of water running out a faucet takes the place of any conversation and then Kakashi walks back, holding out the water to him. Sasuke’s outreached hand goes through the glass’s fuzzy outline, and startled, he whips his hand back, knocking the unseen cup from his old sensei’s hands.
Water spills all over his lap and the glass hits the floor with a cracking sound.
“It’s not broken,” Kakashi says as Sasuke pulls back the now-soaking sheets. “I’ll get someone in here to help replace those; let you get back to sleep.” His voice sounds like the voice of someone who has lost something, and Kakashi, he knows, has lost many things. Yet his voice never sounded like this before.
“Wait.”
Kakashi stills, nothing more than a shadow silhouetted against the doorframe, backlit by a hall light.
“Turn on the light when you leave; I’m not going back to sleep,” he says instead of what he was going to say. ‘What did Obito know about the Mangekyo Sharingan’ was what he was going to say. ‘Tell me about Naruto’ was what he was going to say. ‘Does Sakura love me’ was what he was going to say.
‘Do you forgive me’ was what almost spilt off his tongue. Out of everything he could have said, most of all he doesn’t say that.
The shadow in the door moves out into the hall.
“The light’s already on, Sasuke,” he says, and shuts the door.
________________________________________________________________________
After his old teacher is gone, and the wet bedding replaced, he traces his fingers around the frame’s edge before putting it on the chair beside the bed. When Sakura comes in for his daily check-up, he shows it to her and asks, “What is this a picture of?”
“You can’t see it?”
Sasuke doesn’t say anything, which is answer enough. Admitting the weakness does nothing for either person in the room.
Taking the frame in hand, her fingertips ghost over something- the image most likely- tracing the changes between now and the time the photograph was taken. “It’s of us. The first Team Seven.”
“I thought so,” he replies. She sets it back down on the chair.
“I miss those days,” she says.
“I thought so,” he repeats and both notice he didn’t say ‘me too.’
‘But I like the look of tomorrow, too,” she tells him, and when Sasuke doesn’t say anything, she smiles and continues writing down her records, a thoughtful silence hanging between them both.
X. Uchiha Itachi
“And then nobody was expecting Pa Toad’s heart to give everybody a scare like that. We got this freaky note he was going to die! - Though, he didn’t- so we had to take a side trip to check up on things. Gaara’d never seen talking toads before. Boy, was that a sight. I think he actually had a facial expression! Still, hard to tell without the eyebrows, you know? But they helped us make up lost time, so we could go to the Hidden Rain. Traveled inside a toad. Believe it!!! Konan-san’s acting leader there. She said not many people knew about Nagato being Pain. Actually, they may think she’s Pain; she didn’t say. But it was a lot harder to get the city to open up to trade negotiations than anything. Hinata-chan’s dad and them stayed behind for that, but Konan did tell us where the Atasuki’s main base was. And-“
“Naruto, we’re all glad you’re back, but do we really need a play-by-play?” Sakura sighed, tapping a pencil against her clipboard. The bottom of his bed bounced around as Naruto squirmed. If he hand to guess (and he does have to guess, he can’t read their body language or see their thoughts running across their faces as they use to. Not because their emotions don’t rule his first teammates as they always have, but because it is Just. Too. Damn. Hard. To. See.), he would say, that Naruto is forcing is way through this conversation, the first Sasuke has had with him since his “return” to Konoha, faking his way into a façade of good times and victory. The oddest part is that it doesn’t seem to be for him.
He’s the one they’ve been chasing, the one who’s been gone. He’s the one their city nearly decided to execute, if Sasuke wanted to get right down to it, and he’d sat through more uncomfortable reunions than he cared to think about since first waking in this forsaken hospital bed. Yet, it’s not him they are dancing around. Naruto’s easy way he punches him in the shoulder and the easy way he makes jokes and the easy way he know when not to make jokes- it is more than absolution and more than love. It is as if Sasuke has not been gone. It as if there is nothing to forgive, nothing to mend.
Naruto takes him as he is, and even if Sasuke can’t see it, he knows Naruto smiles when he sees Sasuke and that he smiles genuine smiles. True, it’s been just one afternoon that since Naruto returned from his reportedly very eventful trip, but he can tell- they are genuine to the point it seems a little unreal that Sasuke worried they wouldn’t be.
No, Sakura and Naruto are dancing around each other. He can’t tell why they are dancing this particular dance of theirs. But it makes him want to draw Sakura closer, make her sit in the chair beside him, on the bed beside him, where he can put a hand to her shoulder to reassure. Which is ridiculous. What would that do?
“Aaah, Sakura-chan!” Naruto whines. “I’ve been gone forever! Dontcha want to hear what I’ve been up to?”
Kakashi chuckles from his perch on the sink, and Sasuke can hear the soft flip-flip of pages. Whether he’s forgiven or not is still a mystery to Sasuke, but his former-sensei-turned-village-leader has been, if not warm, then at the very least detached, indifferent, towards him. It is better than open hostility though, and with Hokage business keeping him away, Sasuke isn’t forced to think to often about what Kakashi isn’t saying.
Sakura, for her part, just sighs.
“Naruto, we both know there’s someone else who would very much love to hear each and every detail about your trip with her dad, but right now? I and Kakashi-sensei have both been up since five this morning and only want to know if you found it or not.”
Naruto mumbles something and Sasuke is pretty sure he’s blushing too. Who else does he even have to talk to? Iuka, Sasuke supposed, or maybe his replacement, but somehow, he couldn’t picture that douchebag caring anymore than Kakashi or Sakura. Wait…. She say Dad?
“You haven’t talked to Hinata-chan about her confession yet?”
Oh. That Dad.
“I’ve been busy,” Naruto says defensively.
“I think,” Sakura says and Sasuke finds he can picture one eyebrow uplifted. “That your not talking, might be giving Hinata-chan her answer whether you want it to or not. Get you lazy-ass in gear. Kami, you’re making Shikamaru look motivated.”
“Isn’t Shikamaru the only one of us who has a girlfriend? -Uff!”
Sasuke isn’t sure, but Naruto might just have been whacked by a clipboard. ‘I’m just really strong,’ she'd said. A vast understatement. Somehow, finding this out has got him replaying every conversations together, looking for facts he didn’t see because he’d assumed a twelve-year-old girl couldn’t be someone else completely at the end of three years.
“I told you! He’s not seeing Temari-san anymore,” Well, not completely someone else. Sakura still gossiped from the sound of it. “Look, just tell us! Did you get it or not?”
“Heh,” Naruto huffs. “Yeah. Gaara found him when we were securing the Atasuki base.”
Kakashi pushes himself off the counter and walks over to the bed where Naruto gives him-something. Something smaller than a man and larger than a key, like a key to cell or hospital room could ever be. The air seems too thin as Sasuke works to form a question into words.
“Who?” He can count the members of Atasuki- former or not- who are alive on one hand, and only one is not already in Konoha. That one is not a him, either.
“Uh,” Naruto trails off and scoots close enough Sasuke can see shadows across his face, giving a hint of where eyes and a mouth might be. “Sakura-chan sent a message. Said, uh, you, uh, might need them.”
And then he takes what Kakashi holds out and presses it into Sasuke’s empty hands. Sasuke very deliberately does not look down. Looking and not looking are not the same thing, except when they are. Sasuke’s smells formaldehyde and tries not think how different that smell is from the burnt-bone smell of a proper death.
“Are these my brother’s eyes?” he says.
“Sasuke-“ but that is all Sakura gets to say before he decides he doesn’t want to hear Team Seven explain.
“Please leave.”
“But Sasuke-“
“Leave. Please.”
They go and the remains of Uchiha Itachi stay behind in his brother’s hands.
____________________________________________________________________________
Naruto comes back first thing the next day. His childhood bravado, Sasuke finds, has melted away into the cool reassurance that you are in the company of someone completely transparent, who is wearing his heart on his sleeve. This fact makes the fact they don’t talk about it even more reassuring. Kakashi doesn’t come at all, hardly surprising, but both men’s actions speak plainly. The choice is his to make.
So when Sakura comes in, lacking that bustle and efficiency she wears like armor when stressed, Sasuke knows she knows that too. When she speaks though, it is not a friend’s voice, nor a medic’s professional tones. It is not even a voice somewhere between the two. It is something else entirely and in a distant way, Sasuke wishes she wouldn’t use that tone with him, with others, or ever at all. It pushes his heart up into his throat where it beats against his voice box and spinal cord, cutting off all breath.
“I haven’t been entirely up front with you,” she starts and she may be looking at him and she may not be. He can’t tell and that this point they are the same thing. “You shouldn’t even really be in the hospital anymore; you’re find except for your eyes.”
A large except.
“Medication isn’t working. Lately, I’ve been slowing it down with the regeneration justsu Tsunade-shishou taught me. But even that is not stopping the degradation of your eyesight, and quite frankly it is too draining a jutsu for me to continue indefinitely. So, when we were sent word that they’d reached Atasuki headquarters, I asked them to look. It didn’t seem to likely your brother’s body was still not cremated, but Madara had… preserved certain parts, for whatever reason.”
“Itachi did not want to see what I was going to.”
“Itachi is dead. He isn’t going to see anything at all.”
Sasuke does not reply to this, and the three years and the world stretches out between them. Sakura sighs and picks up the frame that sits on his bedside chair when one of his (mostly unwelcome) guests aren’t using it.
“Kakashi-sensei said it was your choice.”
Again he says nothing and she sits down. Even this close, he can’t see her face.
“Are you still going to see the same things you were going to?”
“I’m not going to see anything at all.”
“I’d like to see you smile.” A hand reaches out to hold his face, thumb brushing across his cheekbone, under his mostly-useless eye.
“I’d like to see you seeing you smile.”
“Would you?” he asks as his hand finds his way up to hers.
Shadows across his face are all the warning he gets before the breath of her next words brush across his lips. They fizzle on his skin like he licked battery. “Tell me tomorrow, okay?”
She doesn’t kiss him, and his face feels cold when her hand leaves his cheek.
“Does tomorrow still look good to you?” he asks. He misses the closeness where he could almost make out her face.
“Does it to you?”
And though he doesn’t, according to Nara, know what caring means, he understands it is written all across what she doesn’t say. She walks out; he could watch her moving down the hall through the crack in his door if he had his brother’s eyes. He doesn’t though, and so moves from the bed to the door, and then past the guards to watch what he cannot see and see what she does not say.
A guard’s hand guides him back to his room. It smells of formaldehyde, but it won’t for long. Looking and not looking become the same thing at some point, and he wants to see the same tomorrow Sakura and Team Seven do, that Team Taka will, that Konoha and the Leaf will. Who would have imagined that?
His brother, Sasuke thinks, hands reaching for the jar by the sink, that’s who. The room is dim, but tomorrow it won’t be and from there? Who knows? He might see things neither Uchiha brother ever expected to see.