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He saw it in her eyes the moment they looked at each other. It was all over her, in the softness of her words and the brightness of her smile. His wife had truly missed him.
...
He knew now how time dilation worked. The further he travels, the farther they will get from each other. "It's simple physics" his wife says. But he notices.
She is just as troubled by this realisation as him, that they eventually won't be able to recognise eachother.
He promises to come as often as he can. After all even from afar he can feel his wife's longing creeping in to his skin and reminding him of his own yearning. It getting bigger and bigger now not only because of how long he travels, but also because of how far.
Until one day he gets lost. Dimensions are often tricky and he ends up slipping into one that is just that much further away than he ever wanted to go.
"Sasuke-kun, I want to grow old with you" was the unspoken mantra between his teeth.
...
When he comes back. He sees his daughters face carved into the mountain. And he is flooded with questions. He feels his wife's chakra and rushes to the hospital. Surely his lovely wife would be working herself to the bone like she always does. What he finds though is a woman in her fifties, fixing him with the most beautiful pair of green eyes he has ever seen.
They go home together. Sasuke is now around 20 years younger than her. Because of that, he is extra soft and caring. They kiss and cuddle like teenagers, while burning with the endurance of mature love.
But he sees how tired she is and he tells her so, softly... And she takes it the wrong way. She murmurs how 'offcourse he wouldn't be interested in a woman that much older than him, what was she thinking... Maybe if she were to use the seal, she could look younger and much more appropria...' So he kisses her in the neck, in the jaw, in the lips.
"Tsuma, we should eat something and go to sleep"
"They will have so much time from tomorrow on". He falls asleep with his wife in his arms. He wakes up knowing it to be only wishful thinking.
A day after his return his wife went into a coma. She had been sick and weak until that day. So much so that not even she could fix herself. So much so, that she had cried herself to sleep thinking, that they wouldn't see each other again.
His wife, which would normally be happy and pleased by a mere kiss in the cheek and heartfelt "I love you" had suffer so much thinking she would be betraying him by dying, that he had left her for good, because he didn't love her, or that not even her death would make him deviate from his mission
So Sasuke waited by her side so that she could feel his constant presence. Just as she had patiently waited for him.
He wouldn't eat though, only sporadically drink and take almost boiling hot showers, to keep himself clean and not compromise Sakura's health any further. His wife's condition just making him feel nauseous and his heart feel heavy.
He did felt better, When he was by her side though. So, in spite of himself, he would sneak into her room at night, slip soundlessly into the hospital bed with her, radle her softly against his chest to keep her warm, kiss the crown of her head and sometimes even beg for her to open her eyes again.
If not for him, for their daughter. If not for his love for hers.
A week after Sakura fell into a coma, she is declared clinically death.
...
Naruto tries to talk him into it. His daughter can't even come into the house and talk to him at the same time and Kakashi almost tries to take him to the funeral by force. But it doesn't work. He just wants to stay in his bed... Their bed. To still try and be close to her.
Later he tries to be as far from her as he possibly can. His grieving makes his heart ache so strongly when he sees her face, that he thinks that if he were to rip it out, it would burn less.
He liked sleeping and seeing her in his dreams. Eventually though he became aware, that her body was cold, her smile fake, her eyes blank. And he didn't want that. He just couldn't stomach the memory of her beloved wife being tainted by his dreams.
That's why, when the nightmares came. He just accepts it. At least the picture of his wife choking in her own blood while he presses his cheek against hers, holding her with his only hand, feeling powerless, is much more realistic.
Sometimes he asks himself
although only for the tiniest of seconds, why did they fall in love with eachother in the first place. The pain he was feeling was so excruciating, that even a fraction of it would outweigh any and every happy moment he could have brought her.
"Maybe Sakura would have been happier without me", he reasons. Maybe she thought exactly the same and knew her love to be much more stubbornness than love. After all in his travels a second to him had been more than a month to her. So Sakura had had more than enough time to ask herself the same.
So he doubts his wife's love. He wants to find comfort in someone. He talks it over with Kakashi, who is baffled, with Naruto, who brushes it off, with his daughter, who cries in his arms just remembering how painful it was to see her papa go and to not know, when he will come back
'Everybody around him is grieving and they are all in denial'. He accuses.
He tries to find comfort in other things: alcohol, gambling, sex. But alcohol didn't help, gambling was boring and although there were a lot of generous men and women offering themselves, he was a married man, he would never cheat on his wife.
Naruto visits him a third time that week. Trying to talk things over with him. Telling him that he can see that he is in pain, but what he is doing to himself, would hurt Sakura just as much. At the time though, Sasuke doesn't care. The realisation of how much he hurt his wife had been eating at him, at his heart since her death. It brought him nightmares of his happiest times with her, to then rip them apart...the moment he knew he was in love, their first kiss, the first time they shared the intimacy of lovers, the moment they knew Sakura was pregnant, the day of their daughter's birth. It is always the same. He looks into her eyes. The way they shine bright full of happiness, just to turn blank and die out in front of him.
So Sasuke, for the first time in 2 weeks, feels something other than pain and confusion; Anger, he kicks Naruto out. How dare he imply that his wife loved him, how dare he say that she cared about him. If she ever did, she wouldn't have let him fall for her, love her, let him put his heart in her carrying hands. That's right, she just took advantage of him, of his love-craving heart, of the happy memories they shared from their childhood, of the way he started getting kind of nervous around her and the way her smile made him feel all bubbly and weird.
Immediatly after, he feels worst. Not his wife nor his friend deserved that. That night he starts doubting himself. Why was he trying to delegitimize his wife's love for him? In fact wasn't he trying to do that with everyone else's love. Why was he crying over a picture of her again? He thought he was done with this. He had hoped that if he hated her enough she would go away, but it wasn't working.
...
He should have known though, he is a grown man, that has love and still loves in that way. Pain had only cover up the needs, but they would inevitably resurface. Also, he still remembered the embarrassment of the first time he truly felt the that kind of pressure coiling there. He had had something that could barely be called a mature dream, but had his at-the-moment-still-only-a-friend-of a wife saying his name in a slightly to provocative way and that had been enough already. He was flustered, sweaty, in need of a cold shower and new bedding.
So when he greets his wife into his thoughts. He rationalised, that he knows her body best, that even if he isn't yet ready to believe again that she loved him, he at some point did, so it was almost close enough.
He takes care of it and feels so guilty afterwards that he at least has to apologize.
Which takes him to this moment, having visited his wife's grave in the coldest day of winter. He stays for 5 hours until he can feel his own heart freezing and numbing the pain.
He stops at Ichiraku, hoping that the memories would warm him up. They don't, instead he listen to Teuchi's story, that although in rent still visits his daughters business, of how he himself lost his own wife, of how it is still as painful as ever.
Sasuke returns home with the conviction that his wife loved him. He doesn't even know why . He aches the same, but somehow, knowing that the pain won't ever go away, makes him desire the comfort of his wife's love even more.
He is so emotionally spend, that he just collapses on their bed and drifts off. And he sees her again, how her pink long hair is softly being moved by the blowing wind while his head sits in her lap. She is brushing his hair softly with one hand and holding a book with the other. He slowly, almost timidly, tries to take her attention by raising his hands and brushing both of her cheeks. He feels the warm of her skin in the tip of his fingers. At first he worries that she wouldn't recognize him, but it is there the silent aknowledgment in how she beams at him... with an earnest smile and a soft look.