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Some days are good. Others are bad. Most are somewhere in between, the feeling of walking on a tightrope and looking down into an endless black sea of nothing and yet safely making it to the other side where colour returns.
Some days are terrible. On those days, he finds himself talking to the ghost of his brother, asking him why he hadn’t had the mercy to just cleanse the earth of him along with the rest of their kin.
Somehow he escaped their fate. Somehow he slithered through the cracks of their inevitable demise, like a venomous snake. Like an undetected poison.
And here he is, nine years later, wreaking havoc and causing destruction, following in their predecessor’s footsteps. Living up to the Uchiha reputation.
Itachi had been wrong. It was he who had been the fool. Sparing his life was a grave mistake and now everyone else would pay the price.
But no. No, Itachi was not the fool. Or perhaps they both were.
Fire burns and burns, but at some point it must be extinguished.
Naruto defeated him and Sasuke’s fire died out. Now, all he is left with is the smoke and ashes of his own mistakes.
And yet, despite everything, they still stand by his side. What did he expect, really? Their hearts are far too big for this world. A shame they waste it on him. An awful, awful shame and a terrible, terrible waste.
Sasuke has started waking up at dawn despite notoriously hating early mornings. But he finds that he likes to see the sun rise and the dewiness of the air. And he does not wish to waste any more time, does not wish to keep his eyes shut anymore.
In winter, the days are short and the nights are long. Sasuke now starts his days with the birds. Maybe, like them, he can get the worm.
He is polishing his kata when he is suddenly visited by an anbu messenger, telling him that the Hokage has summoned him.
As he walks towards the Hokage Tower with a steady gait, he wonders what the Senju princess could possibly want with him. The likelihood of her changing her mind on his release and sentencing him to death instead is pretty high, he thinks.
He finds her in the company of no one but her bottle of sake. Sasuke is not quite sure if that is better or worse than having Shizune or anbu, or worse, Kakashi, listening in. The Godaime cuts his thoughts short.
“Uchiha,” she says, tapping her nails ominously on the sleek wood of her desk. “Come closer.”
He does so, apprehensively.
“I received your request for leave from the village,” she says, raising a brow at him. “Is this temporary or…?”
“…I’m not sure yet,” he admits quietly. “I…wish to atone for my sins. I am not sure if it will ever be achievable.”
“Hmm,” she narrows her eyes at him. “Who knows.”
He says nothing and waits for her to continue.
“Well, I called you here to tell you that I have decided to grant your request. Call it one last act of kindness from me. However, you must complete your probation period first without violating any of its conditions.”
“I understand,” he says. “If that is all…”
“Actually, Sasuke, there is one more thing,” Tsunade stops him from leaving. He turns to her, attempting to not show how he is eager to leave. But the Godaime surprises him with what she says next.
“You and I are the last of our clans. It may be far too late, but I would like to end this feud here, if you too are willing,” Tsunade says. “I regret that I could not do more for your clan, and I am ashamed of many of my predecessor’s actions. This truce between you and I, Uchiha and Senju, is my last wish as Hokage.”
Sasuke stares at her outstretched hand. He wonders for a moment what his parents might have thought of Senju Tsunade had they gotten to truly know her.
“What do you say, Uchiha Sasuke? Shall we strive for peace?” she says.
He lifts his hand and slips it into hers. “Yes. Let’s strive for peace,” he replies.
She smiles. “Once your papers are finalised and your parole is over, you’re free to go wherever it is you are headed,” she says as she pulls back her hand. “Atonement, hm? I see we have all changed somewhat.”
Sasuke’s mouth loosens with a confession he was not aware he was holding back.
“I never wanted to be angry,” he whispers, though it still echoes around the room as if he had screamed the words, drowning them both in his melancholy. He is not sure why he is telling this to her of all people. “I never wanted to be the way I was.”
“I know,” Tsunade replies, calm in the face of his tumultuous emotions, a quiet, disastrous storm. “I see it in your eyes. Your tragic past and the hand that life dealt you washed away the person you could’ve been. But it’s become clear to me now, Sasuke; you are a very gentle boy.”
Sasuke almost rears back. She no doubt sees the tear that falls down his cheek, softly, but she does not indicate so. He does not bother trying to hide it. He is too busy remembering.
His mother laughs lightly at the pout on his face, gently brushing away the tears on his round cheeks. “So quick to cry, Sasuke-chan,” she coos. Little Sasuke sniffles and digs his face into her stomach, clutching her apron.
A wistful smile graces her lips and Sasuke never wants his Kaa-chan to stop stroking his hair.
“My gentle, gentle boy.”
A breath escapes him as he stands there, cold and empty. Suddenly the room is too small and stifling and he feels like he is suffocating so he leaves without another word, quick and instant like the wind.
Outside he walks in an unknown direction, with his feet and not his eyes, as though his vision is blurry. But no, that’s not the case, because he can see—he is seeing things. He sees his mother’s smile and her hair and her eyes that are identical to his—his real ones, not the stolen ones inside his skull.
And then he’s not seeing his mother anymore, but his father instead. His father in all his glory, so tall that Sasuke briefly wonders if he’s shrunken back to the six year old he once was. Fugaku is looking at him, disappointment etched into his features. Sasuke looks back and has a startling realisation; he may look like his mother but he has taken after his father in every other aspect.
Sasuke is cruel and cold and furious—just like Fugaku once was.
And he wants to scream and cry and he wants to hate his father because you did this to me you did this to me (though, it wasn’t you, was it? It was your perfect, precious prodigy of a son—) but his father is no longer here and all he can remember of him is his dead, lifeless body on the floor, draped over his mother’s and suddenly grief and guilt are clogging his arteries like poison and—
He thinks he might be selfish. He knows he probably is.
Your father is dead , he thinks, your father is dead and you want to despise him when he’s already paid a far bigger price for a far bigger sin.
He’s stumbling now, black spots filling his vision and a familiar phantom pain searing through an arm that is no longer there. A sob climbs up his throat but is locked behind pursed lips.
For a moment, he is able to see in front of him again, and he watches his feet. His steps falter and it is then that he realises he has been unconsciously walking in the direction of the Uchiha graveyard. Their own one, separated from others, because of the sheer mass of it.
(Or perhaps the village simply wanted to continue the tradition of alienating the Uchiha, even in death).
His breath is uneven and he is sweating as though he has just fought a battle and lost. Wild eyes dart back and forth, from Uchiha to Uchiha. Sasuke has not visited in a while. Not since he was a child, since before he deserted the village; twelve years old and missing his family. He suspects the flowers he last planted are long since deceased.
He wants to speak to his mother, but he is too ashamed. He wants to speak to his father, but he is too angry. He is trembling, and he does not want them to see him like this.
Perhaps another day, he tells himself as his feet lead him down another path, brown leaves crunching underneath his shaky steps. Another day, he promises again, when his sorrow is not so bone-deep and sore.
Sasuke feels too much. He once believed it was his biggest flaw, one that he was determined to squash. But now he knows all that effort wasted on burying his own emotions was for nought. Because even when he feels so much that his anger and pain and grief slowly fade to numbness, it ignites again on behalf of his team.
Sasuke often feels a burning fury that threatens to rip him apart from the inside out when he thinks of Naruto’s childhood.
Even if he could not decimate this village for himself and for his clan, he could have done it for him. And despite his defeat and this new leaf he has turned, Sasuke sometimes regrets that he did not.
They are sitting atop the Hokage’s mountain and Naruto shares something with him that he never has before.
“I’m good at forgiving and I don't hold grudges. And I’m very attached to this village and its people,” he says as they stare down at the village from above, and Sasuke wonders how many of the people walking past had had a hand in Naruto’s torment. His blue eyes are shiny and lip trembling slightly as he continues, “But sometimes it hits me. These are the people who scorned me, ostracised me, hated me. For something I was not even aware of until it was too late.”
The tears fall, then, and Naruto looks like he’s hurting.
Turning his eyes away, Sasuke brings his hand up to Naruto's head and gently lays it on his shoulder, the one with the stump. Silence, borne from suffering, falls upon them.
“This village has sins upon sins on its back,” Sasuke eventually says when Naruto’s tears have dried on his cheeks and Sasuke’s throat feels a little less tight.
Naruto closes his eyes, saying nothing.
Today is a good day. It began with a dream, not a nightmare. He saw his brother, and in this dream he loved him and did not resent him. They were crouched in the back garden of their childhood home, knee-deep in dirt, planting tomatoes.
When Sasuke wakes up, his throat is not sore from crying out, nor are his eyes swollen from shedding tears. It is a good day. He decides to step outside for a little bit.
It is cold and frosty, but sunny outside; Sasuke’s favourite kind of weather.
The chill in the air is worse today, having snowed last night, so he dons a coat that Kakashi had lent him instead of his usual cloak. He also pulls a warm beanie over his head, enough that it covers his ears, the tips of which get bright red in the cold.
He ventures to a quiet patch of grass in front of an almost frozen lake, where he knows he can sit in solitude, and stares out at the landscape. His hand absently rakes through the snow, fingertips red and numb.
If Konoha had not taken his family from him and replaced them with grief, he might have found the village to be beautiful.
He is alone with his thoughts for a while, until his ears perk up at the sound of boots trudging through the snow, approaching him steadily. The chakra tells him it is Sai, Naruto and Sakura’s friend and teammate. An acquaintance of Sasuke’s.
He finally reaches him and lowers himself to the ground beside him. “Hello,” he says in that strange, monotone but polite tone of his. Sasuke nods at him amicably. He does not dislike Sai, weirdly enough, so he does not mind his company.
“It is a beautiful morning, so I came outside to draw the landscape,” he explains, and Sasuke nods again, this time with a little hum.
“…It is,” he responds.
There is no further conversation and Sai opens up his sketchbook and begins to scrape away at the page. They are silent for a long while, Sai drawing and Sasuke staring out at the horizon, occasionally taking a curious glance at the art piece. His fingers continue to drag through the snow, and he plucks a little purple flower peeking through, trying to place its name.
Suddenly, Sai pauses and turns to him, pulling his attention away. Sasuke looks down and sees that the sketch seems to be done, more or less. “I used to think that I was your replacement,” Sai says abruptly.
Sasuke blinks at him. He does not tell him that he once also believed this. That envy and betrayal and hurt used to grip his heart because of it.
“But I realised very quickly that that was untrue,” Sai continues, his breath forming clouds in the icy air. “Because, for them, you cannot be replaced.”
Sasuke takes a moment to think about that, to let it sink into his skin and warm him from the inside. Then, he says to Sai:
“You also,” he hands him the flower, a crocus, it finally comes to him, “cannot be replaced.”
Sasuke gets up and leaves, leaving a dent in the snow. He does not see Sai’s smile.
He finds Sakura one early Tuesday morning following a particularly bad dream, before most people have risen. She is sitting on a bench near the harbour.
The sky is grey and the waves crash against the brick wall below them. Seagulls cry aloud as they soar across the sky and for a moment, he is transported back to the beach house his parents had taken him and Itachi to one January weekend. The air tastes like that exact morning they arrived, after travelling all night—salty and cold and nostalgic.
They haven’t spoken much. Sakura avidly avoids his eyes and his touch and his voice. During his stay at the hospital following the war’s end, she barely let herself get close enough to him to do her job. He’d blink and she’d be gone in the next instant.
She is angry with him. He has given her the space she desires, lets her be angry. Her silence is a painful punishment and it is one that is wholly deserved.
And yet he advances quietly towards her, sits a mere few inches from her. The seagulls seem to cry louder for it, as though to warn him to stay away from her, you’ve done enough damage .
But perhaps it’s because she’s had a long night shift, and she’s too exhausted to hold up her walls, or maybe it’s the freshness of the sea air and the little specks of water that fall onto their faces that stops her from bolting the moment he sits next to her.
Whatever it is, any or all of those things, Sasuke doesn’t ponder it for long. Because when she lets her head slip onto his shoulder, wisps of pale pink tickling his cheeks much like the salt water of the waves, it feels like entering the threshold of his childhood home. Like the tinkling of laughter and smell of warm food and the feeling of safety.
His chest is a hollow gourd that’s been left outside in the heavy downpour. The rainwater sloshing and flowing over the edges is his love for Haruno Sakura.
“I'm sorry for disappointing you,” he says evenly despite every molecule inside of him screaming.
Kakashi leans against his desk, arms folded across his chest, and stares at him for what feels like hours. Finally, just as Sasuke feels like the silence is beginning to suffocate him, he speaks.
“You didn’t disappoint me,” he says, uncrossing his arms and slowly walking towards where he was standing in the centre of the room, his Hokage robes flowing around him with his movements. When he is directly in front of him, Kakashi bends his neck a little to look into Sasuke’s eyes (because the boy has grown but he has a lot more growing to do still) and says to him, “You worried me.”
Sasuke stands stock-still, almost afraid to breathe.
“You had me losing sleep, agonising about my precious student,” he says. “‘Where is he? How is he faring? Is he lonely?’”
Sasuke is blinking rapidly, trying to keep the moisture in his eyes from forming into tears. Suddenly he feels twelve years old again, looking up into the face of the only person in his life who seemed to manage to fit into the role of a father figure.
Kakashi is not angry. He’s not disappointed. He was worried about him.
A shaky exhale escapes his mouth, eyelashes fluttering faster, tears threatening to spill.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, quietly. Yes, he muses, he feels like a little boy again.
In the next moment he is pulled into an embrace, soft and warm and disarming. The white robes are new but the arms wrapped around him are achingly familiar. A choked sob leaves his chest, wet and messy, as though it were fighting a battle to be let out.
“I’m sorry,” he cries again.
“I know, my boy. I know,” Kakashi’s voice flows over him like a gentle wave of the sea, pulling him further into his safety net. “I know.”
The next day, it is Kakashi who searches for him. He finds Sasuke meditating underneath a great old tree and goes to sit next to him. There is something he has wanted to discuss with Sasuke for a while.
“In the weeks following Rin’s death, I could not show my face anywhere without being called ‘murderer’ or ‘traitor’ or ‘teammate-killer’,” Kakashi suddenly speaks, voice low and somber. Sasuke opens his eyes but does not look at him. “That day, on the bridge in Iron, I was terrified. terrified of losing Sakura, of you facing the same repercussions that I did in the aftermath of plunging a chidori into a precious person. Of the mental anguish and eternal mourning that would inevitably follow.”
Sasuke stares at him with unblinking eyes.
“But, I did not love Rin the way that you love Sakura,” he says. “If I had not shown up just in time, if you had succeeded, you would have never recovered, Sasuke. Never.”
“I know that,” Sasuke says after a long moment. His voice is wrecked and eyes forlorn. “You think I don't know that? When I'm not dreaming of the night of the massacre, I'm dreaming of that day.
“I caused them so much pain. I caused her so much pain. Perhaps I am just like him in the end.”
“You are not like him,” Kakashi interjects before he can expand on that thought. “You both traveled similar paths, but the difference is that you did not succeed in achieving your goal. You saved yourself, from eternal damnation, from the burden of carrying others’ sins on your back as well as your own. You are not like him.”
“I didn’t save myself,” is all Sasuke responds with. He looks up at his old sensei—the man that the child inside of him sometimes craves to call father. The man that he had tried to kill once upon a time. “Team seven saved me.”
Kakashi’s eyes soften. A gloved hand lands on his head and strokes through his raven locks gently. “…Yes.”
Sasuke’s eyes glaze over, then. It is obvious that he is somewhere far away, eyes distant and mind not present. “I suppose…Itachi never had anyone to save him.”
He had lost everyone went unspoken.
The hand sifting through his hair stills. “…No, I suppose he didn’t.”
They sit quietly for a long time after that, stewing in aching memories and painful regrets.
Later, in the solitude of his room, he sits in the dark and stares at their team picture. He hasn’t yet put it into a frame and so the photo crumples slightly under his forceful grip. When he realises what he is doing, he loosens his hand and flattens his fingers over it to smooth out the creases.
Sasuke sits and wonders if there are other sinners out there, just as damned as he is, who have been granted such forgiveness. He wonders if there is a life where he may deserve his team.
You saved me, he thinks as his eyes drift over those three faces, completely bypassing his own, as if it were a ghost he did not wish to see for fear of a great shock. You saved me. You cared enough about me to bring me back.
I love you, Sasuke thinks, wants to say. I love you. I love you.
Don’t ever leave me. You brought me back. You’re stuck with me now.
He wishes he could pull the words from his stomach and untie them from around his heart to wrap them around his team. But he has never found it easy, baring his heart.
But it’s fine, he finds, even if he doesn’t say the words. They know how to read his eyes, his gestures, his silences. They have opened him, learnt him, memorised him like he was their favourite childhood storybook.
I love you , he wants to cry.
When he used to water the flowers at his parents’ graves as a child, he would sometimes imagine that the water could bring them back to life, like the sun and the rain does for the plants. They would climb out of the ground, mud underneath their fingernails, and find him there with his hand clutching the watering can like a lifeline.
“ My precious boy ,” they would say to him, kneeling in front of his small body and holding him close to their chests. “ You’ve saved us. Thank you. We love you .”
And Sasuke would close his eyes and listen to their heartbeats, strong and powerful and alive, and he would dig his face deeper into their chests until the pounding rhythm became a dent in his cheek.
Today, his sorrow is not so bone-deep and sore, so he approaches his clan, bravery and hesitation nipping at his feet.
The flowers he planted as a boy are gone. Fresh ones have replaced them. His heart clenches clenches clenches as if squeezing all the love stored in there out into his bloodstream and through his veins, like warm honey, dripping from his eyes as tears.
Sasuke is twenty-two years old and he cannot bring back his family. But it’s okay. He’s grown himself a new one, while they have nurtured his buried.