Chapter Text
Sakura’s heart had always been a hero’s heart.
Of course the war had wounded it—all the lives she could not save weighed on her. She remembered everything keenly: the crimson that covered her like a second skin, the looks of hope that dying men turned upon her that slowly dimmed into despair, and then nothingness. She took each tragedy as a personal failing, a sin to redress for the rest of her life.
So it was that Haruno Sakura, greatest of healers, left Konoha after the Fourth Ninja War. They heard little word of her in the years since: only rumors of a grief-stricken healer who never stayed for long in a single place, pouring her chakra like water into the sick and wounded that she came across.
Year after year she drifted in loneliness, and year after year Sasuke’s heart grew ever more sure of its love.
[Love, like grief—a transitive act. A state of being that required both path and object.]
He longed to offer her his love, to place it against her guilt in the hopes that he could tip the scales. Because of course he knew of her guilt and her grief—like what he had known of her affection, neither were hidden. Her feet roamed the wide world, but he could see how she had also made it her prison.
More than anything, he longed to break the expansive cage she built.
So it was that Uchiha Sasuke, newly restored to the honor and dignity that his clan had once known, forsook it all. He left his post as adviser to the Seventh Hokage, searching far and wide for Sakura.
For a while she eluded him. He chased spring after spring, waiting to reach her, until at last the tyranny of her anguish grew slack, and she relented.
Sasuke found her in a small village on the fringes of Iwa, in the midst of the poor and sick. The years of torment bore down on her: Sakura looked older and far more frail than her thirty years would have made her.
“Why did you pursue me?”
Her voice was hoarse and her eyes spoke nothing—they seemed but mirrors to him. And what he saw there reflected was only the enormity of his longing.
“I love you,” Sasuke answered. There was nothing else to confess, no words that could possibly be more truthful. “I wish to be with you.”
“There’s nothing I can give you, Sasuke-kun. Not anymore. I’m spent.”
“I’m not here to take, Sakura.” He bridged the distance between them, taking her into his arms and laying her careworn head on his shoulder. “There are no demands I wish to make of you.”
[Because in the end, that’s where the difference is between love and grief: hope. Grief itself is love; it has only despaired of its way.]
Sakura grieved, Sasuke loved. But finally he had caught up to her. From this point they would take the same path, if she allowed it. He would lead her out of her despair, or join her. Because starting from that moment, he would not suffer her to go alone.
Held firmly in his embrace, the terrible mirror broke and Sakura wept—the way a child wept, wild and inconsolable. Each sob was a shard that plunged into Sasuke’s heart as he continued to hold her.
Hours or mere moments passed; neither could tell. No one dared to touch them as they cried in each other’s arms.
“I only ask that you let me love you,” Sasuke told her at last, parting the silence that was the only thing that kept them from each other. He fixed his eyes on the length of Sakura’s graying hair, watching as the setting sun restored something of its rosy hue.
“Won’t you let me love you, Sakura?”
They held the wedding in the village: the barest of ceremonies, with an unadorned bride and a travel-stained groom. The exchanging of sake cups seemed merely the punctuation to their story, which had a protracted journey to the happy ending.
Sakura smiled at him in the soft candlelit dark. Removed from her cares, she looked radiant and girlish—Sasuke wished there was a way to preserve that joy on her face forever. But she erased that anguished thought when she bent towards him and kissed him.
They made their vows quietly and exited the shrine into a brisk dawn. The cool tickled his nape; it felt as if the sun were withholding itself. Sasuke tried not to take that as an omen.
His bride led him further out, into the clearing. She turned her face to the sky, as if asking for a blessing.
It started to rain.
Sasuke started to rush back into the shrine to fetch an umbrella, but Sakura held on to his arm. He would not refuse her anything, so he pulled her close and tucked her head under his chin, wrapping his outer robes around her.
A melody rose to his ears, muffled by the fabric of his kimono. Sakura had begun singing. He moved before he was aware of it, answering her—they swayed to the accompaniment of her song and the gently falling rain.
At last they were married.
Sasuke bent down and kissed his wife’s forehead, pressing his lips against her seal. She laughed softly, delightedly: no longer burdened by her terrible destiny.
No longer heroine, but human.
No longer lonely, but his own.