Work Text:
The first I love you comes easy, explodes from the back of Karin’s brain without any real thought about it, no time to consider what it means. I love you, and it feels like she's been smacked across the face, sparks flying across her vision.
I love you, and the momentum of the words against her clenched teeth nearly knocks her off of her feet, down onto her knees.
“You are important to this mission,” Sasuke remarks, wiping his sword in the grass to remove the last traces of blood.
I love you, she tells him, but it comes out as something closer to, I knew that.
She crosses her arms and turns her face away from him, showing him her back instead.
(It’s already an infinite amount of trust for people like them—a gamble that he won’t stab her in the back instead.)
With her head bowed low, Karin leaps to another tree and lets Sasuke interpret her words however he’d like. I knew you were just protecting me. I knew it didn’t mean anything.
I know you don’t care.
She doesn’t know, though, doesn’t truly understand it, doesn’t know a single person working under Orochimaru who would spare the life of someone weaker than them, let alone any who would go out of their way to protect them.
She knows plenty who would kill for any reason at all: to eliminate competition, to get rid of a nuisance. To entertain themselves. When there’s no one to hold them accountable, they don’t really need reasons.
Sasuke isn’t one of them, though. He’s nothing like them, and nothing like her either. He leaves the hideout the day after their emergency mission, but Karin’s memory of that night and those words grows as endless and as sacred as the oceans her ancestors crawled out of.
Once those words shake loose from the dark corner of her mind where they’d been buried, Karin can’t hold them back. I love you stalks her thoughts, boils to the surface of every sample she tests in the lab for weeks after, floating above her head in acrid smelling clouds of smoke.
They taste bitter, and they’re gone the moment Kabuto sneers at her from across the lab and swipes his hand over the counter top.
Don’t you have a job to do, Karin?
She might, but maybe the job she has now isn’t the same one she had before. She fiddles with the sheets of paper around her and tries to look busy while she returns to her daydreaming.
She wants something different for this love that she’s found, something she hasn’t been able to find in Otogakure.
We hold fast, her mother had liked to say, her hands cupping Karin’s, her chakra as green as the sea in the stories she’d tell. That’s our power—that we cling to what is good. That our love does not falter.
That, Karin thinks, is the kind of love she’d like for herself. Sturdy love, faithful love. It’s the kind of love that’s meant for Sasuke, whose ideals run deeper than any of the caves in Otogakure.
She keeps her head down while she works in the labs and locks the doors when she showers. Only then, when she’s in total privacy, does she let herself clutch her chest and fall back against the wall, her cheeks aching with the expressions she spends all day holding back.
Lukewarm water runs over her body, and dirt and blood and released tension pool in the drains beneath her feet. As long as she has her love for Sasuke inside of her, the muck and grime of Otogakure means nothing.
I love you. I love you. She can trace it over the surface of her skin, that she can spell it out in the curves of her own hips and the slant of her thighs, in the scars that glow like Uzushio pearls in the ghastly lamplight overhead.
(Your father was one of the greatest swimmers I had ever met, her mother told her once. It’s why the ocean kept him.)
Her scars fall all the way down to her ankles and crawl right up to her throat. Before Sasuke, they’d carried a groaning weight—a low litany of rounded O’s kept muffled under long-sleeved shirts with collars pulled high.
Oh no. Oh God.
Oh my God, please, no.
Karin thinks of Sasuke and her hands translate those sighs into, Oh my God, I love you.
Oh, my God.
Loving Sasuke returns something to her. It makes her body feel whole again, as if her entire body could be whole again. As if it could belong to her, and her alone.
She thinks of possessing her own body, if only so that she can be the one to give it to Sasuke. It’s changed hands enough times that she knows it can be owned. That it, like a coin or a kunai or a scroll, is an object that can be possessed.
Everything in Otogakure is an object. Everything has a price, a value to be exchanged for food, for favors. For time.
But time is one thing we don’t have… Kabuto muses one day in the lab. They’re both preparing medicine for Orochimaru, though Kabuto is the only one allowed to go to his room to deliver it. And Sasuke is progressing rather nicely, all things considered…
She tries to imagine it for herself, fantasizes about possessing Sasuke’s body, how it’d feel to bury her flesh into his flesh, to squeeze his soul between her hands like a squirming bird and feeling its hollow bones creak, crack.
The bodies don’t last as long as they should, Kabuto says; the soul lasts much longer.
But Karin has no interest in immortality. One life is enough for her.
.
.
.
She keeps her routines as if nothing has changed.
And at times, it’s difficult to say that anything has. Her work doesn’t change, but sometimes, a feeling of longing strikes her like a splash of cold water to the face. The right trigger, and for a few sweet, short moments of clarity, she remembers that Sasuke is out there somewhere, that for one, beautiful moment, his life and hers had overlapped.
And that one day, he’ll come back to her. She knows it in truth even if she doesn’t know it in fact.
She sees Sasuke rarely, sparingly, feels the hot-burn-snap of his chakra from miles away and jolts awake in the night, laughing to herself in the dark emptiness of her room, into the echoing hallways of Oto.
Oh my God. I love you.
She contains it, buries the sentiment when the slap of his sandals finally passes by her lab, stops herself from immediately running out to see him. She tastes something burnt on her tongue, an electric echo of his chakra that lingers in every sweet sacred spot his sandals touch.
She contains it, but it can’t be contained.
Her love shouldn’t be contained, but love is weak, affection is vulnerable, and there is no place in Otogakure where she can be weak or vulnerable.
She isn’t like Sasuke, but she isn’t like the rest of them either—the outcasts of Otogakure who salivate at the thought of tearing each other apart, who can only think of the next day, the next meal.
They watch her closely because Orochimaru trusts her. Any single one of them would jump at the opportunity to cut her down, but Karin refuses to bare her neck or bow her head to them. To anyone.
Maybe only ever to Sasuke.
The only palatable shade of love that Karin had ever known before in Otogakure was lust, shoulder-bruising, seam-snapping sex.
She senses it in quick-burning flares throughout the hideout while she works. It happens in dark corners and in the clouded, sulfur-smelling shower stalls. On dirty cell floors. It’s fucking—desperate, pathetic fucking, grinding and grasping until whoever is involved finishes or is caught.
It makes her skin itch, and her nose burns; their feelings fill the dark halls of Oto like pollen.
Karin doesn’t know how to get rid of it, how to banish the fever that creeps under her skin.
.
.
.
She keeps her head down, and it serves her well.
Sasuke keeps his chin high and it serves him equally well.
As his star rises, hers isn’t far behind. Kabuto’s research progresses, and Orochimaru begins to cultivate more of an interest in her.
One day, he summons her to accompany him on a visit to his research cells. There’s not much work involved, he tells her with a deceptively patient wait. All I require is your presence.
She follows him dutifully down rows of cells until he finds the prisoner he wants. In a sense everyone in Oto is interchangeable, all of them equally disposable, but there’s a value - however fleeting - in being one of his temporary favorites.
This is true for all of his subordinates.
This one, he announces, stopping in front of a cell. You’ve got quite the interesting ability, don’t you? he says to the man.
The man only glares back. What I’m gonna do to you when I get out of here is a lot more interesting, he sneers.
The sannin only hums, amused. Karin, if you would.
Silently, Karin scrambles to Orochimaru’s side and opens the portfolio she’d been given in the lab.
The man lurches, his facade almost immediately crumbles. Orochimaru doesn’t blink. He reaches through the prison bars and holds his hands over the prisoner’s head like a benediction, like there’s a blessing to be had.
She spreads out glossy photographs in front of the man’s knees. Even this is done intentionally—she does each one at a time, giving him the chance to analyze each before introducing the next.
She knows - because Orochimaru told her - that they’re pictures of his brother, kept somewhere else in the hideout.
Orochimaru tilts the man’s head back until the cords in his neck stand out and says, If you cooperate, maybe there’ll be more. You understand that, don’t you? That things go so much better when we all work together?
A feeling of unease coils in her stomach. She can acknowledge that it’s there in a distant, disinterested sort of way, but she’s learned to live apart from them. She breaks herself into pieces and buries them, two or three or as many that it takes until she feels nothing for the man or his brother, or the tears that darken the floors of his cell.
And then she doesn’t feel anything at all.
She’s lucky in that, because all too often her indifference passes for obedience, and Orochimaru likes this in a follower. Every moment spent in Otogakure is a test in this way, an assessment of whether her body is more valuable with her alive inside of it.
Orochimaru hands her the keys to the cell afterwards and pats her hand, and she can tell in his chakra that he’s satisfied with her performance. That he’s pleased by her fortitude. Not all of his followers know how to break themselves into pieces, or how to move their right hand ignorant of their left.
They, like Karin’s weaker selves, will only get buried for it.
Orochimaru places his hand on her shoulder when they leave the cells afterwards. It’s fatherly, but in a way that she understands is supposed to be a parody of the real thing, a shared joke between the two of them, and that she is expected to laugh along with it, at the idea that their relationship would be built upon any real sort of fondness for the other.
You must always leave them wanting more, Karin. Remember that.
Karin would offer Sasuke the whole of her, her entire being on a platter, but she knows he isn’t interested in that. At least, not yet—he can’t afford it just yet.
“I have a mission,” Sasuke announces to her in the infirmary during one brief return to Oto, just as he’s shrugging his robe back on, the cloth still torn and bloodied, though the skin beneath it is smooth as ice.
For several short, gorgeous moments, she takes in the straight expanse of his shoulders and the high column of his neck. There’s a rush of air through her lungs that says, Mine.
A fuzz of static in her brain that says, his.
Karin rearranges her shirt with unsteady hands, her vision not yet cleared. Her cloudy mind is dense enough for her to fall back into on while Sasuke drones in the background, but she has his attention now, and so she holds herself steady and shakes her head back at him.
She scolds him later because you stupid thickheaded moron tastes like I love you on her tongue and even if it’s by inches, it brings her all the closer to saying those words to him.
Sasuke has a mission, though, and Karin understands that means she has a mission too. He doesn’t need to ask for her help—she only understands that where he will go, she will follow.
The specifics will fall into place when they need to.
Karin is no fool, though, and so she listens closely to the details. She’ll pay any price he asks of her, but she still calculates its value to him, and the cost to herself.
Orochimaru offered her what he offers every lost child who crosses his path and nothing more. He offered her an escape, but what Sasuke offers her instead is better by leaps and bounds.
She’s tired of living in the dark, trapped with all of the dreamers and sleepers who wander Otogakure.
Karin has no voice in Otogakure to support Sasuke directly, but she has eyes, she has ears, and she has enough influence tucked away to fill any outstretched palm. She rarely leaves the hideout, but there’s a tide of followers who do.
The ocean is in our blood, her mother used to say—all things set adrift float back to them eventually.
Eventually, but time doesn’t slow for anyone; not for her, not for Sasuke, and not for Sasuke’s brother—not as long as Sasuke wants him dead. His days are numbered, and Karin counts them down, ticking off a day for each glimpse her spies catch of him passing between nations, a week for every skirmish.
His name is so sacred that Sasuke never says it in her hearing, and doesn’t allow it to be spoken in his. Her heart burns with jealousy when the titles roll off of Sasuke’s tongue, one of the few excesses he allows himself.
My brother. My goal. My target.
How does it feel, Karin wonders, to be so important to a person that your being is totally absorbed into theirs? That Sasuke does not once need to sound out the chopped syllables of Itachi for Karin to know exactly who he means?
Her grudges aren’t nearly as personal, but Sasuke’s brother is his own kind of obstacle, and she’ll be glad when he’s dead.
.
.
.
A year passes where she does not once see Sasuke—Orochimaru is so pleased with her work that he sends her to the Southern Hideout alone. He calls it a reward, but she’s no freer to refuse it than if it had been a punishment. For twelve long months, she lives alone with fifty souls, fifty chakra signatures she binds tighter than a noose.
Her power is nothing like Sasuke’s, nothing like Orochimaru’s. She rules by threat alone, building her seat on fears and the ghosts of thoughts her prisoners can’t bring themselves to speak out loud.
Time slows there. Each day at the Southern Hideout day follows the last: morning inspections then lunch, afternoon inspections then dinner. Her island sits alone in the ocean, miles off of the coast of the Land of Wind.
The seasons never change; it never even rains.
Karin rests on her throne and waits for the clock to start again—for Sasuke to return.
The only time she leaves the prison itself is when someone dies, when there’s a body that needs to be buried; she never does the burying herself, but someone needs to make sure it’s done properly.
In Uzushio, her mother said they used to set the bodies adrift, allowing the sea to reclaim what the land had taken from it. Karin never puts much stock in it, but she watches to make sure the bodies stay where they’re put.
The crashing waves of the ocean follow her everywhere, penetrating even through the walls of the hideout. If Karin concentrates long enough, her senses can reach the continent and just barely scrape the edges of the continent, sifting through leagues of open sea for the few blinking signatures roaming at its edges.
(Imagine the largest noise possible, her mother had told her one winter, leaning against the stove in their house, wrapped tightly in her shawl. When we went into the ocean, everything else fell away.)
Even then, Karin thinks her mother still had faith in it—that even after the wars and her father and Kusa, there was still something that she expected to come back to her, somewhere she thought she might go.
Karin promises herself: one day she is going to leave, and she will never look back.
.
.
.
She senses Sasuke long before she sees him, a lone storm over the ocean water.
Except, when he comes back to her, Sasuke is not quite as alone as he’d once been.
And not as alone as she’d like for him to be.
But all the same, he stands before her and says, “I need you.” Before he even asks, she’s already said yes in her heart.
(She waits, however, to say it out loud.
She waits, if only to see what he’s willing to offer. What he’s willing to do.)
Where Sasuke goes, Karin will follow. The same day she leaves the island, waves rocking under her feet when she and Sasuke step out onto the water.
Now, wherever Sasuke goes will be Karin’s home. Sasuke’s war will be her war, even if Sasuke’s allies are not quite her own allies.
What ultimately becomes Team Hebi is far too similar to Otogakure for her liking; out of the four of them, she can only ever trust Sasuke and herself.
There is an obvious strength in numbers, however: the Akatsuki travel in pairs, and Sasuke’s brother will have a partner they’ll need to subdue. She looks to Suigetsu and Juugo for that.
Karen, however, is something different.
She has a specific duty. No one on the continent can do what she does, and there are hundreds of thousands of people on the continent Sasuke could have chosen to accompany him.
Even after all this time, there’s still something of her mother within her, an ocean in her veins— all things set adrift will come back to her.
.
.
.
It takes several days of searching before they’re able to find Sasuke’s brother. Once they do, fate comes crashing in like a tsunami.
When they arrive at the Uchiha hideout, Karin is already steeling herself for what she’ll likely have to do to keep Sasuke alive past this next fight. No price is too high, and no challenge too daunting where Sasuke is concerned, but the precariousness of their task sits heavy on her.
His brother is an unknown quantity, though his reputation speaks for itself.
Sasuke’s morals have always been his own, though—he lives by old laws and blood bonds, and those laws demand justice, payment of blood for blood spilled. His vengeance is a lightning strike, heaven sent.
Sasuke tells her to wait, and so she waits.
She finds his brother’s chakra easily, waiting, quietly resting inside the hideout as Sasuke journeys towards him. As far away as she is, there’s a limit to what all she’s able to sense, but even from a distance, she can tell it’s heavy and slippery, tinted dark with dishonesty.
As they wait, she finds herself licking at her lips, less in anticipation, and more to banish the strange, ozone taste from her mouth as the battle begins.
The two of them cast genjutsu one after another, an entire battle fought without so much as a single step taken. Even to her biased senses, though, she can tell Itachi’s are stronger. Itachi’s chakra is stronger, even when Sasuke’s reserves run deeper.
It’s a battle of seemingly perfect scales—Itachi outpaces Sasuke, but never enough to overcome him. The lies in his chakra taste like black licorice, but there’s a strange serenity beneath it that is cinnamon-warm.
What that means, she can only guess.
Not once is he afraid—not of his death, and not of Sasuke. Not once is she afraid. Not once does the battle ever spiral beyond Sasuke’s ability to control it.
Not even when - in the midst of the battle - she feels Sasuke fall, consumed by a fiery chakra that fills her mouth with soot. Sasuke collapses, chakra clouded, broken, weak. His brother watches over him, staring down at him, and he waits and waits and waits until, finally, Sasuke stands up again to continue the battle.
And his brother is pleased. Cool, gentle approval.
And Karin thinks, Oh.
But she says nothing.
Sasuke’s laws are iron-forged and blood-bound, but Karin lives by the laws of Otogakure—laws of survival, of subservience.
Sasuke’s dream is her dream, and wherever his dream takes him she will follow. Suigetsu and Kisame spar in circles but Karin’s body is an arrow, pointed true north to where Sasuke is, fighting a battle to the death with a man who knows he is going to lose.
In the midst of all of this, Karin recognizes that they have made a mistake. The calculating, analytical side of her bristles uncomfortably with the understanding that this situation is not what they intended for it to be, and Sasuke’s revenge is, perhaps, not exactly what he believes it is.
But who is she to challenge him? Why should she, of all people, divert him from his goal?
Vengeance, in this case, comes without ceremony, dirty water being sucked down a drain. Sasuke’s brother’s chakra tells her more in the moment than Sasuke’s does, with each creeping step he takes towards oblivion.
Pain, relief, pride—his life seems to flash before her eyes, an unfathomable, paradoxical slurry of emotions. He moves forward, one more step, then two, then three, before he collapses only inches away from where Sasuke is.
And then he dies.
He dies, and Karin isn’t the least bit sorry. Not then, at least, and not for a long while. Then, she has bigger concerns.
Sasuke collapses seconds later, his exhausted stores dwindled down to nothing more than a smoulder, and she snaps to attention. She ignores all the rest of them—Suigetsu and Juugo and Kisame, whose chakra goes eerily still the moment she begins to run toward Sasuke.
They have no way of knowing what’s happened, but in that moment, all she can think about is getting to Sasuke and taking him somewhere safe.
She gets there too late, though—she never senses his arrival, but Tobi is already waiting for them when she arrives with the rest of Hebi, and Sasuke is gone.
Karin doesn’t trust Tobi, but he has Sasuke, and wherever Sasuke goes bruised, beaten, and drained of an alarming amount of chakra, Karin needs to follow.
If you don’t mind, Tobi says, though Karin absolutely does mind, the boy and I need to have a private chat first.
She leaves and, for the rest of her life, will wonder what might have happened if she hadn’t.
Karin has only ever moved in one direction, though, and there is nothing in her past that’s been worth dragging into the future.
.
.
.
They go to Ame, they go to Kumo—it’s more traveling than Karin has ever done in her life, and it all passes in a singular, dizzying blur.
In Kumo, Sasuke almost dies. Their opponent is a complete freak—a freak of nature, a freak of deep, bizarre unseriousness that, in the aftermath, proves to be nearly fatal to them.
Sasuke changes. He’s always been sharp but he’s sharper now, honed like the lightning that flickers along the tip of his blade. His rough edges point outwards, and they slice Karin when she gets close to him.
He’s been broken, even if he won’t say as much.
She wants to offer herself to Sasuke in the same way she’d once been kicked in the backs of her knees and forced to kneel before, to bow her head in the way she’d once been held down by her neck.
Use me, she wants to say. Let me love you, she wants to shout, when Sasuke has no love to spare. Let me fix you.
Instead she says: Hurry up. Keep moving. They go on and on and on, always running, their target constantly changing.
Sasuke’s cold to the touch, and Karin grows seasick on his emotions: they spill and rock and her stomach churns, her mind reels.
He wants her for her cunning, her uncanny ability to slip through any trap set for her. What he needs, however, is someone who will stay beside him. To hold him steady, even as the world around them grows increasingly hostile.
Stability like that doesn’t come naturally for people like them, and it doesn’t come for Karin at all. Still, her support never once wavers.
She mirrors Sasuke, sharpening her edges and hardening her heart to match his. No sympathy, no empathy, no stopping.
Not for anything.
When Suigetsu and Juugo are captured, she keeps her head trained straight ahead, refusing to look back and be dragged down with them. What had once been that man, my brother, my revenge becomes Danzo, the Elders, Konoha.
And yet, where Sasuke goes, she will follow.
Karin’s love is a tether around her heart. Her greatest gift has always been the sensing that lets her know Sasuke is near, that pulls her back to him no matter how far away he drifts.
Didn’t Sasuke himself say so? There is no one who can do what she does—no one who has her ability.
.
.
.
Karin doesn’t realize the depth of her love for Sasuke until the first I hate you slips between her lips and burns her tongue like acid.
I hate you, and it’s the enormity of that hatred that tells Karin she’s only gone in deeper, that hating Sasuke is acknowledging he has the power to hurt her, that she’s given more of herself to him than she has left to keep.
When Danzo wraps his arm around her throat, Sasuke says, hold still, Karin.
She does.
She believes in him—she trusts him, she loves him more than she’s loved anything, including herself, and this is when Karin realizes she learned nothing from Orochimaru.
(She cannot, after all, sense the lies she tells herself. She has no power over truth and is only privy to what people believe to be true.
It’s a lesson she’s had a lifetime to learn and has still failed to understand: that there is no one in the entire world who would not betray her.)
When the lightning comes, Sasuke is smiling. It’s a grotesque expression, crazed and open-mouthed and naked in a way Sasuke has never been, but it’s a smile all the same.
It’s not Sasuke, she tells herself, even as she sinks to her knees, blood soaking through both the front and back of her shirt. It could never be Sasuke. It’s some shell Tobi hollowed out and filled with his own hatred. It used to be Sasuke, but now it's something else, empty.
Cold.
Shock comes before the pain, but the pain still comes. Her fingertips go numb and her shirt grows damp with blood.
Her body tumbles to the ground. With fading strength, she pulls herself forward and struggles to her feet, red footprints trailing behind her. Blood thrums in her ears, blurring every noise around her.
She collapses again and gags, drowning in her own body.
The blood she coughs up is as warm as seawater and just as salty.
She closes her eyes and thinks, I’m coming home, Mom.
In the distance, she hears the distinct cry of birds and tastes the ozone of Sasuke’s chakra. He’s going to kill her, she realizes. Once he realizes she’s still alive, she’s nothing more than another loose end he’ll need to tie up. He’ll kill anyone, so long as their death brings him closer to his ever-changing goals.
It hurts to move her head. Her limbs are too heavy to lift anymore. Someone else is there now, a girl with pink hair—a chakra Karin doesn’t recognize. Sasuke is going to kill her too, she thinks.
The sky spins overhead, tinged blue and pink.
But still, Karin isn’t done.
If there’s nothing left for her, if Sasuke is done with her, then at the very least she can save someone else with the little bit of life she has left.
Maybe then, just this once, she can do something good.
“Stop… Sasuke.”
At the last second, the girl turns around and only narrowly avoids Sasuke’s strike. More shinobi join the fight, until the blood loss dulls Karin’s vision and her sensing enough that she’s no longer able to keep track of their blows.
The next time Karin opens her eyes, the pink-haired girl is standing over her, her face set with grim determination as her eyes trail over Karin’s battered body.
Don’t talk, she says, as she kneels. Karin accepts this and lies back, eyes closed, prepared to wallow in her self-pity until the girl adds, I’m going to get the blood out of your lungs.
The girl pieces her together like pottery, gently pulling all of the shards of bone lodged into Karin’s lungs and remaking her ribs. The med-nin’s hand trembles on Karin’s chest as she works, but her chakra control is steady, so perfectly honed that the soft prickle of it never so much as wavers, that Karin hardly feels a moment of pain.
Though they’re strangers, the girl’s calm facade cracks as she works, thin tears slipping down the bridge of her nose and onto Karin’s face.
The tears keep falling even after the girl is done, spattering against Karin’s own cheeks as if they were her own.
I don’t want your pity, Karin snaps, even as she realizes that maybe she does. Maybe the girl’s tears are prettier because the girl herself is pretty.
Maybe it would be nice if someone that pretty cried for her like that.
Thankfully it missed your heart, the girl says in the aftermath, hands shaky as she fixes her gloves. She gives Karin a startled look when Karin laughs, hacking up leftover blood with the force of it.
Sasuke leaves them both like that. Leaves her, she thinks, without knowing for certain whether he’s left her for dead.
Karin doesn’t know what to make of that.
She’d follow him to hell itself if he asked it of her, but she doesn’t think she could go there alone.
.
.
.
The Konoha nin take her with them. Karin can’t decide if it’s any better.
Konoha is soft, and she wonders if it’s a softness Sasuke has outgrown, or if it’s only buried somewhere deep within him, sunk so far down in his memory that he’s only forgotten it. For the first time, Karin wonders about the life he lived before he came to Otogakure, what he’d given up for revenge before he’d ever set eyes on her.
(That girl—Karin wants to know who that girl is, and why she helped her. What Sasuke means to her.)
She cries a little, but the Konoha-nin believe her. She lies through her teeth, painting a tale so bleak that it’s almost worse than the truth, but they believe that too.
Enough of them do, at least.
Konoha is soft and its shinobi are kind to her. They sit and listen to her with their own tears, her daunting list of crimes long forgotten.
It wouldn’t be the worst place to stay, but Sasuke is out there somewhere, and she intends to find him.
.
.
.
The next time she sees Sasuke, it’s through a haze of red hot fury. She finds him on the battlefield with Juugo and Suigetsu, who has a dumb grin on his face so obnoxious that she immediately wipes it away with a right hook.
But more importantly: Sasuke.
The anger spills out of her, a hot spring, welling up and exploding. It’s purgative, and her chest is sore before she’s done, a phantom ache springing up in the place where she’d almost bled out months ago.
“Oh,” Sasuke says. “Sorry.”
His chakra doesn’t taste like anything in particular. Whatever flavor there is, it’s already gone by the time she opens her mouth to speak.
If he’s lying, she can’t tell that he is.
He could say more, could offer her more, but Sasuke has never once offered Karin more than is absolutely necessary, and she’s never not accepted it.
She thinks maybe that’s what being in love is supposed to be like, but when Sasuke turns to go, their brief moment over, she can’t help but feel dissatisfied with it.
.
.
.
Sasuke slips away, determined, towards another battle. She prowls just behind the frontline with Suigetsu, kicking at rocks and clumps of dirt as they pass over the various dead and wounded.
She could care less about them. Her mind - her eyes - are elsewhere.
It becomes easier to track Sasuke as the fight wears on, as the chakra signatures around them are snuffed out one at a time. She crouches down to focus, her sensing keen enough that she’s able to follow it all—every jutsu, every quick swivel of his head, every wince of pain.
The world around her fades away entirely. The voices around her grow dull, until all that’s left is Sasuke. Her body sinks down to the earth and she sinks down into her body, losing everything except for Sasuke’s blazing chakra signature.
Until she loses that as well.
The blade that slices through his chest might as well pierce through her too. That’s a lie…
Her face is damp. She stands without ever realizing that she’s doing it. Her feet hit the ground and she’s moving, blindly, through the battlefield.
Sasuke is out there somewhere, his chakra so dim and weak that, at times, she can’t even feel it.
And yet—Sasuke is out there somewhere, and he needs her help.
(Has Karin ever had a real choice in it?)
She follows.
Her mother used to say that the women of their clan had unrivaled strength, that they held fast to what they loved and protected what was dear to them.
You feel it, don’t you, Karin? her mother had asked, pulling her little shawl tight around her, shivering even in the Kusa summers. That’s your power too—it’s come all this way and it’s yours now, yours to use.
She remembers her mother’s smooth hands over hers, trying to coax out green links of chakra, only ever getting bright lime-tinted sparks.
It’ll all be okay, she had said when, after years of sporadic practice, Karin still was unable to master their jutsu. There’ll be a time—you’ll learn it, and your time will come.
One day you’ll learn it all—what it means to hold fast.
In a way, her mother was wrong, Karin thinks, because she doesn’t understand it at all; she doesn’t even need to think about it to make it happen.
Sasuke is out there somewhere, and Karin has to go to him—everything else is the universe falling into place around her. Bright-green chakra manifesters around her, harder than steel, forged out of love—Karin doesn’t need to say the words because she’s proved them, she’s living them, and even a statue with a thousand swinging hands can’t withstand the blunt, brute strength of a woman who knows she’s in love.
Anything, everything—all of it for Sasuke.
Karin holds fast, and where Sasuke goes, she will follow.
.
.
.
(Karin seldom dreams but that night she does—she dreams of her mother, of Kusa, and of Sasuke. It’s the smallest thing she could ever ask of him, but the greatest gift she’s ever been given.
Sasuke smiles—just for her.)
.
.
.
The dream ends, eventually, as all dreams do.
The dream ends, and the only place left for her to go is back to the beginning, back to Orochimaru with nothing but the broken pieces of herself.
They’re all prisoners, but this time, there are no other prisoners left—the hideout corridors echo more than they ever have before, and for weeks Karin wanders aimlessly, trying to figure out what her new role in it is supposed to be.
Juugo says very little and Suigetsu says too much, trying to worm his way under her skin because he knows there’s room for him there.
She tries to ignore it like everything else he does, but one day he grins at her from across the lab, his skin colored an eerie shade of blue.
You know, that stunt of yours during the war really was something else. He cocks his head at her, like he’s watching her from some new angle. I might almost respect you for it.
Love, Karin comes to realize, is not always a function of grasping or tugging or holding, but of letting go.
Sasuke visits Orochimaru’s rebuilt hideout once after he’s pardoned by Konoha. He’s gone within the same day.
He says, “Sakura,” and Karin thinks of soft pink, cherry blossom sweetness. A home with a front door and a warm bed in a village where someone will always be waiting for him.
She tries to imagine a life like that built on earth, on stable ground that never shakes but withstands, that never wavers but holds still. Holds fast.
A body set adrift has to wash up somewhere, she thinks. Eventually.
Sasuke tells them, “It’s a journey I intend to undertake alone,” and Karin knows there’s no arguing against that.
She’s growing tired of going where she isn’t wanted, she thinks. Where she isn’t loved.
Sasuke leaves, and Karin doesn’t try to stop him. She stands in the entrance of the hideout and watches him go, his black cloak billowing behind him as he wanders out into the wild.
There is nothing more that needs to pass between them, no more to be said: no thanks or apologies.
It’s an I love you that does not come easy, that only comes too late, but it comes all the same. She whispers it into the wind and can only hope the wind will carry it where she cannot, that if the land refuses to take her and if the ocean isn’t ready for her yet, then the wind will at least accept her words.
Karin stands at the exit of the hideout long after Sasuke’s back disappears from her sight, the tether of his chakra a rope around her heart, pulling her to him, squeezing tighter every step Sasuke takes on his new journey.
The tether pulls tighter and tighter until it stretches so thin that it snaps, and Sasuke is gone.
Sasuke leaves, and Karin doesn’t stop him.
It is not the end.
Karin will love Sasuke, or she will not live at all.
It is the strength of her love that allows her to accept that she will never be loved in turn, that he’ll travel to shores Karin will never see, that Sasuke will make himself a home and find a wife and raise a family that Karin will never be a part of.
That Sasuke’s life will continue, and that it’ll continue long after she’s gone from it.
That, where Sasuke goes, Karin cannot always follow.