Chapter Text
Uchiha Sasuke does not recognise her.
Not truly.
Not in any way that matters.
She stands behind the counter of a half forgotten roadside shop, the kind swallowed by fog and age in equal measure.
The air around him tastes of herbs and the cold breath of winter, bitter mint, dried mugwort, and the faint sweetness of yamabuki burning low in a clay bowl. The scent coils through him, tugging at the corners of memory long buried.
“Sasuke,” a voice whispers from the shadows of his mind, low, even. Familiar in the way old wounds are familiar, it slides through the back of his mind like a blade drawn in silence, impossible to ignore.
“You can tell a lot about someone by what scent they choose to live in.”
It’s not real. He knows that. But Itachi’s ghost has always been like that, slipping in when something pricks too deep, too close to something he refuses to name.
The words settle on him anyway. Herbs crushed beneath brisk practised hands. Work done quietly, diligently. A presence soft enough to be overlooked.
The memory threatens to pull him under, but the rustle of clothes drags him back to now. Now where Sasuke’s eyes meet short hair, uneven at the ends as though cut by a blade rinsed more often in river water than care. Smoke clings to the strands. Frost on her lashes.
When she looks up, her eyes—pale, steady— washed out moonlight rimmed with fatigue. Those eyes skim over him like a hand tracing the bruises of an old wound. And then something shifts in the dim borderlands of his memory, where a name forms.
A flicker.
A silhouette.
Then it’s gone.
And she becomes a stranger again.
“Can I help you?” she asks, voice quiet enough to be mistaken for the wind outside.
Sasuke nods, though he doesn’t know why. He should be moving, should be gone already, but something in the cut of her gaze pins him there.
Not familiarity—no, familiarity would have been kinder. A mercy even. This is something else. Something half-remembered, half-feared. A shadow of recognition that refuses to take form. He studies her.
She flinches. Her chakra is stifled, compressed in on itself until even he can barely sense it, like someone trying to swallow their own heartbeat. Like someone who has spent too long running.
It is a notion Sasuke is all too familiar with.
When she hands him the bandages her fingers brush his. A fleeting touch. A spark buried under ash and blood and years long gone.
It catches somewhere inside him. Sharp and unwelcome, he stiffens unsure why a simple touch feels like something scraping against his bone. He doesn’t understand it. He hates not understanding.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
A pause. Too long. Too careful.
“Yuri,” she whispers.
The lie sits strangely between them. He doesn’t know why it unsettles him. Why her voice tugs at a thread he cannot follow. A ghost pressing fingers at the back of his skull, whispering that he should know her, should remember, should—
And she looks away before he can ask anything else, as if afraid the next question might unmake her. That he will see the truth she’s burying beneath her ribs.
Outside, the snow continues to fall. Slow and unhurried. Inside, something gathers in the small space between them.
Something he cannot name and something she cannot carry.
It is something fragile enough to vanish the moment he turns away.
Uchiha Sasuke does not recognise her.
Not truly.
Not in any way that matters.