Chapter Text
The facts were these: Sasuke Uchiha should have been imprisoned for life or executed for everything he had done after sealing Kaguya away. He had declared his intent to execute the five kage while they were unconscious in the Infinite Tsukuyomi. Trapped the nine tailed beasts in his genjutsu and sought to destroy them. He had used his Rinnegan to incapacitate one of Konoha’s head medics, and vowed to kill its beloved jinchuuriki. During their fight to the death (initiated by Sasuke himself), both Naruto and Sasuke had almost died, losing an arm each in the process.
Just one of those actions should have led to a life of internment.
However, since everyone was under the Infinite Tsukuyomi at the time of said wrongdoings, the vast majority had neither seen nor heard any of his treasonous acts.
The only witnesses to his talks of revolution were the original Team 7, the spirit of a long-since dead shinobi, and the tailed beasts who didn’t trust anyone other than Naruto enough to talk to them and respected Naruto too much to reveal the information to others.
“What if we just didn’t tell them…?” Naruto offered sheepishly when Kakashi pointed out that they would need to inform the Kage of everything that had happened while they were trapped in the genjutsu.
“Naruto, you’re missing an arm. That’s going to be kind of hard to gloss over,” Sakura said, crossing her arms. She was all for leaving out Sasuke’s sudden turn if it meant he’d live, but she just wasn’t sure it was possible.
“Sakura’s right,” Kakashi said with a sigh. “Even if we did leave out everything that happened after Kaguya, it will be kind of hard to ignore the fact that you didn’t lose arms during your fight with her.”
“They don’t have to know when we lost our arms,” Naruto started, a devious smirk overtaking his face. Nothing good ever followed that look. Across from her, Sasuke furrowed his brow with a frown. He too must have recognized the look on Naruto’s face despite the years apart from it.
“You want us to lie to the Kage, Naruto?” Sakura exclaimed. If he weren’t mortally wounded, she would slap him. “That’s insane, even for you.”
“It’s not going to be lying!” Naruto groused. “The arms we lost just happen to be the ones we had to touch her with to seal her away…”
Sakura felt the tightness between her eyebrows start to ease.
“...And you’re hoping they’ll just assume sealing her away took your arms as a sacrifice,” Kakashi finished for him.
“It’s not that big of a stretch,” Naruto said with a shrug of his shoulders. The action was followed by a hiss of pain as he curled in on himself.
“I told you to lie still, Naruto!” Sakura chastised, her hands already alight with healing chakra as she placed them on his shoulders. Her attention flickered to Sasuke, checking him for any sign of pain as her chakra eased Naruto’s. His brow was still furrowed, and he was glaring off into the distance somewhere between Naruto and Sakura.
“Sasuke…?” Sakura questioned quietly.
“I won’t do it.”
“What?” Naruto snapped.
“They should know the truth about everything I did. I deserve to pay for what I—”
“Like hell you do!” Naruto interrupted.
“I threatened absolution on the shinobi world, Naruto. You can’t just let that go unpunished.”
“I just beat the shit out of you and saved the shinobi world. I can do whatever the hell I want!”
“Naruto—” Sakura began, a warning in her voice.
“Okay, fine, not whatever the hell I want, but I think I’ve at least earned the right to leave some minor details out of the story.”
“‘Minor’?” Sasuke scoffed, directing a glare at Naruto now. “You weren’t black and blue and close to dying of blood loss after Kaguya.”
“And no one needs to know that—”
“Everyone should know that, loser—”
“No,” Naruto said firmly. “This time you’re the loser. You said it yourself: you lost! You don’t get to call the shots on this. I do,” Naruto glared at Sasuke, and Sasuke, for his part, looked at least mildly chastened. But, of course, Naruto opened his big mouth again. “You sure chose a bad time to get a conscience on top of everything else, bastard.”
Never one for letting Naruto get the last word in, Sasuke opened his mouth to retort. He was swiftly cut off by Kakashi clapping his hands twice to get everyone’s attention.
“Let’s table this discussion for later,” Kakashi said, his eyes crinkling in a smile. “We’re not getting anywhere, and the more you two bicker, the more Sakura has to heal you, and she already looks close to passing out as it is.”
Sakura hadn’t really noticed how true that was until he said it. She was swaying slightly where she knelt between them, and was having to blink an awful lot. At the mention of her current physical condition, she popped a soldier pill into her mouth and instantly felt better.
“You two should take one as well,” She said, handing the bitter pill to Naruto and Sasuke. Naruto gulped it down immediately—a testament to how bad he felt; normally he would have thrown a fit before ingesting the pill. Sasuke eyed it distrustfully. Old habits died hard, Sakura supposed. After a minute or two of eying the pill and rolling it between the fingers of his right hand, he seemed to remember he had chosen to trust her again and popped the pill in his mouth, winching lightly at the flavor. It showed how exhausted he must have been. Sasuke would never have let such a physical reaction show if he was at full coherence.
“For now, let's get the two of you to camp to recover,” Sakura said, getting to her feet and brushing her hands off on her pants.
“I can’t really walk…” Naruto said, sheepishly while rubbing the back of his head with his left arm. Sakura didn’t miss how he raised his right arm slightly before letting it hang limply at his side and bringing his left arm up instead.
“We’ll carry you, don’t worry,” Kakashi said. His eyes slid to Sakura, gauging her reaction.
She knew what he was looking for. Sasuke had allowed Sakura to heal him. That meant he would trust her to carry him, but not necessarily Kakashi. The brief glance Sasuke had shot towards Sakura confirmed it. However, Kakashi was letting her know he didn’t care what Sasuke wanted. He wanted to know what Sakura was most comfortable with.
If she were being completely honest, she could still feel Sasuke’s phantom arm through her chest. Could feel her body tensing up and her heart rate quickening even being this close to him.
But, for the first time in years, Sasuke had extended an olive branch. He had admitted to his loss, reneged on his declarations, allowed Sakura near enough to heal him without batting an eyelash, and he had apologized. For everything.
Maybe years, weeks, days, hours from now, that wouldn’t be enough. Eventually, they’d have to talk more to really clear the air between them. Maybe they’d never be as close as they had once been or wouldn’t even be close at all.
But, for now, at that moment, his apology was enough…
Kakashi read the decision in her eyes and crouched before Naruto with his back to him. “Hop on, Mr. Savior-of-the-Shinobi-World.”
…It had to be.
Sakura sat quietly beside Naruto in the war camp tent their team occupied. Rebandaging his right arm, Sakura fought the burn of tears in her eyes at Naruto’s play-by-play of his fight with Sasuke. Only Naruto could talk fondly of a fight to the death between him and his best friend turned traitor mere days after it happened.
He told her and Kakashi how he fired tailed beast bomb after tailed beast bomb at Sasuke’s susanoo to no avail. Kakashi kept his features schooled in a mildly interested face, but Sakura could see the slight furrow of concern in his brow threatening to take over.
Sasuke lay on his right side with his back to them in his cot, pretending he was asleep.
“And then, Sasuke readied this massive arrow to fire at me, but at the same time, Kurama had accumulated some nature energy that I used to make two massive rasenshuriken, and—” Naruto tried to hold both his arms up to mimic what he had done, but stopped suddenly with a hiss of pain. He clutched at his right arm with his left hand and curled slightly into himself.
“Naruto, you need to lie still,” Sakura said through clenched teeth.
Normally, with the help of Kurama, Naruto would have already been back on his feet, even with such extensive damage. But, Kurama had been so exhausted from back to back battles, he couldn’t speed up Naruto’s healing like he normally would. That meant Team 7 had to wait in the Allied camp until the boys were well enough to travel.
When it became clear that Sasuke intended to sell himself out to the first shinobi with any rank he saw in the camp—which just happened to be the Tsuchikage—Sakura declared their team should be quarantined in case of contamination from cross-dimensional travel and everything else otherworldly they had encountered. Given no one but the Hokage outranked her in medical knowledge, the order went uncontested.
They had been in their tent for nearly three days, and, still, they hadn’t convinced Sasuke to stay silent.
Naruto finally finished his horrifying tale and promptly fell asleep. Kakashi had fallen asleep around the time Naruto told them he tripped while charging at Sasuke with Rasengan.
In the silence, Sakura leaned back in her chair with a sigh and wiped at the tears now flowing freely from her eyes.
“He’s an idiot,” Sasuke’s voice broke the silence, his back still facing her.
“You both are,” Sakura said with a dark chuckle.
Sasuke let the statement go uncontested.
Sakura wiped the tears off her face one more time before looking at Sasuke’s back. His breath was even, his body rising and falling with each inhale and exhale. For a moment, Sakura thought he might actually be asleep this time.
“Now you understand why I shouldn’t be given the second chance Naruto is offering me,” Sasuke said quietly. Still, he kept his back to her.
Sakura stood up with a sigh and dragged her chair to the side of his bed. If he was awake, she might as well change his bandages as well. His body tensed reflexively as she reached out towards him, years of shinobi training and isolation leaving him uncomfortable with someone being so close to his back while he was in a weakened state. But he did not pull away.
Ignoring his obvious lack of instinctual trust in her, Sakura reached out with confident hands and began unravelling the bandages around his stump of an arm. She felt tears gather in her eyes once more at the sight, but blinked them away rapidly. To have lost his fight against Naruto and his dominant arm in the process…
What a cruel punishment to any shinobi, especially one as proud as Sasuke.
A battered humility now hung around Sasuke that Sakura was unused to sensing in him.
“I understand…” Sakura began, gathering her thoughts while unconsciously wrapping the bandages in a neat roll. She placed a healing hand above his arm and healed spots whose coloring didn’t meet her approval. “...That you haven’t changed at all, Sasuke…”
Sakura felt his muscles tense further under her chakra. She tried to ease them with her next words. “You still refuse to accept help from anyone.”
His body visibly relaxed.
Sakura reached to the table beside his bed and grabbed the bowl of antiseptic ointment she had mixed up earlier. She scooped some out with her fingers and began dabbing it over his wound. Next, she grabbed a roll of fresh bandages and began rewrapping his arm.
“I understand that all Naruto has wanted since the moment you left was to bring you home, but not in chains.” Sakura finished wrapping his arm, but let her hand linger for just a moment longer than necessary. “After everything he’s done to bring you home, you going to jail would be just as much a punishment for him…”
Sakura got to her feet and moved her chair out of the way to an unoccupied corner of the tent. “...and me,” Sakura whispered so quietly under her breath, she wasn’t sure if he could even hear her. She almost hoped he couldn’t.
She threw herself on to her own cot with a sigh and stared up at the ceiling.
It was so surreal having Sasuke so close again. Before now, the four of them hadn’t slept in such close quarters in over four years. Yet, even though Sasuke was fully present, he felt like he would slip away again if they left the safety of this quiet tent.
Here, the world outside and all of the complications that awaited them after didn’t exist.
They were simply Team 7 when their biggest concern was whether or not they could get a C-Rank mission.
Sakura felt tears slide down the sides of her face and into her hair. She threw a hand over her mouth to stifle the gasping sobs she felt coming. So close. Sasuke was so close to being home. But he was equally as close to being taken away.
Please, Sakura begged whoever would listen. Please don’t take him away again. I can’t take anymore. Please.
The next day, Sasuke shocked the group by telling them he would omit everything that happened after Kaguya as well.
Naruto cried and laughed at the same time. Kakashi’s eyes crinkled with a smile. Sakura looked down at her hands folded in her lap and smiled softly.
She didn’t notice Sasuke looking only at her.