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It was a rare sort of peace they had figured out together.
It was a peace built on a quiet, unspoken trust, of gazes that lingered a little too long and smiles hidden behind hands. Sakura always told him what she meant, and he always showed her in return.
But there was a certain sort of frustration that came with never being able to speak it aloud, of never being able to tell her the things he couldn’t give her through brushes of his fingers and bigger portion sizes when she pretended not to watch him prepare the food. It became harder when the world became a place he never thought he could inhabit, when the air was still and the moon shone dappled patterns on the ground. The world Itachi had wanted for him; one he could never quite believe could truly exist, after everything.
Sakura lay asleep beside him, her trust another quiet, unspoken shard of this peace that had settled between them. Strands of pink hair curled softly around her jaw, the hue subdued by the pale glow of the moon and the canopy of trees above them. The fire had long since gone out, but he found he didn’t need the warmth when her eyelashes fluttered against her cheek like that.
He reached out to brush her hair from her forehead, and aside from a slightly deeper breath, she didn’t even flinch. It was a trust that made him feel sick. One he certainly didn’t deserve, and yet had resolved to keep earning every day for as long as he could have her. And if she ever changed her mind… he would deserve that too.
His eyes flit slowly over her face, the slope of her nose, the curve of her lips. It was a habit. It had always been a habit. He remembered their first mission, her hair longer and curling across the leaves, not yet burned with the true instincts of a shinobi. He had barely slept that night. Naruto snored so loudly he had told himself it was impossible to sleep, but he had spent the night staring at waves of pink hair to try and distract himself from the dread that came with finally being out of Konoha in a way that had nothing to do with the noise.
She stirred slightly in her sleep, her brow furrowing slightly before smoothing out as he watched. Her lashes fluttered against her cheek once more before she pressed her face into the thin fabric of her bedroll as if protesting the fact she was waking up.
He didn’t bother looking away. The wind rustled the trees softly. There were no chakra signatures for miles. It was safe. He didn’t know what to do with that.
So he did what he always did. He looked at her.
“I can feel you staring at me,” came her mumbled voice.
“Pretend you don’t.”
A tiny huff of air, more amusement than anything, escaped her lips, though her eyes didn’t open.
He bit back a tiny, imperceptible smile, his thumb moving gently over her temple in the way it only did when it was quiet enough to count the faint dusting of freckles across her nose.
“How long have you been watching me sleep?” She shifted to look up at him, green eyes hazy with sleep, and so very trusting he almost looked away.
“What a ridiculous question,” he murmured. It felt impossibly soft on his tongue, a tone he wasn’t ever quite sure he was capable of until it came out.
Sakura blinked at him slowly, as if surfacing from somewhere warm and deep, and for a moment she simply looked at him. The moonlight caught in her irises, softening the green into something almost silver around the edges. His hand was still at her temple, thumb brushing once over skin that was warm from sleep. He should have moved it away by now, but he couldn’t come up with a reason good enough to justify breaking the contact.
“You do this a lot,” she whispered after a long moment. It was more observational than anything, but the tone of her voice when it was late and soft and quiet always made him feel like he was twelve and working up the courage to ask her for advice again.
“Do what,” he said flatly, though it came out a little higher than intended.
“Look at me like I’m going to disappear.”
For a second, he said nothing. She was unfairly perceptive, and she always spoke it so openly, as if it were a simple fact. The trees whispered overhead, leaves shifting against one another in the wind, and somewhere in the dark an owl called once, low and distant. It would have been easy to let the silence swallow the words. He had spent most of his life learning how to do exactly that, to let quiet become a wall, how to tuck every thought into the spaces no one could reach.
But Sakura was looking at him with sleep-heavy eyes and that unbearable, unguarded honesty of hers, and she had always had a way of making silence feel less like shelter and more like cowardice.
“I’m making sure you’re not going to,” he said finally.
Her expression changed so subtly anyone else would have missed it, but he didn’t. He always noticed.
“Sasuke,” she said, and there was no reprimand in it, no pity. Just his name, held carefully between them.
He looked away then, not far, but enough to break whatever it was in her face that he could not bear for too long. His hand had stilled against her skin. He became abruptly aware of it, of the gentleness of it, of the way his pulse had settled somewhere strange and unsteady in his throat. His fingers were used to the cold of steel, but her skin was always soft in a way he couldn’t really comprehend.
“You should go back to sleep,” he said.
Sakura watched him for another moment, then shifted, the bedroll rustling softly beneath her. Before he could think to move away, she inched closer until there was hardly any space between them at all, sitting beside him with her shoulder brushing the line of his arm. The contact was featherlight, almost accidental, though it still made every muscle in his body lock.
“I’ve slept enough,” she said, voice dropping as though sharing a secret with the night. She settled her cheek against his arm, eyes slipping half-shut again. “For the record,” she mumbled, “if I was going to disappear, I probably wouldn’t do it in the middle of a forest. It’d be inconvenient. I don’t have any food, and you’d get in a mood about it and hunt me down.”
He stared at her slightly incredulously. She always chose the most inopportune moments to remind him that this was the same girl who called Ino a pig-nosed freak.
One eye cracked open. “I’m trying to comfort you.”
“I don’t think it’s working,” he sighed, impossibly fondly in a way he didn’t even bother to hide.
“It’s the middle of the night,” she nestled her head against him. “You get what you get.”
Against his will, a small breath escaped him, something quieter than a laugh, but too warm to be anything else. Sakura’s eye opened the rest of the way at the sound, and triumph flickered across her face, soft and bright.
He should have found it annoying. In a way, it was easier when he had met all her persistence with sharp words and colder silences because it had been easier than facing the fact that she had always seen more of him than he wanted anyone to. But, as his arm came around her shoulders and his cheek rested on the top of her head, he found he didn’t want to. Now, when she looked at him like that, it only made something old and aching turn over inside his ribs.
Sakura, perhaps sensing that if she opened her eyes fully she would lose whatever advantage drowsiness had granted her, simply lifted a hand and caught the front of his shirt in her fingers. The gesture lacked all of her usual strength; it was clumsy with sleep, barely enough pressure to tug him at all, and yet he let her pull him down as though she had him by the throat.
He stopped when his face was inches from hers, close enough to feel the warmth of her breath. Close enough to see the little scar that was usually hidden underneath her hair; not one from a battle with a story to rival the Sannin, but from when Naruto had gestured a little too enthusiastically with a pair of chopsticks without looking where his hand was going. Close enough that if either of them moved, he-
Sakura released his shirt only to slide that same hand up, knuckles brushing his jaw with devastating care. Her palm settled against his cheek, and for a moment, she just looked.
“There,” she whispered, “now I can make sure you’re still here too.”
His breath hitched so suddenly it almost hurt.
It was not dramatic. No visible fracture, no sudden unraveling. Just a quiet, splintering shift beneath the surface, like ice giving way somewhere far out over the lake in Konoha during winter. It was so, so, profoundly unfair. He had stood in battle with bones shattered and blood in his eyes and still kept moving. But this… it wasn’t something he could pretend wasn’t affecting him.
“Sakura,” he said, and her name came out low and frayed, like something pulled too tight.
She shifted slightly, her eyes meeting his again, still tired but clearly listening now. She didn’t say anything; she just waited for him to find the words he never could. He knew she would. That was the worst part, maybe, that Sakura had learned the shape of his silences over years of standing beside them, around them, through them. She knew when to fill the quiet and when to leave it untouched. She knew when he was merely withholding and when he was trying, desperately and clumsily, to find his way toward speech.
His hand covered hers, and for a long while, his thumb just pressed lightly against the inside of her wrist, feeling the steady beat there.
“I’m not…” He stopped. He turned the words over in his mind, and then shook his head as if physically dismissing them. “I don’t know how to do this.”
Her brows knit faintly, not in confusion but in that fierce, aching concentration she always gave him when he offered her even the smallest shard of truth.
“Do what?”
He looked at her, really looked, and hated how defenseless it made him feel.
“This,” he said. “Any of it.”
His hand tightened once around hers before easing. “Staying. Wanting things I can’t keep. Pretending I know how to…” He glanced away, jaw tense.
For a moment Sakura said nothing. Then, with the hand not trapped between his and his cheek, she reached up and touched his forehead.
“You don’t have to pretend,” she whispered.
The breath he took was shaky, slow, and so impossibly measured it was almost humiliatingly obvious how much control it was taking to not respond outwardly.
Her fingers lingered for a moment, a gentle pressure against his forehead that made his gaze slightly hazy in a way he didn’t bother to blink back. Her voice was impossibly quiet when she continued, “You always act like if you can’t do something perfectly, immediately, without hurting anyone, then you shouldn’t do it at all.”
“That’s not-“
“It is.” Her fingers drifted from his brow to his hairline, brushing dark strands away from his face. “But that’s not how people work. It’s not how healing works either.”
Sakura’s expression softened further, and when she spoke again her voice was so quiet he had to lean in to hear it.
“You’ve already been doing it,” she said. “Choosing this life. Me. Every day you stay. Letting me… letting me do this. I don’t need you to tell me.”
He knew she didn’t mean to be cruel with words like that. Sakura had never understood the full extent of what simple tenderness did to him, how it lodged beneath his ribs and stayed there, bright and painful. Or maybe she did understand and chose to say it anyway, because she was braver than he had ever managed to be.
His hand slipped from hers to the back of her neck before he could stop himself. Just his fingers spreading into the soft hair at her nape, as if to reassure himself she was solid, real, and always so warm beneath his hand. Sakura’s eyes widened just slightly, the last traces of sleep giving way to awareness in a slow, unmistakable bloom. He could feel the pulse in her wrist fluttering against his thumb, quicker now. He stayed where he was, forehead nearly brushing hers, and watched understanding pass over her face in a series of tiny changes: the soft parting of her lips, the way her lashes trembled, the flush that rose slowly on her cheeks even in the cold silver light.
“If I asked you not to look at me like that,” she whispered, “would you stop?”
“No,” Sasuke’s mouth formed the words before he could think.
“Then don’t tell me you don’t know how to do this,” she said softly, “when you’re already doing it.”
He didn’t know what she wanted him to say. He didn’t know if there were words for this that would not break apart in his mouth or turn into something he didn’t mean. All he knew was that she was here, and awake, and looking at him as if he were something worth waiting for, and the feeling in his chest had become too large and sharp to keep.
They stayed like that, breathing the same air, until the tension in her shoulders melted and her hand, still cupping his face, softened into a caress.
When she spoke, her voice was barely there at all.
“I sometimes feel like I don’t know how to do this either.”
He felt her smile almost shyly against the space between them and, helpless against it, returned it in the dark where she couldn’t quite see.
“You have always known how to love me, Sakura.”
The word still felt unfamiliar on his tongue, like something he was never supposed to speak; something someone like him shouldn’t be capable of even saying aloud. But he didn’t take it back. Because she had, hadn’t she? It was one of the only constants that had ever been in his life. There were a few things Sasuke Uchiha had never doubted, and one of them was that she would always, always find him.
“But I don’t know how to let you love me back,” came her response, so quiet he almost didn’t hear it, and he stilled.
When he finally drew back, it was only far enough to look at her.
Sakura’s eyes opened, bright despite the hour, and whatever she saw on his face made her own expression go soft with wonder. He had the absurd thought that she looked as if she were the one being entrusted with something fragile, when in truth it was him, always him, placing far too much in her hands and finding that she held it carefully every time.
“Let me,” he repeated, as if trying to understand the sentiment behind her words and finding something he couldn’t quite process.
He looked at her for a long moment, as if there might be some answer written in the planes of her face that he had simply not learned how to read yet.
“I know,” he said at last.
Her lashes fluttered. “You know?”
He nodded once, slow and deliberate. “I think,” he said, voice low, “I gave you every reason not to.”
Sakura’s mouth parted, perhaps to protest, but he didn’t let her. If she interrupted him now, he knew he might not find his way back to the words. His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth, then back to her eyes. “You spent so long loving me in ways I didn’t know how to answer that I think somewhere along the way, you learned to expect silence in return,” His voice roughened on the last word. “Even now.”
Even now, when he was here. Even now, when his hand was at her neck and her breath was mingling with his and the word love had already crossed his mouth on more than one quiet night under the trees, impossibly and without taking itself back. Even now, he knew, some part of her was waiting for the moment this would be withdrawn, as if tenderness from him must surely have a limit she would eventually reach.
He had done that. He knew he had. Not just the leaving, not just the years apart or the blood or the cruelty of old choices. He had taught her, in a thousand smaller ways too, to take what little he offered and never ask if there could be more. To accept scraps of softness as if they were all that could be expected from him. To treasure moments so brief they could be mistaken for accidents.
And Sakura, who gave with her whole heart when she loved, had made herself smaller around that absence just to keep from breaking against it. Something hard turned over in his chest, and he decided he was tired of pretending he didn’t know how to love her.
“Sakura,” He said her name carefully, waiting until she met his eyes fully. “Look at me.”
A tiny, humorless huff left her, a sound he had come to recognise as a deflection. “I am looking at you.”
“No,” His hand slid from her hair to cup the side of her face properly, his palm warm against her cheek. “Look at me and listen.”
Her expression changed at something in his tone. The softness in her features remained, but her attention sharpened, every trace of sleep falling away beneath the quiet weight of his voice. He could feel the pulse at the base of her throat still, quick and uneven.
“I don’t know how to say things the way you deserve to hear them. I don’t know how to…” He hesitated, jaw tightening briefly around the admission. “I don’t know how to be gentle without feeling like I’m handling something I could still ruin.”
Sakura’s eyes softened with such immediate understanding it made him almost wince.
“But,” he continued before she could speak, “I know this.”
He leaned in a fraction, enough that her breath caught, enough that he could see the moonlight caught in the green of her irises.
“I know that I want you to let me try. I want,” he said, slower now, as if laying each word down with deliberate care, “for you to stop treating every good thing I give you like it might be the last one.”
Something in her face cracked at that in a way she didn’t let show often. It was small, almost invisible, but he had seen it a few times over the years. A tiny trembling at the corner of her mouth, a shine rising too quickly in her eyes, but he saw it all the same. Sakura looked away before he could decide what to do with it, her lashes lowering as if to shield herself from the full force of being seen.
“That’s not fair,” she said quietly.
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
His thumb brushed beneath her eye, though there were no tears yet to catch. “It isn’t fair,” he repeated, “because I’m asking you to unlearn something I taught you.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. The leaves overhead shifted with the wind, casting fractured shadows over her face, the moonlight straining through the gaps in the trees as if desperate to reach her. The world felt impossibly large around the tiny circle of space they occupied, and yet all of Sasuke’s focus had narrowed to the woman in front of him and the hurt he could still trace through her even now, after all this time.
Sakura closed her eyes for a moment as if steadying herself. When she opened them again, there was no hesitation left in her gaze, only that same terrifying honesty she always saved for him.
“When you left,” she said, “I kept thinking that if I loved you enough, if I was patient enough, if I became strong enough, then maybe one day you would come back and choose me.”
The words were quiet, though still struck like a blade eased carefully between his ribs.
“I know,” he said.
Her smile faltered. “No, I don’t think you do. Because you did come back. And you did…” Her eyes searched his face, almost disbelieving even now. “You did choose me. In all the ways that matter. I know that,” Her hand flattened over his chest, right above his heart, and he felt the warmth of her palm through the thin fabric there. “I know who you come home to. I know who you look for first. I know what it means when you hand me your sword without thinking, or when you sleep beside me like this, or when you tell me things no one else gets to hear.”
Each example landed in him with a quiet sort of violence, not because she was wrong but because she had noticed all of it. Of course she had. Sakura missed very little when it came to him.
“I know you love me. I do. But sometimes,” she whispered, “it still feels like I’m standing by that bench asking you not to leave. Not because of anything you’ve done, but because I… I don’t understand why you chose me.”
The confession was so soft, so carefully spoken, that it would have been easy to miss the devastation beneath it. Her gaze dropped to the space between them, shoulders drawing in just slightly, and he realized with a cold sort of clarity that this was it; this was the thing she had not known how to let him see. Not doubt in him, but something older than that, something that perhaps started on that very first day of school when the other girls in the class had made fun of her forehead, or maybe every time she had laughed too loudly or taken up too much space or said something that wasn’t quite met with the reaction she expected. It was a wound that had scarred over badly and still ached whenever touched in the wrong place.
“Sakura.”
She shook her head once, quick and embarrassed. “I know it’s stupid.”
“You are not standing there anymore,” he said, and his voice had gone quiet in that dangerous way it did when every word mattered. “You’re here.”
Sakura’s lashes lifted.
“With me,” he continued. “And I’m here with you.”
Her lips parted, but he did not let her interrupt, not yet.
“I can’t undo what I was. I can’t make you forget what it felt like to love someone who kept leaving,” His jaw tightened. “But you… you don’t understand. I wouldn’t have even bothered leaving if it were anyone else, because staying wouldn’t have affected me.”
The tears came then, not dramatic, not even enough to fall, just a further brightening of her eyes that made his chest ache. Sakura blinked hard, once, as if annoyed by them, and he found himself almost absurdly angry on her behalf. And there was more to say, but he was never really able to finish his thoughts in the way he wanted to, so he trusted her to understand.
“I am here,” he said, each word slow and certain. “Not because you waited long enough. Not because you loved me hard enough to drag me back. Not because you earned it by healing me or by staying up too late at the hospital or punching a hole through a mountain or something equally as Tsunade-like.”
Sakura’s breath trembled against his mouth, almost as controlled as his had been earlier, though not quite.
“I’m here because I love you too.”
Sakura stared at him as if she had forgotten how to breathe, which maybe she had. His thumb brushed the dampness gathered at the corner of her eye. “I know that may not be enough to make you understand why.”
Her lashes trembled, and the moon had finally found its way to her face, casting her in an almost impossibly soft light that was more befitting of her features than any road in Konoha ever had been.
“I can’t tell you why I chose you, Sakura. I don’t have words to tell you what you do to me. But believe that I have,” he murmured. “Then let me spend the rest of my life proving it.”
Sakura made the smallest, most wounded sound he had ever heard from her, and surged forward the last inch between them and buried her face against his shoulder, arms winding around him with a force that would have knocked the breath from anyone else. He held her automatically, one arm coming around her waist, the other cradling the back of her head as if he could shield her from the entire world by sheer instinct alone. She was trembling slightly, enough that he could feel the aftershocks of every carefully contained emotion working through her one by one. Her breath hitched once against his neck, then again, and Sasuke closed his eyes, his grip tightening.
“You say things like that,” she whispered, “and then act like you don’t know how to love me.”
He looked at her, at the tears still clinging to her lashes and the impossible fondness threaded through her exasperation, and something in him eased enough to let a small, real smile show.
“You’re so annoying.”
It was more of a confession than anything spoken thus far, and was enough to let her smile mirror his. The words were spoken to impossibly delicately, steeped with a meaning that rewrote most of her life, including that day by the bench that seemed so very, very far away now.
“I do believe you,” she added softly, “just so you know. I do believe you, even if I get silly sometimes.”
“I know, Sakura,” he said quietly.
“And I love you too,” she rested her head back against his arm, her eyes fluttering closed in a way that had nothing to do with tiredness and everything to do with a deep-seated contentment.
His voice was almost a whisper, so inaudible he almost wasn’t quite sure he had formed the words. “I know.”
If peace looked like this, like pink hair caught in moonlight, and a warm weight tucked against his side, and promises spoken too softly for anyone but her to hear, then maybe this was what Itachi had wanted for him all along.
Not that the world would ever truly become kind, but that, somehow, despite everything, Sasuke still could, and that he could deserve it in return.
With the warmth of her there, it was almost easy to believe.