Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Two years had passed since the end of the Fourth Shinobi War, and although time had been generous enough to erase most of the visible evidence of what had happened, covering old battlefields with new grass and allowing ruined villages to rebuild themselves one street at a time, it had proven considerably less capable of repairing the people who had survived it.

Konoha, at least from a distance, appeared to have recovered remarkably well. Buildings that had once existed only as piles of shattered timber and stone stood again beneath freshly painted roofs, merchants filled the streets from early morning until sunset, and children too young to remember the war ran through crowded marketplaces with the careless certainty of people who had never learned how quickly an ordinary day could become something else entirely. There was laughter again, festivals again, complaints about missions and weather and rising prices, and sometimes, on particularly peaceful mornings, it was almost possible to believe that the village had returned to what it had been before everything changed.

Almost.

Because new buildings could be raised over destroyed ones, roads could be repaired and memorial stones polished until the names carved into them gleamed beneath the sunlight, but none of that changed the fact that there were houses whose doors would never open for the people who had once lived behind them, dinner tables with permanently empty seats, and survivors who had become very good at pretending that continuing to live was the same thing as healing.

Sakura Haruno had become particularly good at pretending.

To anyone who saw her from the outside, she appeared to have adjusted as well as could reasonably be expected. She worked more than ever, continued developing her medical abilities beneath Tsunade's guidance and remained the same dependable presence she had always been whenever someone needed her. She smiled when people spoke to her, laughed when circumstances required it and responded to questions about how she was doing with enough practiced ease that very few people thought to ask twice.

The performance had become so natural that there were moments when Sakura almost believed it herself.

Then she would return home.

The door would close behind her, the noise of the village would disappear, and the silence waiting inside the apartment would remind her that very little had actually changed.

There was an emptiness inside her that she had never learned how to name properly, because grief seemed too simple a word for something that had gradually worked its way into every part of her life. It followed her into the hospital, sat beside her during meals she frequently forgot to finish and waited patiently beside her bed on the nights when exhaustion finally became stronger than memory. Some days it remained quiet enough that she could almost ignore it; on others it expanded until there seemed to be no room inside her for anything else, filling itself with the faces of people she could remember perfectly and voices she knew she would never hear again.

Her mother, whose embrace had once been waiting for her whenever she returned home exhausted from training.

Her father, whose laughter she could still remember with such clarity that occasionally, in those strange moments between sleeping and waking, she expected to hear it from another room.

Friends whose names had been carved into memorials before any of them had been old enough to imagine becoming memories themselves.

And among all those losses was one name that did not belong there, because its owner was still alive.

Sasuke Uchiha.

Perhaps that was what made him more difficult to mourn than the dead.

Sasuke had survived the war. He had been pardoned, returned to Konoha and, however reluctantly, allowed himself to become part of the village again. Sakura had never questioned whether he deserved that second chance; after everything that had happened, she wanted him to have it more than almost anyone. She wanted him to find some version of peace that did not require running from everything he had once loved, wanted him to discover that living did not have to mean carrying every dead Uchiha on his shoulders for the rest of his life, and wanted, with an affection she had long since stopped trying to understand, for him to someday become genuinely happy.

He remained, unfortunately, Sasuke.

Cold when he did not know how to be gentle, distant whenever emotion became inconvenient, stubborn enough to turn even the simplest conversation into an exercise in patience, and so catastrophically incapable of expressing what he felt that Sakura occasionally suspected a direct confrontation with an enemy would be less frightening to him than admitting he cared about another human being.

Once, those qualities had made her chase him harder.

Now they only made her tired.

Losing her parents had not transformed Sakura overnight. There had been no single morning when she had awakened as a different person, no dramatic moment when something inside her shattered loudly enough for everyone around her to hear it.

She had simply begun disappearing from her own life a little at a time.

The hospital made that remarkably easy.

There was always another patient waiting, another surgery requiring an extra pair of hands, another chart that needed reviewing or night shift someone was grateful to surrender. Sakura accepted nearly everything offered to her and volunteered for whatever remained, sometimes working until her chakra reserves had been drained so thoroughly that even climbing the stairs to her apartment became an effort.

People called her dedicated.

Sakura never corrected them.

The truth was that exhaustion had become useful.

When her hands were occupied closing wounds, monitoring chakra pathways or keeping someone alive through the worst night of their life, there was no space left in her mind for anything else. She could not think about her mother while calculating a medication dosage, could not hear her father's voice while directing an emergency team, and could not wonder why she had survived people better than herself while another person's heartbeat depended upon her concentration.

Work did not make the grief disappear.

It merely kept her too tired to feel it properly.

There were nights, however, when even exhaustion failed her, and those were the nights Sakura found herself thinking things she knew she would never permit one of her patients to believe.

Sometimes she wondered whether she had earned the right to grieve at all.

The thought was irrational, medically unhealthy and cruel in precisely the way Sakura would have recognized immediately had it belonged to anyone other than herself, yet knowing that never prevented it from returning whenever she looked at Naruto or Sasuke.

Both of them had learned loneliness before they were old enough to understand what the word meant. Naruto had grown up without ever knowing the comfort of returning home to parents who were waiting for him, while Sasuke had known that comfort only long enough to understand exactly what had been taken away. Their childhoods had been shaped by absences Sakura had never been forced to imagine until adulthood, and when she compared their histories with her own, guilt inevitably followed.

Because Sakura had known what home felt like.

She remembered returning from training with aching muscles and finding her mother waiting to complain about the state of her clothes while simultaneously making certain she had eaten. She remembered her father's ridiculous jokes, arguments over things so insignificant she would have given almost anything to argue about them again, and evenings spent around a dinner table she had once considered completely ordinary.

Naruto had never had those memories.

Sasuke had watched his become ghosts.

And Sakura, despite knowing better, sometimes looked at everything she had once possessed and wondered whether mourning its loss made her selfish.

Perhaps that was why she had become so good at crying quietly.

Perhaps it was also why, somewhere during those two years, she had finally accepted another truth she had spent most of her life refusing to acknowledge.

Sasuke Uchiha was never going to love her.

The realization had not arrived dramatically. There had been no rejection, no argument and no single cruel sentence capable of finally killing the hope she had carried since childhood. Instead, the certainty had accumulated slowly, built from countless small moments until one day Sakura discovered that she no longer possessed the energy required to argue with it.

She still loved him.

That was the inconvenient part.

Some childish part of her had once assumed that accepting he would never return her feelings would somehow make those feelings disappear, as though love were a wound that could be diagnosed correctly and then treated. Instead, it remained exactly where it had always been, quieter now and stripped of most of the hope that had once made it bearable, but no less real.

What had changed was Sakura.

Once, she would have crossed the entire world for Sasuke without asking whether he would ever do the same for her. She would have followed him into darkness, waited through years of silence and accepted almost any amount of pain so long as there remained the smallest possibility that one day he might turn around and finally see her standing there.

She could not do that anymore.

Not because she had stopped loving him, and not because she blamed him for failing to give her something he had never promised.

She was simply tired of chasing someone who had never asked to be followed.

And so, quietly enough that Sasuke himself never seemed to notice, Sakura had begun letting him go.

Letting go, Sakura discovered, was considerably less dramatic than she had once imagined it would be.

There was no moment of sudden clarity, no morning when she woke to find that years of affection had conveniently disappeared while she slept, and certainly no miraculous point at which looking at Sasuke stopped producing that familiar, instinctive ache somewhere beneath her ribs. She simply stopped arranging her life around the possibility of him. She stopped finding unnecessary reasons to remain at the hospital on days she knew he might come for a check-up, stopped lingering whenever she happened to see him across the village, stopped convincing herself that his occasional visits meant something more than what they were, and, perhaps most importantly, stopped waiting for a future he had never promised her.

Sasuke did not appear to notice.

That should not have surprised her, and most of the time it did not, but there were still moments when the realization hurt in ways she was embarrassed to admit.

For most of her life, Sakura had occupied so much emotional space with him that withdrawing from it had felt enormous to her, almost like removing a piece of herself and leaving the absence exposed for everyone to see, yet Sasuke continued moving through his days as though nothing had changed. Perhaps that was proof that she had finally made the right decision. Perhaps loving someone also meant understanding when your presence in their life was something they could take or leave without consequence.

Whatever the answer was, Sakura had stopped searching for it.

There were other things inside her that frightened her considerably more.

She had spent enough years studying medicine to recognize illness even when the patient happened to be herself, and although she had tried for months to disguise what was happening beneath exhaustion, grief and an increasingly unreasonable workload, there was eventually no clinical explanation left for her to hide behind.

Depression.

The word was almost insulting in its simplicity.

It was too small for the heaviness that sometimes made opening her eyes in the morning feel like an obligation she had never agreed to, too ordinary for the nights she spent staring at the ceiling while wondering how a person could be surrounded by people and still feel so completely removed from the world, and far too clean for the thoughts that had gradually begun appearing in the darkest corners of her mind.

At first they had frightened her.

Later, that frightened her more, because eventually they stopped.

There were days when the possibility of simply not waking up seemed less terrifying than the certainty that morning would arrive and demand another performance from her, another smile, another shift at the hospital, another evening spent returning to an apartment where no one was waiting. Sakura knew exactly what she would have told a patient who admitted such thoughts to her. She knew the questions she would ask, the warning signs she would look for and the treatment she would recommend without hesitation.

Knowing all of that had not prevented her from sitting alone in her apartment one evening with a small glass vial resting in her palm.

The liquid inside had been perfectly clear.

That was what she remembered most clearly afterward.

Something capable of ending a human life should have looked more threatening, she thought. It should have been black or red or corrosive enough to burn through the glass containing it, anything that might have reflected the enormity of what she had been considering. Instead, it had looked almost like water, shifting harmlessly inside the vial whenever her fingers trembled.

Sakura had sat beside the window for what might have been minutes or an hour, unable to tell the difference, staring at it while an unsettling calm settled over her.

She had not been crying.

She had not been angry.

She had simply been tired.

And perhaps that had been the most frightening part of all.

In the end, it had not been hope that made her put the vial down, because hope had felt painfully inaccessible that night, nor had it been fear of death or some sudden realization that everything would eventually become better.

It had been pride.

Stubborn, unreasonable, deeply ingrained shinobi pride.

A shinobi dies fighting.

The words had surfaced from somewhere in her memory with almost ridiculous timing, and Sakura had stared at the vial for another long moment before a bitter laugh escaped her.

If she was going to die, she had thought, then she refused to let it happen sitting alone beside a window because grief had finally exhausted her enough to surrender.

So she had uncorked the vial, crossed the small distance to the windowsill and poured every last drop into the soil surrounding the miserable cactus she had somehow managed to keep alive despite regularly forgetting it existed.

The cactus died three days later.

Sakura considered that a fair trade.

By the following morning she had already returned to work, wearing the same composed expression everyone expected from her, and no one asked what had happened because no one knew there was anything to ask about. Those closest to her had noticed that she had changed after the war, of course, but grief offered such a convenient explanation that most people accepted it without looking deeper. They assumed she needed time, assumed the hospital gave her purpose and, with the kindest intentions possible, gave her space.

Sakura became very good at filling that space with work.

Still, life had not become entirely empty.

There were moments—brief, unexpected and increasingly precious—when something inside her loosened enough to remind her that happiness had not disappeared completely.

Naruto was responsible for many of them.

More specifically, Naruto and Hinata.

Whatever had begun changing between the two of them after the war had continued developing with the agonizing slowness of two people who were apparently capable of facing world-ending enemies but completely helpless when required to discuss their feelings. Naruto no longer ate ramen alone nearly as often as he once had, because Hinata somehow appeared beside him with increasing regularity, and although he continued insisting there was absolutely nothing unusual about this, Sakura had watched him look at the Hyūga heiress often enough to know better.

Sometimes Sasuke joined them.

And on the increasingly rare occasions when Naruto succeeded in dragging Sakura away from the hospital before she volunteered for another night shift, the four of them would sit together long enough for Sakura to remember what Team Seven had once felt like before war, betrayal and adulthood complicated everything.

Those evenings had become rare enough that she noticed every one.

Tonight was one of them.

The strangest part was that Sakura herself had suggested it.

Naruto had stared at her for so long after she proposed drinks that she eventually lifted an eyebrow and asked whether he had forgotten how invitations worked.

“You want to go out?”

“That is generally what ‘we should go out for drinks tonight’ means, yes.”

“With us?”

Sakura had looked around theatrically as though searching for another Naruto standing nearby.

“No, the other loud blond idiot I spend most of my life treating for preventable injuries.”

Naruto's eyes had narrowed.

“There is no other loud blond idiot.”

“Then I suppose I mean you.”

His suspicion had only deepened.

“Sakura-chan, are you sick?”

She had nearly hit him.

Nearly.

Instead, several hours later, she found herself sitting in a warm izakaya with Naruto on one side of the table and Sasuke on the other, watching the two surviving members of Team Seven engage in what had somehow become an intensely competitive argument over which of them possessed the greater alcohol tolerance.

It was absurd. Entirely childish. And, despite herself, Sakura was enjoying every second of it.

“You're slowing down,” Naruto announced, pointing accusingly at Sasuke with the grave authority of a man whose words had already begun running into one another. “I can tell.”

Sasuke looked at the nearly empty bottle beside Naruto before returning his gaze to him.

“You can't tell where the table ends.”

“I know exactly where the table ends.”

“You tried to put your glass on your knee.”

Naruto looked down at his knee.

“That was tactical.”

Sakura covered her mouth, but the laugh escaped anyway.

Both men turned toward her.

For half a second she felt strangely exposed, because the sound had surprised her almost as much as it appeared to surprise them.

Then Naruto grinned.

“There! Sakura-chan agrees with me.”

“I absolutely do not.”

“You laughed.”

“At you.”

“Same thing.”

“It really isn't.”

Naruto muttered something deeply offended beneath his breath, while Sasuke lifted his drink again and Sakura found herself smiling into her glass.

A real smile.

Not the polite one she offered colleagues in the hospital corridors, not the reassuring one she gave frightened patients before difficult procedures, and not the carefully constructed expression she had learned to wear whenever someone asked whether she was doing all right. For several minutes she was simply Sakura again, sitting with two boys who had once driven her insane on a daily basis and somehow become two of the most important people in her life.

The realization hurt almost immediately. Because she was going to miss this.

The thought arrived without warning and settled heavily beneath the warmth of the alcohol, and Sakura's smile softened as she looked at Naruto, who was still attempting to defend the strategic importance of balancing alcohol on one's knee.

She would miss his laugh. She would miss the ridiculous confidence with which he could say something objectively stupid and somehow make everyone else wonder whether they had misunderstood him.

She would miss the way he filled silence simply by existing.

Her eyes shifted toward Sasuke. She would miss his dry remarks too, although she would rather die than tell him that.

She would miss the barely visible movement at the corner of his mouth whenever Naruto embarrassed himself, the quiet hn he somehow expected everyone around him to translate into complete sentences, and even the infuriating expression he wore whenever he decided the rest of humanity was being unnecessarily loud.

She would miss Team Seven.

Whatever damaged, strange, incomplete version of it they had managed to rebuild. For one dangerous moment, Sakura wanted to change her mind.

The mission had not begun yet. She could still refuse.

She could report to the Hokage in the morning and say that after reconsideration she was no longer willing to accept an assignment expected to keep her away from Konoha for an indefinite amount of time. There would be consequences, questions and perhaps disappointment, but none of those things were impossible to survive.

She could stay.

Tomorrow evening she could still be here.

Next week Naruto could annoy her into eating ramen again, Hinata could pretend not to notice Sakura noticing the way she looked at him, Sasuke could continue being emotionally impossible from a safe and irritating distance, and Sakura could return to the hospital and continue pretending that surviving each day was enough.

The temptation lasted longer than she wanted to admit. Then she remembered why she had accepted the mission in the first place. Her decision remained unchanged. So instead of reconsidering it, Sakura allowed herself to watch them.

Properly.

She memorized Naruto's ridiculous expression, the slight crease between Sasuke's brows, the warm lantern light reflecting against familiar faces and the particular cadence of their voices when they argued over something that did not matter. She stored every detail somewhere inside herself with the strange, deliberate care of someone packing possessions before leaving a home she did not know whether she would ever see again.

Then, before she could lose her nerve, Sakura reached into her bag and placed a small velvet box on the table.

“Naruto-kun.”

The effect was immediate.

Naruto stopped speaking.

Sasuke's glass paused halfway to his mouth.

For perhaps the first time that evening, the table became completely silent.

Naruto blinked at her several times, his alcohol-flushed face slowly twisting into bewilderment before he turned toward Sasuke with the grave concern of someone experiencing a medical emergency.

“Teme.”

Sasuke's eyes narrowed.

“What?”

“I think I've had too much.”

“That realization came several drinks too late.”

“No, seriously.” Naruto pointed at Sakura without taking his eyes off Sasuke. “I'm hallucinating.”

Sakura folded her arms.

“You're pointing at me.”

“Exactly! Sakura-chan just called me Naruto-kun.”

His expression became increasingly disturbed the longer he considered it.

“That's never happened.”

“It just did,” Sakura said.

Naruto ignored her.

“That is your thing.”

Sasuke's gaze sharpened slightly.

Naruto, oblivious to danger as usual, continued.

“She's supposed to say Sasuke-kun. Not Naruto-kun. That's weird.”

For reasons Sasuke could not have explained even to himself, hearing Naruto say it produced an unpleasant tightening somewhere in his chest.

Because Naruto was right.

That honorific had once belonged almost exclusively to him.

Sasuke-kun.

Sakura had said it thousands of times throughout their childhood, sometimes brightly enough to irritate him before she had even finished speaking, sometimes angrily when he deliberately ignored her, and sometimes so softly that the sound had remained in his memory long after he stopped understanding why.

He could remember hearing it in hospital rooms while her hands moved carefully over injuries he pretended did not hurt.

He could remember hearing it before missions.

After missions, across training grounds, at the gates of the village. It had once been so constant that he had barely registered it.

Only now did Sasuke realize he could not remember the last time she had called him that.

The realization was strangely uncomfortable. In fact, now that he thought about it, he could not remember the last time he had spoken to Sakura for longer than a few minutes.

When he first returned to Konoha, they had seen one another frequently while she supervised parts of his recovery, and even after the hospital discharged him, he had continued appearing every week or so under the entirely reasonable justification that she was familiar with his injuries.

Then the visits had become less frequent. At some point they had stopped entirely.

He had not noticed when. Sasuke's eyes returned to Sakura and for the first time that night, he truly looked at her. The warm lighting was forgiving, but not enough.

She had lost weight.

Too much.

Her face was thinner than he remembered, the soft fullness in her cheeks diminished enough to make the angles beneath them more noticeable, and faint shadows rested beneath her eyes despite whatever effort she had made to conceal them. There was nothing immediately alarming about her appearance, nothing another person might have recognized without knowing what she had looked like before, yet Sasuke knew.

Or perhaps he should have known.

How long had she looked like this? The question irritated him because he had no answer. While Sasuke watched her, Sakura opened the velvet box.

For one ridiculous second, an entirely unreasonable thought crossed his mind.

Is she proposing to Naruto?

His fingers tightened around his glass. Then his own stupidity caught up with him. What the hell was wrong with him?

That made absolutely no sense.

Naruto was—

Naruto.

And Sakura—

Sasuke stopped the thought before it could finish forming, increasingly convinced that Naruto was not the only person at the table who had consumed too much alcohol. Sakura turned the open box toward Naruto. Inside rested an elegant silver bracelet.

“I want you to give this to Hinata.”

Naruto stared at it.

Then at Sakura.

Then back at the bracelet.

“And when you do,” she continued, the corners of her mouth lifting, “I want you to ask her to be your girlfriend.”

Naruto stopped functioning. Sasuke could practically see the moment every coherent thought abandoned his brain. The color began at his ears before spreading rapidly across his face.

“S-Sakura-chan, what are you talking about?” Naruto sputtered. “Hinata and I aren't—we're not—we're just friends!”

Sakura's expression became dangerously innocent.

“Oh?”

“Yes!”

“Just friends?”

“Exactly!”

She tilted her head.

“Interesting.”

Naruto narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Sakura-chan.”

“I simply wasn't aware you regularly wanted to kiss your friends.”

Silence descended over the table. Naruto's mouth fell open.

Sasuke slowly lowered his glass.

Sakura waited.

The resulting explosion was spectacular.

“W-WHERE DID THAT COME FROM, SAKURA-CHAAAN?!”

Naruto shot upright so quickly that his chair scraped violently across the floor, attracting several irritated looks from neighboring tables as he waved both hands in frantic denial.

Sakura laughed.

She could not stop herself. The sound came bright and unrestrained, bending her forward slightly as Naruto became increasingly horrified, and for a few seconds the heaviness she had carried into the izakaya disappeared so completely that she almost forgot it had ever existed.

“You should really stop getting injured,” she managed between laughs.

“What does that have to do with anything?!”

“Anesthesia.”

Naruto froze. Sakura wiped beneath one eye where laughter had gathered moisture.

“It doesn't agree with you.”

His expression changed slowly and horribly.

“No.”

“Mm.”

“No, no, no.”

“You become extremely talkative when you're waking up after surgery.”

Naruto stared at her in absolute horror.

“Sakura-chan.”

“You're lucky I was the only person in the room.”

He buried his face in his hands. Sakura laughed again.

Across the table, Sasuke looked down before either of them could notice the faint movement at the corner of his mouth. For a little while longer, everything felt normal. And Sakura allowed herself to enjoy it.

Because there were still things she needed to tell them before the night ended.

Naruto eventually recovered enough from his humiliation to lower his hands, although the color across his face suggested that recovery was perhaps too generous a word for what had actually happened, and he regarded Sakura with the wounded suspicion of a man who had just discovered that a trusted medical professional had been collecting deeply compromising information while he was unconscious.

“You weren't supposed to remember that.”

Sakura lifted her glass to her lips, hiding another smile behind it. “That's not generally how memory works.”

“You could have pretended.”

“I did. For months.”

“That makes it worse.”

“I thought it was considerate.”

Naruto muttered something about needing a new doctor, although his attention had already drifted back toward the bracelet resting inside the velvet box, and Sakura watched the indignation gradually leave his face as he reached toward it. For all the embarrassment he had displayed the moment Hinata's name entered the conversation, there was an unmistakable softness in the way he studied the gift, turning the bracelet carefully between his fingers as though suddenly aware that it represented something considerably more serious than Sakura teasing him over something he had confessed under anesthesia.

“You really think she'd like it?” he asked.

Sakura's expression softened. “I know she would.”

Naruto looked down again, running his thumb carefully over the silver before glancing toward her with considerably more uncertainty than Sakura was accustomed to seeing from him. “And you really think I should ask her?”

“I think you should stop making that poor girl wait for you to realize something everyone else figured out months ago.”

“I figured it out.”

Sakura raised an eyebrow.

Naruto shifted in his seat. “Mostly.”

“Impressive.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I.”

For a moment Naruto appeared prepared to defend himself, but whatever argument he had intended to make disappeared before reaching his mouth. He looked back at the bracelet instead, and Sakura could almost see him remembering every small interaction he had spent months pretending meant nothing: Hinata waiting for him after missions, the quiet meals that somehow became increasingly frequent, the way she listened to even his most ridiculous stories as though he were telling her something important, and the unmistakable warmth that entered his face whenever someone mentioned her name.

Sakura knew that expression because she had worn versions of it herself for years.

That thought should have hurt more than it did.

Instead, when her eyes moved briefly toward Sasuke, she found that the familiar ache remained strangely quiet. He was sitting across from her with one elbow resting loosely beside his glass, appearing only marginally interested in Naruto's romantic crisis, but Sakura knew him well enough to recognize that he was listening to every word.

She wondered, not for the first time, whether Sasuke had ever understood how completely she had once loved him.

Probably not.

Perhaps it was better that way.

Naruto finally closed the velvet box and slipped it carefully into his pocket, treating it with far more care than Sakura had ever seen him give anything that was not ramen or a mission involving people he loved.

“Fine,” he said.

Sakura blinked. “Fine?”

“I'll give it to her.”

“And?”

“And I'll talk to her.”

Sakura stared at him.

Naruto frowned. “What?”

“You're going to have to do better than ‘talk to her.’ You talk to her every day.”

“I'll ask her.”

“Ask her what?”

His eyes narrowed. “You know what.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Sakura-chan.”

“Naruto-kun.”

He visibly flinched at the honorific again, which only made Sakura's smile widen.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “I'll ask Hinata to be my girlfriend.”

“There. Was that so difficult?”

“Yes.”

Sakura laughed softly, and Naruto shook his head as though she were the unreasonable person at the table. The exchange might have ended there if Sakura had not reached into her bag a second time, but the movement immediately caught Naruto's attention, and when she placed a folded envelope beside his empty glass, his amusement faded.

This time there was no velvet box. His name was written across the front in Sakura's handwriting.

Naruto looked at it, then at her.

“What is this?”

“A letter.”

“I can see that.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Sakura-chan.”

The warning in his voice was mild, but Sakura recognized the concern beneath it and deliberately kept her expression light.

“Don't open it now.”

That only made his suspicion worse. “Why not?”

“Because I don't want to sit here while you read something I wrote to you.”

“You've given me mission reports before.”

“This isn't a mission report.”

Naruto's hand stopped halfway toward the envelope.

Across the table, Sasuke's attention shifted fully toward Sakura.

She noticed.

Of course she noticed.

Sakura had spent too many years learning every minute change in Sasuke's expression not to recognize when his indifference had become an act, but tonight she had no intention of helping him understand something he had never bothered to ask.

Naruto looked between the letter and Sakura. “What's in it?”

“Things I wanted to say.”

“You're sitting right here.”

“I noticed.”

“Then say them.”

A small smile touched her mouth, although it did not quite reach her eyes. “Some things are easier to write.”

Naruto continued staring at her, and Sakura knew she had made a mistake when the playful confusion in his face began giving way to something more serious. Naruto might have been oblivious about romance and incapable of recognizing subtlety when it was directed at him, but he understood people he loved with an instinct that had always been far sharper than anyone gave him credit for.

“Why are you giving me this now?”

Sakura reached for her drink. “Because I remembered to bring it.”

“That's not an answer.”

“It is technically an answer.”

“Sakura-channn.”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“Be happy.”

He looked at her as though she had begun speaking another language.

Sakura smiled. “I'm serious. Stop waiting for everything to become perfect before you let yourself have the things you want. Give Hinata the bracelet, tell her how you feel, and when she inevitably says yes, don't spend six months wondering whether she really meant it.”

Naruto's face reddened again, although this time the embarrassment failed to erase his concern.

“And stop acting like you have unlimited time to tell people what they mean to you,” Sakura added, her voice becoming quieter despite herself. “None of us do.”

Something changed in Sasuke's expression.Sakura saw it from the corner of her eye. Naruto saw only her.

“You're really freaking me out.”

“I know.”

“Then stop saying creepy things.”

A genuine laugh escaped her. “Fine.”

“Seriously”

“I said fine.”

Something had begun bothering Sasuke from the moment Sakura placed the letter on the table, and the feeling only worsened as the conversation continued. It was the way she was speaking.

The gifts.

The letter.

The advice about not waiting to tell people what they meant to you. Individually, none of those things meant anything.

Together, they irritated him.

Sasuke watched Sakura while Naruto continued protesting some accusation she had made about Hinata, and the uncomfortable awareness from earlier returned. She looked tired. Not ordinary tiredness after a difficult shift or several days without proper sleep, but something older and more deeply settled, something that remained even when she laughed.

He should have noticed sooner. The thought came uninvited.

Sasuke disliked it immediately.

He had never asked Sakura to organize her life around him, and she had finally stopped doing so; logically, that should have made things simpler between them. Yet sitting across from her now, listening to her speak about leaving as though she had already put some invisible distance between herself and Konoha, Sasuke discovered that he did not like the result nearly as much as he should have.

At some point, Sakura had stepped away and he had not noticed until she was almost gone.

By the time they try to finally left the izakaya, Naruto had reached the stage of drunkenness where he seemed convinced that walking in a straight line was an unreasonable demand being imposed upon him personally. Sakura slipped the strap of her white bag over her shoulder and caught him by the wrist before he could stumble into the edge of another table.

“Come on.”

“I can walk.”

“You just apologized to a chair.”

“It was in my way.”

“It was sitting there.”

“Exactly.”

He complained under his breath like an overgrown child being dragged home past his bedtime, grumbling at every step, yet he made no real effort to resist; he was far too drunk to support himself properly, and with every uneven step his weight leaned more heavily against her until it became obvious that she was struggling to keep him upright.

Without saying a word, Sasuke moved to Naruto's other side, hooked one of Naruto's arms over his own shoulders, and silently took half of the burden from Sakura. She did not turn to look at him or thank him, but from the corner of his eye he caught the faintest upward curve at the corner of her lips, something too small and unconscious to quite be called a smile, and for some reason he could neither identify nor dismiss, the sight of it made something tighten faintly inside his chest.

After paying for the drinks, the three of them stepped out into Konoha's quiet streets, now blanketed in darkness. Since Naruto lived the farthest away and was in no condition to make it across the village without either collapsing in the street or dragging both of them down with him, they decided to take him to Sasuke's house instead.

The walk was painfully slow, made worse by the alcohol still lingering unpleasantly at the edges of Sasuke's thoughts and by Naruto's almost complete refusal—or inability—to cooperate with the two people attempting to carry him. Every few steps the blond lurched unexpectedly, mumbling incoherent nonsense beneath his breath and nearly taking all three of them down before Sakura and Sasuke managed to steady him again, yet despite Naruto's drunken rambling and the uneven rhythm of their footsteps against the road, the night surrounding them remained strangely peaceful.

Everything else was silent.

Normally, Sasuke would have preferred it that way. He was not a man who required conversation merely to fill empty space, nor had he ever understood the impulse other people seemed to have to speak simply because silence had lasted longer than they considered comfortable. Words had always felt unnecessary to him unless they served some purpose, and he had spent most of his life perfectly content allowing other people to exhaust themselves trying to draw conversation from him.

Tonight, however, the silence stretching between himself and Sakura felt wrong in a way he could not explain.

His thoughts wandered, almost against his will, toward the countless conversations Sakura used to have with him, conversations that had hardly required his participation at all. She would tell him about her day, about the hospital, about Naruto, about patients he had never met and coworkers whose names he barely remembered, about things so ordinary that by every reasonable measure they should have bored him, while he contributed little more than an occasional nod or a quiet hn. Somehow, she had never seemed to mind carrying every conversation on her own.

Tonight she had nothing to say.

Before Sasuke realized what he was doing, the words escaped him.

“I'll come by the hospital tomorrow.”

For a brief second, he almost wondered if someone else had spoken. He was almost never the one to break a silence first, particularly not one he had done nothing to create, and perhaps that was why Sakura did not react immediately. It took her a moment to realize that he had actually addressed her, and when she finally turned her head toward him, surprise flickered briefly across her tired features before softening into curiosity.

Sasuke was already looking at her.

His expression, as always, revealed nothing.

Calm, unreadable, and beautiful in that distant way he had always been beautiful to her.

I wonder... will I ever see that face soften with genuine affection?

The thought drifted quietly through Sakura's mind before she could stop it, and she immediately hated herself a little for allowing it to appear at all. She did not mean affection for her; she had long since given up wishing for that. Whatever foolish part of her had once believed that patience and devotion might eventually make Sasuke look at her the way she had always looked at him had been buried beneath too many years and too much grief to survive intact.

She simply wanted to see him happy someday.

She wanted to see him smile because he wanted to rather than because someone had surprised the expression out of him, wanted to see him love someone without carrying the weight of everything he had lost across his shoulders, and wanted, perhaps selfishly, to know that after she was gone there would eventually be someone capable of reaching the places inside him she never had.

Swallowing the lump beginning to form in her throat, Sakura forced herself back into the present.

“Is something wrong with your arm?”

Her voice came out softer than she intended, almost fragile beneath the quiet of the street.

Sasuke frowned slightly. “No.”

After a brief pause, he added, “You told me to come back for another check-up two months ago.”

Realization immediately crossed Sakura's face, and she lifted a hand to her forehead with a quiet sigh as a small, embarrassed smile appeared on her lips.

“I'm sorry, Sasuke. I completely forgot.”

She let out a soft laugh at herself before shaking her head, although the amusement faded almost as quickly as it had appeared.

“And... I'm sorry, but I won't be there tomorrow.”

The words lingered between them in the cool night air.

“When you arrive, just ask them to send you to Shizune-san instead.”

She smiled again, and there was nothing visibly unusual about the expression; it was gentle and peaceful, the sort of smile Sakura had given him countless times before, yet for reasons Sasuke could not explain, something about it felt strangely like a farewell.

His brows drew together almost imperceptibly.

“I'll come another day,” he said after a moment. “A day when you're there.”

The words left his mouth before he had the chance to reconsider them, and the fact that he had said them at all irritated him almost immediately. The entire night irritated him—the silence, the alcohol clouding his thoughts, the strange heaviness pressing against his chest, even the road itself, which seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of them as though they had been walking for hours without getting any closer to his house.

Sakura lowered her eyes.

“I'm afraid that won't be possible, Sasuke.”

There was something rough about her voice now, something painfully restrained beneath its softness, as though every word required more strength than it reasonably should.

“I'm leaving tomorrow morning.”

She paused briefly before forcing herself to continue.

“It's a mission... and I don't think I'll be coming back for a long time.”

She offered him a small smile that never quite reached her eyes.

“So you really should let Shizune-san examine your arm. She's far more experienced than I am.”

Another brief pause passed before she added, more quietly, “You can trust her.”

“Hn.”

That was all Sasuke said.

He wanted to ask where she was going, who she would be traveling with, why she believed she would be gone for so long and why every sentence leaving her mouth sounded more like goodbye than an explanation of another mission. The questions circled endlessly somewhere behind his thoughts, but none of them found their way past his lips, because asking questions had always required admitting that he wanted the answers.

Instead, he remained silent.

As always.

By the time they reached his house, Naruto was practically asleep on his feet. Sakura accepted the keys from Sasuke and unlocked the front door while he kept Naruto upright, and together they somehow managed to drag the blond inside before wrestling his dead weight all the way to the guest room. When they finally lowered him onto the bed, Sakura carefully adjusted his position and pulled the blanket to his shoulders with the same instinctive gentleness she showed every patient entrusted to her care.

She lingered for only a second, smiling faintly at the sight of Naruto already snoring without a care in the world, before Sasuke stepped out of the room. Sakura followed him a moment later, quietly closing the guest-room door behind her, and once again silence settled between them.

Her eyes wandered through the house almost absentmindedly.

There was barely any furniture and almost no decoration, nothing unnecessary and very little that suggested someone actually lived there rather than merely returned there at the end of each day. The emptiness did not come from anything obviously missing; it came instead from the absence of all those insignificant things people accumulated simply because they loved them, because someone had given them as gifts, because they carried memories, or because they made a room feel less like a collection of walls and more like somewhere a person belonged.

In many ways, the house resembled its owner.

Cold, quiet and beautiful, yet almost impossible to call warm.

The last time Sakura had been here was nearly a year ago, and nothing had changed since then. The walls were still bare, the rooms still carried a faint echo whenever someone moved through them, and the same loneliness she remembered seemed to linger in the air despite Sasuke apparently never noticing it at all.

After losing her parents, Sakura had discovered that she could no longer continue living in the house where every room reminded her of what she had lost. She had moved somewhere new, somewhere untouched by those memories, and had spent months trying to turn it into a place that actually felt like home. Framed photographs eventually covered the walls, little ornaments appeared across the bookshelves, and a handful of houseplants—most of which she occasionally forgot to water—added small patches of green to the rooms.

It was not perfect, but it was warm, lived in and, in all the small ways that mattered, loved.

The irony was almost laughable.

She had somehow managed to fill her home with warmth while her own heart remained frozen solid beneath grief so deep that on the worst days it whispered that she might be better off dead.

Her gaze lingered on Sasuke's living room for one final moment before she quietly exhaled. She had brought Naruto home safely, and there was nothing left for her to do here, so without another word she turned and slowly walked toward the front door.

Sasuke watched her go without knowing what he was supposed to do.

For one absurd moment he wondered whether he should offer her something to drink, then whether he should ask her to stay for a while, and finally whether he should walk her home. The last thought disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared. Her apartment was only a few minutes away, and walking her there would be pointless.

Before he could decide whether he should say anything at all, Sakura glanced around the living room one last time.

“I think you should buy a painting,” she said thoughtfully. “Or maybe a plant. Something... alive.”

Her eyes drifted over the bare walls.

“This house feels so empty. You should try making it feel a little warmer.”

“It doesn't need to be warmer.”

The answer came more sharply than he intended.

“It's not empty. It's practical.”

The words lingered between them.

Sakura simply smiled.

She did not argue with him, did not tease him or insist that he was wrong the way she once would have. Instead, she gave a small nod as though accepting his answer for exactly what it was, slipped on her shoes and quietly stepped outside without even saying goodnight.

Sasuke stood frozen in the doorway until she disappeared into the darkness, walking toward the apartment that stood only a short distance away, and only after the door clicked shut did an unfamiliar feeling settle heavily inside his chest.

Regret.

He frowned at himself before walking over to the window, where he watched the faint silhouette of pink hair moving beneath the streetlights until it finally vanished around the corner.

Only then did he drag himself back to his room and collapse onto the bed without bothering to change his clothes.

Sleep came quickly, helped along by exhaustion and the alcohol still lingering in his system, but it did not last.

A sharp knock echoed through the silent house and dragged him from shallow, restless sleep. Sasuke opened his eyes and blinked at the clock beside his bed.

4:00 a.m.

Naruto's unmistakable snoring drifted from the guest room as Sasuke reluctantly climbed out of bed and made his way toward the front door, irritation already gathering across his features.

Who would come here at this hour?

Certainly not anyone he wanted to see.

He opened the door and froze.

Sakura stood quietly beneath the pale glow of the porch light.

She had already changed into her black mission uniform, and the large travel pack slung over her shoulder was considerably bigger than the one she usually carried. In her hands rested a carefully wrapped canvas.

She smiled when she saw him.

“I'm sorry for waking you.”

Her voice carried an excitement that somehow sounded forced.

“I was just about to leave for my mission, and then I realized...” She laughed softly at herself. “I bought something for Naruto, but I never gave you anything.”

She lifted the wrapped painting toward him.

“So... this is for you.”

Sasuke looked from the painting to Sakura and then back again.

Something was wrong.

The feeling had been bothering him all night, ever since dinner, yet no matter how many times it returned, he had been unable to identify its source. It was not anything Sakura had said, not the mission and not even the sadness he occasionally caught behind her eyes.

It was something missing.

Something that had quietly disappeared without him noticing.

Sakura continued holding the painting toward him, patiently waiting while the seconds passed between them, until eventually she let out a small, almost embarrassed laugh.

“I guess you don't want it after all.”

The disappointment in her voice was so faint that most people would have missed it.

Sasuke did not.

Almost instinctively, he reached forward and took the painting from her hands.

“If you don't like it...” she murmured, lowering her eyes for a moment, “...you can throw it away. I won't mind.”

Sasuke frowned.

Why would she even say something like that?

He studied her face again, noticing the almost imperceptible tremor of her lips and finding himself unable to decide whether it came from the cold predawn air or from the effort she appeared to be making not to cry.

“We're friends.”

The words left him quietly, yet with a certainty that surprised even himself.

“I won't throw it away.”

For a heartbeat, Sakura simply stared at him.

Then her smile grew brighter.

It was beautiful.

And unbearably sad.

She reached out and rested her hand lightly against his shoulder.

“You should spend more time with people, Sasuke-kun.”

Her voice was barely above a whisper now.

“You can't keep shutting yourself away from the world forever.”

A gentle breeze lifted several loose strands of her pink hair as she continued.

“Talk more. Smile more. Find something that makes you happy.”

She glanced past him into the empty house.

“Maybe pick up a hobby. You'd probably be good at pottery... you've always had incredibly steady hands.”

A quiet laugh escaped her.

“Fill your days with things you love instead of spending every evening alone in this house.”

Her fingers slowly slipped away from his shoulder.

“I wanted this painting to be the beginning of something new.”

She looked into his eyes one last time.

“I hope...”

Her voice faltered almost imperceptibly.

“...I hope one day you find the place where you truly belong.”

Sasuke's brows furrowed as his eyes moved from the hand that had rested against his shoulder to the woman smiling at him.

He had never truly understood Sakura, and most of the time he had simply chosen not to try. People were complicated, feelings even more so, and ignoring both had always been considerably easier than attempting to understand something he had spent most of his life avoiding.

But tonight he was trying.

And somehow, he understood her less than ever.

Slowly, almost instinctively, he stepped backward, allowing the remaining distance between them to widen.

Sakura withdrew her hand immediately.

“I don't need that advice.”

The words came out colder than he intended, and he watched the smile on her face falter ever so slightly before she carefully pieced it back together, as though she had grown accustomed to hiding disappointment before anyone could notice.

For one fleeting moment, Sasuke hated himself.

Not because he believed she was right and not because he regretted rejecting her advice, but because that was not what he had wanted to say.

He wanted to ask why she was speaking like this, why every sentence sounded less like encouragement and more like a farewell, why she kept looking at him as though she were trying to memorize his face, and why she was smiling with tears hidden behind her eyes.

Most of all, he wanted to ask her one simple question.

Why are you talking as if you're walking toward your own death?

The thought struck him so suddenly that he almost recoiled from it.

No.

That was ridiculous.

Sakura and death were two words that simply did not belong in the same sentence. She was one of the strongest shinobi in the village, a medical ninja whose entire life had been built around saving others.

She was not someone who lost her own.

Silence stretched between them one last time.

Then Sakura smiled, small and gentle, the kind of smile that barely reached her eyes.

“Sayonara,Sasuke-kun.”

Sayonara.

Not ja ne.

Not mata ne.

That was the last word Sakura Haruno ever said to him.

She turned before he could answer, before he could stop her and before he could ask even one of the questions trapped uselessly inside his chest, while Sasuke remained standing in the doorway with the painting held in his hands, watching her walk away until the sound of her footsteps disappeared into the sleeping village.

Only then did he quietly close the door.

The house felt impossibly silent.

Without bothering to unwrap the gift, he carried it into his bedroom and carelessly slid it beneath his bed before dropping onto the mattress with a tired sigh.

Sleep never came.

His mind kept replaying every strange thing she had said that night, every smile that had failed to reach her eyes and every sentence that somehow felt heavier now than it had only minutes earlier, until something he had failed to notice at the door finally surfaced in his thoughts.

His eyes opened.

Sasuke-kun.

She had called him that. For the first time in what felt like forever. He had not even noticed.

A frustrated breath escaped him as he let himself fall back onto the bed, throwing an arm across his eyes. Even after all these years, Sakura still possessed an unbelievable talent for getting under his skin.

“...How annoying.”

Yet for reasons he could not explain, the words carried far less irritation than they used to.