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The first thing Sasuke noticed when he stepped through the gates of Konoha was that no one was waiting for him.
It should not have meant anything, because Sakura had never made a habit of meeting him at the gates whenever he returned from a mission, particularly when neither of them could ever be entirely certain what day or hour he would arrive, and there had been countless occasions when he had walked into the village beneath the afternoon sun or in the middle of the night and found nothing waiting for him except familiar streets and the quiet knowledge that somewhere beyond them there was a house in which Sakura would eventually look up from whatever she was doing and realize that he had come home. Still, there was something about the emptiness that afternoon that caught at him before he could reason it away, some instinctive discomfort that settled beneath his ribs as he passed beneath the enormous wooden gates and acknowledged the shinobi stationed there with a brief nod.
The mission had taken seventeen days longer than expected.
There had been complications near the border, followed by another investigation that Kakashi had requested he complete before returning, and although Sasuke had sent word ahead when he could, communication had been unreliable enough that he had no idea whether Sakura knew he was arriving today. He had been away for nearly six weeks, which was not particularly unusual, and there was therefore no logical reason for the unease beginning to crawl slowly along the back of his neck.
He told himself that Sakura was working.
It was the middle of the afternoon, after all, and Sakura spent more time at the hospital than she did almost anywhere else. She was probably halfway through a surgery, or arguing with one of the administrators about funding, or standing over some unfortunate junior medic who had made the mistake of attempting to work after an eighteen-hour shift. Perhaps she had not even received his most recent message yet. Perhaps she thought he would return tomorrow.
There were dozens of perfectly reasonable explanations for why Sakura was not there, and Sasuke considered all of them as he walked farther into the village, although none of them managed to quiet the strange feeling that had begun in his stomach.
He had almost reached the road leading toward their house when someone called his name.
“Sasuke!”
He stopped and turned.
Naruto was moving toward him from the direction of the Hokage Tower, and there was something wrong with his face.
It was not panic, exactly, nor was it grief, and Sasuke would remember later that this should have reassured him, but in that first instant he saw only the abrupt way Naruto stopped several feet away and the unmistakable hesitation that crossed his expression.
Sasuke felt the world narrow around him.
“What happened?”
Naruto's mouth opened, and for one terrible second nothing came out.That second would return to Sasuke many times afterward.
It would become one of those moments his mind refused to leave untouched, something he would revisit in the darkness long after everyone else had decided that the danger had passed, because there had been a fraction of time in which he had stood beneath an ordinary afternoon sky and understood, with absolute certainty, that something had happened while he was gone.
“Sakura's okay,” Naruto said quickly, apparently recognizing whatever had changed in Sasuke's expression. “She's okay now.”
Sasuke did not hear the last word properly.
“Where is she?”
“At the hospital, but—”
Sasuke was already moving.
Naruto caught his shoulder before he could disappear, fingers closing firmly around the fabric of his cloak, and Sasuke turned so sharply that Naruto immediately released him.
“Listen to me first,” Naruto insisted. “She's alive. She's awake. Tsunade-baachan checked her herself, and Shizune's been there almost the whole time. She's going to be fine.”
There were too many reassurances.
People did not offer that many reassurances unless there had once been a reason to believe the opposite.
“What happened?”
Naruto's expression changed again, and Sasuke hated him for it in that moment, hated the pity he thought he saw there even though Naruto had probably never intended it to look like pity at all.
“There was a mission four days ago,” Naruto explained, his voice becoming more careful as he spoke. “It wasn't supposed to be anything serious. Sakura went with a small medical unit because there'd been reports of some kind of poisoning in a village east of here, and everyone thought the river had been contaminated by something upstream. They were supposed to identify whatever was causing it, treat the people who were already sick and come home.”
Sasuke said nothing, although the unease that had followed him from the gates had sharpened into something colder now, because Naruto was taking too long to reach the part that mattered and there was something in the deliberate steadiness of his voice that told Sasuke he was choosing every word before allowing himself to say it.
“It wasn't the river,” Naruto continued. “They found an abandoned storage facility a few kilometers outside the village, and Sakura realized pretty quickly that someone had been using it to manufacture and store poisons. There was a missing-nin hiding there. He'd been testing different compounds and dumping whatever he didn't need into the surrounding area, which was how the villagers had been getting sick.”
Sasuke's expression changed.
“Who?”
“We know who he was. It doesn't matter anymore.”
That answer told Sasuke enough.
Naruto exhaled slowly before continuing. “He attacked the team when they found the facility. Sakura ordered the other medics to get the villagers who were still nearby out of the area while she stayed behind to keep him from following them, and apparently the guy was stronger than anyone expected. He used poison, wire traps and earth-style techniques, and Sakura was already injured before the fight really got going because she took the first attack while protecting one of the younger medics.”
Sasuke's fingers curled slowly against his palm.
“How injured?”
“A cut across her side. Deep enough that she was losing blood, but not enough to stop her.”
Of course it had not been enough to stop her.
Sasuke could picture that part without Naruto explaining anything further, because he knew Sakura well enough to know exactly what she would have done after looking down and realizing she was bleeding. She would have assessed the wound in seconds, determined whether it was immediately fatal, pressed chakra into it just long enough to slow the blood loss and then returned her attention to whatever was threatening the people behind her. She would have told herself that she could treat it properly later, because Sakura had always been considerably better at recognizing other people's limits than respecting her own.
Naruto glanced at him before continuing.
“She fought him alone.”
Sasuke's eyes lifted.
“The others tried to stay,” Naruto added quickly, “but Sakura ordered them out. There were civilians who couldn't move on their own, and somebody had to get them far enough away in case the poison spread. She knew she could handle him better than anyone else there, especially because she could neutralize most of what he was using before it got into her system.”
“Most?”
Naruto hesitated.
Sasuke's voice dropped.
“Naruto.”
“Not all of it.”
Something unpleasant twisted beneath Sasuke's ribs.
Naruto continued before he could ask another question. “She still won. From what the others said, it wasn't even close by the end. She destroyed half the facility getting to him, broke both of his arms when he tried to use another jutsu and knocked him unconscious hard enough that he was still out when the retrieval team arrived. He was alive when they took him into custody, but he wasn't getting back up on his own.”
Under any other circumstances, Sasuke might have felt something resembling grim satisfaction.
Instead he asked, “Then why is she in the hospital?”
Naruto went quiet.
The silence stretched just long enough for Sasuke's stomach to drop.
“Because Sakura didn't collapse until after she knew everyone else was safe.”
Sasuke stared at him.
Naruto rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, and when he spoke again, there was none of his usual lightness left. “The medic who stayed closest said Sakura was still standing when it was over. She restrained the missing-nin herself, checked his pulse, made sure he couldn't use his hands even if he woke up, and then she walked back toward the others like nothing was wrong. She was asking about the poisoned villagers before anyone even realized how much blood she'd lost.”
Sasuke could see it.
That was the worst part.
He could see Sakura walking away from the wreckage with blood darkening her clothes, one hand probably pressed against her side while the other still glowed faintly with medical chakra, her mind already moving past herself because there were patients waiting and Sakura had never learned how to place her own name at the top of the list.
“She made it outside,” Naruto continued. “One of the medics asked if she was okay, and Sakura told him she was fine. Then she asked whether all the civilians had been accounted for. He told her yes, and apparently she asked him twice because she wanted to be certain.”
Naruto paused.
“When he told her the second time that everyone was safe, she just… went down.”
Sasuke's face emptied.
“What do you mean, went down?”
“She collapsed.”
The word landed harder than it should have.
Naruto seemed to notice because he immediately continued, although the explanation did nothing to soften it. “Her body had been compensating for too much at once. Blood loss, chakra exhaustion, the poison she'd managed to suppress during the fight, a couple of broken ribs and internal damage from one of the hits she'd taken. She'd kept herself functioning with medical chakra long enough to finish the fight and make sure nobody else needed her, but once she stopped maintaining it—”
“How long was she unconscious?”
Naruto stopped.
Sasuke looked at him.
“How long?”
“Almost two days.”
For several seconds, the sounds of Konoha seemed strangely distant.
Sasuke had been away for almost six weeks, and four days ago Sakura had fought a missing-nin alone while injured, poisoned and bleeding, had won anyway, had made certain everyone around her was safe and had then collapsed the moment her body was finally permitted to fail.
He had known none of it.
While Sakura had been fighting, Sasuke had been hundreds of miles away following a trail that had ultimately led nowhere.
While she had been forcing chakra through damaged pathways simply to remain standing long enough to protect her team, he had been walking through another country's forest beneath a clear afternoon sky.
While she had been asking whether everyone else was safe before allowing herself to fall, Sasuke had not even known that there was anything wrong.
His jaw tightened.
“Why wasn't I contacted?”
“We tried.”
Sasuke's eyes snapped toward him.
Naruto did not flinch. “Kakashi sent a hawk as soon as the team got back, but you weren't where the original mission report said you'd be anymore. By the time we figured out you'd crossed farther north because of the investigation, another message had already been sent, and then Sakura woke up before either one reached you. She told Kakashi not to send anyone after you.”
For the first time since Naruto had begun speaking, something sharper than fear broke through Sasuke's expression.
“She what?”
Naruto gave him a look that suggested he had already had this argument with Sakura and lost.
“She said you were on an active mission, she was stable, and dragging you across two countries after the danger had already passed wouldn't accomplish anything.”
Sasuke stared at him.
Naruto raised both hands slightly.
“Don't look at me like that. I told her it was stupid.”
“It was.”
“I agree.”
“She nearly died.”
“I know.”
“And she decided I didn't need to know.”
“She decided there was nothing you could do from hundreds of miles away except panic.”
Sasuke's eyes narrowed.
Naruto grimaced. “Her words, not mine.”
They stood there for another moment, and Sasuke discovered that the anger was easier to hold than everything beneath it, because anger gave him somewhere to put his hands and something to do with the terrible image Naruto had placed in his mind.
“How bad was it?” Sasuke asked.
Naruto looked away.
Sasuke's hand tightened at his side.
“Naruto.”
“It was bad.”
There were words after that, but Sasuke remembered almost none of them. He remembered Naruto saying something about emergency surgery and internal bleeding, something about the poison having already begun interfering with Sakura's chakra network by the time they reached Konoha, and something about Tsunade being called in personally when Sakura's condition deteriorated during the first few hours, but the details blurred together beneath the relentless repetition of one thought that became louder with every step Sasuke took toward the hospital.
Four days ago.
It had happened four days ago.
Four days ago Sakura had been fighting for her life, and Sasuke had not known.
Four days ago she had won, and Sasuke had not known.
Four days ago she had collapsed after making certain everyone else was safe, and Sasuke had not known.
There was something uniquely unbearable about that last part, because Sakura had apparently spent the final conscious minutes before her body gave out asking about everyone except herself, and Sasuke knew with a certainty that made his chest ache that, had he been there, he would have been the one person willing to ask the question she never would.
What about you?
Who was making sure Sakura was safe?
Who had looked at her after the enemy fell and noticed that her hands were shaking, that blood was still slipping between her fingers, that the chakra she was forcing through her own body was beginning to fail?
Who had told her that she had done enough?
Sasuke had not.
He had been four days too late.
By the time Sasuke reached the hospital, the anger that had carried him through the last several streets had begun to lose its shape, leaving behind something far more difficult to manage, because anger had at least allowed him to think about the missing-nin, the failed messages and Sakura's infuriating decision that informing her husband she had nearly died would serve no practical purpose, whereas fear offered him nothing useful to hold on to and refused to be directed anywhere except toward the images Naruto had placed inside his head.
He remembered almost nothing about entering the building beyond the sharp smell of antiseptic that greeted him the moment the doors opened and the brief flash of surprise on the receptionist's face when he passed her without stopping, because his attention had already moved upward, searching automatically for the familiar chakra signature he had learned to recognize among hundreds of others long before he had ever admitted how easily he could find Sakura in a crowd. It was there, faint enough to make his stomach tighten but steady enough that he could feel the rhythm of it beneath everything else, and Sasuke concentrated on that steadiness as he moved through the corridor, because Naruto had told him Sakura was awake, had told him she was recovering, had repeated more than once that the danger had passed, and there was no rational reason for Sasuke's body to remain prepared for a catastrophe that had already happened four days earlier.
He was halfway toward the stairs when Shizune stepped out of a room farther down the corridor, and although she smiled when she recognized him, there was something in the immediate softening of her expression that Sasuke disliked so intensely that he almost wished she had simply greeted him as though nothing unusual had happened.
“Sasuke,” she said as she approached him, lowering the stack of papers she had been carrying against her side. “You made it back.”
“Where is she?”
Shizune seemed unsurprised that he offered nothing else, and whatever she had originally intended to say disappeared behind the practical calm of a medic who had spent enough years around frightened relatives to recognize that information mattered more than pleasantries. “Third floor, room three-seventeen, although she's sleeping at the moment and I'd prefer that you let her continue doing that if she doesn't wake on her own, because she's still recovering from considerable chakra depletion even though the rest of her condition has stabilized.”
Sasuke absorbed the room number and began to move past her, only for Shizune's voice to stop him before he had taken more than two steps.
“Sasuke, Naruto told you what happened, didn't he?”
He looked back at her.
“Enough.”
There must have been something in the way he said it, because Shizune studied him for a moment before sighing and shifting the papers beneath her arm. “Then I'm going to tell you the part he probably didn't explain properly, because Naruto's definition of medical detail tends to begin with whether someone is alive and end with whether they can eat ramen afterward. Sakura is going to recover completely. Her chakra pathways were strained by the poison and by the amount of medical chakra she forced through them after she was already injured, but there is no evidence of permanent damage, the internal bleeding was controlled during surgery, her ribs are healing normally and the toxin has been completely eliminated from her system.”
Every statement should have made the pressure inside Sasuke's chest ease, and perhaps some part of him registered the relief contained within them, but another part caught immediately on the word surgery and refused to move past it.
“How long?”
Shizune frowned slightly. “How long what?”
“The surgery.”
Understanding appeared on her face.
“The first one was a little over five hours.”
Sasuke's expression did not change, although the number settled somewhere unpleasant beneath his ribs.
“The first one.”
Shizune hesitated just long enough for him to notice.
“There were two procedures,” she admitted. “The second was much shorter and nowhere near as dangerous. There was bleeding we couldn't safely address during the first operation because her blood pressure had become unstable, so once she was strong enough, Tsunade-sama went back in to repair the remaining damage.”
Sasuke stared at her, and Shizune seemed to realize that every answer she provided was producing another question he did not particularly want answered but would ask anyway.
“What happened during the first?”
“Sasuke—”
“Tell me.”
She looked toward the staircase and then back at him, apparently deciding whether giving him the details would help or simply provide his imagination with more precise material with which to torture him, but whatever she saw in his face must have convinced her that refusing would accomplish nothing.
“She arrived in severe hypovolemic shock from blood loss, and the poison had interfered with her ability to maintain the healing technique she'd been using on herself, which meant several injuries she'd been partially suppressing became significantly worse during transport. Two ribs had fractured badly enough to cause internal damage, there was tearing around the wound in her side, and by the time we got her into surgery her blood pressure was dangerously low.”
Sasuke listened without moving, because he had discovered that if he allowed himself any reaction at all, he might not be able to control which one escaped first.
“Did her heart stop?”
Shizune became very still.
It was such a small change that another person might not have noticed it.
Sasuke did.
“How long?” he asked.
Her lips pressed together.
“Sasuke, she's alive.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
“No,” Shizune said after a moment. “It isn't.”
He waited.
She finally lowered her voice. “Less than a minute.”
Less than a minute was not a long time by any reasonable measurement, and Sasuke had endured battles in which individual seconds had contained enough decisions to alter entire lives, but standing in the bright hospital corridor with people moving around them and sunlight spilling through the windows at the far end, he discovered that fifty or forty or thirty seconds could become an impossible amount of time when they were seconds in which Sakura had not possessed a heartbeat.
Shizune must have seen something change in him, because she reached toward his arm before apparently thinking better of touching him and allowed her hand to fall again. “Tsunade-sama restored normal cardiac function immediately, and there were no neurological complications. Sakura woke yesterday morning, she has been talking, eating, arguing with everyone who tells her to rest and attempting to convince me that being able to walk to the bathroom independently means she should be discharged, so whatever you're imagining right now, I need you to understand that the woman upstairs is very much herself.”
Sasuke looked toward the stairs.
“Did she know?”
Shizune followed his gaze. “Know what?”
“How close it was.”
There was another hesitation.
“Yes.”
Of course she did.
Sakura was a medic before she was a patient, and Sasuke should have known that there would be no protecting her from the meaning of her own numbers, no vague reassurance capable of disguising what had happened when she could read a medical chart as easily as most people read a letter.
“And she still told Kakashi not to send anyone after me.”
Shizune's expression shifted into something dangerously close to sympathy. “She told him you were on a mission and there was no reason to compromise it once she was stable.”
“That isn't her decision.”
“I said something similar.”
Sasuke looked at her.
“She threatened to remove her own IV if I continued arguing.”
That sounded sufficiently like Sakura that, against his will, something in Sasuke's chest loosened by the smallest degree.
Shizune noticed.
“She really is all right,” she repeated, and this time her voice was gentler. “She frightened all of us, Sasuke, but she is all right now.”
He nodded once before turning toward the stairs, and Shizune allowed him to go without stopping him again.
The third floor was quieter than the first, with only a few nurses moving between rooms and the muted sounds of conversation occasionally escaping through partially closed doors, and Sasuke found room three-seventeen at the end of the eastern corridor, where afternoon light stretched across the floor in long golden rectangles. He stopped outside it with his hand already reaching toward the handle, and it was only then, with less than an inch of wood separating him from Sakura, that the full absurdity of his hesitation struck him.
He had walked willingly into battlefields without knowing whether he would leave them.
He had faced men who wanted him dead, gods who could tear landscapes apart and memories he had spent years believing would destroy him if he ever allowed himself to look at them directly, yet the simple act of opening a hospital door required a kind of courage he had not expected to need.
Naruto had said she was fine.
Shizune had said she was fine.
Sasuke could feel her chakra through the door, weakened but stable, and there was no uncertainty left regarding what he would find on the other side.
Still, when his fingers finally closed around the handle, the image that entered his mind was not the Sakura waiting beyond it but the one he had never seen, the Sakura Naruto had described walking out of the ruins with blood soaking into her clothes and poison moving through her body, asking whether everyone else was safe before her knees finally gave way beneath her.
He opened the door.
Sakura was asleep beside the window.
For one suspended moment Sasuke remained where he was, because his mind had spent the entire journey to the hospital preparing him for something worse than what he actually found, and the ordinary quiet of the room seemed almost incompatible with the story he had just been told. Sakura's hair was loose against the pillow, slightly longer than it had been when he left because six weeks had passed while he was away, and one side of her face was turned toward the window as though she had fallen asleep watching the movement of clouds beyond the glass. Her complexion was paler than usual and there was a healing cut near her temple, while a strip of bandaging disappeared beneath the neckline of the loose hospital gown she wore, but she was breathing evenly and there was enough color in her cheeks that she looked less like someone who had nearly died four days earlier and more like someone who had been forced into bed against her will and was deeply annoyed about it.
Sasuke closed the door carefully behind himself.
There was a chair beside the bed, close enough that whoever had occupied it last had probably been speaking to her, and he crossed the room before sitting without removing his cloak or the sword at his side, because going home first had never occurred to him and now seemed even more impossible than it had at the gates.
For several minutes he simply watched her.
Sakura had always hated being watched while she slept, although she usually defined watching as anything longer than the few seconds it took Sasuke to realize she was awake and glaring at him, and under any other circumstances she would eventually open one eye and accuse him of being creepy before stealing his pillow as punishment. The memory should have been comforting, but instead it made him notice how still she was, which made him notice the steady movement of her chest beneath the blanket, which in turn made him remember Shizune saying that for less than a minute there had been no heartbeat beneath those ribs at all.
His gaze moved toward the hand resting beside her on the mattress.
There were bruises along the back of it where needles had been inserted and removed, as well as a darker mark circling part of her wrist that looked nothing like an injury from the fight and everything like the consequence of someone gripping her while trying to keep her still during treatment. Sasuke found himself wondering who had held that hand when she arrived unconscious, whether Tsunade had spoken to her even though Sakura could not hear, whether Naruto had sat in this same chair during the long hours before she woke, and whether anyone had thought to tell her that Sasuke would come back.
The last thought was immediately followed by another that hurt considerably more.
Had she asked for him?
He could ask Shizune.
He could ask Naruto.
Eventually, if he was sufficiently foolish, he could ask Sakura herself.
He knew he would not, because there were questions whose answers could become wounds regardless of what those answers were, and if Sakura had asked for him, Sasuke would spend the rest of the night imagining her waking frightened and in pain only to discover that he was hundreds of miles away, whereas if she had not asked, he would wonder whether she had already accepted so completely that he could not be reached that his absence had never even needed to be explained.
His attention returned to her face, and he realized with an unpleasant tightening in his chest that he had not seen her in six weeks.
Six weeks ago she had stood with him near the front door before sunrise, still half asleep and wrapped in the robe she wore around the house, complaining quietly that missions beginning before dawn should be illegal while checking the contents of his pack for things he had already checked himself. She had tucked additional bandages into one of the side compartments despite his telling her he did not need them, had informed him that this was exactly what people said before needing bandages and had then followed him outside with her arms folded against the cold.
Sasuke remembered kissing her forehead before he left.
He remembered Sakura catching the front of his cloak before he could turn away and pulling him down far enough to kiss him properly, because apparently a forehead kiss was, in her words, an unacceptable farewell for a husband disappearing for several weeks.
He remembered telling her he would be back before she had time to miss him.The mission had taken seventeen days longer than expected.
She had almost died before he returned.
The thought moved through him with enough force that he leaned forward, resting his forearm against his thigh while his remaining hand closed slowly around hers.
Warmth met his palm.
Sasuke had expected it, because living people were warm and everyone had already assured him that Sakura was alive, yet the simple physical certainty of her skin beneath his seemed to reach some part of him that words had failed to convince. He shifted his thumb until he could feel the steady pulse beneath the inside of her wrist, and when it beat once against him and then again with the thoughtless consistency of a body that had already moved beyond the crisis everyone else was still remembering, he lowered his head and allowed himself to breathe properly for what felt like the first time since Naruto had called his name.
He did not know how long he sat that way before Sakura stirred.
Her fingers moved first, curling faintly around his without enough strength to constitute a deliberate grip, and Sasuke lifted his head immediately as her brow tightened and her face turned slightly toward him. She made a quiet sound of discomfort before opening her eyes, blinking several times at the ceiling while consciousness returned slowly enough that he could see the exact moment she remembered where she was.
Then she looked toward him.
For a heartbeat there was only confusion in her face, followed so quickly by recognition that Sasuke nearly missed the transition.
“Sasuke?”
He had heard Sakura say his name thousands of times in thousands of different ways, with anger and affection and amusement and exhaustion, but after spending the last hour imagining all the circumstances in which he might never have heard it again, the simple sleepy surprise in her voice did something to him that he had no intention of examining.
“When did you get back?”
“Today.”
Her eyes moved toward the window as though the position of the sun might somehow tell her how long he had been sitting there, and then they returned to him, traveling slowly over the cloak he was still wearing, the dust along its hem and the travel-worn clothes beneath it.
“You came straight here.”
It was not a question, and Sasuke did not insult either of them by pretending otherwise.
Sakura's expression softened.
“You should have gone home first.”
“No.”
“Sasuke, you've been travelling.”
“And you've been in the hospital.”
“That isn't exactly an argument.”
“It is to me.”
A faint smile touched her mouth, and the sight of it should have reassured him, but his attention had already moved toward the small tension around her eyes when she shifted against the pillow.
“Don't move.”
Sakura stopped halfway through attempting to sit higher.
Her eyebrows rose.
“I was adjusting my pillow.”
“Don't.”
“I am medically cleared to adjust my own pillow.”
“I'll do it.”
The amusement in her expression became more obvious as Sasuke stood, moved the pillow with considerably more care than the task required and then waited until she settled against it again before returning to the chair.
Sakura watched the entire process.
“You spoke to Naruto.”
“Yes.”
“And Shizune.”
“Yes.”
She sighed.
“I can tell.”
Sasuke looked at her.
“What did they tell you?”
“Enough.”
“That could mean anything.”
“It means enough.”
Sakura studied him for several seconds, and because she had known him for too long to be fooled by silence, her gaze eventually lowered toward their hands, where Sasuke realized he was still holding hers.
He considered releasing it.
He did not.
“They told you how bad it was.”
“Yes.”
Her thumb moved gently against the side of his hand.
“Sasuke.”
“Why didn't you contact me?”
The question came more quietly than he intended, and Sakura's expression changed immediately, the remnants of amusement disappearing as she looked at him with the particular patience she usually reserved for patients who were frightened enough to disguise it as anger.
“We did contact you.”
“You told Kakashi not to send anyone.”
“I told him not to pull you out of an active mission after I was already stable.”
“You had been unconscious for almost two days.”
“And by the time I was awake enough to have that conversation, I was stable.”
“You nearly died.”
“Yes.”
The calmness of her answer irritated him more than denial would have.
“You know.”
“Yes, Sasuke, I know. I was there.”
His jaw tightened.
Sakura immediately closed her eyes for a moment and exhaled, and when she opened them again there was apology in her expression rather than defensiveness.
“That came out wrong.”
“No, it didn't.”
“It did.”
“You decided I didn't need to know.”
“I decided that there was nothing you could do from two countries away except abandon whatever you were doing and exhaust yourself trying to get back to a situation that had already been brought under control.”
“I would have come.”
Sakura squeezed his fingers.
“That was exactly why I told Kakashi not to send anyone after you.”
Sasuke stared at her, caught between the urge to argue and the uncomfortable understanding that Sakura had known precisely what he would do because she knew him well enough to predict it without hesitation.
“You should have let me decide.”
Something in his voice must have reached her differently this time, because Sakura's expression softened further and she stopped preparing whatever practical argument had been waiting behind her lips.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “I probably should have.”
Sasuke looked away.
The admission did not make him feel better.
Sakura waited for a while before speaking again. “I'm sorry.”
His gaze returned to her.
“I wasn't trying to keep it from you because I thought you didn't deserve to know, and I wasn't trying to prove that I could handle everything without you. I woke up, Tsunade-shishou told me you were still out of the country and Kakashi told me they had already sent messages that hadn't reached you, and the first thing I imagined was you finding out I was hurt and running yourself into the ground trying to cross half the continent when I was already safe. At the time it seemed unnecessary.”
“At the time.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
Sakura looked at him for a long moment before giving him a small, tired smile.
“Now I'm looking at your face and reconsidering several decisions.”
He almost told her that his face was fine.
Then he remembered she had nearly died and decided the argument was beneath him.
“What happened?” he asked instead.
Sakura's eyebrows drew together.
“Naruto told you.”
“I want you to tell me.”
She became quiet.
Sasuke knew immediately that she understood what he was really asking, because he did not need a mission report and he did not need another list of injuries; he needed the missing hours to stop existing as fragments assembled from other people's voices, needed to hear Sakura place herself inside them and describe a sequence of events that ended with her lying alive in front of him.
“The missing-nin was stronger than we expected,” she began after a while. “Not stronger than me, before you make that face, but he had prepared the facility for anyone who found him, and most of his traps were designed around toxins rather than direct attacks. One of the younger medics triggered a wire trap when we were evacuating the first group of civilians, and I pushed him out of the way before the blade came down.”
Sasuke's gaze moved instinctively toward the bandages hidden beneath her gown.
“That was the wound in your side.”
“Yes.”
“You kept fighting.”
“I wasn't going to ask him to wait while I stitched myself up.”
“Sakura.”
“What?”
There was enough genuine confusion in her voice that Sasuke closed his eyes briefly.
“Continue.”
She did, although he noticed the tiny smile she tried to hide. “I sealed the wound enough to slow the bleeding, sent the others out with the civilians and stayed behind because somebody needed to make sure he couldn't follow them. The fight took longer than I expected, mostly because he kept releasing poison into enclosed sections of the building and forcing me to use chakra to neutralize it while fighting at the same time, but once I figured out where he was storing the compounds, I destroyed the eastern section so he couldn't keep using them.”
Sasuke could imagine the word destroyed carrying a considerably more literal meaning when Sakura used it.
“He broke your ribs.”
“One of them was already fractured before that.”
“Sakura.”
“I'm explaining.”
“You're minimizing.”
She gave him an unimpressed look. “Would you prefer dramatic reenactment?”
“No.”
“Then stop interrupting.”
Under different circumstances, he might have pointed out that she was the patient lying in a hospital bed and therefore had very little authority with which to intimidate him, but there was something reassuringly normal about being scolded by Sakura that made him let the matter go.
“He caught me with an earth-style strike against the wall,” she continued. “That was when the ribs broke properly, and I knew there was internal damage, but the others weren't far enough away yet and I could still fight, so I kept going. I got close enough to stop him using hand signs, broke his arms, knocked him unconscious and restrained him before I went outside.”
Her tone remained maddeningly matter-of-fact.
“And then?”
“I checked on the civilians.”
“And then?”
“I asked whether everyone was out.”
“And then?”
Sakura hesitated.
Sasuke's fingers tightened around hers.
“And then I woke up here.”
The simplicity of it was worse than anything else she had said.
“You don't remember collapsing.”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“I remember one of the medics telling me everyone was safe, and I remember being relieved because I had been worried we'd missed an elderly couple who couldn't walk without assistance. After that, there isn't anything until I woke up and Tsunade-shishou was threatening to personally sedate me if I tried to sit up.”
Sasuke looked down at their joined hands.
“You didn't know you were going to collapse.”
“I knew I was injured.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
Sakura was quiet.
“No,” she admitted eventually. “I didn't realize how close I was.”
For some reason, that was the answer that finally broke through the last of Sasuke's anger.
If Sakura had known, he could have been angry at her recklessness, could have accused her of choosing to continue despite understanding precisely what would happen, but the truth was somehow worse because it meant she had believed she still possessed time. She had believed she could finish checking the civilians, perhaps treat herself afterward and return to Konoha with another mission completed, only for her body to make the decision for her before she understood that she had reached its limit.
Sakura watched him absorb that.
“I'm sorry,” she said quietly.
“You already said that.”
“I know, but you're still upset.”
“That doesn't make the apology expire.”
A small laugh escaped her before she could stop it, and Sasuke looked at her sharply enough that she attempted to hide it behind a cough, which only made him more suspicious.
“Don't cough.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“I am allowed to cough.”
“Not with broken ribs.”
“They're healing.”
“Don't.”
“Sasuke, I cannot promise never to cough again.”
“Try.”
This time she laughed properly, although the movement made her wince almost immediately and Sasuke was out of the chair before she could protest, one hand bracing carefully against her shoulder while his eyes searched her face.
“Where?”
“Sasuke, sit down.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“My ribs, because I laughed with broken ribs, which is generally considered a poor medical decision.”
“Then don't laugh.”
“You're making that extremely difficult.”
He stared at her.
Sakura stared back.
For several seconds neither of them moved, and then the humor slowly left her face as she seemed to realize that Sasuke's hand was still resting against her shoulder and that he had gone rigid at the smallest sign of pain.
Her fingers closed around his wrist.
“Hey.”
He looked at her.
“I'm all right.”
“I don’t belive it.”
“No, you know what everyone has told you. That's different.”
Sasuke did not answer.
Sakura gently guided his hand away from her shoulder and held it between both of hers, her thumbs moving over his knuckles as though he were the injured one and she had somehow decided he required soothing.
“My ribs hurt when I laugh, my side pulls when I move too quickly and I'm tired enough that Shizune has become unbearably smug about being right when she tells me to sleep, but none of that means I'm dying. It means I'm healing.”
His gaze remained on her hands.
“Your condition is not good.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I can see it.”
“Do you ever believe me?”
Sasuke looked at her.
Sakura's eyes were tired but clear, the green of them exactly as he remembered and exactly as he had expected to find when he came home, and the fact that she could read him so easily irritated him only because she was right.
He lowered himself back into the chair.
“I will.”
Her expression softened at the answer, and for a few moments neither of them said anything, Sakura's thumb moving absently against the side of his hand while Sasuke continued to hold hers as though releasing it had simply ceased to be an option sometime after entering the room. Eventually, however, Sakura shifted carefully against the pillows and glanced toward the small pile of papers Shizune had left on the table beside her bed.
“I’m being discharged tomorrow, actually.”
Sasuke’s eyes moved from the papers to her face.
“Tomorrow?”
There was nothing particularly dramatic in the question, but Sakura knew him well enough to hear the objection immediately. His expression had not changed much either, although the slight tightening around his eyes told her exactly what he thought of a hospital willing to release someone whose heart had stopped four days earlier.
“Tsunade-shishou cleared me this afternoon,” she explained. “She wants to repeat my bloodwork in the morning and check the wound again, but assuming nothing has changed overnight, I can recover at home.”
Sasuke was quiet for long enough that Sakura could almost see him arranging several objections in his head and discarding each one because he knew perfectly well that he was speaking to a medic who understood her own condition and that Tsunade would sooner demolish the hospital with her bare hands than release Sakura before she was ready. None of that meant he liked it, however, and when his gaze dropped briefly toward the bandaging disappearing beneath the neckline of her gown, the displeasure in his face deepened.
“You woke up yesterday.”
“I know.”
Another silence followed, heavier this time, and Sakura watched him look toward the window before returning his attention to her. Sasuke did not tell her that she could not leave, because it was not his decision to make, and he did not demand another day merely because another night surrounded by medics would make him feel better; he simply sat with the knowledge for a while, visibly disliking every part of it, before his thumb moved once across her knuckles.
“I’ll talk to Tsunade in the morning.”
It was so entirely Sasuke that Sakura nearly smiled. He was not asking permission to overrule anyone and he was not pretending to possess medical knowledge he did not have; he simply needed to hear from Tsunade herself that Sakura was safe enough to leave the place that had kept her alive while he had been gone.
“All right,” she said softly.
His eyes narrowed slightly, apparently suspicious of how easily she had agreed, but Sakura only squeezed his fingers and settled farther into the pillow. “You can ask her whatever you need to ask. Just don’t stand there glaring at her like she personally invented hospital discharge.”
“I don’t glare.”
“You absolutely do.”
Sasuke did not dignify that with an answer, and Sakura decided not to push the matter because the exhaustion she had been ignoring was beginning to drag heavily at her limbs again. Sasuke noticed almost immediately, of course, and although he said nothing about it this time, he adjusted the blanket where it had slipped away from her shoulder and remained beside her until her eyes finally closed.
The next morning proved that Tsunade was entirely unmoved by the opinion of one Uchiha.
Sasuke had disappeared from Sakura’s room for approximately fifteen minutes while Shizune helped her change out of the hospital gown, and when he returned his expression was composed enough that another person might have assumed the conversation had gone perfectly well. Sakura, however, took one look at him and knew exactly what had happened.
“She said I can go home.”
Sasuke placed the small bag containing Sakura’s medication and discharge papers on the chair beside the bed.
“She did.”
“And you asked whether she was sure.”
A pause followed.
“Yes.”
Sakura bit the inside of her cheek.
“How many times?”
His eyes moved toward her.
“Sakura.”
That answered the question well enough.
She wisely decided not to laugh, partly because her ribs still objected to it and partly because Sasuke already looked as though Tsunade had spent the last quarter of an hour explaining, with progressively less patience, that Sakura was recovering rather than actively dying. Instead she reached for the light jacket Shizune had left beside her, only for Sasuke to pick it up first and hold it out for her without comment.
Sakura slipped her arms carefully into the sleeves. “You know, Tsunade-shishou wouldn’t discharge me if she thought there was a real risk.”
“I know.”
“You don’t look like you know.”
“I know.”
There was little point continuing after that, because Sasuke had clearly reached the stage at which he understood something intellectually and rejected it emotionally, and Sakura knew better than most people that no amount of additional explanation would force those two things to reconcile before he was ready. She therefore allowed him to collect her belongings, ignored the way he read Tsunade’s written instructions one final time before folding them into his pack, and pretended not to notice that when she stood from the bed his attention immediately dropped to her feet as though he expected the floor itself to betray her.
He did not reach for her, which Sakura appreciated. He did, however, remain close enough that he could have caught her before she moved three inches.
The walk home was slow, although Sakura suspected it would have been considerably faster if Sasuke had not spent the entire journey adjusting his pace to hers with such precision that it became impossible to pretend he was doing it accidentally. He never told her to slow down, never asked whether she needed to stop and never hovered obviously enough for her to accuse him of it, but every time the distance between them widened by even half a step he somehow ended up beside her again, his attention shifting toward her whenever she breathed too deeply or moved a hand toward her injured side.
At first Sakura found it sweet.
By the time they reached home, she was beginning to understand that it might become a problem.
She stepped through the front door and stopped for a moment, unexpectedly overwhelmed by the familiar quiet of their house after nearly a week of hospital corridors, antiseptic and nurses entering her room at impossible hours. Everything looked almost exactly as they had left it before Sasuke’s mission, from the book Sakura had abandoned on the low table to the cup she had forgotten to return to the kitchen that morning, and the simple ordinariness of it loosened something inside her chest.
“Home,” she murmured.
Sasuke, who had entered behind her carrying the small bag Shizune had packed despite Sakura being perfectly capable of carrying it herself, followed her gaze around the room before looking back at her. Something in his expression softened, and for one brief moment Sakura thought perhaps being home would finally convince him that the crisis was over.
Then she bent to remove her shoes.His hand immediately caught her elbow.
Sakura froze.
Sasuke froze too, apparently realizing only after touching her that there had been absolutely no reason to do so.
Slowly, Sakura looked at his hand and then at his face.
“I was taking off my shoes.”
“I know.”
“Were you worried I was going to lose a fight with them?”
His hand left her arm.
“You moved too quickly.”
“I bent down.”
“You have broken ribs.”
“My ribs are not responsible for removing my sandals.”
Sasuke gave her the particular flat look that usually meant he had decided a conversation was beneath him, picked up her shoes before she could reach them and placed them neatly beside his own.
Sakura stared at him.
He walked into the house.
That should have warned her.
It did not.
For the first half hour, Sasuke’s behavior remained subtle enough that Sakura could almost convince herself she was imagining it. He made tea while she settled onto the couch, which was normal enough after several weeks apart; he brought her medication with the tea because Tsunade had instructed her to take it with food, which was thoughtful rather than strange, and when he disappeared upstairs to put away their things, Sakura finally relaxed into the cushions and decided she had perhaps been unfairly anticipating some dramatic display of overprotectiveness from a man whose preferred method of expressing concern usually consisted of silently making sure she had eaten.
Then Sakura decided she wanted water.
She pushed herself from the couch, crossed the room and had nearly reached the kitchen when Sasuke appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
Sakura stopped.
“The kitchen.”
His gaze flicked toward the kitchen and then back to her.
“Why?”
She stared at him for several seconds, wondering whether this was a genuine question.
“To organize a coup.”
His expression remained completely serious.
“Water,” she clarified.
“I’ll get it.”
Before Sakura could tell him she possessed two functional legs and at least one arm that had not recently been attached to an intravenous line, he walked past her, filled a glass and returned with it.
She accepted it slowly.
“Thank you.”
Sasuke nodded and went back upstairs.
Sakura watched him disappear.
Strange, perhaps, but not alarming.
Five minutes later she reached toward the blanket folded over the other end of the couch.
Sasuke, who had somehow returned without her noticing and was now standing near the doorway, picked it up and handed it to her.
Sakura looked at the blanket.
Then she looked at him.
“I could reach that.”
“I can see it.”
“Apparently not, because you just rescued me from the exhausting physical burden of moving my arm twelve inches.”
He ignored the sarcasm and went into the kitchen.
Sakura narrowed her eyes after him.
The pattern became impossible to deny over the next hour. If she stood, Sasuke’s attention immediately found her; if she walked toward another room, he developed an inexplicable reason to be somewhere nearby, and if she reached for anything heavier than a book, it disappeared from her hand before she could properly lift it. He never actually ordered her to sit down, which would at least have given Sakura something concrete to argue against, and he never admitted that he was watching her, which made the entire situation significantly more irritating.
Eventually Sakura rose from the couch and headed toward the stairs. Behind her, a chair shifted.
She stopped.
The sound stopped too.
Sakura looked over her shoulder. Sasuke was standing.
For several seconds they simply looked at each other.
“Are you following me?”
“No.”
The answer arrived without hesitation.
Sakura glanced toward the stairs and then back at him. “Where are you going?”
“Upstairs.”
“What do you need upstairs?”
There was the smallest pause.
“Something.”
Sakura stared at him.
Sasuke stared back with the calm expression of a man who had apparently decided that something constituted a complete and convincing explanation.
“What something?”
His eyes narrowed.
“Sakura.”
A laugh nearly escaped her, but she suppressed it when her ribs protested at the first movement. Sasuke noticed that too, his gaze immediately dropping toward her side, and Sakura saw the moment the ridiculousness stopped being funny to him.
She understood then.
Not completely, perhaps, because she had spent the last several days experiencing the entire situation from inside her own body, where every improvement had been measurable and every frightening number had gradually returned to normal. Sasuke had experienced none of that. He had gone from believing she was safe in Konoha to learning within the space of a single conversation that she had fought a missing-nin while poisoned and bleeding, collapsed after defeating him, undergone two surgeries and briefly lost her heartbeat, only to walk into a hospital room and find the emergency already over.
There had been no gradual transition for him.
No first night when Tsunade told everyone Sakura had survived surgery, no second morning when her blood pressure stabilized, no moment when she opened her eyes and Shizune nearly cried with relief. Sasuke had missed every stage between danger and safety, and now everyone expected him to look at Sakura walking around their home and simply accept that the woman whose heart he had learned yesterday had stopped four days earlier was fine.
Sakura’s irritation softened. She turned toward the stairs again and began climbing.
Behind her, Sasuke followed.
She did not mention it this time.
He remained one step below her, close enough to catch her if necessary but careful not to touch her, and Sakura could feel his attention on every movement even though he pretended to be interested in absolutely anything else whenever she glanced back. By the time she reached the top, her side had begun to pull slightly beneath the bandages, nothing unusual and certainly nothing dangerous, but she paused for a second to adjust her breathing.
Sasuke’s hand came to her waist immediately.
Sakura looked down at it.
“Pain?”
“A little.”
His face changed.
“Normal pain,” she added before he could decide to carry her back to the hospital himself. “The kind Tsunade-shishou told you I would have.”
He did not remove his hand.
“Sasuke.”
“I heard you.”
“Then why are you still holding me?”
“You stopped.”
“I climbed stairs.”
“You’re tired.”
“I am recovering from surgery. I’m going to get tired.”
His jaw tightened slightly, and Sakura realized that he had no response because he knew she was right and hated the fact anyway.
She covered the hand at her waist with hers.
“I’m okay.”
Sasuke looked at her for a long moment before nodding once, but although his grip loosened, his hand remained there until Sakura started walking again.
She allowed it.
That afternoon, however, she discovered there were limits to her patience.
Sakura had spent nearly two hours asleep in their bed, partly because Tsunade had ordered rest and partly because her body had betrayed her by falling unconscious within minutes of lying down, and when she woke she found Sasuke sitting beside the window with a book open in his hand. He looked up the instant her breathing changed, which suggested he had absorbed approximately none of whatever he was supposedly reading.
Sakura pushed herself upright carefully.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Two hours.”
“Did you sit there the entire time?”
“No.”
She looked at him. Sasuke closed the book.
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I went downstairs.”
“For how long?”
He stood instead of answering, which was answer enough.
Sakura shook her head, pulled the blanket away and placed her feet on the floor. Sasuke’s eyes followed the movement automatically.
“I’m hungry.”
“I’ll make something.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You should rest.”
“I just slept for two hours.”
“You’re still tired.”
“I’m also bored, and if I spend another hour staring at this bedroom ceiling, I’m going to start naming the cracks.”
Sasuke considered this, apparently found no medical basis on which to imprison her in bed and finally stepped aside.
Sakura walked downstairs.
Sasuke walked downstairs behind her.
She entered the kitchen.
Sasuke entered the kitchen.
She opened a cabinet.
Sasuke stood beside the counter.
Sakura turned around slowly.
“Are you going to do this all day?”
“Do what?”
“Exist approximately three feet away from me.”
His expression did not change.
“It’s my house.”
“It is also my house, and somehow I have managed to live in it for years without following you from room to room.”
“I’m not following you.”
“You followed me upstairs.”
“I was going upstairs.”
“You followed me downstairs.”
“I was coming downstairs.”
“You followed me into the kitchen.”
“I’m making food.”
Sakura folded her arms carefully.
Sasuke reached for a pan.
She watched him for several seconds before the absurdity finally defeated her irritation.
“You know,” she said, “most people would simply admit they’re worried.”
“I’m not most people.”
“That was not the important part of that sentence.”
“I know.”
There was something so stubbornly, unmistakably Sasuke about the answer that Sakura's mouth curved despite herself. He was not going to confess that he had spent the entire day inventing reasons to remain within arm’s reach of her, because admitting fear directly had never been easy for him and because, in his mind, he was probably doing nothing remarkable at all. Sakura had been badly injured. Sakura was home. Sasuke could remain nearby. Therefore he would remain nearby.
It was that simple to him.
She walked toward him and rested her forehead lightly against his shoulder.
Sasuke stopped moving.
For a moment his hand remained suspended above the counter, and then he set down the knife he had been holding and turned enough to look at her.
“Tired?”
“No.”
“Pain?”
“No.”
“Dizzy?”
Sakura lifted her head.
“You are ruining this.”
His brow furrowed.
“I’m hugging you.”
“You leaned against me.”
“That was the beginning of the hug.”
Sasuke considered that before his arm finally settled around her waist, carefully avoiding the healing wound at her side. Sakura let herself relax against him, listening to the steady rhythm of his breathing and feeling some of the tension in his body gradually ease as he realized she was not leaning against him because she needed support.
After a while she murmured, “You can follow me around if you want.”
“I’m not following you.”
Sakura smiled against his shirt.
“Of course not.”
“I’m not.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Sakura.”
“You just happen to need to be in every room I enter.”
He was silent.
“And whenever I stand up.”
Still nothing.
“And apparently whenever I approach stairs.”
His arm tightened slightly around her.
That tiny movement told her more than any confession would have.
Sakura closed her eyes and decided not to tease him anymore, at least not about that, because underneath the absurd hovering and the glasses of water appearing before she could ask for them and the invented reasons to climb stairs behind her was something too raw to deserve being turned entirely into a joke.
Sasuke had come home too late to protect her from what had happened.
So now he was making certain he would not be late for anything else.
If Sakura needed water, he would already be there. If she became tired, he would notice before she said it. If she stumbled on the stairs, his hand would be around her before she could fall, and if some impossible complication appeared despite every assurance Tsunade had given him, Sasuke intended to be close enough to see it happen.
It was not rational, and it would probably become unbearable within several days.
For today, Sakura could allow it.
She tightened her arms around him.
Sasuke lowered his chin until it rested lightly against her hair.
Neither of them said anything for a while, and for once the silence did not feel frightened.
It simply felt like home.