Chapter Text
He’s here again. There’s a great murmuring out in the compound streets, many whispers and just as many accusations, that reach all the way to his window. For a long moment, Sasuke closes his eyes and ignores it. It’ll fade soon, he knows. It always does.
Except five minutes go by, and the murmurs are growing angry and louder, and Sasuke can hear a high-pitched whistle like a boiling kettle left on the fire.
With an irritated sigh, he snaps his book shut.
“Sasuke,” his mother calls, worriedly, when he stalks past her in the corridor. “Aren’t you working on your homework?”
“I can’t focus with the noise,” Sasuke tells her, trying to bite back his irritation. Despite his best efforts, it bleeds into his tone anyway, and his mother winces slightly. He pauses, and looks at her, “Sorry, mother. I did not mean to snap. It’s not your fault.”
Mikoto bites her lip, and goes to say something. Mika, one of the too many cats on the compound, chooses this moment to come barreling down the corridor, hissing and batting at her.
“Oh dear,” Mikoto murmurs, and drifts away so as not to upset Mika more.
Sasuke takes advantage of that, and leaves the house quickly. He knows his mother means well, that she doesn’t want him dealing with the noise, with everyone else. He gets it – sometimes, his clan is overwhelming and intense in ways that others aren’t, and Sasuke is only ten years old. He has seen a lot, but he’s only human, and he gets nightmares.
Mikoto just does her best to protect him. Her best, unfortunately, isn’t as good as it used to be.
It’s a short walk to the commotion, shorter than it should be. Sasuke frowns. Usually, when he drops by, he doesn’t venture very far in, and leaves quickly after, chased away by the Uchihas that see him coming.
Sasuke doesn’t know what changed, today of all days.
He gets nearer to the crowd, trying to stay unseen as he assesses the situation. There’s a great many people there, and more are coming, all of them making a blockade to ward off the intruder. There are cats, too, watching warily from the roofs, hissing but not daring to come near.
“You shouldn’t be here!” Someone shouts, heard over all the murmurs and the ear-piercing whistle.
“Why do you even come?” Someone else demands.
“Leave!” A third screams.
The cry starts a crowd movement, and suddenly many are wailing it, an otherworldly chant of leave, leave, leave ! Sasuke slaps his hands over his ears, grimacing, and keeps walking nearer. He’s pretty sure he can hear Great Uncle Kagami, always louder and clearer than many in the clan, but his voice is drowned out by the demands and the wailing.
Sasuke tries to get closer, only to get a burst of static in the face.
His patience snaps.
“That’s enough! ” He shouts.
He’s angry enough that his voice comes out loud and sharper than usual. Silence falls like a weight on the crowd, as all of them turn as a single unit towards him. Red eyes, spinning and spinning and spinning, everywhere he turns. It should be a comforting, familiar sight, but at the moment it only makes him sneer, a bad reminder of worse days.
Sasuke ignores them, ignores the way they watch him cautiously. He usually is much kinder to his family, calmer. But it has been a long day, he still has homework, and he can’t focus properly past the headache building behind his eyes.
So he walks forward, and the crowd parts easily in front of him, until he’s standing in front of the intruder and Great Uncle Kagami.
“You are trespassing,” he informs the intruder sharply. “Usually, I overlook it because you do not linger. What has changed?”
For a long moment, the man stares at him, eyes wide and red. Red like the sharingan, and yet nothing like it. Were he in a better mood, Sasuke might find it ironic.
“You can see me,” Senju Tobirama says, more a statement than a question, incredulous all the same.
“Obviously,” Sasuke bites out. “I can also hear perfectly fine, and you all -” he turns his gaze onto the crowd, most having the grace to look slightly sheepish or apologetic- “Are being loud and distracting. I have homework.”
A chorus of apologies starts around him, thousands of whispers that grate in his ears and make his brain buzz. Sasuke keeps from grimacing, instead staring at the intruder.
“He shouldn’t be here,” someone says over his shoulder, a hissed accusation.
“Murderer,” someone agrees.
“His fault,” another says.
“I said enough !” Sasuke snaps, and they all fall back to the usual, barely audible whispers. He turns back to the Senju, and bites out, “State your purpose, and leave. Or stay silent and leave, as you wish.”
“Do you know who I am?” The Nidaime asks.
“I am not blind,” Sasuke tells him. “I also have no patience left, and very little respect for people that show me none.”
The crowd around him finds itself suddenly a little more distant, giving him a bigger berth. Sasuke appreciates it, even though a part of him regrets the reaction.
“You-” Senju Tobirama starts, and then shakes his head, thinking better of whatever he would have said. “I only wished to see if you were in good health.”
“Why?” Sasuke asks. “You are not of my clan, not of my family.”
“You are a boy who lives alone in an empty compound,” he says.
“Evidently not so alone or empty,” Sasuke can’t help but say with dry bitterness, gesturing to the crowd.
“Ah,” a measure of humour crosses the man’s face, “Evidently not. I did not know that, however. I suppose it is comforting.”
Sasuke stares at this man. At the face that he has seen many times in his life, in books and more importantly, carved on the mountain. He looks different in person. He acts different in person.
Sasuke wonders if he’s here because he feels guilty – then decides it doesn’t matter, and he does not want to know.
“Is that all?” He asks.
“It is,” Senju says, after a beat. “I will take my leave.”
“Please do,” Sasuke agrees. And then, because his mother did not raise an impolite host, he bows his head, albeit not as low as a Hokage deserves, and says, “Have a safe journey out, Nidaime-sama.”
Senju Tobirama watches him for a beat, and then inclines his head right back. It’s a gesture of respect that Sasuke didn’t expect, given that he bowed so short. From the whispers that start all over again around him, neither did anyone in the clan.
Only Great Uncle Kagami does not looks surprised. He looks sad, though.
“I will escort you back, sensei,” he says, and nods goodbye to Sasuke.
Sasuke nods back, and turns around. He doesn’t want to waste time watching them leave. He also doesn’t want to intrude.
Besides, there’s still a crowd.
A very displeased looking crowd.
“You shouldn’t be so nice to that man,” a voice calls from the mass of shapeless figures. “He doesn’t deserve our respect.”
“He was Hokage,” Sasuke reminds them. “He founded the police.”
“Trapped us,” someone jeers.
“Doomed us,” someone else hisses.
“He was Danzo’s teacher,” another voice adds, more hatefully, with static to it.
“Maybe,” Sasuke says, already all too done with this mess. “But Itachi was one of us. And the coup was our own decision.”
That shuts them all up. Mentions of Itachi, of the clan’s self-destruction, no matter how orchestrated, always do. Reminders that most of the people that still haunt the compound are there because of the clan’s own mistakes aren’t well-received – mostly because it’s a painful truth. Sasuke closes his eyes, breathes for a beat, then starts walking home.
There’s grief in his heart, heavy and bitter, and a headache pounding behind his eyes.
He still has homework to do.
Perhaps his mother could help.
Knowing the dead and their blunt, horrifying honesty probably has spoiled Sasuke a little for the living. He finds, when he bothers to look around at his social circle, that he doesn’t really have friends. Of the living kind, that is.
Living friends come with the danger of having to explain why he often stares into air or why he sometimes talks to himself. So much of his behaviour probably isn’t normal, and only the fact that he doesn’t have friends saves him from having to explain why he sometimes cringes at nothing, or has violent mood swings.
Sasuke can’t imagine what sort of excuses he’d come up with, but they’d probably be terrible.
The downside of living mostly with the dead and their lack of empathy for all living troubles such as nuanced communication, is that Sasuke has grown to be a terrible liar.
Thankfully, his lack of a proper living social circle makes it easy to hide his reaction to the floating people surrounding him in class. No one really pays any attention to his reactions.
There are three different ghosts at his desk today, and none of them are helping Sasuke focus on the lesson that Iruka-sensei is trying to teach them. Of course, they do not care much about that. If there’s one thing everyone in his life agrees on, it’s that everything is built on lies, especially history of villages.
The kunoichi that is sitting on his desk doesn’t look very impressed with what she’s hearing, that’s for sure.
“That’s not how the Second War went,” she tells Sasuke. “I would know, I was there.”
“War is hell,” the other shinobi there agrees. He looks younger than her, not by much, and his uniform is more recent, “You are lucky, kid, to be born to peace.”
Sasuke gives him the glare that this comment deserves, and the man has the grace to wince at his own faux-pas. Sasuke ignores him, and turns back to the kunoichi. She’s the one with the stories, he can tell, and if the dead are so set on making him lose focus, then they can make it up to him.
The woman grins, sharp and grim, and starts telling him about the political nightmare and all-around hell that was the Second War.
It is, Sasuke has to admit, highly more gruesome than what Iruka-sensei is telling the others. It’s also highly more interesting.
Neither of the other two ghosts say anything up until the moment where she mentions Uzushio. There’s a burst of static, and Sasuke turns to watch the third ghost. He’s not sure if they still have a face, because it’s hidden behind a colourful mask depicting a mockingly joyful face. They do, however, have a lot of red hair, with bells and ribbons woven into it.
“Something wrong?” The kunoichi asks warily.
“Konoha left Uzushio to rot,” the masked one says, voice distorted into a high moan, like wind howling.
The kunoichi’s face does something complicated, but she doesn’t reply to that. She doesn’t look like she disagrees nor agrees. The other nin is slowly backing away. A wise move, all things told. Masked ghosts, no matter what, are dangerous.
Sasuke isn’t wise, and living with the dead has taught him that there are many things to learn, and many secrets to spill.
“Tell me about it?” He requests politely, in a quiet breath.
For a long moment, his only reply is a scratching noise, like a cat clawing at wood. Then the mask turns to him, with a thousand bell chimes.
There are eyes, there, Sasuke can see. Purple, glowing and inhuman.
He stares back.
The mask starts to talk.
Seeing the dead isn’t as much a burden as people would think.
Not that Sasuke knows what people would think of seeing ghosts, but that’s neither here nor there.
The thing is, he wasn’t born like that. He remembers, with perfect clarity, waking up and seeing ghosts for the first time. He also remembers the many breakdowns he had after that, because incidentally it happened the day after the massacre. As far as he and the clan can guess, when Itachi put him in Tsukyomi, it made something in Sasuke’s head come loose.
Or perhaps in his soul.
Sometimes, on bad days, Sasuke thinks morbidly that he was supposed to die on that day, and that some part of him will never forget that. He has one foot in the grave, and so he can see the dead.
It’s a curse, for all the distractions that the dead offer, for the sleepless nights, for the many whispers, the headaches and the secrets that they spill like ink on a blank paper.
It’s a blessing, too, because Sasuke would have gone mad if he had been alone in the compound, with no family, and a lie told by his brother eating at his brain.
He can see ghosts, which means he still has family. Still has Shisui, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins and distant relatives he didn’t even know before. Still has mother, her kind smile and her knowledge. Still has father, as well, although Fugaku stays distant most days, wallowing in regrets and things that make the air around him terribly cold.
Sasuke is glad, selfishly, for that small mercy.
He could have lived without the ghost drama, though.
“It wasn’t his fault!” Great Uncle Kagami is shouting somewhere outside, probably at Aunt Himiko – she’s a sharp, bitter one, always up for an argument.
“He paved the way to our demise!” Aunt Himiko – it is her screeching voice that Sasuke hears – shouts back. “He has never held any love or respect for us, and Konoha only followed his example!”
Sasuke sighs, at the same time his mother and father do. Fugaku is there for dinner, for once, sitting across from Mikoto. Shisui, who is not subtly listening in to the outside argument, is sitting as well. Three feet in the air, his head right next to the open window.
If Sasuke hadn’t seen Great Uncle Kagami at his most mischievous and annoying, he would wonder how he and Shisui could be related. Drama queens and gossips, the both of them.
“What got Himiko going, this time?” Fugaku asks with a long-suffering expression.
“I don’t know,” Mikoto says.
Sasuke’s mother does not really follow the dead-clan gossip, he knows. Most of her time is spent at home, or with him. She likes to wander the city and beyond, when she can. Some days, she looks like she’s searching for something. Some days, she might find it, because she comes home in a better mood than usual.
Sasuke thinks that if he didn’t still need her, if he wasn’t her son, alone and without any living relative nearby, she would be traveling around and enjoying some sort of vacation.
Then again, she wouldn’t be around in the first place, if he didn’t exist, because the regret that ties her to this place is very much related to Sasuke’s existence.
Shisui, because apparently he can multitask and eavesdrop on two conversation at the same time, drifts back to them to enlighten them.
“The Nidaime dropped by again, sooner today,” he tells them. “Didn’t linger when grandfather met with him, though.”
“Ah,” Sasuke nods.
That makes sense. The Nidaime is a controversial figure in the Uchiha compound, and many that still roam the streets dislike him heavily. They blame him, partly, for their demise.
Sasuke thinks that this game of laying the blame is exhausting.
The clan is to blame, and Danzo is, and Itachi is, and the Sandaime is, and the Nidaime is, and Madara is…
Sasuke wishes they would stop trying to point fingers.
Himiko shouts something else, outside, her voice rising in a screech that bursts into static half-way through, and Sasuke sighs. He turns to Shisui.
“I’m not telling her to shut up,” his cousin says, eyeing him warily. “She might just find a way to kill me again.”
“Shisui, if I have to leave my meal to cool while I deal with Himiko, I will be in a very foul mood for the rest of the evening,” Sasuke warns him.
Shisui, not as much of a fool as he plays, drifts off to relay his threat to Himiko and Great Uncle Kagami. Father stares at Sasuke from the other end of the table, and Sasuke stares back, trying to find something in his lined face.
When only silence remains, Sasuke sighs and goes back to eating. He’s no cook, but with his mother’s help he’s getting better. Today’s dinner is almost as good as hers were.
“I’m sorry, son,” Fugaku eventually says.
“What for?” Sasuke asks, not looking up from his plate.
“I should have done better,” Fugaku says.
Better as what, Sasuke wonders. Clan head? Father? Person? Who knows. He looks at his father, and sees his regret, stark on his pale face.
He doesn’t look down, not wanting to see any stain on his chest.
“You did your best,” Sasuke says, after a beat. “It was not enough, no, but you tried. It matters.”
Fugaku doesn’t reply, but there’s a slight tension that isn’t there in his shoulders anymore. Mikoto also looks a bit happier. Sasuke will take it.
His clan is the result of many circumstances and bad choices. His parents are the same, product of their environment.
Sasuke loves them all, all the same.
If seeing ghosts is good for something, other than learning historically accurate stories, it’s to keep watch.
No one but Sasuke sees or hears them, and nothing can stop them.
“Hey kid,” a ghost – an Inuzuka woman, whose name he doesn’t recall – waves at him from the eaves of a nearby building as he shops. He glances up, makes it curious and bored, like looking at the sky, or perhaps at a bird, nothing more. She grins, feral and amused, and tells him, “Got a trail on you. Heads up.”
Sasuke hums, thoughtful – as if recalling a shopping list maybe – and looks back at the shop window. If he nods ever so slightly, well, only the ghost of the Inuzuka woman will ever know.
He hears her laugh, bright and amused, and keeps going.
Today is one of the days the Hokage or Danzo decide to keep an eye on him, it seems. It’s not all that rare – Sasuke is the last loyal Uchiha, after all, and they need to make sure he stays that way, safe and pliant. It’s annoying, however, because it means that he won’t be able to interact with anyone he cares about until the Anbu on him leaves.
Sometimes, that takes days.
But well. At least, it’s not Danzo himself.
“He’s at your five, in that tree,” the Inuzuka tells him, drifting lazily in the corner of his vision. She grins when he shoots her a quick look, and says, “Inuzuka Kegawa, by the way. Nice to meet you.”
Sasuke nods, makes it look like he’s checking his pockets. Kegawa laughs brightly again.
“I like your style, kid,” she tells him with amusement. “Nothing fazes you much, does it?”
Sasuke glances at her, safe in the knowledge that the Anbu agent that is trailing him is at his back, and arches a brow. Really , he wants to say.
“Yeah, okay, I suppose that’s fair,” Kegawa grins. “I’d be hardcore too, if I could see the dead parading around.” A second eyebrow lifted, and she snickers. “Yeah, yeah, I meant when I was alive , smart ass!”
Well, at least she doesn’t need a translator to his many facial twitches like some ghosts do when he has a trail on him. Some of them seem to expect that he could communicate with them on a complex scale even with an Anbu following, without anyone noticing.
Sometimes, the dead are just as stupid as the living.
“Ah,” Kegawa says, eyes darting up. “At your three, now.” She hums, and comments, “His technique isn’t all that good. Anbu agents sure have let themselves go in times of peace, huh? Sloppy.”
Sasuke rolls his shoulders in a shrug that looks like he’s trying to ease a muscle pain. He wouldn’t know, he’s not yet good enough to spot Anbu, let alone be at their level. Besides, he has no clue how good they were during the wars.
Kegawa, still drifting in front of him, shrugs right back.
“I know, I know, just saying,” she says. “I had a sister in Anbu. She could sneak up on you wearing a dress made of bells. Fucking gave me a heart attack or two in my life, too.”
That’s a funny image, and Sasuke has to duck his head to hide his twitching lips in his collar. Kegawa sees it anyway, and grins at him.
“One time,” she says, “We tried to take her by surprise…”
As she keeps him entertained with her funny stories of her sister, Sasuke relaxes and almost manages to forget about the annoyance he feels about being followed by an Anbu.
Seeing ghosts isn’t so bad, really.
Sasuke senses the man coming down the street long before he actually sees him.
Or rather, he hears the commotion.
Shimura Danzo may be a quiet, stoic sort of man, the suite of ghosts that follow him are anything but. There are a few of his victims permanently with him, screeching his secrets and his crimes to the wind, filling the air with static and angry wails.
Always worse than that, though, are the others .
Sasuke sees one, always so very small, flickering like a bad light, barely there at all, and feels the blood retreating from his face. Tastes bile, at the back of his throat. With a quick, hurried and frantic look around, he makes sure that no one is paying attention to him. Then, before it can get worse, he ducks for the nearest way out.
It’s easy enough to slip away from the main street where he was shopping, and to hide between two shops in a back-alley without anyone noticing or questioning it. Sasuke curls up against the wall, and tries to keep his lunch inside. The only person with him at the moment is Shisui, dead and floating next to him, a grimace on his face.
The way his eyes flicker between sharingan red, black, and bloody empty eye-sockets is the only real evidence that he is as disturbed as Sasuke is.
“Are you alright?” His cousin asks Sasuke, staring at him with those fake eyes.
“Is he gone?” Sasuke questions instead.
“Soon,” Shisui replies, glancing back to the entrance of the alley. There’s high-pitched shrieking, and a lot of static coming from that direction, and he winces, as does Sasuke. Shisui grimaces again, “Damn, that never gets better.”
Sasuke has half a mind of asking him what he means by that. Is it facing Shimura Danzo himself, or is it what follows him around that is hard on his cousin?
He doesn’t ask, though, because he suspects that just like for him, it’s a bit of both that has Shisui so shaken.
“Is Takeda still poking him?” Sasuke asks, mostly to try and distract himself.
“Yep,” Shisui says, and his face flickers only once more before starting to stabilize again. He looks at the street, and grins. “Aunt Akaina looks mighty pleased with herself, too. She’s coming this way.”
Sasuke looks up, and tries for a wobbly smile when he sees the woman drift towards them. She does look pleased.
Sasuke steadily ignores the few faceless figures that have curiously drifted after Akaina, pale, small wraiths that have a human shape and little else. Truthfully, some have very little at all, not even shapes, barely impressions of something that was once human. Some of them are flickering, making it hard for Sasuke to not look at them, but he manages. Focuses on Shisui, on Aunt Akaina.
“What did you do this time?” Shisui asks with vindictive anticipation. “Spilled his tea on an important file?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, boy, I don’t have the strength for that yet,” Akaina sniffs. She smirks, and it’s just as malicious as Danzo deserves, “No, I made a draft just as he had finished organizing his paperwork in a neat pile. Spilled all on the floor. He had to start over again.”
“Oh no,” Shisui says, and it’s probably supposed to be mock-sympathetic but he’s grinning too wide for it to be anywhere near believable. “How awful.”
“Truly terrible,” Sasuke pipes up flatly, but he can’t hide the spiteful twitch of his lips either, for all that he sounds bland.
One of the others has drifted closer yet, and Sasuke tries not to look. Tries very, very hard, because the sight of that blank, empty face-
Sasuke dry-heaves, and immediately Shisui is there, soothing him. Aunt Akaina is shooing the others away, but Sasuke can’t hear her, can’t focus beyond the angry buzz of her voice. She’s probably trying to reason with them, to tell them can’t you see you’re upsetting him -
Sasuke doesn’t know why she tries. The others don’t understand emotions. They don’t even know who they are. They’re just after images of people, and even then not quite.
The only reason they even leave a trace is because loyalty was so ingrained in them that they can’t imagine straying.
“Come on, Sasuke, breathe,” Shisui tells him, gentle, his hand making a cool draft against his back that sinks comfortingly into his skin. “That’s it.”
Sasuke tries to say something, but chokes on it, chokes on his breath and on the static that still comes from the main street. He wants to tell Shisui that he’s sorry, that he should be more well-put together.
How is he even going to kill Danzo, if every time the guy comes near, Sasuke is reduced to helpless mess?
Shisui makes a helpless, amused noise, and Sasuke realizes a bit too late that he might have succeeded in saying that last part aloud.
“You have time, little cousin,” Shisui tells him, and keeps rubbing his mist-hand into Sasuke’s back. “Remember what Aunt Mikoto said.”
“I know,” Sasuke manages, barely refrains from rolling his eyes.
When he learned – from Shisui, mostly, and then bits and pieces from others in the clan that made for a gruesome large picture – what Danzo had done, he’d been furious. Had wanted- he doesn’t know, doesn’t quite remember what he wanted. Just that he never had felt such rage as the anger he felt when he learned that his brother obeyed an order.
Even to this day, Sasuke isn’t quite sure if he was more angry at Danzo or at Itachi for that.
Still, only one of the two was in Konoha, so Sasuke had grabbed his kunai, determined to find the old murderer and gut him .
His mother, always wise and gentle, had stopped him with one stern word and a look.
“Sasuke, really,” she had said once he had put the kunai down and sat in front of her. Her hands had been cold and breezy in his hair. She had hummed, and added simply, “Make jounin first. Then kill him.”
“Make jounin first,” Sasuke echoes softly, the familiar goal helping him ground himself again.
“Kill the bastard then ,” Shisui finishes for him, with a smile that is a touch too wide.
Sasuke smiles back, even though it’s not much of a smile. Bares his teeth, and gets a laugh out of both his cousin and his watching aunt.
Danzo better be watching his back. Because when the time comes…
Not even the others will save him from the Uchiha’s wrath.
There’s a girl in front of the compound doors, dithering there, looking sad. She’s been there for a moment now, watching and not moving, worrying her lower lip with her teeth.
Sasuke doesn’t even think about it, before he approaches her. They’re inside the compound. There’s no one watching, except for a few restless cats. He’s curious.
“Can I help you?” He asks.
The girl jumps with a burst of static, her whole shape shuddering for a moment, before she solidifies again and turns a startled gaze on him. She’s young, with a sweet face, and there’s a hole in her chest the size of a bowl.
“You can see me,” the girl says. When Sasuke nods, she smiles at him, a very sweet smile. A very sad one, “I was told you could.”
Sasuke blinks. Ghosts in Konoha pass on that information, sometimes, for the dead with small regrets that can be easily fixed. Or for the dead with stories. Sometimes, just to pass on secrets and truths, like ghosts like to do.
He wonders which one she is.
“Can I help you?” He reiterates.
“No, I don’t think so,” she says, and for a blink there’s a trickle of blood on her lips. “I was searching for a friend. But he’s not here.”
“An Uchiha?” Sasuke asks, even if it seems logical. Very few ghosts in the compound aren’t from the clan. And there’s no one living here, besides him.
She nods. Her eyes are growing distant, and her shape flickers again. Like ink touched with water, her colours seem to fade, leaving her a wan after image.
“I’m not sure why I thought he’d be here,” she tells him. “He never liked this place, even if-” She trails off, and her smile goes thin. “Well. No matter. I suppose I’ll have to look elsewhere.”
She shakes her head, and static bursts, framing her with stark lines like brush strokes. She looks suddenly more vibrant, colourful, browns and purples and red spilling all over her pretty pink apron-skirt.
Powerful, Sasuke thinks, feeling the static like sparks on his skin. Dangerous, too, to have made her death such an integral part of her identity that she’s wearing it so obviously. Most ghosts like to hide the marks and wounds that caused their death in the first place, when they can help it.
Even so, he can’t help but ask.
“Have you been searching long? For your friend?”
“He died before I did,” she says simply, and that’s not an answer except it is in a way.
Sasuke can guess she’s been looking for her friend since she died. He wonders when that was – she looks young, but ghosts don’t age. Maybe she’s been searching for centuries.
“You know,” Sasuke says, and tries for sympathetic but it ends up probably sounding very blunt, “Some people do not leave ghosts.”
“I know,” she says, simply. “Maybe he didn’t.” She smiles again. “I like to think he had no regrets, and that’s why I can’t find him. I just don’t think that’s true.”
She would know better than him, so Sasuke just nods. For a second, the wind picks up. The trees on the edge of the compound rustle with it, and it drifts past Sasuke, a cold draft on his cheeks not unlike a ghost touch.
The girl’s hair doesn’t move at all, and neither does she. Stuck between planes, like every other inhabitant in the compound.
Maybe that’s what happened to her friend. Maybe he’s stuck somewhere.
“Maybe he’s lost,” he tells her. “That happens, too.”
She looks at him, silent for a beat. Her eyes are sad, but her gaze is straight when she nods.
“That would be like him,” she says. “Thank you.”
Sasuke nods back, and with a last smile, she drifts away, leaving the compound.