Chapter Text
He receives the invitation at dusk, when the sky is bruised purple and gold and the world looks as though it, too, has been struck and is pretending otherwise.
The paper is thick. Naruto would choose something thick—something earnest and excessive and expensive. There is a pressed flower in the corner. Of course there is. He stares at it for a long time, as though the flower might wilt under the severity of his gaze and spare him the necessity of comprehension.
Uzumaki Naruto and Hyūga Hinata.
The names lie beside each other with the terrible simplicity of inevitability.
Sasuke folds the paper once. Then again. He does not tear it. He is not so theatrical. His grief is not the loud, demonstrative creature it once was; it has learned refinement, has learned how to sit upright at a table and smile with its teeth hidden. It moves through him like winter through stone—slow, invasive and inescapable.
He camps beneath a shallow cave that night, because he does not wish to be among people, and because the mountains are mercifully indifferent. He builds a small fire with one hand and his teeth, steadying branches beneath the curve of his forearm, and the absence where his other arm should be burns with phantom sensation—an ache like a memory of warmth that will never return.
He tells himself that this, too, is part of atonement. That pain is simply interest accrued.
Snow gathers at the mouth of the cave as if conspiring. It begins delicately, then thickens with the relentless enthusiasm of a world that does not pause for heartbreak. By midnight, the wind is a thin, whistling thing that threads itself through every seam of his cloak.
There will be too much snow by morning.
He exhales, and the breath leaves him in pale clouds. “Idiot,” he mutters—not to the weather, not to himself, but to the memory of a blond grin that would have insisted on staying to watch the snowfall. But he wasn't here and Sasuke was alone.
He hates that he can still hear that laugh.
At dawn, he dismantles the camp with efficient movements, the cave emptying of his presence as though he had never occupied it at all. The invitation is tucked inside his cloak, near his ribs, as though proximity to his heart will either sanctify or cauterize it.
The river is half-frozen when he reaches it.
He kneels at the bank and strips with the economy of a man who has long ceased to consider modesty relevant. The water is glacial; it bites. He steps into it anyway. The cold climbs his legs like penance.
He remembers another river.
They had been boys then—reckless, feral with ambition. Naruto had cannonballed into the current with all the grace of a falling boulder, splashing him deliberately, shouting something about how “brooding doesn’t suit you, bastard!” and Sasuke had retaliated with a precise flick of water that became a full skirmish, the river erupting around them as if applauding.
He allows himself a small, brittle smile at the recollection.
Naruto had complained about the temperature then, too. Dramatic. Loud. Pretending to shiver only so Sasuke would roll his eyes. They had stood shoulder to shoulder beneath the current, rinsing blood and dirt from missions neither of them fully understood, the sun catching in Naruto’s hair until it seemed as though he carried a private dawn with him.
Sasuke plunges beneath the surface now.
The cold is merciless. It strips thought from him for a moment, and in that blankness, in that aching clarity, he imagines—not Hinata’s hand in Naruto’s, not their wedding robes, not their shared future—no. He refuses that cruelty.
Instead he imagines steam.
Naruto in a narrow shower stall, complaining about the water pressure, singing off-key to songs he half-remembers, water tracing the broad lines of a body carved by persistence and foolish hope. He imagines the echo of that laughter against tile. He imagines the scent of soap too sweet, chosen without irony.
It is an indulgence, and he despises himself for it.
The river accepts his bitterness without comment. When he rises, water sluicing down his spine, he feels flayed open, as though the current has skinned him to the bone and found there not hatred, not envy, but something far more humiliating: longing without entitlement.
He does not think of Naruto and Hinata together.
He does not.
His mind skirts that precipice with disciplined avoidance, as though there is a seal inscribed there—danger, forbidden, irreversible. Instead, he focuses on the absence of his arm, on the way balance requires adjustment, on the way he has relearned even the most basic gestures with a patience he never possessed in youth.
Redemption, he once believed, would be a single, blazing act.
Instead, it is this: building fires with one hand. Folding invitations carefully. Bathing in rivers alone. Choosing to walk toward a town because the snow will otherwise swallow him whole.
He dresses slowly, fingers stiff with cold. The town will be loud. There will be lanterns and the smell of broth and the clatter of merchants. Somewhere, perhaps, a florist pressing petals between pages for someone else’s joy.
He wonders what gift is appropriate for a man who once chased him across continents and now stands at the altar of a future that does not include him.
A rice cooker, perhaps. Naruto would misplace it within a week.
The thought is so absurd it nearly breaks him.
He presses his palm—his single palm—flat against his chest where the paper rests. The ache there is immense, tidal, but contained. He will attend. Of course he will attend. He has forfeited the right to absence.
Snow begins again, soft and unassuming.
He steps onto the path toward town, cloak snapping faintly in the wind, grief pacing him with measured stride. It does not howl. It does not rage.
It simply walks beside him, quiet as falling snow, and refuses to leave.
Sasuke trudged into the small hamlet nestled between frost-rimed hills, a place so unremarkable that its name might have been forgotten even by the maps that once charted the shinobi world's scars; the war's echoes lingered here not in grand monuments but in the missing men, the patched roofs, the way eyes darted toward strangers with a mixture of wariness and weary hospitality.
He had meant only to pass through, perhaps barter for provisions with the last of his coin, yet his solitary figure—cloak heavy with wet flakes, one sleeve hanging empty like a defeated banner—drew the gaze of an elderly woman standing at the threshold of a modest farmhouse, her three daughters clustered behind her like cautious sparrows.
Sasuke pauses at the threshold of it, snow dissolving against his cloak.
“—I’m telling you,” a man insists to no one in particular, shaking a turnip with theatrical indignation, “this one is crooked. Crooked vegetables taste bitter.”
Sasuke blinks once, slowly. The world has not ended. Naruto is getting married. A turnip is being morally assessed in the street.
He steps past them.
Inside the market square, conversation tumbles over itself in banal, luminous fragments.
“Did you hear? The baker’s boy eloped.”
“With who?”
“With the seamstress.”
“She can’t even hem evenly.”
“Love doesn’t require symmetry.”
Sasuke almost snorts at that. Love, in his experience, requires carnage.
He purchases nothing. He simply stands, listening, as if these trivial exchanges are foreign birds he is attempting to identify. They speak of winter stores, of roofs that still leak since the war’s concussive tantrums rattled the foundations, of sons who never returned and daughters who did but do not sleep well.
Close enough to have felt it.
Far enough not to know his face.
It is almost a mercy.
He finds the inn too crowded, too inquisitive. The proprietor stares at his missing arm with that particular brand of curiosity that pretends to be sympathy. Sasuke leaves before questions appear.
It is the same older woman at the edge of town who intercepts him.
She saw the exhaustion etched into the hollows beneath his eyes, the way his remaining hand flexed unconsciously against the phantom ache of what was gone, and without preamble she spoke in a voice worn smooth by decades of gentle command: “There's room for you here. Come in before the wind decides you're its next meal.” There were no more questions of name or origin, no flicker of recognition for the last Uchiha.
“I can pay.”
She waves that away with dismissive authority. “You can help with the fields. Snow’s coming. Potatoes don’t dig themselves.”
He inclines his head once.
The three daughters regard him with varying degrees of fascination.
The youngest hides behind her mother’s skirt and whispers loudly, “Is he a samurai?”
The middle one elbows her. “Idiot. Shut up will you?”
“He is not a Samurai,” the oldest corrects softly, eyes fixed on Sasuke with disconcerting intensity and a questioning gaze.
“No.” Sasuke answers. “I simply use a katana. Not skilled enough for a Samurai.”
Naruto would disagree.
The older two refrained but the youngest's pout is visible.
He raises a brow. “I disappoint already.”
The oldest flushes scarlet.
Inside, the air was thick with the dull, comforting drone of mundane talk, a litany so achingly ordinary it bordered on the absurd against the cavernous silence in his chest. The youngest girl, no more than twelve, chattered without pause: “Mama says the carrots froze solid again last night, like little orange icicles—do you think rabbits dream of stealing them? I bet they do, sneaky things.”
Her middle sister rolled her eyes but joined in anyway: “Rabbits don't dream, silly; they just hop and eat. Speaking of, did you check the traps today? Last time we got nothing but a bootlace.”
The oldest, perhaps seventeen, said little at first, only watched him with wide, unguarded eyes as he accepted tea with a nod, her cheeks blooming pink whenever their gazes brushed.
Sasuke found himself drawn into the rhythm of their small labors: splitting firewood one-handed with an axe borrowed from the barn (the stump throbbed in protest, a dull sermon on redemption's cost), mending fences where the wind had torn them like old promises, hauling water from the half-frozen stream while the girls trailed behind with buckets too heavy for their arms. The work was repetitive, unglamorous, gloriously dull, and in its monotony he discovered a strange balm; no Sharingan flared, no vengeance stirred—only the creak of wood, the crunch of snow underfoot, the occasional silly burst of conversation drifting over the fields.
“Mister One-Arm,” the youngest dubbed him with gleeful irreverence one afternoon as he stacked logs, “have you tasted snow?”
He paused, a log balanced awkwardly against his shoulder. “I don't know.”
“You don't know if you've tasted snow?”
“No.”
The oldest girl—her name was Aiko, he learned—followed him more often now, shyly at first, then with a persistence that amused rather than irritated him. She would appear at the edge of the field pretending to gather kindling, her steps hesitant yet determined, cheeks flushed from more than the chill.
Once, when he caught her staring as he repaired a gate, she stammered, “I—I just wanted to see if you needed help. With... the nails. Or something.” He arched a brow, the ghost of a smirk tugging at his lips—the great avenger reduced to being tailed by a farm girl who blushed at the sight of his cloak—and found, to his quiet surprise, that he did not mind. Not really. There was something endearingly foolish in her devotion, a purity that reminded him of brighter days he had long buried.
“You’re doing that wrong,” she informs him earnestly as he knots a rope.
He glances down at the perfectly secured bundle. “Am I.”
She kneels beside him, fingers trembling as she demonstrates a loop that is objectively inferior. “This way looks nicer.”
He studies it. “It will unravel.”
Her mouth falls open in horror. “It will not.”
He tugs lightly. It does.
She stares at the rope as if betrayed by a trusted ally. Sasuke’s lips twitch.
“You’re cruel,” she accuses.
“Only accurate.”
She follows him from chore to chore after that, asking questions that are almost questions and sometimes not.
“Do you travel far?”
“Yes.”
“Do you fight?”
“Sometimes.”
“Are you lonely?”
He pauses mid-step.
“That’s a rude question,” the middle sister calls from the porch.
Aiko’s ears turn red. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine,” Sasuke says, surprising himself.
He considers the field. The frost. The horizon.
“Yes.”
Aiko nods solemnly.
One morning, as he helped peel the last of the frostbitten daikon (one-handed, with a knife steadier than his mood), Hana plopped down opposite him, chin in hands, eyes bright with conspiracy.
“Mister One-Arm, do crows ever forget where they hide their shiny things?”
He glanced at her, then back at the vegetable. “Crows have excellent memories.”
“Then why do they keep stealing my hairpins? I think they’re building a secret crown somewhere. For the Crow Queen.”
A faint huff escaped him—almost a laugh, though he would deny it to his dying breath. “I don't think the Crow Queen would ever want your hairpins.”
Hana gasped theatrically. “Rude! My hairpins are treasures. They have little butterflies on them. Butterflies are basically flying flowers, you know.”
“Flying flowers that land in crow nests,” he deadpanned.
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re secretly a crow sympathizer, aren’t you? I bet you talk to them when no one’s looking.”
He did not dignify that with an answer, but the corner of his mouth twitched traitorously.
Later that afternoon, while he was repairing the chicken coop (the birds eyeing his missing sleeve with deep suspicion, as though he might be hiding extra grain), the middle daughter, Miko, wandered over with a basket of eggs and an air of casual interrogation.
Aiko, predictably, appeared not long after, pretending to inspect the newly mended fence slats while her sisters retreated indoors. She lingered, tracing a finger along the grain of the wood, cheeks already faintly pink.
“You fixed the gate faster than Papa ever did,” she said quietly.
“It was loose,” he replied, as though that explained everything.
She bit her lip, then blurted, “Do you… ever get tired of being lonely out there? When you’re walking alone?”
Sasuke’s hand stilled on the post. He looked at her, and saw not just a farm girl with hopeful eyes, but someone who had lost brothers and cousins to the same war that took his arm, who knew the shape of absence even if she couldn’t name it.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But loneliness is a familiar road. You learn its turns.”
Aiko nodded slowly, as if committing the words to memory. Then, in a burst of shy courage: “If you ever want company on the road… I mean, not forever, just… for a little while… I could walk with you. To the next village or something. I’m good at spotting rabbits.”
He regarded her for a long moment, the wind tugging at her scarf. Something soft and ridiculous bloomed in his chest—amusement, mostly, but laced with an unfamiliar tenderness.
“You’d get cold,” he said.
“I’d bring extra socks.”
“Rabbits would steal them.”
“Then we’d fight the rabbits together,” she declared, chin lifting in mock defiance.
“She loves you,” the old woman observed mildly as he he sat down for lunch.
“She’s young,” he murmured. “She’ll forget.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps she’ll remember the quiet man who fixed things without being asked, and carried sadness like a second cloak. Memory is stubborn, child. More stubborn than heartache.”
He flexed his remaining hand, feeling the familiar protest of the absent one. “I’m not staying.”
“I know.” She patted his knee once, gentle as snowfall. “But while you’re here, let the silly things in. The crow queens and goose battles and blushing girls who think they can keep up with you on a winter road. They don’t heal the wound—” she tapped her chest lightly “—but they keep the heart beating until the snow melts.”
“I have new robes. Let me wash yours.” She said after a while.
Sasuke nodded.
When she unfolded the dark cloak to hang it near the fire later that evening, the folded parchment slipped free and landed face-up on the tatami with a soft, accusing rustle. Gold-embossed edges. Naruto’s unmistakable, looping handwriting sprawling across the front like an overeager puppy had written it. And beneath, Hinata’s smaller, careful script adding elegance to exuberance.
Obaasan read it as she carried the dry clothes to the engawa where Sasuke sat sharpening a kunai with slow, meditative strokes, the single blade catching firelight like a captive star.
She set the bundle beside him without ceremony.
He glanced at it sharply.
She settled on the step below him, knees creaking faintly.
“Whose is it?” she asked, voice low.
Sasuke’s hand stilled on the whetstone.
“Don’t open it,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
She lifts her gaze then.
“Whose is it?”
“A friend’s.”
“Are you going?”
He looks down.
There is ash on the floor near his feet. A stray thread from his cuff. The pressed flower in the corner of the card is slightly more fragile now, its veins pronounced, like something long preserved that should have been allowed to decay.
“He’ll hate it if I don’t,” Sasuke says quietly.
“And if you do?”
“I’ll hate it.”
The house is silent. Even the girls, sensing something solemn without understanding it, have retreated to whispers upstairs.
The old woman sets her mending aside.
“I don’t know who you are, mister,” she says. “But you are clearly shinobi.”
It is not a question.
He does not deny it.
She rises, joints protesting softly, and crosses the room. Then—unexpectedly—she kneels in front of him.
“I do not care who you are,” she says firmly. “What you have done. What you have survived. I do not care.”
Her eyes search his face, not for infamy, not for legend, but for something simpler.
“Think for yourself, my child,” she says. “Think of your heart. Do you wish to go?”
Sasuke’s gaze dropped to the invitation still lying between them.
He imagines standing in a crowd of lantern light, watching vows spoken in a voice that once shouted his name across valleys and battlefields.
He imagines clapping.
Smiling.
Swallowing glass.
“No,” he says.
“Then stay here,” she told him. “Help us out a bit till winter’s over. The fences still need mending. The goats still think they’re escape artists. Hana still believes crows are plotting against her hairpins. There’s plenty to do that doesn’t require you to choose between your heart and his.”
It is such an unremarkable offer.
Stay.
He has spent so long moving—fleeing, chasing, atoning—that the notion feels almost illicit.
Sasuke looks at the invitation one last time.
Uzumaki Naruto and Hyūga Hinata.
He presses his thumb over the ink until it blurs slightly with the warmth of his skin.
Naruto will be angry, perhaps. Disappointed. There will be a flash of that old stubborn hurt.
And then—
He will forgive.
Sasuke nodded.
Obaasan rose with care, brushing snow from her knees.
“Good,” she said simply. “Tomorrow you can help Miko wrangle the chickens. They’ve decided the coop roof is unnecessary.”
She turned to go inside, pausing only long enough to add over her shoulder:
“And Sasuke?”
He tensed at the name—he had never given it—but she did not wait for denial.
“Leave the invitation where it is. Let it gather dust with the rest of winter’s things. When spring comes, if your heart changes, it will still be there. If it doesn’t…” She shrugged one shoulder. “We’ll burn it for kindling. The goats like dramatic fires.”
She slid the shoji door closed behind her.
Sasuke remained on the engawa a long while after, kunai forgotten in his lap, staring at the parchment as though it might speak. It did not.
Instead, from inside the house drifted Hana’s indignant shout—“Miko! That was MY pickled radish! You can’t just declare war on my snacks!”—followed by Miko’s laughing retort: “War was already declared when you hid the last onigiri behind the miso jar, traitor!”
A faint, reluctant huff of breath escaped him. It was not quite a laugh, but it was close enough.
He reached out with his remaining hand and nudged the invitation beneath the edge of his folded cloak, out of sight.
Just for tonight. Maybe forever. Or, just until the snow stopped falling, the goats stopped plotting, and the foolish, stubborn roots beneath all this frozen earth remembered how to believe in green again.
Sasuke,
Where are you now?
— Naruto
Sasuke had responded earlier that morning. He was startled at the short letter, perhaps the shortest narutos ever written as he remembered the dandlings and dundlings of thought. Rambling tales of Ichiraku's grandson and the miraculous twins (a girl and a boy, Sasuke—how perfect!), or, Gamabunta says one of the tadpoles looks just like you—grumpy and suspicious! or, Kakashi-sensei was late to a meeting he scheduled himself or, Sakura’s being terrifying again. I’m pretty sure she’s actually an evil witch with evil witch powers. Don’t tell her I said that. (Sasuke found that request ridiculous. He doesn't even write to Sakura and he's pretty sure Naruto knows.)
Sasuke doesn't bother writing to Sakura for many reasons. Mainly because she hadn't bothered either.
He could never have her forgiveness the way he had Naruto's.
Naruto’s forgiveness had been volcanic—immediate, overwhelming, impossible to withstand. It had swallowed his sins and spat him back out as something almost human again. Naruto forgave like he breathed: instinctive, reckless, unmeasured.
Sakura—
Sakura loved with discernment.
Her heart was no smaller. He knows that. If anything, it was terrifyingly vast.
But it did not extend indiscriminately the way Naruto's did.
He had been allowed inside once, briefly, foolishly, when she was still a girl who believed love was easy. He had proved her wrong in the bloodiest way possible.
She had cared then—fiercely, painfully, stupidly—and he had thrown that care back in her face like broken glass. She had picked up the pieces anyway, bandaged her own hands, and rebuilt something stronger without him in it.
Because forgiveness, when it is withheld, is not always punishment; sometimes it is mercy. Sometimes it is the kindest thing one person can do for another: to stop pretending the damage can be undone.
Because Naruto's heart stretches to cover the whole village, the whole world, even the parts that tried to burn it down.
Sakura's heart still stretches—but only to the people who did not try to burn her world down.
And Sasuke is no longer one of them.
He remembers the war’s end: her standing over him, blood on her hands that was not hers, eyes sharp not with love but with clarity.
“I will help you,” she had said.
A medic’s promise.
Not a lover's-- not even a friend's.
So he does not write.
He thinks of her but he does not write. He knows that forgiveness is not something one demands, it is something one is offered.
Or not.
And he will not force her heart to open for him again.
He folds Naruto’s letter carefully and tucks it into the inner lining of his cloak.
He turned abruptly now, cloak snapping in the breeze, aware since dawn of the eyes tracking him from the canopy. Footsteps too careful, breathing too controlled—not the clumsy shuffle of desperate vagrants seeking coin, but the measured tread of hunters on contract. They had followed the hawk's trajectory, perhaps, mistaking the bird for a vulnerability.
Fools.
He allowed them to trail him through the noon heat, testing their intent, letting the sakura blossoms drift lazily around him like pink snow in reverse—petals catching in his dark hair, clinging to the empty sleeve that fluttered uselessly.
By noon, he understood.
They were not homeless men hoping for a quick purse.
They were shinobi.
Sasuke walks a little farther into a clearing, sunlight pooling between tree trunks. He adjusts the strap of his pack, as though indifferent.
When he deemed the charade long enough, he spun on his heel. Kunai flashed from his fingers in precise arcs, embedding in bark with soft thuds. Three bodies tumbled from their perches—shinobi garb, headbands scratched but not crossed, faces frozen in surprise. Before they could rise, the Rinnegan ignited in his left eye, purple ripples blooming and they were dead within seconds.
Sasuke stands among the aftermath, breath steady.
He waits a moment longer, listening for additional footsteps.
Nothing.
Only cicadas.
“It wasn’t personal,” he mutters, though to whom he does not know.
He wipes the blade clean against fallen leaves.
The heat presses closer now, heavy and damp. Spring surrendering reluctantly to summer. Sakura petals drift down onto blood-darkened earth, absurdly delicate.
He moves away from the clearing without looking back.
A small river curves through the underbrush not far ahead. He settles beneath a tree where shade fractures the sunlight into manageable pieces. The bark is warm at his back.
He unwraps the fish he caught earlier—charred carefully over a low fire at dawn.
He ate in silence, chewing mechanically, gaze drifting to the sakura canopy overhead. Blossoms continued their gentle fall, carpeting the ground in fragile beauty, each petal a brief, perfect life already ending. One landed on the half-eaten fish; he brushed it away without thought.
He rose, brushing petals from his shoulders, the missing arm aching with phantom heat from the sun. The road stretched ahead, lined with blooming trees that whispered of transience, of things beautiful and brief.
He walked on.
But not towards Konoha. Not away either.
Just onward.
He felt Naruto before he saw him.
A familiar surge of chakra rolling in like summer thunder over flat plains—wild, bright, uncontainable—growing closer with every heartbeat until the air itself seemed to hum with it. Sasuke waited until the blur of orange resolved into a man standing breathless and grinning right in front of him.
“Usuratonkachi,” Sasuke says.
It falls from him without thought.
Naruto’s mouth twitches.
“I’m hungry.”
Of course he is.
Sasuke finds himself smiling as he unwraps more fish. A few seconds in and his heart is already lighter at the sight of the blonde man.
Naruto took the offering, sniffed it, raised an eyebrow. “Are you offering me raw fish?”
Sasuke rolled his eyes. “You should’ve planned ahead if you don’t like my food.”
Naruto huffs and tears off a bite anyway. He chews with exaggerated contemplation.
“Heh. I kinda just ran as soon as I got your letter.”
Sasuke does not remind him that he is Hokage now. He is certain Sakura handles that particular scolding with more violence than he ever could.
“There’s a town ahead,” Sasuke says instead. “It’ll take a couple weeks of travel.”
“A couple weeks?!” Naruto nearly chokes. “We are in the middle of nowhere?!”
“You found me.”
“That’s not the point!”
Sasuke sighed, reclaimed the remaining fish from Naruto’s greedy fingers, and sat down properly beneath another sakura tree whose petals fell in gentle mockery of snow long gone. He kindled a small fire.
He can feel Naruto’s gaze on him but does not meet it.
As the flames caught, Sasuke skewered pieces of fish and held them over the heat, turning them carefully. Really, why was he the one doing this? He had one hand. Naruto had two perfectly good ones and an appetite that could bankrupt a fishing village. Yet here he was, tending the meal like some long-suffering attendant, while Naruto simply sat cross-legged and stared.
“You never came,” Naruto said quietly.
Sasuke passed the first perfectly roasted piece across the fire.
“Why didn't you come Sasuke?”
Sasuke chose not to answer.
Naruto accepted another piece, blew on it once, then bit in. “It was the greatest day of my life and you never came.”
The next piece of fish is blackened lightly at the edge.
Naruto chews without complaint.
“Why didn’t you come, Sasuke?”
“I was too far.”
Naruto shakes his head immediately. “I know you had time. Don’t lie.”
Sasuke exhaled through his nose. He reached into the inner folds of his cloak and withdrew a small leather pouch, no bigger than a child’s fist. Inside rested a single tiny frog-shaped chocolate.
“Here,” he says.
Naruto looks confused as Sasuke holds it out stiffly.
“It's a wedding gift for you,” he said, holding it out as though the small, absurd thing might repair what words never could. “It’s apparently inspired by some western sweet. But that one was… sort of alive.”
“Alive?” Naruto asked, brows lifting.
“It was magical,” Sasuke said, voice dipping into dry mockery. “At least that’s what the guy told me.”
Naruto took the pouch, turned it over in his palm once, then simply pocketed it.
“I don’t care about the damn chocolate, Sasuke.”
“Then why’d you let me talk about it?”
Naruto’s gaze softened, the fire painting gold along the sharp lines of his face. “I like hearing Sasuke talk.”
Silence follows.
Sasuke waited for the question.
But Naruto only rose to his feet, stretched until his spine popped, and looked down the road ahead.
“So. Town’s a couple weeks ahead, huh? I would race you but getting here took a week at my best. I'm tired, let’s go.”
The question never came again.
The road to the town unfurled like a lazy scroll of green and gold, cherry blossoms long surrendered to new leaves that rustled overhead in conspiratorial whispers, and Naruto—Naruto—filled every inch of silence with the kind of chatter that could power a small village if only someone could figure out how to harness it.
The town receives Naruto the way dry earth receives rain.
They have barely crossed the threshold of the first crooked street before Naruto is already speaking to a man hauling crates of cabbages as if they are lifelong friends.
“Those look heavy!” Naruto announces cheerfully.
“They are,” the man replies, wary.
“You should stack them in a triangle,” Naruto continues, gesturing enthusiastically. “Triangles are stable. I learned that once. I think. Or maybe I just made it up.”
“That’s… not how cabbages—”
But Naruto is already helping, lifting a crate, adjusting it at a slightly questionable angle.
Sasuke watches from a short distance away, arms folded.
Really, he thinks.
It takes Naruto less than four minutes to learn the cabbage vendor’s name, his daughter’s birthday, the tragic saga of a goat that escaped last winter and was discovered three villages over with a bell that did not belong to it.
The goat story grows more elaborate with each retelling.
“And then,” Naruto says, leaning in conspiratorially to a widening circle of listeners, “the goat just stared at him. Like it knew what it did.”
“It’s a goat,” someone points out.
“Exactly,” Naruto replies gravely.
Laughter erupts.
They move deeper into town. Naruto is intercepted by a group of children who are arguing with devastating seriousness about whether fish sleep.
“They do!” one insists.
“They can’t!” another counters. “They don’t have pillows!”
Naruto crouches to their level immediately. “Okay. First of all. Pillows are optional.”
Sasuke closes his eyes briefly.
“Second,” Naruto continues, pointing with dramatic emphasis, “fish absolutely sleep. But they do it with one eye open.”
The children gasp.
“Really?!” one whispers.
“I’m almost certain,” Naruto says confidently. “Unless I’m completely wrong. Which is possible. But I don’t think so. Sasuke here is very smart. He will tell you.”
“You’re making that up,” Sasuke mutters from behind him.
Naruto twists around. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“Prove it.”
Sasuke considers engaging. He decides against it.
They walk onward towards the village inn.
“Afternoon, obaasamas! Is the well water still sweeter than your smiles or has someone finally figured out how to bottle both?” Naruto yelled at a cluster of aunties.
One of the women—a round-faced matron with flour dusted across her apron—laughed so hard she nearly sloshed her bucket. “Boy, if you think flattery gets you free water, you’re half right. The other half is charm, and you’ve clearly got buckets of that too.”
“Buckets!” Naruto echoed delightedly. “See, Sasuke? I’m collecting buckets now. Soon I’ll have enough to open my own well. Naruto’s Infinite Well of Infinite Charm—believe it!”
“Do you never get tired?” Sasuke sighed. He knew that, growing up, Naruto had endless energy. But did adulthood simply not affect him at all?
“Be nicer to me, I just got us free water!”
The second auntie, squinting at Sasuke’s empty sleeve with the frank curiosity of someone who had seen worse in her seventy-odd years, clucked her tongue. “And you, quiet one—did the wind steal your other arm or did you trade it for all the words your friend is using up?”
Naruto answered before Sasuke could decide whether to deflect or ignore. “Nah, he lent it to me years ago and I forgot to give it back. Classic me. I’m terrible with borrowing things—socks, patience, arms, you name it.”
The women dissolved into cackles, one of them pressing a still-warm sweet potato into Naruto’s hands “for the poor limb-less companion who has to put up with you,” and Sasuke accepted it without protest, peeling it one-handed while Naruto launched into an impromptu tale about how he once accidentally adopted a whole litter of raccoon dogs because they looked lonely and “who can say no to striped socks with faces?”
By the time they reached the central square, Naruto had acquired: a bag of candied persimmons from a fruit vendor who declared him “the loudest customer in three seasons,” a wooden toy flute from a child, and the undying loyalty of three stray cats who now trailed him like grey-and-white bodyguards, meowing indignantly whenever he paused talking for more than five seconds.
The inn’s single room smelled faintly of cedar and yesterday’s rain, the kind of modest lodging that had probably hosted generations of weary travelers who asked no questions and left no traces. One futon. One thin blanket. One window letting in the soft, persistent glow of paper lanterns strung along the street below.
Naruto had burst through the door first, dropped his pack with a theatrical groan, and immediately launched into economics. “Two beds? Two beds, Sasuke! They wanted enough ryō to feed a small army for a month! Jesus, has your bachelor life made you luxurious or what? We’re shinobi, not daimyo!”
And then Naruto, in a display of fiscal righteousness that would have made any treasurer proud, declared they would absolutely be sharing.
Sasuke had wrinkled his nose—indignant, automatic, the way one wrinkles one’s nose at a particularly bad smell—and paid for the room without another word, sliding coins across the counter while Naruto bounced on his heels behind him like an over-caffeinated puppy who had just won an argument he invented.
Now the consequences lie before them.
The mattress is narrow. The blanket insufficient. The window slightly crooked, allowing a draft that smells faintly of woodsmoke and distant rain.
Naruto is on his back, hands folded beneath his head, staring at the ceiling as though it contains constellations only he can decipher.
Naruto, predictably, could not let silence last longer than thirty seconds.
“So anyway,” he continued, voice bright and conspiratorial in the dimness, “I’m telling you—Gai-sensei totally likes Kakashi-sensei. Like, likes likes. The eternal youth thing? It’s a front. He’s been doing those ridiculous challenges for years just to get Kakashi to look at him for more than five seconds.”
Sasuke, already half-turned away, makes a noncommittal noise.
“No listen. And Iruka-sensei? Iruka-sensei gets all flustered whenever Kakashi’s around. Blushing, stammering, dropping chalk—classic. It’s so unfair because Kakashi-sensei doesn’t even seem to notice! He just flips another page in that stupid book like the whole village isn’t quietly losing its mind over him.”
Sasuke snorts quietly.
“I thought Gai was the type to declare his love from mountaintops.”
“Exactly!” Naruto rolled onto his side, propping himself up on one elbow so he could stare at the back of Sasuke’s head. “That’s why it’s serious! He isn’t shouting it from the rooftops, which means he’s actually terrified of messing it up. That’s what Hinata says, anyway. She’s got this whole theory about how the louder someone is normally, the quieter they get when it really matters—”
Sasuke’s mood soured instantly.
The name landed like a pebble in still water, rippling outward through every quiet place he had tried to keep sealed. He did not hate her. That was the worst part.
She was unbearably shy, yes, but never foolish. She spoke softly and meant every word. Her affection for Naruto had been steady, patient, almost frightening in its endurance.
In a way—
She is almost perfect for him.
Sasuke had once felt a quiet kinship with her. The weight of family expectation. The ache of inadequacy carved by lineage. The strange position of loving Naruto from a distance that felt both necessary and unbearable.
He rolls over, presenting Naruto with the firm line of his back.
The mattress dips as Naruto shifts closer.
“Hey, Sasuke. Sasuke, you aren’t even listening, teme!”
“I’m sleepy, dobe.”
“You’re not sleepy. You’re brooding.”
A beat of silence—rare, almost miraculous—then Naruto huffed, dramatic and wounded. “Sasukeeeee, you’re taking all the bed.”
“It was your idea.”
“That doesn’t mean you get territorial rights!”
Sasuke shifts marginally farther toward the wall, which does nothing to improve spatial distribution.
Naruto huffs dramatically and attempts to reclaim blanket real estate.
“Unbelievable,” Naruto mutters. “You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Am not.”
“You absolutely are.”
Sasuke exhales softly. He closed his eyes.
Naruto shifted in his sleep, mumbling something about “more pork… extra spicy…” and burrowed closer.
Sasuke did not push him away.
You should be starin' at the sky
The birds just passin' by, love.