A/N: This is the story that gave birth to Seek, my other fic. So if you've read that and wished it had gone a different direction, well... this one promises to do exactly that.
Summary: Immediately post-war, Sakura is barely holding herself together. She relives the deaths of all that she couldn't heal, those who died when connected to her chakra during the war - including her parents. She accepts a long-term ANBU contract to get out, to forget.
Sasuke hasn't seen Sakura in years, not since she left home. Then he finds her in the place he least expects to - with startling new power.
The Sun Goes With You
Chapter 1 - get out
baby baby baby
when all your love is gone
who will save me
from all i'm up against out in this world
-matchbox 20, bright lights
I have to get out of here.
Sakura was covered in blood. Hot, red, thick, sticky, angry blood. It was burning her skin, burning her nose with its corrosive metallic scent, flowing into her eyes and mouth. Screams grated at her senses, wordless shouts of pain and fear and loss. Her lungs were deflating, her bones were crunching under the weight of falling bodies.
She clapped her hands over her ears and fell to her knees. She repeated simple words to herself, like she did every time she found herself back here - back on the battlefield.
This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real….
The blood disappeared, replaced by water so hot that it scalded her. Sakura found herself sitting the floor of her shower, knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around herself, fingernails digging into the skin of her back. She gasped for breath, but it didn't reach her lungs. She squeezed her eyes shut and let the water run over her face.
This too would pass, she knew. It always passed, some way or another. This was a daily occurrence for her since the end of the war. She would see things that weren't there, feel things she couldn't feel, and then come to her senses seconds later feeling like she had been gone for hours, days, weeks.
The war had ended a month ago. Four weeks, thirty days. But she couldn't get out from under it.
She reached out and turned the water cold. She sat in the cold spray until she was shivering violently, her teeth chattering and her fingers shaking, and then she pulled herself out of the shower.
She stared at her naked body in the bathroom mirror. She'd lost more weight - not in a good way, not in the right places - and her eyes were tired, distant. She turned away from the woman in the mirror, unwilling to look at her any longer.
Her hands gripped the edge of her sink as a wave of dizziness came over her, threatening to send her to her floor. Slowly she gave in to the nausea, sinking to her knees, pressing her forehead into the cool tile of the counter.
She stayed this way for nearly two minutes before trying again. This time, she was able to stay standing as she pulled on her clothes. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror and studied herself. She studied her eyes, looking for any warmth - adjusting her lips, the crinkle of her cheeks to make it look more authentic, more welcoming than she felt.
When she was satisfied, she let the smile slide off of her face and into her pocket, to be taken out whenever she needed it.
It was already dark outside when she left her apartment. Her shift started at 7 PM and had no defined end - there was too much work to do. She didn't want to come home, anyway. There was nothing for her at home.
She kept her eyes downcast as she walked through the dark village to the hospital. She didn't want to see the shop windows full of happy displays or the well-kept jacaranda trees on the sidewalks. She just wanted to work.
She let out a sigh of relief as she walked into the hospital. The fluorescent lighting and smell of disinfectant were simple and sterile, bereft of the ability to spark any memories or feeling. She pulled on her white coat and clipped her badge to the collar.
Haruno Sakura, Head Medic. Nurses smiled at her as she began her rounds. She smiled back with the fake smile that she had practiced earlier, letting her eyes say things she didn't feel.
A nurse touched her arm, asking about a patient. The contact made Sakura nauseous.
I have to get out of here.
Her first patient was civilian woman and her pre-term twins. All three were recovering well and sleeping - she did not wake them as she checked vitals, labs, coloring. Her second patient took longer - a grouchy old retired nin, admitted for exacerbation of his asthma. He refused to quit smoking. Sakura changed his inhaler, sent him for x rays, and told him to come back if he starting having chest pain.
The evening hours passed this way, in simple routine. It never ceased to amaze her how grateful people were for things that were as difficult for her as tying her shoes - a script for antibiotics, a refill on blood pressure medicine, smooth reassurances that a woman's baby would not die from a case of the sniffles.
She knew why. It was easy to heal someone else; your own afflictions evaded you time after time until they finally got the best of you.
Sakura checked her clipboard and sighed when she saw the name of her next patient. Her easy night had come to an end.
Uchiha Sasuke.
Even written, the name sent a flutter across her nervous system.
She still loved him. She loved him so much that it felt almost clinical - a pathology that could be studied, a part of her being that was not supposed to be there but was completely incurable. It was chronic, it was terminal, it was uncorrectable. She would die of it someday - it had very nearly taken her life on more than one occasion.
Incurable, indeed, she thought to herself as she flipped through the pages of his blood tests. Organ function fine, blood fine. He didn't have high cholesterol - she didn't know why they even tested him for that. He'd been here for a month, since the end of the war, and they kept running new tests on him. Useless - he hated it, she hated it. It had been necessary.
He had accepted the offer of a new arm, grown from Hashirama's cells. This meant he had to stay here. It meant that she had to see him every day. The thought made it hard to get out of bed in the mornings. She didn't know what was more afraid of - that he would be there when she opened his door, or that he wouldn't.
Itinerant. That was the best word for him, she decided. She was incurable and he was itinerant.
She pushed open the door to his room.
I have to get out of here.
.
.
.
When Sasuke awoke, he knew exactly where he was - a feeling he would never get used to. After so many years of continuous migration, he had grown accustomed to never being quite sure where in the world he would wake up.
But this place was becoming more and more familiar as the weeks passed, much to his chagrin. The four moonlit walls of the Konoha hospital room he was imprisoned in seemed to shrink every night, almost imperceptibly, but closing in on him all the same. The barred window looked out on the destruction that his war had caused - he would never know if they had given him this view on purpose, to remind him of why he was being kept there, but he suspected they had.
Of course, if Sasuke really wanted to leave, there was no room in the world which could contain him. The elders knew it, and his rinnegan pulsed in quiet agreement. But where would he go? He was purposeless, a blank sheet of paper in a breezeless sky. Here, at least, things were interesting. This was where Itachi would want him to stay.
The steady sound of another person's breathing drew Sasuke's eyes to the edge of his bed, although he already knew who he would see there. Haruno Sakura, arms crossed upon her chest and white coat unbuttoned, slept in a chair pushed up against the wall. Even in her sleep, the bags under her eyes were apparent.
Sasuke stretched his arms out experimentally, testing the progress she had made on his new limb that night. He could feel the new vasculature and nerves that were now silently working under the new skin. Certainly, she was almost finished. The new limb was almost imperceptible from its predecessor - even the hairs were the same. There was the smallest of delays in response when Sasuke commanded it to perform, as if his old body and new one refused to speak to each other. But surely that would go away with time - she had promised it would.
This was their arrangement, and as close to friendship as Sasuke could come to someone with whom he was not cosmically linked through repeating souls. Every night, well past midnight, she would quietly let herself into his room and tut disapprovingly when she found he was still awake. She would drag a chair to his bedside, roll up her sleeves, and settle into her work. She rarely spoke to him, except to ask him questions about his arm. Her concentration was a mighty, unshakeable thing - Sasuke wondered if she would even hear him if he attempted to speak.
However, his new arm was not the only gift she gave him. Each night, not long after her chakra first flowed into him, a pervading feel of peacefulness would wash over his mind and lull him into a dreamless sleep. He knew that this was her doing, that she poured her own calmness into him for his sake.
He had become addicted to it, in a way. For as long as he could remember, nightmares had plagued him every night - but as long as she was touching him, the ghosts of his family dared not rouse him. He felt nothing, thought of nothing. He would be this way for hours as she worked.
But as soon as that thread of peace was broken, the ghosts came crawling back. And he would wake up, well rested but shaken, to see that she had dragged her chair as far from him as possible to sneak a few moments of undisturbed sleep. Immediately after the war, Tsunade had retired, taking Shizune with her, and left the hospital to Sakura. And a post-world-war hospital was not an easy beast to tame. Yet, she still made the time for her old teammates.
Sasuke was not the only one in the hospital plagued with nightmares, either. The hospital was rife with the screams of men who returned to the battlefield in their dreams every night. He wondered sometimes, for the briefest of seconds, why she did not go to their bedside, to calm them the way she calmed him. But he already knew the answer. He had always known.
She was no exception, herself one of the injured. She saw her own terrors when she closed her eyes. She did not scream or sob like the other patients, but her eyes would fly open, sweat beading on her brow, and her gaze would fix itself on the wall above Sasuke's head. She would stare for several minutes before silently taking her leave, venturing back out into the well-lit hallways of the hospital, where she was so desperately needed.
Sasuke gave her no indication that he saw those episodes, and she never spoke of it. But she must have known.
Tonight, she was peaceful. He eyed the clock; dawn was closing in. Someone would be looking for her, surely.
"Sakura," he murmured, his voice permeating the silent room.
She stirred briefly before her eyes snapped open. There was no need to wipe sleepiness from her eyes; it was not there. "Sasuke. Is everything alright?"
"It's late," he shrugged.
She rubbed her forehead with her palm, lingering on the diamond-shaped seal on her brow. "I didn't mean to sleep so long."
No, she never did. Her voice was tinged with an apology, as if Sasuke would begrudge her the extra moments of sleep she could steal from the hospital. He never did.
He waited for her to stand up and apologize once more before leaving, as was their routine. But she didn't. She leaned forward in her chair, her elbows on her knees and her fingertips pressed together.
"I have news," she said carefully.
Sasuke didn't respond. He knew he did not need to - she would tell him anyway.
"I would have told you earlier," she continued in his silence, an obvious nervousness pervading her words. "But you looked so tired, so I just -"
"Sakura," he cut her off. He knew she was stalling, and it made him uneasy - her news was never good, and he would prefer her to just get it over with. "Get to the point."
She sighed. "Your arm is finished, Kakashi has signed off on your release, the council found you an empty apartment. You're being discharged."
Her words caught Sasuke by surprise - he had been expecting her news to be of the sort that made his gut twist. More Konoha shinobi succumbing to the wounds inflicted by the war, or dead of post-war reconnaissance missions. But this news… this was good, wasn't it?
"Say something," Sakura murmured, and Sasuke glanced at her. Her green eyes held no emotion that Sasuke could place. They were searching him for something, although he could never figure out what.
"So I can go?" he asked, only to quell her.
"In the morning."
He nodded and looked out the window at the remnants of his village. Tomorrow, he could go. He could… what? Everything that had been his life until this exact moment was now useless. There was no one to take revenge on, no one to run from or run to. No unattainable standard of power that he had to live up to.
"Sasuke."
"Huh?" he murmured, distracted.
"You'll be okay," she said gently. He looked at her, surprised; somehow, after all these years, she knew what he was thinking.
She reached a hand out to him, as if to touch his shoulder reassuringly, but the gesture never settled. Her hand stopped halfway to him and then the gesture died; her hand returned to her lap.
The tension was painful.
Sakura cleared her throat. "Another doctor will come by in the morning to sign you out, and a nurse will assist you in the exercises you need to do to become accustomed to your new arm."
"You won't do it?" he asked her, apprehensive. He did not relish the thought of some skittish nurse, afraid of the rumors she'd heard about him, trying to teach him to use his own arm. Better to have someone who could at least touch him without shuddering.
She did not answer immediately. Her gaze became slightly glazed, focused just to the left of his eyes. After a moment, she responded. "No, I… I have somewhere I need to be."
He frowned. Here was where she needed to be. The hospital. But he did not push her.
She finally stood, the chair squeaking back across the floor. Again, there was hesitation. He turned to look at her, expectant; she was not one to keep her concerns quiet.
But she did not do what he was expecting.
"Take care of yourself, Sasuke," she murmured, and the softness in her eyes, the gentleness in her expression, rendered him speechless.
Sakura turned to leave, her white coat fluttering as the door closed behind her. He stared after her, half expecting her to turn right around and come back.
She didn't.
He would lose count of the years before he saw her again.
A/N: Thanks so much for reading! If you liked this, and want to see it continue, please leave a review. Unfortunately I do not continue review-less stories as the motivation just isn't there for me, haha. Stay safe out there, everyone!