Onward
It was quiet.
His stark white face was luminous under the moon, which bathed the village in a ghostly light and did nothing to hide him. He was walking, taking long, swift strides that echoed softly on the pavement.
It was strange, to see such a happy, bustling little place ransacked, but Konoha was in shambles and had been attacked while he was away.
He remembered the Chuunin exams, and Orochimaru's men swarming throughout the whole of Fire Country. There were explosions, and then, beasts—demons—masquerading as giant snakes. (Slither, slither, they conquered the day.)
He wasn't fond of snakes.
Kakashi's apartment slipped out of view somewhere on his side, and he did not look back. It wasn't Kakashi that he had come to see, though he did allow himself to wonder just how the man had aged. How bittersweet it would be, to see the weather of years before his very eyes.
Sakura's apartment, too, flew past, but the complex was in such a tired state that he did not recognize it until it was far behind him. He thought she might be awake, reading, or perhaps waiting near her window. She'd always been able to tell if he was about to do something stupid.
Being in Konoha counted as stupid.
A slight smile etched its way onto his face, and his head burned with visions of being loved once. Nobody would love him now, not when he had turned their affections and their worries away, so long ago.
The smile disappeared, and he kept moving, pausing only once in his path, to glance at the academy where he had studied as a child who knew nothing. There was a light on in one of the classrooms—Iruka, if he had to hazard a guess—but he wasn't supposed to care. (He did, and he wasn't supposed to.) Everything he had learned there, here, was a mistake.
Returning on a whim was a mistake among mistakes.
Growling, he continued. Each step killed a little bit of who he was, reviving who he had been before Orochimaru. He held fast to painful memories of training, of being tortured, but he could not hold on tight enough, and then there were three colors in front of him.
Orange, pink, and gray.
He shook his head furiously, but they would not go away.
Orange fought for the spotlight, and suddenly Sasuke really saw it. On a jacket. Naruto's jacket! It was lying atop a pile of rubble, torn.
He bent to pick it up, and underneath, the face of a peaceful infant, bloodied, greeted him. In shock he stumbled backward, and his spine fell against something hard; upright. He turned and it was Kakashi.
Gray.
"I can't say I'm surprised to see you here," Kakashi said, dryly, "You must have heard about the attack."
He nodded numbly, and noticed another color behind Kakashi. It was pink. Sakura. ("Thank you.")
"Hey," she whispered sadly.
And then he got to thinking. "Where is Naruto?" He demanded, loudly.
They exchanged glances, she and Kakashi, and Sakura wrapped herself around his torso, holding him tightly.
"I won't let you go," she promised, "Not when I've already lost someone."
He was almost afraid to ask if that someone had been Naruto, but somehow the question worked itself into the open, and the ugly answer was "yes".
"Stupid dobe," he said, shaking. "You said you wanted to fight me!"
Sakura rubbed his cheek in an attempt to comfort him, but he pushed her away.
"It's okay to cry," she insisted, "so go ahead. It takes a real shinobi to show emotion in the face of death."
For a while she rambled on and on, the shadow of a twelve year old girl behind her, and her heart spilled its contents like never before as she gushed about Naruto and how powerful he had been, and about Kakashi and how each of them had missed him, and, and how dare he leave them?
"You are annoying," He said quickly.
She hugged him again, and over her head he saw the wall of carved hokage that overlooked the village.
"Is that…?"
She let go; Kakashi shifted uncomfortably, staring up at the sky. They sighed together. ("We are as one.")
The heavens opened, giving way to a red morning sun, and life and death met in a chilling chorus of "Yes, Sasuke. Yes."
Finite.
Because every day, he discovers something else, some other small tragedy that tears him apart.