Full of Grace
Naruto stared down into the valley below him, the wrinkles formed by forty-five years of laughter and tears crinkling around his eyes.
He had not expected this.
The house in the valley was small, barely two rooms. From here he could see the black and gray haired man moving slowly around it, collecting firewood and attending to all the little chores that living out in the wilderness created. There was a child, he knew. He'd snuck up to the bedroom window and peered inside last night. His stealth skills still sucked ass, but he hadn't been detected. The child was small for his age, with messy brown hair and a quiet smile and that indefinable quality that all orphans in the bloody world of shinobis acquired.
The other man had found the boy in a tiny orphanage in the equally tiny village three miles away, and had promptly adopted him and built the cabin the two now inhabited. That kind of information had been surprisingly easy to acquire in the insular, isolated village. It was just another thing Naruto hadn't expected.
Truly, none of them had expected this. How could they? It just wasn't part of the story. It wasn't the fairytale ending of the hopeful, or the bloody carnage of the bitter. It was…something different.
Different? No, that wasn't right. The lives of his friends, when written down, read like legends: the downtrodden hero/heroine rises up to throw off the bonds of the past and become powerful. Epic battles. Tragic loves. Enemies were very clear-cut; there was no gray area. It didn't read like the lives of the people he knew and cared about, people who had shed blood and tears, who had killed innocents because their village needed money, who vomited and swore and sobbed after another bloody mission and then got up and stood strong and did it all again.
Their little stories, woven into the tapestry of history, were exactly that - stories. They didn't have room for things like what sat so peacefully in the little valley below him. In the back of his mind, a part of Naruto insisted that this wasn't right, that there should have been some final showdown and either a bloody end or a heartfelt reunion.
He wasn't supposed to go blind, grow old, and quietly live his life with the child he had adopted out here in the middle of nowhere.
Naruto smiled to himself. Because…why not? Life went on. This wasn't a story; this was his life. His life, and the fact that no one in Konoha had thought of the fact that one Uchiha Sasuke had created a life and moved on was hardly his fault.
With a groan, the blond stood, grimacing as hair got in his face and he caught sight of the thin streaks of gray running through it. Time to return home, he supposed.
Life, after all, waits for no one.
…Right. Because sometimes I sprout philosophical shit out my ears and don't know what to do with it.
But really…it seems stupid that it occurs to absolutely no-one in canon that Sasuke could be doing anything other than training and brooding about revenge. I thought about it, and this…thing…developed. Like it? -Heliotropic