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A/N: Edited by the ever graceful Zero-Motivation.
Itachi was dead, Sasuke had murdered him with his bare hands. The fight had left a permanent strain on body and chakra.. He fought Orochumaru and Kabuto back to back before he left, after the Transfer Jutsu backfired and the Akatsuki ambush.
Sasuke had never felt he had been strong enough to defeat Itachi and he still hadn't even in those crucial moments when the lair exploded in a cacophony of noise and agonized screams of fallen shinobi, and Orochumaru's body lay quite vacant and lifeless he had certainly felt crazy enough. There was the a moment when everything had been scrambled and he could feel his own heart thudding rapidly in his chest and the adrenaline coursing through every vein in his body. It was nothing like the rush of power he had expected to feel in the moments before he finally defeated his brother and avenged his family. It was a feeling of confusion and helplessness, the very same he'd felt the day he found his entire clan slain by the man he claimed to have loved the most in the world.
The man he still loved most in the world.
Then there was nothing but the drumming of his heart in his chest and roar of his soul and then….nothing. Everything in the world it seemed, appeared to stand out in a harsh clarity that he'd never experienced. Nothing in the world mattered then but him and Itachi. Him and Aniki.
He cried afterwards. For the first time since the massacre he cried real tears, blood tears as the Mangekyo finally merged with his Sharigan.
He had finally killed his most precious person.
Afterwards his body had been mapped with scars, bruises, welts and grotesque sores infected due to improper medical care. Over time, he had healed by taking refuge in the small random villages that offered their aid, unknowingly helping one of their countries' most notorious missing nin. Sasuke had prayed that their ignorance lasted and returned their kindness in the only way he knew how. He performed hard manual labor in each village, working hard on their small rice farms before departing, in search of another village for refuge.
Now that Itachi was dead and his eyes now literally bleed scarlet with the Mangekyo Sharingan, Sasuke found that he had no actual purpose in life. He was an avenger in heart and soul and once an avenger's work is done there is little more for him than to whither away and die.
He no longer had a home to return to, but then again he never actually considered Konoha his home. He had never felt the pulsating loyalty to his land of birth as most ninja and citizen alike boasted. He simply lacked the passion for it, just as he lacked passion for many things.
When he had left, he felt a constricting in his chest, not for the land itself but for the few memories and people he ever truly felt love for, harbored within.
Six months later in a remote village in Kirigakure where Sasuke had found refuge with a couple, owners of a Sento bathhouse across the bridge separating the two halves of the small village and in exchange for their hospitality and board he worked odd jobs around the rooms and baths. While on an errand across the bridge he came across a young beggar woman, barely fourteen it seemed and draped in foul smelling rags as her only defense against the harsh winter's cold. When Sasuke passed her, he dimly noted a very soft life force emitting from her, but not much else.
She would die soon, he could see the acceptance in her wide glassy eyes as they locked gazes for a fraction of a second before he passed her on the bridge in a hurry.
When he passed her next, on his way to pick up a package for the mistress of the bathhouse, she was still in the same place had found her the night before on the bridge, her position unchanged...except this time, she was dead.
Her wide eyes remained open even after death into a lax expression of acceptation but as he passed her again, he could feel that same faint ebb of life from her frozen unmoving limbs. Perhaps it was out of curiosity that he squatted down before her and touched her frozen cheek, pressing his fingers against her stiff neck to find exactly what he had expected: no pulse.
Still, he lingered for a moment or so and gently lowered her open lids. He figured that even if in life she was forced to live homeless that she should at least be allowed this honor in death.
As he lowered his hand he felt that pulse of life, stronger this time and shifted the blankets covering her shoulder open just slightly. In the crock of her rigid arms, an infant that couldn't be older than a few days, a week at the most, was half dead; frozen and starved. Of course he had realized, as he slowly pulled the barely breathing thing from its dead mother's bosom, that it would be so much more merciful to let the thing just die and end its suffering. However another larger part of him wanted the child to live. It was that want to drove him to the entrance of the local emergency room, the infant wrapped in his winter cloak.
As soon as he had showed the nurses the baby, they had snatched the half dead thing from him and rushed it behind swinging metal doors. He had waited in the main entrance since. For what reason he couldn't comprehend and didn't actually want to, a part of him (a miniscule part) was worried sick over the little pink shriveled thing. Nothing innocent deserved to die, he concluded, and nothing so young should be denied life.
But he couldn't get over the subconscious nagging at the back of his head that he very may well have just preserved the life of the next mass murderer of his time. The notion in itself irked him to the bone.
Three hours later, the nurses approached him. A single nurse pulled him aside and spoke to him in low anxious whispers, gesturing with her hands frequently (which Sasuke vaguely found irrationally peevish). She asked about the baby's health, his age, how long he'd been sick, and if he was the father.
He answered her in a blunt disinterested tone that he didn't know any of that information and her face twisted at his arrogance. It wasn't of his concern if the old bat was offended. If she didn't want the truth then she should have never asked him for it in the first place.
As she prodded on; asking for any information of the mother's whereabouts, how was he related to her, why she gave it up; Sasuke felt his control slip.
"Look, I don't know who the kid's mother is or who its father is. I just found him on a bridge with his mom. She was dead (most likely from the cold) when I found her. Other than that, I don't know anything."
The elder nurse gave him a scrutinizing look (obviously peeved at his disrespectful tone and intent on admonishing him for it) before finally coming to her own conclusion that he was, in fact, telling the truth.
"Alright." she invoiced quietly and Sasuke rolled his shoulders.
"The baby is weak, but stable. He suffers from starvation, dehydration, and hypothermia but some how," her wizened face took on a look of soft be wonderment and awe, "he's still alive. Quite the fighter I might add."
"Good." Sasuke turned from her and made for the front entrance, without a cloak but not really bothering to care. He'd rather suffer the frigid winds that spend another hour dealing with these overzealous staff and nurses.
"Wait," the nurse called, her posture and voice had seemingly changed dramatically within the time span of a few seconds and now spoke to him with much less reproach. "Would like to say goodbye to him first, before you leave? I'm sure he'd like to see the man who saved his life."
Sasuke turned the notion over in his mind for a moment, and thought the whole idea was rather stupid. That baby didn't know what was going on, he probably didn't even know that only hours ago, he was on the brink of death. What difference would Sasuke saying good bye to him make if the brat didn't even know he'd been saved? Yet it seemed a force was driving him to accept; the same force that had driven him to save the little brat's life in the first place. Though now he was regretting it, as saving the thing's life only seemed to cause him much more trouble than it would have, had he let it die.
The nursery was as most nurseries are: yellow, blue and pink streamers of paper hung from the ceiling in sad thin strands and new mothers cooed at their pink little wads of clothes and pudgy flesh that simply slept on, oblivious to this new world they'd been forced into. In the very back, among rows of plastic domes on long spindly metal legs, inhabited tiny bodies with long ugly needles sticking from their thin, nearly translucent skin. The nurse maneuvered him to a single dome, and gestured for him to sit in the padded chair beside it as she tenderly lifted the small thing swathed in soft blue blankets.
As the nurse lowered the swathed bundle into Sasuke's stiff arms, she spoke again, soft and lovingly. She had seen many births in her thirty years as a mid-nurse and countless babies but none as strong spirited as this little warrior. He was truly remarkable even in this early stage of his life.
"From what the doctor gathers, he's only two days or so old. The mother must have birthed him at home because the doctors have no record of him on file, but the umbilical cord seemed to have been separated properly."
"She was homeless." Sasuke murmured absently as his arms evenly relaxed under the slight weight of the bundled infant. Now that he was actually looking at the thing, he couldn't see what had so many women cooing over for hours. There was nothing remarkable or cute about this child or any child. His face, like any new born, was fat and wrinkled and so very pink. He looked like a wad of freshly chewed bubble gum.
The elderly nurse clucked softly, sadly and absent-mindedly plucking the corners of the swaddling blankets up a little higher on the babies chin.
"What a shame. And she died from the cold you said."
Sasuke grunted offhandedly in agreement, still staring intently at the scrunched little face before him.
Slowly, the nurse bent on creaky old knees until she was eye level with both the mysterious rescuer and the infant and looked them over questioningly. The man seemed to have no clue as to the mechanics of babies and didn't seem at all willing to learn. The way he held the infant spoke volumes of his apprehension toward it; she smiled at them.
"What's its name?" he queried just as the baby slitted his eyes thinly and yawned, his little pink tongue poking out between equally rosy gums.
"He doesn't have one yet. The other nurses wanted to name him themselves, but I thought it might be better of you did."
Sasuke found himself suddenly staring into huge grayish blue eyes: "Why? I don't know any baby names."
She shrugged and smiled again at the picture they made together.
"I don't know. Humor me anyway."
Sasuke thought long and hard on what this child should be named. He didn't know many names, and certainly didn't know what name that best suited this child or its character. It didn't even have any character yet, as it was still a newborn and even so he certainly wasn't any judge of character himself. But as they continued their staring contest, between the infant and himself, his mind formulated the perfect name for him.
"Lawleit."
"Lawleit?" she rolled the name over in her head and frowned. "That's a funny name. Never even heard of it before."
Sasuke shrugged as the baby finally blinked -- a tiny spit bubble formed at the edge of his tiny mouth.
"Then you pick a name."
"Hikaru. It suits him, I think." she nodded as if agreeing with herself and touched the tip of her finger to the squirming infant's nose.
"Then Hikaru it is."
The elderly nurse left them not long after; once she carefully instructed Sasuke on the proper way to feed and burp an infant and handed him a bottle of warm milk. At the front desk, she greeted the head nurse of the late shift with a grin and asked for a birth certificate. As she filled it out, she couldn't hold back the grin that smoothed her fine lined cheek as she printed the name "Hikaru Lawleit" and the last name blank for what ever this mystery saviors name was last name was and filed the mother as deceased.
She deliberately left the father blank.
She had a feeling, even if it was a small one, that by morning she might just be able to have the father side signed.
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