Lost and Found
It was far into the night when you knelt down to the ground and hugged your knees. You were lost.
The road wasn't always a safe pathway from one place to the next. Sometimes it liked to play tricks, to lead you the wrong way, to promise and end yet give only more roads to travel. And sometimes it led you stray until it disappeared completely, leaving nothing but a mossy forest floor and the sound of crickets as your only company.
Your nose was assaulted by wood, both alive and dead, that lived in the forest for longer than a hundred human lifetimes.
This isn't how it's supposed to end, you thought. I have somewhere to go.
You trembled in the dark as the forest closed in around you. Yet when it readied to clamp shut you felt a hand on your shoulder instead, and saw, floating in the dark, a pair of red eyes.
"Sasuke-kun!" you said, and his name echoed through the woods.
He lifted you from the ground and carried you in his arms through the black until the trees thinned and you emerged into a small circle of bare grass and the road lay lit by the moon farther up ahead. Sasuke placed you on the ground and studied your face, your eyes sunk deeply in the weak light.
"Baka," he said. "I told you not to come looking for me."
You smiled though he couldn't see. This was the third time you came looking for him since he disappeared from Konoha many years ago. It was a silly game of lost and found. You would become lost by looking for him, and instead he would find you. The lost finding the lost.
It was a silly game.
"Just come back. Then I won't have to look for you."
There were very few people in Konoha who could possibly have the power to sway Sasuke to return to the village. You were one of them. Naruto was away and Sakura was training, which meant, for now, the search was on your shoulders.
Sasuke shifted and you clutched at the hem of his shirt.
"At least stay here until morning," you said.
He nodded and you laid your head in his lap and he placed an arm around your shoulder. You fell asleep peaceful in his arms, knowing that when you woke in the morning he would already be gone.
All through the night he watched you as you slept, he struggled and believed for moment that he really should return, for your sake, yet when the sun on your eyelids brought you back to life you found yourself lying alone in the grass.
You packed your things and stepped out into the road.
"Maybe it's time to go home," you said, and started on your way back.
