The Atrophy and Redemption of Uchiha Sasuke

Chapter Ten: "You Care"


"Saké?"

Kakashi shook his head once and shifted his weight to one hip, watching as Konoha's Godaime Hokage began pouring the nihonshu alcohol into a cup, before changing her mind and drinking straight from the large bottle instead.

She exhaled contentedly after downing several mouthfuls, the potent liquid having given her temporary respite from the report the Copy-Nin had just relayed to her. Then her amber eyes narrowed at the thought, and her fist came slamming down onto her desk.

Kakashi arched a silver brow. He was quickly starting to reconsider the temptation to pull a worn volume of Icha Icha from the pocket of his tattered flack vest. No, that was much too risky.

Tsunade was muttering distractedly, nearly crushing the bottle with her fist, "That foolish little brat . . ."

"Tsunade-sama," the jounin interrupted with a lazy and placating tone lacing the drawl of his words, "I believe she made the correct decision considering the circumstances. She has always been a very sharp young—"

"I dedicate years to carefully training and honing her medical jutsu, and what does she do? Practically secedes from the village without warning and goes gallivanting across the countryside with an S-Ranked criminal."

"War hero," Kakashi corrected under his breath.

The Godaime glared at his impertinence and brought the bottle back to her painted lips, which seemed to have formed a permanent scowl since the Copy-Ninja's entrance into her office early that morning; another swig of saké disappeared down her far-beyond-inebriated throat, "Hmm."

It was time to change direction, Kakashi decided, "One of Sai's ink creatures reported back that Sakura defeated quite a few of Fujita's men. Helped put his prison out of commission for good, apparently."

A pleasant crease formed at the corner of his one visible eye as Tsunade's demeanor shifted altogether, and she leaned back in her chair, barking out ecstatic laughter and nearly spilling what was left of her saké all over herself, "That sure does sound like my hellion of an apprentice! Good for her!"

Their conversation sobered rather quickly, however, when Kakashi removed a seemingly inconspicuous-looking scroll from the confines of his dark green vest.

His face went grim while he placed it into Tsunade's outstretched hand. She unrolled it onto her desk with a frown. Kakashi watched as her eyes darted up and down the page and over the scientific diagrams, each one of them causing more and more potent horror to bloom on her face.

"Well, shit."

He nodded slowly and drew closer to the desk, "I could scarcely believe the contents myself."

"Does Sasuke know?" closing her eyes in barely concealed anger, the Godaime looked away from the scroll and reached for her trusty alcohol, this time pouring the liquid into a small cup.

"I believe he knows enough," Kakashi placed a gloved hand over the breast pocket of his vest, "and I'm surprised he hasn't stormed into the village by now and tried to assassinate every one of them. He may, whether revenge-driven or not," his dark eye darkened yet further, tomoe of his borrowed doujutsu spinning headily in the other eye beneath his hitai-ate. "Even I would not blame him. There's a difference between vengeance and justice. Executing them would be justice."

Reclining backwards in her chair, Tsunade observed her warrior with curious, light eyes. He was generally less forthcoming; she knew he was especially interested where Uchiha affairs were concerned, and understandably so, yet she wondered what had brought such an obviously dark response about.

"And what else did you find with Homura's papers, Kakashi?"

The hand resting against his pocket slipped deftly into the hollow between the flack fabrics. A clinking sound resonated through the material.

"I didn't say anything to Naruto about the scroll," the object clamored delicately onto the wooden desk as it dropped from the open confines of the Copy-Nin's hand. "It's no use getting him worked up over the elders again when we haven't even discovered the full extent of their lies."

Nodding in agreement, her eyes glued to the small heap on the corner of her desk, Tsunade pressed healing chakra into her temple with the tips of two fingers. The red paint of her nails greatly contrasted the hazel of her tired eyes.

Honestly. She was getting far too old for this shit.

"I'm glad you didn't tell him. He's furious enough over their treatment of that Uchiha brat," she re-rolled the scroll and tossed it to Kakashi, who unfurled it briefly and pushed up his hitai-ate. Scant seconds passed before he repositioned the forehead protector and then ignited the flimsy parchment in a consuming burst of katon.

The contents had been far too horrid, far too disgusting for Tsunade to even bother committing to memory, and so she had obligingly watched as Kakashi recorded every word and every diagram into the already extensive archives of his prodigious mind, his borrowed Sharingan a whorl of steady, observant manipulations of the pupil. It had not been the first time she had marveled with medical wonder at the complex iris, the miraculous ocular powers of which had yet to be deciphered by any medic or by any genius thinker. The Sharingan wielder sunk into the wooden seat before the desk.

Tsunade turned slightly in her chair to gaze, absent-minded and sightless, outside of the window.

Kakashi hummed, "How is Naruto's training going?"

Nonchalance in the face of lies and conspiracy. Such is the interaction between two jaded shinobi that have seen too much death and taken far too many lives.

She scoffed deep within her chest, "Unruly brat nearly severed the entire village's security system trying to get out. Four times mind you, Kakashi. Although," she sighed and crossed her jade-clad arms over her large chest, "I suppose we couldn't stop him if he truly wanted to find those two. It's only been this title, this position of Hokage that he's vied for so desperately since childhood, holding him back."

"Hmm," Kakashi conceded, "he does seem to have matured. But I think he just has more trust in his teammates than he used to."

Tsunade nodded, "But what of them? What of your other two students?"

"Ex-students," he corrected dryly and out of guilty habit.

Flipping a blonde pigtail over her shoulder, the Godaime shrugged. Kakashi's eye drooped slightly as fond regard washed over him in the form of memories, "I'm certain, Hokage-sama, that they are just fine, though I do pity one of them in particular," he shifted in his chair.

A fine light brow arched, "I assure you that my apprentice can deal with the young Uchiha well enough. It's her own fault for attaching herself to him so thoroughly."

"No, Hokage-sama," Kakashi chuckled, the corner of his eye crinkling in his usual, suspiciously jolly fashion, "I was referring to Sasuke."

He stood to the sound of his superior's loud laughter and prepared to leave. She began sipping from her ceramic cup, suddenly in much higher spirits than earlier. As he began turning around, he stopped abruptly when his gaze found the edge of the desk.

"Tenzou is acting as an undercover reconnaissance retriever—at least that is what I have been informed of by Sai. Is that correct, Kakashi?" Tsunade turned again in her chair and watched from the window of the Hokage tower, piercing eyes observing Mitokado Homura scurrying from his home, one guard trailing behind protectively like the slinking tail of a vermin, while several more specialized ANBU followed invisibly through the surrounding trees.

Once the council member entered the marketplace and vanished from the watchful Godaime's sight and into the evening crowds, she realized faintly that the last remaining Hatake had not confirmed her question.

She spun her chair back around to face the room, brow furrowing in a nonplussed expression as she did so. Had he vanished from the room already?

But he still stood there, deathly still as he had been minutes before, gazing down at the object he himself had placed on her desk, face slate-solid and void of all expression; his dark eye was absent of any light or recognition, seeing but not seeing, far away and drowning in deep thought over the truth—in that same manner of thought that overcame him whenever he stood before the monument, that slab of names as cold as the corpses it commemorated.

Understanding quieting all the questions in her throat, Tsunade watched as the silent Copy-Nin's gloved hand descended to the table's sheen surface, the dexterous fingers enclosing around the object he had discovered alongside the elders' hidden documents.

His voice was muffled and strangely ponderous when it finally drifted through his mask's black fabric.

"I remember," he murmured thoughtfully. The Hokage curiously sought out his hooded eye, but found it trained unerringly upon the crumpled item draped across his fingers, "working with him once when I was in ANBU. He was very young then . . ." sighing, Kakashi slid the object over the desk and towards Tsunade.

He slipped his hands into his pockets, shoulders falling back into his familiar lackadaisical slouch; however, his stance adopted a forlornness that was not so familiar; he tilted his head, as if in thoughtful sorrow, and his silver mane fell over his eye and the folds of his hitai-ate.

"He was also the second person to ever tell me that my father was a hero," Kakashi shook his head slightly at the irony and the truths he still did not know, and turned to leave.

And as Tsunade watched him disappear behind the door and down the stairs, rather than in his characteristic cloud of smoke, she mused to herself that Hatake Kakashi had just looked like the thousand years in age he truly was.

Pursing her lips and pouring a hefty amount of saké into a ceramic cup, the Godaime began to sift through paperwork without real interest. The moon rose higher into the sky and glinted off of the object still resting upon the desk.

Wondering when the aim of shinobi had become one of genocide and forcing children to murder their own blood, she scooped the metal and black twined rope up within the cradle of her hand, and gazed down admirably at the necklace of Uchiha Itachi.


She could feel the violence of his shuddering and could only think to clench her arms tighter around him. Her cheek pressed closer to his back, against the rise and fall of muscle between his shoulder blades. And she heard her name, a nearly mute utterance like the soft whisper of wind created by a single wing beat, carrying over Sasuke's shoulder, so faint and broken that she could not even bring herself to believe he had been the one to say it.

One of his hands enclosed around her wrist in a suffocating vice grip, and he turned around with shock-scarred eyes to take her in, as if it was the first time he had seen her as anything other than a nin from the Leaf.

Frozen by the recognition in his eyes, Sakura allowed his steel grip to remain locked around her arm, watching as Sasuke's brow furrowed and the red hue faded from his tired eyes. Ignoring the red-stained water pooling around their ankles and the chaotic sounds muffled outside the abandoned building, the Uchiha released her wrist and pulled his hand—his limbs, now vanquished of any adrenaline, were weighted down in chakra exhaustion—up to the dirt-smudged face of his ex-teammate.

The tip of one extended finger traced the pale skin of the pinkette's jaw so lightly that her body became wracked with chilled shivers that tore a breathy gasp from her gently parted lips. Eyes brushing over every detail of her face, as if to reassure himself that she was indeed alive, only now that she was before him, breathing and watching him with potent worry swimming like unshed tears in her gaze, did he realize the extent of fear he had suppressed at the thought of the other bounty hunters ending her. That he was unable to protect her, that killing one of them had not been enough, and that, for the entire duration of time he was fighting the Mist shinobi, his gentle teammate lay lifeless and bleeding out beneath the frayed debris of the leveled building.

And in the midst of these morbid thoughts his exploring hand dropped to her neck.

Sakura flinched.

He froze.

And the outside world came rushing back to them.

Pounding footsteps invaded their silence and forced them to separate. Stepping so silently that his feet barely disturbed the water, Sasuke backed away from the dead body of the bounty hunter. He nodded to the fallen end of the roof beam and leapt onto its makeshift path that led up to the ceiling in a steep diagonal slant. When Sasuke glanced over his shoulder, his racing heart was quieted by the sight of Sakura eagerly running after his lead.

They threw themselves onto another mass of wood, the only structural beam that remained horizontal and intact across the underside of the abandoned building's roof. Their shoulders touched the unsteady ceiling when standing hunched on the wooden plank, their eyes anxiously watching the mirror of water below shake with tremulous ripples that told of approaching shinobi. Two of the hunters had escaped, and only the most naïve of academy students would bother hoping that they had not sought out help and were back scouring the battle sight for either them or their remains.

Shaking with renewed anger, Sasuke pushed up against the roof and slammed his fist repeatedly into the old cross-sections of bamboo supporting the roof of the building which, judging by its archaic architecture, was a temple long abandoned, a structure frozen within the realm of the past as Takigakure steadily became a thriving and modern village.

Sakura would have mused at the irony of its location next to a whorehouse, had she not been stunned by the bruised and bloodied state of Sasuke's knuckles.

Her green eyes widened in horror. Splintery shoots of the hard bark embedded unforgivingly beneath his skin, and Sakura's own hands reached out to stop him and help push against the crumbling panels, just as senbon and kunai rained upwards and into the ceiling. Still wrenching apart the roof, Sasuke quickly dodged to the side out of instinct, causing the pinkette to wince when a rusty blade pierced the bamboo less than a finger's width away from his ear.

"Dammit," he hissed and they pushed up with one last burst of strength, successfully dislodging the thin wood from the supporting bamboo poles.

Sakura blinked as gritty sawdust invaded her eyes while she pulled herself through the jagged hole and onto the roof. Pieces of shattered ceramic dug into the medic's skin; she landed harshly onto her damaged back and partly on her aching arm, all breath forced from her lungs and the young moon shining down upon her from the evening sky. Her thoughts were growing bleary, and her vision skewed.

Was it nightfall already?

Groaning piteously, she turned onto her side and looked back down through the hole in time to witness Sasuke slap a final exploding tag onto the surface of the crossbeam.

Panicking, the pinkette rolled with a struggle onto her knees. She gasped and screwed her eyes shut in agony, hand reaching backwards to clutch in vain at her spine.

Sasuke, having heard her, wasted no time in climbing onto the roof. He barely noticed the broken shards of tile cutting into his knees when he knelt beside her with an urgency he had not felt in a very long time. Blood was strewn across one side of her face and her hooded eyes were glazed over in exhaustion and—Sasuke grimaced—a possible concussion.

Avowing to himself that if the wind-nature shinobi was not already dead he would gladly kill him again, he helped Sakura stand with a hand around her arm, looked down into the building, saw the bounty hunters swarming around the perished Mist nin, and jumped off the roof.

Sakura stumbled when they hit the ground, muffling her groan of pain against his naked shoulder as the impact wrought pain up her spinal cord. Sasuke gripped her around the waist. He cursed under his breath, and her eyes rolled back into her lolling head, hair obscuring her visage. Casting one last look behind him, he hoisted her unconscious body over his shoulder and navigated rapidly and with skilled precision through the back alleys of the now vacant, dark streets.

The panting Uchiha sped like a blur over the village walls. He wrapped his arm tighter around Sakura's waist; his opposite hand gripped her thigh and kept her body firmly anchored over his shoulder despite the haphazard slapdash of his movement.

And just as he entered the haven of the forest, the old temple and half of the entire street burst forth violently and erupted into a bright flame that illuminated the surrounding night.


Sakura whimpered, fingers fisting into the sheets beneath her. A calloused hand gripped her shoulder and gently rolled her onto her stomach. Drawing his hand back and sifting its fingers through his mess of dark hair, Sasuke dropped down onto the floor next to the futon, upon which he had just tentatively deposited his companion.

His breathing was painfully hoarse from exhaustion, and he swallowed heavily to stifle the gravelly sensation creeping up his throat with each pant for air.

The seconds had bled into minutes and the minutes into hours while the Uchiha traversed through the forests of the Land of Waterfalls, away from Takigakure and the bounty hunters viciously stalking him, hunting him down to kill him. And now, they knew he was no longer travelling alone.

He fisted his hand weakly by his side, vanquished of all ability to move into a more comfortable position that did not find his tired body splayed onto the coldness of the wooden floor. Sakura was passed out on her front beside him and breathing just as uneasily as he. Her injured back was obviously tormenting her—even in her pained state of sleep—but Sasuke did not know what to do to ease her pain.

He sat up with a grimace. Chakra deprivation was creating an irritating sting within his overused muscles. The tips of his sweat-dampened hair tickled lightly across his bare shoulders as he turned to look down at the resting form of his ex-teammate.

Her large forehead wrinkled, covered by a layer of sweat, and rings of deep green appeared out from beneath her heavy eyelids, "Sasuke?"

The sound of her drowsy voice made it easier for the Uchiha to move himself to sit on the edge of the futon. Sakura started to turn onto her side, only to be thwarted by Sasuke's halting hand on her arm, "Don't move."

Lowering herself back down onto her stomach, the pink-haired medic allowed herself a light laugh, "We sure are a mess, aren't we, Sasuke-kun?"

He did not answer.

His eyes were trained on the wall over her head, seeing, watching something entirely unknown to her, as his hands searched for weapons to occupy his restless, alabaster hands. She could tell that the effects of his adrenaline had yet to fade completely. And so Sakura decided to leave him to his thoughts. They both had been through damn hell in Takigakure, and she knew they were both so tired, too tired to even sleep restfully.

The pain in her back and left arm had been reduced to dull ache, but she did not dare jostle her battered body. She only allowed her neck to turn so that she could figure out where Sasuke had taken them. The walls were old but not run-down or unkempt, stretching around them in a comforting fortress echoing the interior of any average teahouse inn. Her ears registered no sound, so she wondered whether or not they were alone inside the teahouse, as well as hoping to the heavens that Sasuke had not murdered anyone for their lodgings.

No, she instantly berated herself harshly. Sasuke would kill if need be, but she would not do him the dishonor of believing him capable of cold-blooded murder. Not now. Not when his mind was no longer clouded with hatred. Or so he said.

Dragging her eyes away from the fascinating blankets of her futon, Sakura opened her mouth to ask Sasuke where they were specifically, only for an unforgiving heat to crawl its way up her neck and into the apples of her cheeks. She forgot that she was still wearing Sasuke's shirt, and the tempting view of him sitting there beneath the dim light of the paper lantern hanging overhead, the dips and contours of the skin on his torso still covered with a light luster of sweat, was doing strange things to the pit of her stomach.

His muscles tensed pleasingly with his movement and the sound of stone against blade filled the room in careening trills as Sasuke began sharpening his weapons.

An unbelievable, warm calmness came over Sakura while the minutes drifted by with a sluggishness that matched her current demeanor. Before and even during the war, she had never dreamed that they would be brought together like this, and with only one another's company to be found.

She sighed a peaceful sigh. It was impossible for her curiosity not to grow as she watched him go through the motions of tending to his several kunai, shuriken, and senbon. Their time in the brothel had gone by so fast. Neither was she keen to recollect it very clearly, but she remembered Yamada.

"Sasuke-kun?"

He acknowledged her with a slight turn of his head.

"Can I . . . can I see the scroll you got from Yamada?"

Sakura half expected him to scoff at her or—worse—simply ignore her; instead, he summoned the scroll with a succession of quick hand signs. Without pausing the systematic sharpening of his weapons, he tossed the small scroll into her already outstretched hand.

Pleasantly shocked, she opened the paper and scanned eagerly through its contents, which revealed an almost generic list of locations and names.

Sighing and letting it roll shut, she threw it back to him, "Is that how we'll find this . . . chokutō you got made? To replace the one you used before—" she bit her lip in restraint. She had almost said, "before you were captured," but feared it would do serious damage to that infamous Uchiha ego of his.

But he seemed to remain unfazed, and surprisingly offered more information.

"He, the man commissioned to reconstruct my weapon, had dealings with Orochimaru," he glanced up to catch her grimace at the mention of the man. "He later disappeared during Akatsuki's dominion."

"And that Yamada creep discovered his hiding place for you?"

"Hn."

Sakura fidgeted, watching as Sasuke began to store his blades into the hidden folds of his shinobi pants and weapons pouch. He had been obligingly forward with his thoughts as of late, perhaps because of the ordeal they had narrowly survived and escaped.

The pinkette was wholly uncomfortable with his intentions from here onward. His sword and his brother's remains.

Were there no other objectives—ones that did not entail death, violence, suffering—that he could foresee in his own future? She shifted on the small futon, stricken with the overwhelming urge to find out or convince him otherwise, to persuade him to perhaps—again—just let his fists fall limp without the strain of vendetta and come home.

And the words spilled out of her mouth before she could stop them.

"I don't know," she insisted, "dealing with someone who hung around Orochimaru so often . . . it's not a good idea."

Sasuke stiffened almost imperceptibly but Sakura, realizing what she had just implied about the Uchiha himself, swallowed nervously in remorse. Yes, Sasuke had gone to the snake Sannin willingly, but even suggesting that his goals and intentions were even similar to those of Orochimaru was shamefully underhanded of her, someone who had once sworn to understand him no matter his actions or the tainted nature of his past. That included anything where his family and his revenge were concerned.

Because he had screwed up. Badly. And they both knew this to be fact.

And all at once, he subconsciously raised the coldest of his walls.

"Well then," Sasuke's eyes and his voice grew cold in tandem, "no one's forcing you. You should have gone back to your village days ago."

The kunoichi bristled at his emphasis on implying that Konoha was not his home, and her indignant reaction was only fueled by her own guilt, "I'm going with you, Sasuke."

The last of his kunai grated against the rest of his weapons with a shrill scream as he slammed it harshly into the pouch.

The silence was deafening, but it dwindled against the pounding of Sakura's heart against her ribcage.

And when Sasuke finally spoke, he might as well have plunged Chidori into her chest.

"I care nothing for you. You are of no consequence to me, and my goals do not involve you."

She could no longer look into his cold, cold eyes and allowed her vision to drop to her fingers as she wrung them violently against each other. The hurt was overwhelming, but she refused to allow any tears to flow. He had said similar things to her in the past, but what he had just claimed was so distant, so resolute that she could scarcely bring herself to breathe, for fear that her already exhausted mind would just break down and fail her.

Sakura's head was reeling and her usually sharp thoughts staggered beneath the burden of renewed heartbreak. The moments between them swam in her mind, and one of them, one that seemed so subtle and insignificant, suddenly became incredibly meaningful in hindsight.

"I no longer wish to live out my vengeance, but I cannot live in a village that destroyed my past."

"We are your family, Sasuke," she pleaded, "Team Seven. So please, please come back. Kakashi and Naruto, they'll always care about you. I care about you," the pinkette's shoulders slumped. "You should know that by now, Sasuke-kun."

Characterized by an odd mixture of exasperation and amusement, a scoff from the young man brought Sakura's gaze back to her ex-teammate.

She tried to approach him again, but he moved his arm—the chains crested over the granite ground at the movement, their threatening presence as a weapon keeping the medic at bay.

Once he was sure that Sakura would keep her distance, the Uchiha slumped back against the wall with one hand covering his closed eyes, as if they were overly sensitive to even the light-vanquished darkness inside the mountain.

Sakura's brow furrowed and her heart rate increased.

The prison cell. The chains.

Her eyes alight in realization, she looked back up at Sasuke, who was now dabbing at the sliced skin of his arm and the mess of his knuckles with the gauze that had once bound his abdomen. The gash across his stomach had thankfully not opened during the fight in Takigakure, but the skin was still an angry red.

She murmured, slightly in shock, "You do care."

Sasuke froze and his shirtless state allowed Sakura to see every tense shift of his muscles, the tenuous tightening of every tendon beneath his skin.

"When we were in the prison cell," she continued, absolutely breathless, "you threatened me with the chains. You scared me away."

Jaw tightening, Sasuke stood slowly and walked towards the small window with completely silent strides.

"You knew you were going to use that jutsu to escape, and so you made me back away."

Biting her lip, Sakura waited for his reaction. Confirmation. Adamant denial. Anything.

But Sasuke made no response and continued to gaze out into the night sky, the moon's luminescence creating a soft line of light surrounding his lean form.

While she admired him from her position in the room, Sakura realized she had expected as much. Nevertheless, she felt weightless, yet even more exhausted than she initially had been, and she could think of nothing more to say, no matter how much her heart was soaring. Allowing her head to fall onto the pillow, she wound her fingers into the thin material of Sasuke's shirt, in the patch of fabric directly above her heart. In the midst of her relief, the deep-seated exhaustion finally became her master.

Dark in his reflection, Sasuke would remain by the window the entirety of the night.


A/N:

Thank you so very much for your response last chapter; I was overwhelmed and so extremely happy that you would take the time to review my story, and I just want to thank you for all of your support thus far. I hope you enjoyed this chapter and this turning point in their relationship just as much.

I also hope that you liked the conversation between Kakashi and Tsunade, and that it provided a certain amount of clarity while also creating more questions; I also feel that Itachi seemed like the type of person who would say something like that to Kakashi if they ever encountered one another within an institution like "the foundation." Well, I'll try and update as soon as I can because you've all been so wonderful and patient.

Again, thank you for reading and please, do review!