Chapter Eleven
Interlude
The only spare trench coat Ino owned was much too large on Sakura. Its stiff, taupe polyester ballooned around her arms, even with the sleeves cuffed. The uniform of Konoha Torture and Interrogation Force was designed with menace in mind, although Sakura rather doubted she was convincing anyone to divulge their secrets. One more day. One more day of the squick and small horrors of this rotation, and she could kiss the linoleum floors of the Intelligence Division goodbye for good.
The only piece of furniture in the room was a chair, forged in obstinate, angular lines. A man slumped in its restraints. What remained of him, at least. "Can't you leave the hands?" Sakura said.
"They contain the most nerve endings. It's quick." For all his charms, Morino Ibiki could never be accused of anything less than efficiency. "Don't tell me you're feeling sorry for him, Haruno."
At this point, she was well into plain revulsion. In the six months that had transpired since their victory, the Allied villages enjoyed a tenuous peace… with economic turmoil. The Kage redirected defense funds toward infrastructure reconstruction. For thousands of active duty shinobi, that meant a career change into construction or business; for others, defection. The Chief of ANBU reported a record number of incidents last month.
"People do all sorts of things out of desperation."
"He conspired to start a coup for profit, at the expense of thousands of lives. If we gave criminals like him a second chance, what would prevent others from doing the same?"
"Morals," Sakura snapped. "Common decency."
Ibiki laughed, a sound that was like a coarse bark. "You're soft, Haruno. Don't let the world change that."
A tiny slug appeared in a summoning ring on the ground. "Good evening, Sakura-san. I hope I am not interrupting! Shizune-san requests your presence in trauma bay one."
Freedom. Sakura nodded at Ibiki as she tore out the building and down the familiar road. The medical center campus was a mess of wood, steel, and twenty-foot dumpsters. Pain's attack had had levied the pink limestone hospital of her childhood. In its place stood a new building— an unfinished thing of solemn wood.
She burst through the double doors of the hospital and found chaos. Each of the six bays in the trauma unit were occupied, and still more patients waited on spillover pallets. Unlike Morino Ibiki, Konoha's emergency department could not be accused of efficiency even on its slowest of days. Medic-nin on hands and knees scrawled hasty resuscitation formulas on the ground while staff scrambled with armloads of linens. In the wake of Tsunade's retirement two weeks ago, they were a hive without a queen.
"Sakura!" Shizune's hair was slicked back with sweat. "Sorry for calling you in. We're drowning. There was some sort of explosion at the Iwa site. Kiba just brought them all in. It looks like eight new admits, six for surgery—"
"What do you need? I'm here to help." Sakura pulled her hair back.
Shizune looked at Sakura like a starving man would a steak. "Can you take over for me in OR three? It's a neck trauma case. Hakui is in there, but I told her to wait for you to remove the senbon. There's some poison to extract."
Shizune wasn't pulling her punches. "Can do," Sakura said. "Who's the patient?"
"It's Uchiha Sasuke. His team brought him in."
The air left her lungs. Shizune really wasn't pulling her punches.
Whatever expression she wore made Shizune pause. "Is that okay?"
Stay calm. "That's fine. Where do you want Hakui?"
"Oh you absolute angel." Shizune pulled Sakura into a hug. "Have her see beds one and two. Send Katsuya if you have any issues!"
Her feet moved automatically, she was staring down the door of the new operating room. Her pulse bounded in her ears as she entered. Sasuke was stripped to the waist, motionless on the raised table. Under the glare of the overhead lights, his pale skin appeared bloodless. Hakui was braced over the head of the table.
"Hang on," Sakura said, snapping on gloves. His face was thinner than she remembered. Under a fan of lashes, his angular cheekbones cut into the strong lines of his jaw. Her heart still skipped a beat at the sight of him, to her consternation. Calm.
His pulses were intact, but the flesh there of his neck crackled at her touch— air. She probed: the tip of the senbon spared his carotid, but grazed a tracheal ring. Sakura braced an elbow against the table and gripped the senbon under Hakui's fingers. "Thanks, you can let go now."
Hakui's sigh of relief was audible as she straightened. "Call if you need anything."
"I will. Well done, Hakui."
The door to the operating room swung closed and then they were alone. With care, she withdrew the senbon. The last time she'd seen Sasuke was in October. His trial had been a contentious affair. Kakashi and Naruto both testified in his favor for acquittal, but several of the louder Kage demanded that he be executed for treason. She didn't know the details of his final sentence, only that he had narrowly avoided imprisonment. Sakura deposited the senbon on the tray and opened a specimen jar.
The poison was, thankfully, contained to his neck. Drops at a time, Sakura extracted the fluid and collected it in the jar. The skin of his torso was covered in scars, a few white and faded, but most pink and taut. An angry ring of raised tissue looked as though someone held a burning torch against his abdomen, extending past the waistband of his pants. Were these all wounds from the war? Why hadn't he seen a medic-nin? Her eyes traveled from his chest to his left arm, where it ended in a blind stump above the elbow.
It had taken Tsunade a month of research and experimentation to create bioprosthetic arms from Hashirama Senju's cells. Naruto's replantation procedure took fifteen hours, but the results were spectacular. The allograft grew with his chakra until it was indistinguishable from its predecessor. For whatever reason, Sasuke had turned his down. Sakura siphoned the last drops of poison from his neck and turned—
Half-lidded eyes met hers.
Sakura startled, banging her arm against the procedure stand. The metal tray clanged to the floor, and the specimen jar shattered against the tile. "Damn it— Hello? Can you hear me?"
His eyes turned to the ceiling.
"You're in the hospital," Sakura said. "You were poisoned. Blink if you understand." He grimaced and did, but his gaze remained unfocused. What was going on? Had she missed a vessel? Sakura waved a hand before his face, inches from his eyes. He did not blink. And she realized—
He was blind.
A tap sounded at the door. A painted cat mask peered through the glass panel. What did ANBU want with her at this hour? Sakura pushed through the heavy door to the hallway.
"I'm apologize for interrupting you, Haruno-sensei."
The ANBU wore her black hair in a severe ponytail. Sakura did not recognize her voice. "I was wrapping up."
"I have an urgent message for you from the council. It's a request regarding your patient, Uchiha Sasuke."
Sakura removed her gloves and twisted them in her fingers.
"He was formally reinstated in November for out-of-village missions. Based on his exceptional performance, the council and our Chief intend to recruit him in ANBU upcoming cycle."
Sakura's brows shot up. ANBU were covert operatives who specialized in infiltration and assassination. They concealed their identity, even while admitted to the hospital. The nature of their job required the highest level of security clearance, with access to all the senior leaders in the village… people Sasuke attempted to assassinate but months ago.
"The council would like your assistance with two duties."
"I'm listening."
"As you can imagine, his character is still in question. The Hokage was asked to nominate three jonin for this task, and you were one of them. The duty is as follows: if you observe any behavior or language from Uchiha Sasuke that you feel suggest instability or may jeopardize the safety of the village, report to us immediately."
The insinuation that they would eliminate the threat was clear. Sakura frowned. "What's the other request? The urgent one?"
The woman fell silent before speaking. "Although we do not deem him to be a current security risk, Uzumaki-san is not always available to resolve a threat. If he were to turn, we are under no illusions. It will be a bloodbath. It was agreed that the safest option was to have some sort of insurance, particularly before he enlisted in ANBU."
She produced a thick scroll from her pack. It was inscribed with kanji for a medical seal; Sakura could recognize her shishou's handwriting anywhere. "Where did you get this?" she demanded.
"Tsunade-sama left it to us when she retired. At our request, she modified the Senju arm with a seal. It will block the most destructive of his doujutsu."
Sakura swallowed. "And you want me to attach it now. While he's unconscious."
Her silence was confirmation.
"No. Absolutely not," Sakura said. "Have you asked him about any of this? He didn't want the arm."
"At his trial, he agreed to any stipulations of reinstatement."
But why wait until now to approach her? When he couldn't refuse? Sakura's eyes narrowed. "How exactly did that senbon get into his neck?"
"If you're suggesting that we orchestrated the incident, please rest assured," she said mildly. "There were multiple chunin witnesses. It was a stray senbon."
Sakura looked at the weighty scroll, recalling the first time Tsunade taught her to seal living tissue. "I'm not eager to operate on a technicality."
"If it is any consolation, the seal will be removed when he completes probation."
"When will that be?"
"Ten years," she said. "With a chance for retrial."
Sakura tried to imagine ten years without Strength of a Hundred. Or Creation Rebirth.
"We did not take this matter lightly, Haruno-sensei. The council, the Chief of ANBU and the Hokage deliberated and came to this decision together. I was informed that he was in your first genin squad. I hope that on this issue of village security, you can remain impartial. You saw what he tried to do."
How could she forget? For weeks after Kaguya's defeat, she'd woken up drenched in sweat, the chirping of a thousand birds deafening in her ears. She would never admit it to anyone, but she still took gave the Uchiha complex a wide berth on her way home from work. Sakura accepted the scroll.
"Thank you," the ANBU said. "In the future, I'd advise against being alone with him. He's impulsive."
Sakura pulled on a new pair of gloves and re-entered the operating room.
Sasuke woke to the unmistakable stench of antiseptic. The same smell had permeated the rooms and corridors of Orochimaru's underground hideouts, seeping into his clothes like mildew. Suigetsu once described it as Kabuto's personal cologne.
He hadn't spoken with any of the former members of Taka since losing to Naruto at the Valley of the End. His wounds had been so grievous that he did not expect to survive. The six months that had since passed were a blur of aimless mission and unfamiliar faces. Despite Naruto's insistence on including him in social outings, he could hear the trepidation in his former classmates' voices when they exchanged polite pleasantries. The terrified whispers of strangers that followed him in public.
A growing part of him yearned for the life he before the war. No one to answer to. No rules to abide by. For all the musty caves and underground bunkers of those years, he was free. Konoha ceased to feel like the village of his childhood. And with each passing day, the ties that tethered him to the village seemed to fray.
Dawn illuminated a faint blur of what might have been a clock on the wall before him. He did not try to read the hands. Footsteps rounded the corner, growing louder until they stopped outside his door. A man was speaking.
"—seventeen-year-old male who is post-op day one for neck—"
"Thank you, Iyashi-kun, I know who he is," a woman said, with a touch of apology. Sakura. "I can just see him alone. Shizune is taking out stitches in room twelve. Why don't you see if she needs help?"
Hushed whispers, to which Sakura insisted, "I will be fine. This shouldn't take long." A knock sounded, and the door clicked open.
"Good morning," she said. Her voice was modulated, lower than he remembered. Metal screeched on metal as she drew the curtain closed. She stood two arms-lengths away, a smudge of white against a sea of green. "How are you feeling?"
He swallowed against the burning in his throat. "Fine."
"Can I check the wound?"
He nodded. The bed sank on his right and her breath grazed skin of his cheek. Her fingertips on his neck were cold through her latex gloves and despite her level voice, they were trembling. "Any pain?"
"No."
She tugged the taped dressing off his neck. "Do you remember what happened?"
A group of rogue nin ambushed their team en route from the Land of Sound. His senses were sharp enough that his vision had yet to impact his performance in battle, but this month-long trip had left him running on fumes. A single senbon had escaped his awareness. "No."
"Look at my nose. How many fingers am I holding up?"
"Three. Two. I don't know."
What began as a subtle blurring of the periphery of his vision progressed to cover his entire visual field. Soon, he knew he would open his eyes to complete darkness. He had experienced blindness once before, endured it for a single week before demanding Obito to perform the transplant. The Eternal Mangekyou Sharingan was supposed to grant perfect vision, but the effect did not last. Was this an effect of Kaguya's chakra? Orochimaru's experimentation? He didn't know, and there was no one left alive to tell him.
"Your vision… it's bad," she said gently. "Tsunade said you weren't interested in a prosthetic. Have you given it any more thought since?"
"Not really."
"Why not?"
"I just haven't," he groused. Her inquisition grated on his nerve. She sounded so goddamn placid, so reasonable. "So an—" The word annoying nearly slipped through his lips, as it had so often before. She spoke as though it were obvious that he should want himself fixed. Perhaps it was. And yet, the simple tasks of going to the hospital or asking for assistance were inexplicably insurmountable, and that annoyed him.
"The council asked me to spy on you."
Her quiet divulgence hung in the air between them. "I don't know what the last six months were like for you, but I can imagine they were difficult. Things will only get harder from here to regain their trust. You'll need every advantage you can get," she said. "I think you should reconsider the Senju arm." Her voice wobbled at the end.
"Would you be the one to do it?"
"Yes," she said. "I'll have assistants if you're worried about my experience."
For some reason, inconveniencing her out of all the other staff of the hospital seemed particularly egregious. Self-indulgent. "That's okay."
She signed. "At least let me do something about your vision. I can't let you go in this condition, Sasuke-kun."
Sasuke-kun.
The name settled into his chest. No one called him that anymore. He was Sasuke to Naruto, Uchiha to his colleagues, and psychotic to seemingly everyone else in the village. Sasuke-kun was the naive boy who escorted old men and scavenged for statues, who still believed he could right the wrongs of the world if he were only a little stronger. He nodded.
He felt her weight edge closer on the mattress. Sakura did not smell like iodine, but like soap and something floral.
"Close your eyes." Fingertips touched at his temples and passed chakra between them like the ebbs and flows of the tide. Her control was exquisite. It felt like bathing with an open wound— a smarting sting that dulled until the pain faded altogether. They held the position for so long, Sasuke was lulled to sleep.
"How's that?"
He opened his eyes, and the breath hitched in his throat. Sakura's thick hair was piled atop her head, the flyaways catching the brash light of dawn like a crown of light. Lit from the side, her jade green eyes were flecked through with burnished gold, boring into his own. Her full lips were parted, the cream skin of her throat disappearing into the collar of her white coat, and for one long moment he hated to admit that she was so— so— enthralling that it was all he could do to stare. He paid no attention to the hands on the clock of the wall or the leaves in the window, now sharp in focus.
Sakura stood and swayed, catching herself on the bannister of the bed. A brief grimace of shame crossed her face, and she rushed through her words. "Shizune will be by this afternoon. You can plan on going home after. Take care of yourself."
She had her hand on the door. Her tone sounded like farewell, and it spurred a small, senseless panic. Before he could stop himself he called her name.
"I'll think about it— the arm."
Sakura lived surprisingly close to him. Her apartment was the corner unit of a third-floor walk-up that shared a courtyard with two adjacent buildings. An overgrown wisteria occupied most of her side of the yard, its knobbly branches jutting over the balcony rails, nearly grazing her door.
She opened the door immediately at his knock.
"Hey, sorry it's so late. Got tied up in a case." Light spilled from her hallway onto the balcony, and the smell of cooking wafted out. Her hair was pulled into a bun, and she wore a pink apron over leggings and house slippers. "Did you catch the festival at all?"
He stepped inside, conscious of how grimy his travel pack and sword were against her welcome mat. "No, I just finished with Kakashi." He unlaced his boots and followed her into her living room. Sakura's home looked as he'd imagined it to be, with a touch of disorganization. Her walls were painted a cheerful yellow. An overstuffed bookshelf occupied one wall of the room, and a tufted, emerald futon the other. Dozens of houseplants crowded her window.
"He's the Rokudaime now. Our sensei is moving up in the world," she snickered.
He read the spines of her solemn, leather-bound tomes: The Linshu Toxicology Reference, Yin Transformation: A History, Suiwen Atlas of Surgical Anatomy; nestled with dozens of smaller scrolls on toxins and antidotes.
She noticed his perusal. "It's a bit of a passion project. I was stationed in Suna for a few months on an externship, and they had the most incredible greenhouse and library."
It had been years since he'd entered the Uchiha library, but he remembered there was a section on ancient herbs. Perhaps they would be of interest to her. A bright spot of color caught his eye in the furthest corner of the bottom shelf. A stack of worn paperbacks, hastily shoved between the largest of her reference books, with titles in curling fonts.
"Passion, hm?" He pulled one—Sweet Ruin— from the shelf and examined the bare male torso on the cover.
"Kitchen—" she commanded, snatching it out of his hands. "To the kitchen."
She deposited him into a chair at her round dining table. A pot of nabe simmered on the stove, and his stomach growled. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten a home-cooked meal. A jonin flak jacket was carelessly thrown over the other chair. Sakura moved it to the table to sit. It was a men's jacket.
"This looks really good," she said, turning his left arm over. Immediately after replantation, the prosthetic had been tawny and gaunt. With each passing day, it seemed to adapt to his chakra. Now, it meshed so perfectly with his skin that he could not tell it from his original hand, save for the seal at the wrist. "Does it still hurt?"
"No." Sensation returned in steps: first pain, then temperature, and finally touch. "I can feel your hand now."
"Squeeze my fingers." His fist swallowed her slender index digits. She directed him through a litany of movements, while she tapped and prodded. Her hair smelled like jasmine shampoo, and he wished he'd showered before coming.
"You're nearly at one hundred percent. I think we'll be there in a month," she said. "How's your vision?"
"It's fine." Better than fine. Since the morning at the hospital, his vision was crystal clear, nearly to the level of after the transplant. Even Kabuto had not been able to figure out the way to reverse sharingan damage. "How did you learn to do that?"
"The same way you learned all of your techniques," she said, laughing. "Lots of practice. It's based on yin transformation. I could teach you if you want."
"That's alright." He never had any remote affinity for medical jutsu, and he didn't need to trouble her with more work.
"It should be easy with your sharingan. Unless you just want an excuse to keep seeing me."
"I'm not interested," he said. Her smile flickered. She had been teasing. "Sorry."
"Don't be sorry," Sakura said. "Be honest."
The flak jacket taunted his gracelessness. "Do you often see patients here? From your apartment?"
"Sometimes."
"You shouldn't give your address out to people," he growled. "It's not safe—"
"I can handle myself." Her eyes dared him to object. They fell into silence while she completed her exam, until a distant explosion rattled her house.
"Oh! The fireworks," she said. "Can we watch?"
They stepped onto her balcony, into the music of the warm summer night. Each detonation was a drum-line over a chorus of cicadas. Sakura leaned against the railing, craning her neck around the leaves. Red and green flares blossomed high in the sky before clattering to the ground. At an apartment across the courtyard, a young couple stood with their toddler, watching the display. They waved at Sakura, and she waved back, beaming. Sasuke leaned on the railing too, feeling out of place in his uniform and bracers. The smile never faded from her lips, and her hair was a thousand colors under the lights. It wasn't until she moved to open her door that he realized the show was over.
In her entryway, Sasuke sat before the pair of boots that had collected dust in his closet for half a year. The laces were still wet spider-silk between the fingers of his left hand, but tying was possible. Sakura waited while he fumbled.
"Sakura—" he said, at the same time that she began to ask him something.
"Go ahead," she said quickly.
He swallowed. "Thank you."
"You're welcome. Come see me before February," she said. "And don't forget this!"
She held the hilt of Kusanagi out. He snatched it from her. The katana seemed a particularly vile thing for Sakura to touch. It was suddenly imperative that he kept that domain of his life, of blood and gristle, strictly separate from her. They bid goodbye.
His feet moved automatically out of her courtyard, down narrow sidewalks to the main gates of the Uchiha compound, past his mother's vegetable gardens gone barren, through the double doors painted with the uchiwa insignia, down the dark hallways to the empty guest room he'd claimed, and he fell onto the bed, dirty clothes and all.
His head spun.
When he closed his eyes, he did not see ghosts. Instead, her hair was aglow in the summer night, her lips mouthed would you like to stay, and the flak jacket was defiant at her dining table. He laid there for a long time, unable to shake the sudden tightness of his ribs.
Interlude
A/N: because it seemed wrong to finish their love story before writing the beginning ;) Apparently, their first date was less than 3 minutes long? I haven't seen Boruto.