Sasuke's eyes stung when he reached the landing, the sweltering afternoon sun of the courtyard tinted an angry-seeming orange just past the shade of the stairs. Alma was just outside, scrubbing clothes on a washboard. He stood there for several moments, watching the children play in the center of the square of rundown apartments, before she caught sight of him. Her face broke into a wide smile.
"You're awake! I left some lunch on the table, here, I want to take a break from this anyway, let me have some tea with you."
He noticed the silver strands in the hair she pushed behind her ear once she stood up. He followed her to the table.
Her cooking was excellent. This time, he at least noticed how beautiful it looked, though each bite still tasted like nothing.
"Millie says she wants you to re-do that spell that helps keep her off the alcohol," Alma said, "and Hope reeeally wants you to approve her color theme for her birthday next week."
Here in a remote civilian town that didn't quite know which of the Elemental Nations, if any, it belonged to, genjutsu and ninjutsu might as well be magic. Just a spell. Maybe in a way they were. The idea had come to him in a flash, after years of using his sharingan to harm, that he might try giving people a lasting illusion that they already had a dose of their drug of choice in their system so they wouldn't be craving it all the time. He'd tried it immediately, somehow knowing exactly what to do, as if in a dream. It worked. In between the missions he got every couple months (if that) from Konoha, such charms were how he made his living these days.
"I'll get to Millie after the kids' self-defense class," Sasuke promised. He didn't need to say that Hope would ambush him either before, during, or after the taijutsu lesson and make him weigh in on her birthday. Naruto was, in a round-about way, her namesake since he'd inspired her pregnant mom on his long-ago journeys with Jiraiya, and Hope lived up to it in personality.
As it turned out, he didn't make it five yards into the courtyard on his way to calling his class before Hope sprang on him with swatches of colored fabric and a tangle of ribbons in her hand.
"Mr. Sasuke!"––he didn't like to hear his last name––"Is blue better than green? Or can you tell Jesu he's totally wrong and you can totally put red stripes on a purple background? Or, wait, maybe this bright orange? I'm getting a new outfit for my birthday! I have to choose today or they won't have time to make it, Mom says."
Sasuke took the fabrics from her hand, startled by the gentle brush of human touch but not showing it. Instead he frowned down at the fabrics for a while, trying to act like he was taking this seriously. "If you ask me, this shimmery green with the blue is the prettiest. But if you want to take a strong stance, the orange on black would be good… And if purple and red is who you really want to be, don't let anyone make you shy away from it." He handed the fabrics back. "Those are my opinions, but ultimately you must decide based on your own criteria."
"Ahh, thank you so much! Jesu, see, come over here, I told you, Sasuke-san said purple and red is totally okay!"
Before she could start a fight (which she absolutely should not be doing after his years of teaching her about martial arts and discipline), he distracted her. "By the way, how old are you turning this year?"
"Oh!" she said. "I'm turning 12! I'm practically an adult, I told Donna I was gonna catch up with her and she's still not going to be able to see what's coming…"
Sasuke was suddenly conscious of the heartbeat in his ears. The sluggishness of his thoughts, spending half the day in bed, had faded enough that some things he definitely should've realized before caught up with him. If Hope was turning 12 next week, that meant he'd turned 26 last week, sometime in the black haze of his depression.
Twice the age he'd been when Orochimaru gave him that curse and he'd lost what little he'd had.
And here he was, sitting in a dusty courtyard while his life drained away like sand. Every time he built up some sense of being a person again, it seemed like, something else would happen… he'd come home from that kill mission Konoha had sent him on over three weeks ago already, and he still couldn't get out of bed before noon.
He liked it here. He really did. People needed him. People knew him without knowing anything about the Uchiha clan or Orochimaru or the Village Hidden in the Leaves. He'd seen the same faces year after year and it soothed him. They didn't want anything from him, not anything aside from a conversation or at worst a genjutsu or some spare change. And if he said no they'd maybe grumble before walking away, a sharp contrast with his life before where setting boundaries had normally resulted in physical force being used against him.
But he couldn't keep living like this. There was so much in his past that felt so unresolved. He had to be honest with himself or it was going to keep being like this. He'd have to go backward to move forward.
The other thing about his roommate's daughter turning 12 was that he was suddenly aware of how she and a couple of her friends in his taijutsu class were exactly the age for a new genin, by Konoha standards at least. For a moment, when all three of them coordinated an attack on him in their sparring game and he moved faster and disarmed them one after another, leaving them in a heap on the ground, his brain crossed realities and he was seeing double, these civilian kids in a dusty town and a genin team in a verdant jungle.
That night, he settled down at his desk and calmed his thoughts enough to write a letter.
Don't give me any more kill missions. I'll do capture if you want. And next spring I'll come back if you give me a genin team.
When he was done tying it to his hawk summons's leg, he touched his face and felt cool water on his cheek. Alma and Hope's faces had been on his mind as he let the bird go. He must be crying at the thought of leaving them.
"Hnh."
"And this one will slide in your boot where most people won't expect it," Sasuke said, demonstrating by flicking out his own boot-kunai before handing Hope hers.
She nodded, a look of determination on her face. "I got one for your mom too, but it's you and your friends who are trained to use them," he said, encouraging her evident sense of responsibility.
"I'll protect the whole village while you're gone! Jesu and Sara will help, too," she added.
"But run away if it's a real threat. Anything that would threaten everyone in the village is outside what the three of you can handle. You remember the evacuation routes we talked about?"
She nodded. Of course she did, he'd drilled them on them every other month for almost as long as she could remember.
"Keep teaching the younger kids, make sure they're prepared to handle any emergency. I'm giving Alma a key to a chest in my room that has more weapons, hidden in scrolls––you remember how to take them out, right?––and I know you can sneak it from her if you want but please don't. We need to have these weapons available for a crisis or when another kid proves they're mature enough to have one, okay?"
"Yes, sir!" she said.
"And you can protect them from anyone else stealing them?" He figured if there was any chance at all of her not sneaking them for some scheme or other, it was to make it interesting for her to do the opposite.
"With my life!" she said. When he opened his mouth, she immediately corrected herself, "I mean, not with my life, that's too valuable to waste on any mission! But I'll keep them from getting to them, I really will!"
"And the number one way to do that?"
"Make sure I don't tell anyone else they're there!"
"Okay," he said. "Now let me work on finishing up something before your mom gets here."
Sasuke still had a couple weeks before he'd be setting off for Konoha, leaving his home for at least a year and a half given his commitment to take on a genin team. Of course he could quit if he really needed to, but have you ever seen him quit something before he was through? Still, the last seven months had felt like one long, bittersweet goodbye, for all he'd promised himself he would definitely at least come back to visit.
Now, one of his long projects was finally coming to fruition. Once Hope had run outdoors to go find her friends, he started taking things––large things––out of some of the storage scrolls he'd filled on his last trip to the larger market town.
He'd managed to lay the electric line and wire the house in secret, and he'd sorted out paying for service indefinitely through a local lender. So now he just had to tear out everything in the existing kitchen and put in the refrigerator, stove, and gleaming countertops over sturdy cabinets. He put Alma's cookware in its new places reverently, knowing that her grandparents' things that she put to such good use every day were practically a part of her.
He ended up having time to finish the outlets in the other couple rooms before Alma got back. He heard her gasp and the thud as she dropped the groceries she'd been carrying.
Then he walked in, smiling, and she ran and hugged him tightly, tears streaming down her eyes, for a long time before she could choke out a "thanks". Then she made him stay up past their normal bedtimes telling her how to use everything and helping her experiment.
"You know I'm gay, right?" he said as she ran her fingers through his hair, cuddled up with him on the couch after watching a movie on their new television.
"Do you want me to stop? I'm not trying to go anywhere with it," she said, her lips brushing against his cheek.
He shivered and kissed her cheek back. "No, as long as you know that… I'll miss you when I'm gone," he said.
She tightened her hold on him. "You never would've said something like that when I met you."
He laughed, a hollow sound. "Well, I've come a long way."
And they'd come a long way since he decided to leave. Somehow, that had made him feel more present and dedicated to living his life here, in this village, with the best friend he'd ever had, the friend's daughter who was something more like a close niece, and all their neighbors. He'd been… warm, in a way that gave him flashes of those painful, locked away memories from when his mother was still alive.
Hence the cuddling. Ten days left, and maybe because there couldn't be any ongoing consequences at this point, they'd let it escalate to this.
Honestly, it was nice. If Sasuke hadn't decided to let his bloodline die (and good riddance), he could imagine trying to have a female partner like this. There were worse things, there was something relaxing about touch… his musings splintered into fragments of dreams, mostly pleasant for once, things he wouldn't remember except the sense of lightness and possibility, and the thought that maybe there would be a future for him after this return-to-Konoha ordeal.
A/N: Apparently I needed to write about recovery from trauma and loss of identity. Anyone want to see more?