Day 5: Jutsu
Title: I'm lost, so lost, I'm lost at sea you see
title lyric from: Mercy Me, Alkaline Trio
Tags: BlankPeriod, CanonDivergence, Angst

The sun's setting - it may never rise again.

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The only part of her returned to him are the earrings.

His handmade supplication and silent ardor he'd never had the easy ability to express, and she'd never taken them off since. In an ornate box in a small silk satchel set in a plush compartment they rest, an unnecessary labyrinth of layers for any widower to navigate.

Gleaming, the final remnants of his faithful wife. Like the Sharingan and fresh blood, not such different shades of calamity in the end, the glittered edges of them skewer his soul straight through, churning bile in his throat at the sight:

The ruby and the rust.

Knowing already they'd been torn from her flesh without ceremony, as a thief gropes for gold. He feels sick, chokes down dry heaves at the violence of it — all the 'what if's' between the lines of the detached, clinical summary.

Ino had been the one to slip Sasuke the coroner's report as Naruto sent back food and any emotional entreaties at a dizzying pace, barricaded in his Hokage office and unseen for the 48 hours since.

The photo is almost too much.

You deserve to know, she'd whispered, casting red-rimmed eyes at the closed door. In the face of her best friend's death — and the wilting and withdrawing of a man who Sasuke suspects was more to her than just a friend, more than he might have guessed — each breath coming is a ghostly rattle, the human shell through which untenable grief passes. She was . . .

And in an uncharacteristic breaching of his physical boundaries, Ino's face crumples and she falls into his chest, tears taking their worn fjord paths again, endless and unhealing.

She's clutching, he's still as stone. If he ever possessed the ability to comfort to begin with, how could he articulate that he was gutted, hollowed and scraped — had nothing left?

She was yours.

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A funeral turnout more beautiful and admiratory than expected. Arrangements of flowers in all sundry varieties, proper rites and rituals, tears and anecdotes from every corner, all the tiny pockets in which his wife existed to keep a hegemony well-oiled, well-healed, well-loved.

The sun's setting — it may never rise again, and Sasuke leans into the shadowed corners of Naruto's office as a broken, huddling animal while his best friend drinks in a way he never used to, longing for the desperate peace a substance never brings.

In between empties he tells him all of it.

"Was her idea," Naruto croaks. "I begged her not to, Sasuke. B-believe me!"

Silence.

"Our intelligence team . . . knew the day after she left. The syndicate . . . they'd marked her. I'm sorry."

Into his shaking hands, muffled, Sasuke speaks in a voice bland and dead. "Then why did you let her go?"

"Because she was right." Naruto sniffles, wiping his nose with the heel of his hand. Like a child, a genin again. Both feeling useless and stymied. He laughs weakly. "She always is."

When Naruto tells him the last bit of the mission — this plan so convoluted and shrouded in lies and kept off paper, officially unofficial, Sasuke's insides and soul twist in protest and he thinks again of labyrinths, noiseless sinister tunnels of all the worst-kept village secrets. Wishing he were lost in them, deaf, dumb, and blind.

Naruto's men lingering at their posts hear the end of it: Raised voices shot through with crackling pain, papers skittering, and when Sasuke kicks open the door he tucks his bruised knuckles into his cloak, gripping his secured, temporary discharge orders in his hand.

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Arriving after two weeks of listless travel, it doesn't take Sasuke long to tease out the location based on a handful of conversations with some of the port city's more loquacious characters. Worries him, but as he approaches a dilapidated beach cottage carrying a scent of neglect on the salty breeze, he begs forces unknown for a last flickering flame of faith.

Nothing in the filthy windows, no sounds coming from within. But it's here, the lingering scent of familiar soft skin and now he's on the back step, staring into a dank and empty den, old furniture laden with dust. He raises his fingers as if to tap gently at a door between him and this void, and now he's feeling the skip of his heartbeat and he brushes his fingers against the air, again, some melancholy heartsick action, desperate for the sign that he can peel this illusion back.

And he falls through.

In her arms, into an embrace, and he's letting out a burst of air against her hair and for a moment his chest caves in, shuddering with disbelief, that wounded and breathless sound of stolen speech, lost and found again.

"Sasuke-kun," she sighs.

Taking in this cottage with gleaming wood floors, void of dirt, curtains thrown open to let the sunlight ring with impunity. In defiance of dwelling and hiding, the small resistance cloaked by the jutsu's delusion to anyone lurking outside. Sasuke closes his eyes tightly, shuts them against this relief as if it'll disappear the moment he lets go. She's here. She's real.

His hand travels down her spine, fingers memorizing each chine with the intensity of a blind man seeking purchase in lost memory.

"You're—"

"You made it," she says, sniffling. Prelude to tears. "I was wondering if I'd have to get on the boat myself."

Lips in the crook of her neck, in her hair, holding her with the grip of a man clinging to life and still wondering if this is the most devastating dream, if he's died himself.

"You're real." A catch in his throat. A gentle, brittle fracture in the exhaled shell of her name:

"Sakura."

A moment, another. Then —

"We don't have long," she says, pulling back to look him in the eyes, dabbing away endless tears. "I'm so sorry, Sasuke-kun. For everything you had to go through, for the things you had to pantomime, pretending to grieve."

He doesn't tell her how the plan had been fucked up, that wires and signals crossed in the chaos of the penultimate piece of intelligence; that they'd already set in motion the plan, her plan, of faking her death to the syndicate as a feint for a larger stratagem, a byzantine game of chess; that only when Naruto had drunkenly and haphazardly explained the mess they'd found themselves in, Sakura with a price on her head and convincing them she could carry the illusion with the knowledge that they'd let her husband know, and in a timely fashion.

Sasuke doesn't think he can process it yet, much less explain it to her now.

She'd never forgive herself.

"The ANBU's jutsu did well," she explains, swallowing hard, "but it won't last. I've packed everything, I have the route. Disguises." Thumbing his cheek, brushing away what might be an actual tear his buzzing skin can't feel, she adds, "I need you with me, darling."

Pretty words have never been her beloved's forte. Instead he brings her hand to his mouth, pressing each finger against it one by one in quiet endearment — just as he remembers, the hum of her strength and adoration just beneath the skin.

The art of jutsu, at its roots; some form and blend of technique and magic, a pliable spectrum from love to disaster.

This unlucky fate, he supposes, is its own dark spell.

Thanks for reading, would love hearing from you, also some of these are prompts ended up too long / mature / spawning stories so they might be posted separately. Sorry! I recommend checking me on Ao3 or twitter for the whole series or just hanging around here seeing if I finally catch up with posting stuff!