III. The New and Strange
Sasuke woke to sunlight gushing through the windows. Judging by its amount and intensity, he suspected he had slept in. His clock confirmed this, reading 10:34 A.M.
Normally he'd be awake five hours ago, but normally his bed was on a bunch of loose rocks and sometimes scorpions. Whenever his travels had taken him through a forest, moss always presented itself as a more comfortable alternative, though it had its downsides. Once he had woken to a giant centipede the size of a squirrel resting on his chest; another time, it was a spider the size of his hand on his face. He may have blasted off a Chidori or five on both occasions. After all the "roughing it" he had done over the past few years, sleeping on a mattress with a roof over his head had induced his body into a coma.
As rubbed the sleep from his eyes and lay buoyed atop mattress springs and feather-filled pillows—the luxuries of civilization—the exhausted part of him proposed they just stayed in bed forever. He almost took up the offer until his more industrious half brought to his attention the list of errands he had to do: groceries, new clothes, get his arm at the hospital. So he kicked himself out of bed, washed up in the bathroom, and emerged from his bedroom yawning hugely and stretching his arms overhead. The couch in the living room was empty, and he realized Naruto had left, the blanket Sasuke had lent the night before was left folded in an unexpected display of good manners.
After ticking off his to-do list one last time—groceries, clothes, hospital—Sasuke headed out, cutting a route down smaller roads, alleyways, and sometimes rooftops as he headed for the market district. He usually didn't mind walking and normally wouldn't have minded a casual stroll through the neighborhood, however domestic upkeep sat pretty far down on his list of things he liked to do. As far as he could tell, every second he wasted waiting in line was another second that could have gone towards training or reading or some sort of self-cultivation. Expending the energy to take a couple shortcuts to get his chores over with as quickly as possible was totally worth it in Sasuke's view. Besides, he already had a late start to his morning and hoped to squeeze in some training before heading down to the hospital to meet Sakura, who had left with Kiba last night.
Wait, that last bit was irrelevant.
Okay, it was just that Sasuke couldn't even remember Sakura even talking to the dog-boy when they were kids. Granted, Sasuke had been gone for over half a decade, and a lot could've happened in his absence. Things change, he reminded himself, and maybe sometimes people spoke to each other and then asked each other out.
He then waved off the rest of those thoughts like a bothersome swarm of gnats. Right now, he was a busy man with many busy things to do, and if he was to go about doing them as efficiently as possible, he couldn't afford to be squandering his thoughts on Sakura's dating life.
He yanked the hood of his sweater over his head before leaping up onto the rooftops with excessive strength; a few of the ceramic shingles cracked and crumbled away beneath the force of his landing. Ignoring this senseless act of vandalism, he sped across the roof's spine, his buzzing irritation driving him to go faster and faster until he was blitzing over the village at full tilt like a bullet in sweatpants, leaving damaged roofing (and later, upset homeowners) in his wake. At high speed, the already-brisk air stung like needles against his skin, but the cold pouring over him couldn't touch what felt like hot iron bands clamped around his chest.
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As it turned out, running errands wasn't as awful as Sasuke remembered it to be. It was much worse.
He skidded to a stop at the edge of the shopping district, plumes of white vapor trailing from his open mouth after the unnecessarily hard pace he had set. Well, at least he had gotten to the shops quickly, or at least, what he figured were the shops—it was honestly a bit hard to tell where exactly he was.
During the short time he'd been back, Sasuke had a vague idea Konoha had undergone a transformation, but the extent of that change had not been impressed upon him until this moment. The old dirt roads had ballooned out into a wide avenue paved with flagstones, and the rows of small family-owned shops had vanished, unable to hold out against massive steel and glass monstrosities Sasuke would later come to learn were Kumo imports called "Department Stores." A rush of shoppers in coats and scarves bustled past him with shopping bags hanging from their arms, their cheeks red in the cold air as their individual voices disappeared into the greater hum of the crowd. He blinked hard, feeling dazed. The village from his childhood was gone.
After a bit of walking around and peering suspiciously through windows, he finally decided to give one of the establishments. The automatic doors opened with a high-tech zip, and a wall of techno music slammed into him, pounding out a painful tattoo against his chest. A girl with purple streaks in her hair looked up from where she was folding clothes on the counter. "Welcome!" She screamed over the blaring speakers. Sasuke turned around and left without even stepping past the threshold.
His experiences elsewhere weren't much better. People kept shoving flyers into his hands about something called a "promo," employees kept asking him whether he needed any assistance despite his insistence that he did not, and at one place, he had almost asphyxiated in an attack of free perfume samples. Shopping for clothes had officially become even more treacherous than infiltrating enemy lines.
After an hour and a half of searching and dodging aggressively friendly store employees, Sasuke finally managed to secure a bagful of new outfits that weren't purposely riddled with holes or armored in sequins ("This season's hottest looks!" explained one poster in a store). He spent another half hour trying to figure out where the hell they had moved the grocery store, and another hour trying to actually buy his groceries while trying to avoid all the housewives who propelled their shopping carts around like battering rams.
By the time Sasuke stumbled back home from the warfront, it was almost two. He threw his groceries into his fridge without bothering to take them out of the bag and jumped into the shower. After changing, he washed a tomato in the sink and sunk his teeth into it as he pushed past his front door, this time aiming for the hospital with his hair still damp and sticking to his temples like strokes of wet paint.
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"Ah, Uchiha-san, yes? Sakura-san's office is down that way through those doors, hallway B, room 225B, upstairs, take a left, end of the hall, to your right," the young man at the Hospital front desk directed.
Sasuke blinked once and he had it memorized. "Shouldn't I sign in?" He asked trying not to breathe too deeply—he had never been crazy about hospital smell. The waiting room behind him was filled with rows and rows of chairs, most of them taken up by the sick, old, and occasional hypochondriac. A few potted trees had been placed in the corners in a well-meaning attempt to liven up the room, but their stunted forms only underscored the morose atmosphere.
The phone in front of the clerk rang and the man went to pick it up. "No, no she told us you were coming—Hello? Ah yes? I'm sorry, no." He silently urged Sasuke on with a shoo-shoo of his hands, so Sasuke complied and made his way through the double doors and into a corridor plastered in gray linoleum flooring. He kept to the edges, avoiding the traffic of stone-faced patients and hospital staff as they shuffled along to their next appointment with a look of grim determination. Sasuke got the sense this place was somehow meaner than he had remembered it, though, to be fair, he was only ever at the hospital when he was banging at death's door, so maybe he was projecting a little.
He found room 225B without much effort. As the clerk at the front had promised, it was tucked away in the corner at the end of the second floor. The door was propped wide open so he stepped in without knocking. The air inside was markedly colder and crisper than the hallway owing to the large window that had been left ajar towards the frozen March skies.
Adjacent to the window, a desk had been pushed up against the wall. A mass of papers and files littered its surface, and atop the debris Sakura's head lay pillowed on her folded arms. Her shoulders rose and fell in slow, measured beats, in rhythm with the deep expansion and contraction of her lungs. She was turned away from him, but Sasuke didn't have to see her face to know she was a sleep. In stillness of the room, he could hear the wind whistling through the crack in the window and the steady hush of her breath as she drifted through that dark ocean in her head, worlds away from where he stood.
Sasuke cycled through his options—leave, wake her, or wait—but before he could settle on one, Sakura stirred, the waves boring her back towards him and the room. Slowly, she lifted herself off the desk.
"You're here," she croaked without even turning to look at him. She threw herself back into her chair and stretched her arms above her, yawning hugely; Sasuke suddenly thought of sunflowers in bloom.
"I can leave if it's a bad time," he said, already shifting his weight towards the door.
"No, no, no," she said waving her hands in front of her, "I just dozed off a for a bit. This is actually a really good time—the perfect time. Here—" She stood up and made her way to the examination table beside her desk. She patted the cushion while keeping one hand in the pocket of her white coat. "Take a seat."
Sasuke didn't move as he studied her. She was understandably still tired after waking from a nap, but Sasuke thought her exhaustion ran deeper, rooted in something more systemic. His sharp eyes mapped out the roads of angry red veins in her eyes. Beneath them were the heavy bags that had been present since yesterday, and probably much longer than that.
Her smile contracted a little beneath the press of his stare. "Something wrong?" She asked.
"Nothing," he said and strode over to sit as she had directed.
"Your hair's still wet," she observed, and Sasuke allowed her to reach over and hold a bit of it between her fingers. She let go and smiled delightedly. "Ah, it's frozen."
"I didn't have time to dry it," he explained, rubbing his hands through his brittle hair to try and free them from their frosted chunks.
"You know that damages your hair follicles? Think of all the split ends you'll have, the horror."
"The horror," Sasuke agreed wryly. "Shouldn't I be more worried about catching a cold?"
"That's a bunch of bull. You could stand outside in a blizzard in your underwear and never catch the sniffles. The only things you'd be at risk for is frostbite and hypothermia. Anyways," she said clapping her hands together to punctuate the end of a topic and the beginning of a new one, "take your shirt off." Maybe six years ago he would have refused if Sakura had asked while blushing, but this Sakura was all business and no-nonsense, and so he found himself obeying her authoritative tone without a chance to think it over.
"I'm just going to check some of your vitals," she explained while plugging into her stethoscope. Sasuke just nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on her desk, sensing the air around his bare chest tremor as she stepped into his personal space. He expected the touch of the stethoscope's metallic cold and was surprised instead by the light graze of her fingertips. "Mmm, looks like this is healing well," she murmured to herself.
"What?" He looked down and his gaze collided into hers. Had her eyes always been so green? He flinched and his own eyes darted away, back to the safety of the table, but it was too late—the damage was done and his runaway heartbeat hammered traitorously against his chest.
"Your wound," she explained. She was so close he could almost feel her words moving against him as she spoke. "It's healing nicely." And then she pressed the stethoscope to his chest, belatedly warning him, "this is going to be cold."
Sasuke hoped his heartbeat didn't sound as booming and frantic to her ears as it did in his. After a small eternity, Sakura finally pulled away from him with a small frown.
"Well, everything sounds fine, but your heart's beating a little fast. It might be a small side-effect of the medication." She raised a questioning eyebrow at him. "You have been taking them right?"
"I took some this morning," he lied without blinking. Actually, he had completely forgotten about the pills until that moment, but Sakura was none the wiser so she nodded, pleased. "Good, if you forget a dose, things could get ugly, from a medical perspective, I mean."
His dark eyes cut to her. "Ugly?"
"Oh you know," she said breezily, "massive internal bleeding, cardiac arrest, hemorrhagic stroke, and so on. But you shouldn't have any worries since you've been taking the medicine like I directed, right, Sasuke-kun?" She beamed.
"Uh—"
"Great, and now for your new arm!" She went back over to her desk while Sasuke remained seated with a stricken expression. His fears of a heart attack were quickly chucked aside when he saw Sakura yank open her bottom drawer, reach in, and pull out an arm.
She turned to face him and waved it triumphantly in the air, its fingers flopping flaccidly about as dismembered limbs were usually wont to do. "Ta-dah!"
Sasuke could only stare at the scene of horror before him. "What the hell is that?"
"It's your arm? This is why you're here isn't it?" She asked as she wagged the limb in his direction. Sasuke wondered if he should be insulted that she was treating his body part in such a cavalier manner.
"You just pulled that thing out of a drawer."
"So?"
"Shouldn't it have been it in an icebox or something?" Actually, Sasuke had no idea where new arm were supposed to be kept, but he was pretty sure there was some sort of regulation against keeping them alongside one's file hangers.
"Relax, relax," Sakura assured him as she made her way back to him, and it took all the discipline Sasuke had to not scoot away from her. "It's not actually flesh, though it's a pretty good imitation, right?" She held it out with one hand and poked it. The white surface indented slightly beneath her fingertips and sprang back up as soon as she removed her hand. "We grew them out of Hashirama-sama's cells, but it behaves more like an inorganic compound than a biological one."
Sasuke's gaze asked for a less technical explanation.
"It doesn't rot," she said in sum.
Sasuke gave it a dubious prod with his own finger. It was blanched of color, felt like rubber, and hit all the right notes on the creepy scale; no wonder Naruto kept his bandaged.
"All right," Sakura said, "so before I attach this, I'm going to need your help. Could you pool some of your chakra to the bottom of your left arm—er stump? Great, all right, so right when I attach this, I want you to force out as much chakra as you can into the prosthetic. There's already a chakra circulatory system present in this thing, but you're going to need to activate it to have it link up with your own chakra system. Okay on the count of three—one, two—oh yeah, it might sting a little when I cut you open—three." Sakura touched Sasuke's stump with a glowing hand, slicing off the skin to expose the network of nerve and blood vessels underneath, before pressing the prosthetic against it. Sasuke grunted in a mixture of pain and surprise, but Sakura executed the procedure so quickly the wound didn't even have the chance to bleed.
The artificial arm attached itself seamlessly to Sasuke's flesh, and as he poured his Chakra into it, feeling rushed down its length like a flood of snowmelt, and he felt the arm throb to life. He held up the limb to his face and wiggled his new fingers.
"Perfect!" Sakura chirped. "Although, I think it'll take a while for your nerves fully to connect." She held up her hand, palm outwards, and Sasuke placed the prosthetic against hers. "Feel anything?" She asked.
"No."
"Mmm, well I suppose that's to be expected," she said, pulling her hand away. "Give it a few days. You can put on your shirt now. Come back immediately if your body shows any sign of rejecting the arm."
"How will I know if my body's rejecting it?"
"Trust me, you'll know," she assured him and walked him to the doorway. She leaned against the frame as she bid him farewell. "What're you doing for the rest of the day, going into your clan archives?" She guessed.
"No, tomorrow," he said while staring down at his hand, opening and closing it into a fist.
"Naruto should be finished with his visit to the Academy by late afternoon. You should try and meet up with him for dinner."
"How about you?"
"Ah…well, I have plans with Kiba tonight."
"I see."
They both stood silent, their insides twisting into uncomfortable shapes. When Sasuke finally realized that things weren't going to get any better any time soon, he dipped his head in a slight nod.
"Try and get some rest," he managed before turning around to make his escape. He thought she might have said his name, but instead of slowing down to check, he picked up his pace and disappeared around the corner, leaving Sakura standing alone in the doorframe, quietly staring down the empty corridor.
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Sasuke headed straight for the training fields, coming across an unoccupied stretch of dead grass. He shucked off his sweatshirt and tossed it to the ground, the T-shirt beneath a thin defense against the cold. His boots rasped against the dry blades of grass as he slid into the stance for the 54 steps kata. He closed his eyes. For a moment he stood frozen as the sky arced over him in a loud, yell of blue. A passing breeze wandered through his hair, the dark strands swaying like kelp beneath the waves. The world continued to spin on beneath his feet, but still, he did not move.
He inhaled, then exhaled a large cloud of white vapor. His eyes reopened, he came to life, slowly working out the knots and funny shapes that had formed in his chest.
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When Sasuke finally returned home, the sun had plummeted below the horizon, taking the temperature down with it, and an annoying stray had found its way back to the front of his apartment. It was blonde and slow-witted, and no matter what Sasuke did, he could never shake the damn thing off.
"Yo!" Naruto greeted cheerfully from where he squatted. "You wanna get dinner?"
Sasuke ignored him and shoved his key into the lock.
Naruto stood up with a frown. "Nice to see your ugly mug, too?"
"I'm not hungry—" Sasuke began, but before he could slip into his apartment and lock the door on him, Naruto slammed it shut and leaned his shoulder heavily against it. He crossed his arms and mirrored Sasuke's scowl.
"Jeez, what's got your panties in a bunch?"
"Move," Sasuke demanded. "Now."
Naruto dropped his gaze towards Sasuke's new arm before lifting it back up to consider him.
"You see, Sakura-chan today?" He guessed.
"I said move," Sasuke snarled with a viciousness that surprised even him. Instead of apologizing, however, he grabbed his friend by the shoulder and roughly pried him out of the way, twisting the door handle to let himself in. If only it had been that simple. He managed to crack the door open before Naruto once again appeared and barred it shut with his body.
"Nuh-uh, no way, I've been waiting outside your goddamn apartment for almost an hour. You can go be emo some other night. We're going to Ichiraku, we're going to eat ramen, and you're going pay for it, you jerk."
Sasuke's hand clenched into fist, prepared to give Naruto a black eye for being an annoying dick, but the blonde was faster. His hands wove a blur of seals before he slapped it against the stucco wall. Sasuke recognized the pattern as a summoning jutsu, but by then it was too late. A burst of smoke engulfed the area, and before Sasuke could ask Naruto what the hell he was doing, a frog the size of a small bus appeared before him and swallowed him whole.
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