rating: K
disclaimer: i don't own naruto.
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37. steps
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Sasuke unsurely stares at the pictures pasted into the album of photos depicting mainly of Sarada's childhood moments when she'd been younger. This was not within his comfort zone at all, he thinks to himself.
The title on the album's cover had been handwritten in Sakura's neat scrawl with an exclamation mark: Sarada's Memories! The album seems to be mocking him the more he flips through it, Sasuke's countenance growing uncomfortable from the guilt conjuring deeply in his chest as Sarada's smiling baby faces were shown to him with every flip of the page. He hadn't been there for any of these. It hadn't mattered much to him before and he didn't think of it, if at all, but now that his long duty was done and he was given leeway with spending some free time at home, Sasuke slowly found himself turning regretful at every happy memory he was told during his absence.
Feeling the couch shift, he absently remembers that he isn't alone. Sakura's indulging herself in some shameless motherly gushing, or whatever it was that mothers do when their eyes begin to shine at the prospect of doting on their children.
"—and this was from when she took her first steps at home!" Sasuke listlessly watches her gesture rather excitedly to a photo of their baby daughter, her pudgy hands reaching out to one of Sakura's, and he knows her other free hand held the camera if the odd angle was enough of a clue for him to notice. "She was so cute! She kept trying to say Mama and was stumbling, but she did three steps before falling! Three!" Sakura's fingers rose, accounting three. "I wish you could've seen it, Sasuke-kun! It was so sweet!"
He says nothing, a tad bitter at himself, but he manages a half-smile for her indulgence before flipping the page.
His wife doesn't fail to deliver more comments, endearingly. He found it somewhat soothing after they flipped past the first two pages, as it had given him no reason to speak midst her retellings. "Oh, that's when she first learned how to brush her teeth! She looked so cute with her green toothbrush…"
He found it rather peculiar how Sakura had so many pictures—there were probably enough to hand out to every single Konoha citizen and then some.
A finger nimbly gestures to the photo next to Sarada's accomplishment of brushing her teeth. "This one was when she was trying to help me sweep while I did chores!" Fondly, Sakura's voice is warm and Sasuke indirectly felt some comfort from it. "She kept saying how she wanted to help me, and I was so touched when she just picked up the broom and started sweeping without me even asking. I knew she would grow up to be a diligent girl after that!"
Sarada's determined face peered back at him from the photo, her little six year-old hands tightly gripping a tall broom and resolutely trying to get the dust bunnies from the corner of a room.
Sasuke's chest tightens even more.
He's fully aware that he missed out on Sarada's life altogether for the past decade or so, and he expected much regret to come to him later—he does feel regret and much more, and these pictures do nothing to appease him except remind him what a crappy father he had been. He has wronged her in so many ways that if she were to hate him, he would completely understand. The mission itself was the very thing that separated him from her and with it, came many restrictions. He had strict orders; it lessened his freedom a bit.
Sasuke is a simple man. He doesn't send hawk mail out for leisure, menial conversations—that would be a waste of time, resources, and energy for the hawk. If he were to send any out, it would be to report his findings to Naruto, or maybe even one to Kakashi if he felt his old sensei was of any help on a good day. Sakura didn't get any. Not because he wanted to purge himself of her existence, but because he knew that she made him soft and he needn't such things to regress him into being a liability for the mission. He was never a liability when he's at his best.
It's for the sake of Konoha, he often recited to himself on cold dark nights, or it would be, For my atonement. One or the other: Sasuke knew both lines were utterly true to himself and backing out is not a choice. Uchihas were bred into anything but cowards.
Sarada was like a dew of water in the desert to him; it was all new to Sasuke for him to accommodate quickly as he could.
When Sakura was first pregnant, he honestly was stripped of words comprehensible enough to tell her what he thought. Was this what he wanted? Yes, surely it was: he wanted his family's name to carry on and children were necessary for that. Such idealistic thinking made him forget the progress that needed to be done in order to get there. A pregnant Sakura had been new to him—and he didn't know how to treat her at first, whether she should be coddled or not with a life inside her belly. It was unfathomable. But to him, it was Sakura who mattered the most and his logic had been simple enough for him to finally accept these gruesomely fast changes in his life: a child with Sakura is the proof of their connection.
"—This picture was when she had her first birthday!" Sakura was excitedly driveling on about that Sasuke paid half his attention to.
Fatherhood was a far cry from anything he could feel that he could do right. Results would end in failure for him and he does not expect a change anytime soon, and that included his social skills. "Ah."
"She has cake all over her face," chimes Sakura, nostalgia dripping from every word. This nostalgia is foreign to Sasuke. "I remembered Kiba making a funny face at her and she almost spat cake in his face from laughing!" Her head shakes. "I almost pitied him."
"Almost?" Sasuke finds himself asking back, amused, yet quizzical at how the mere mention of that dog-loving brute would be the first thing he would carry a conversation about. He never thought much about Kiba and to Sasuke, he was just someone with a face. The idiot's enthusiasm is just like the dobe's, if not, nearly identical from every angle.
Sakura smiles, obvious teasing in her crinkling eyes. "If you saw the look on his face, you would think the same too." She leaves it at that, and he smirks at the mental image she had provided him. When Sasuke flips another page, Sakura points to another photo as their routine had been the past hour on the couch. "This was taken during her first day at the Academy!"
The Sakura in the photo was clad in a lovely blue kimono and Sarada in her white shirt with a red ribbon, red skirt, and dark stockings. The formality and extravagance of Sakura's outfit against Sarada is a little jarring, but to Sasuke, it doesn't seem to matter. "How was it for her?"
"She said it could've been better," he listens to her tell him. "She was glad that ChouChou was in her class, but then she started complaining how Boruto got on her nerves." She laughs a little.
"I don't blame her."
It looks like she would've laughed a second time, albeit she restrains herself this time. "Don't be mean to Boruto when he's not around. He's your apprentice!"
Sasuke knows he isn't setting a good example when he says, "Apprentice or not, I was merely stating a fact."
"Still!" she presses, giving him a look that she would often give him for his dry humor. He's not even sure he had humor to begin with. The dobe was more suited for that, and being a fool.
Artfully disregarding the conversation in its entirety, Sasuke flips to another page with nonchalance. "Why did you take so many photos?"
This one showed baby Sarada being held by an eager Naruto as Hinata cooes. This other one showed Sarada in her baby stool, obediently finishing her vegetables. This next one showed a nine year-old Sarada in a yukata, in a festival of sorts, holding onto Sakura's hand. He idly thinks maybe Naruto's wife or that loudmouth blonde best friend of Sakura's took the photo.
The more Sasuke flips through the album, the more he saw of Sarada's life unfold—it feels so strange to see it all in the form of photographs. It's like he is a mere phantom; the Sarada in the photos seem lighter, brighter, happier without him there.
Sakura begins to sit up, prim and proper and back straightening, and yet, her lips curl upward in a gentle smile that seem to soften up Sasuke more than what he would like to admit. "Because you weren't there."
His expression tightens and there are lines on his brow and he scowls a bit to himself, but he ultimately says nothing because Sasuke's not dumb enough to deny that it wasn't his fault.
"I wanted you to see them," she resumes to tell him after a stretch of silence that seemed rather foreboding if she had not spoken up again. "How else can you catch up on her life?"
She looks at him knowingly, like she knows that if he were to approach Sarada and ask her for her life story, it would just end up with awkward mumbles and silences by the end of the night. Like she knows that if Sasuke suggested letters, Sarada would bitterly remark how he never sent them any. Like she knows all of that and Sasuke has to ask himself how did Sakura ever come to love him again, like it's some great big riddle he could never solve.
"I see." He gives her a nod, shaky and unnerved. He always feel unlike himself when it concerns Sarada. He doesn't like that feeling, not one bit. "Thank you," he tells her after a bit of looking at the photos on his lap again. He really means it this time.
"Of course," Sakura replies, and he could hear the emotions in her voice.
Steeling himself after seeing the other dozen pages he still has yet to see in the album, Sasuke adamantly flips another page and listens to Sakura's rambles. If he were to get back on track, getting to know Sarada is part of the process.
When he finally flips to a page with a photo of ten year-old Sarada hunched over a piece of paper and a pen, he notices that Sakura quieted. "And this one?" he slowly inquires, testingly.
Sakura begins to splutter a bit, and Sakura, to his knowledge, doesn't splutter often. This photo must have involved him in some way if she looked a bit reluctant to reveal anything. "This… was when she tried to…" Eyes slowly adverting from his, she tries to find her words. "It's from when she decided to try writing you a letter."
His eyebrow begins to rise.
"W-Well, she had just learned and perfected her vocabulary and writing skills in class a-and—"
"She wanted to talk to me," Sasuke says, dryly, straight to the point, and terribly bluntly that she winced a bit. "...I didn't know. Never got it."
"She didn't intend to send it," she carefully responds, wary. "I told her that you were really busy, but one day, she decided to write to you anyways. She gave it to me to read and it was about how her day was, what she was doing in school. Sort of like a journal entry, per say." Her eyes glance to the picture again. "She didn't know where to send it off to, and since she didn't want to bother you, she didn't send it." She looks at him from his peripheral. "Regardless, I still took the picture in case… Well, in case you ever wanted to know when she started to miss you, even though I think she began to miss you before this."
"She's never met me," he murmurs, feeling utterly terrible and pressured and stressed and sad.
"Anyone would miss their father," Sakura firmly says. "The same applies here with us. But now that you're back, now's your chance to fix it. If you're willing, of course."
Grimly, he feels her hand coil around his reassuringly and he tightens his fingers as if to seek some solace. "Give me some time." Time—he didn't know if he even had that, but it would be done somehow.
Sakura smiles, and it's like a warm sunlit field.
