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Maybe Again
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Chapter 1
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We were alone and starved of love. Kids that live in a world full of hate.
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On the eve of Sasuke's seventh birthday, the Uchiha set the heart of their complex ablaze. Their supplies are packed. Their history and scrolls and riches sealed away in waiting caravans. They leave in groups of twenty, silent and deadly into the night. Children are hushed. Elderly mourn their lost home, the graves of their dearly departed, and the place of all their dear memories. Mothers worry for the future. Fathers worry for the future.
In the morning, the village wakes to a sky full of ashes.
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Before Sasuke leaves, he goes to school. He greets his teachers. He smiles the same cocky smile when he aces his classes, when he answers the questions right, and when the others praise him. Inside, he fears. He worries. He wrings his hands underneath his desk as ANBU pass in the shadows. He still his shoulders when others ask him to play tomorrow.
He says yes. (He feels guilt.)
He does not waste time in the yard. Itachi will not come for him today. Not today (on his last day here.) But he does take a moment to look back at the school and its yard and its children. He looks at its teachers and its grand trees. He feels a certain sense of loss.
(He has never known another home….)
The other parents have come for their children and he knows it is time to go. He must not waste time. But… but there is one last thing he must do. He seeks out Naruto. Naruto because he has always felt something for the other, a pull like an understanding that feels a little too heavy. He finds him behind the trees, hidden away from the other children and their parents who always wear the oddest looks when they see the blond. Sasuke has never understood it. Maybe if he stays he could learn why, but that does not matter anymore.
Sasuke grunts and catches the other boy's attention. Naruto jerks, stands with as much grace as a three-legged dog, and raises his fists. But Sasuke doesn't have time for a fight. He moves, steps in close past Naruto's defense and jabs him once, hard, on the forehead. "Good bye, Naruto." Maybe I will see you again, he means to say. Maybe we can be friends, he cannot say.
Before Naruto can gather himself to speak, he runs away, glancing over his shoulder to see Naruto touching his forehead with a look of confusion, a furious blush on his cheeks. He grins, waves, and disappears into the trees.
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In the years that follow, Naruto will think of that moment, touch his forehead and smile. Because despite Sasuke's words, Naruto had understood. Naruto had known. See you again, Sasuke.
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(Ashura and Indra meet and depart and meet again and again. This is the way the world turns.)
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Five years later, somewhere between the unknown and the horizon, Sasuke comes down with a fever at the tender age of twelve.
The Uchiha have learnt to thrive, have learnt to adapt. They live off the land, learn the plants they cannot eat, catch animals for fur and food, craft the daily belongings they do not need to buy, and several dedicate what they can to the study of herbal remedies.
They have lost some on the way. The days of thirst and hunger while not forgotten are distant enough. Some stayed behind, broke their bound, sealed their Sharingans, and gave away their right to bear children. (The Uchiha do not risk bastards, nameless sons. They have learnt from history. They are always learning from history.) Others have simply passed from time. But this is the first time they have been struck with fever.
Fugaku turns their caverns around, sends a group of fifteen back to the last village they'd passed with orders to bring back a chakra healer because their herbs are not working and their knowledge is limited. After all, the Uchiha have never been a people of healers. Always a people of steel and war. The causers of wounds instead of the fixers. As they rush back, Fugaku regrets.
It is too late. On the fifteenth day, two days from their destination, Itachi wakes them all with a scream. Fugaku collapses to his knees. Would this have happened if we stayed, Fugaku asks no one. Would my son have lived if we'd stayed? It is not the first time he thought this (it will not be the last.) When the healers arrive, Mikoto directs them to the other children as she covers her son, her precious child, with a white sheet.
After it ends, Mikoto sets her blades and her senbon (her weapons, the things that brought her fame and renowned and fear) down, bows, and asks to be taught. Her eyes have dried. Her hands have steadied. On the outskirts of the village they have rested for the past month of sickness and healing, her first born, her husband, and she held a pyre that has only just stopped burning. The medic-nin takes pity.
So an Uchiha healer is made. She is not the only one.
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Far away, Naruto is struck down by a drunkard as he walks home from Iruka-sensei's house. Taken by surprise, he does not fight; he cannot fight. By the time they find him there is nothing to save. Gone is the son of the Fourth and gone, with him, the Kyuubi, whose chakra scatters on the wind.
Iruka makes the arrangements. The Third pays. As they stand in front of the freshly covered grave, the last of the few that choose to attend (The Ichikara family, Kiba, Hinata, and Shikamaru), Iruka is struck by how old the third has become with wrinkles and age spots and thin, shaking hands.
From the shadows, Black Zetsu curses the loss of another plan and swears to try again.
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Somewhere in the heavens, the Rikudō thinks, Again.
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(The world turns.)
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Itachi Uchiha presses his face to his hands as the mediwife, Sadara Uchiha, in the other room orders his wife to relax, to breath. She is screaming, cursing his name, as she gives birth to their first born. Sasuke, Itachi thinks, for a son. Mikoto for a daughter. His mother pulls him closer.
"Fugaku would be proud," she tells him as the screams quiet and then a new, fresh set of lungs fills the air. Itachi's knees nearly give out. His mother catches him. "Come now, Itachi. You have a child to greet."
When they enter the room, Sadara hands him a rinsed and swaddled child. "We have a son," Hikari whispers from her place on the bed, forehead sticky with sweat, cheeks flushed. But in that moment, Itachi swears she has never looked so beautiful.
He echoes her smile. "We have a son."
"Sasuke," Hikari whispers full of awe, holding out her hands for her son.
Itachi nods and comes to her side, hands their small, beautiful baby boy to her and fights back tears. Sasuke, he thinks, savoring the thought. Sasuke. Sasuke. Sasuke. After his beautiful baby brother. After the child who could have done so much more. Who sang with promise, with hope. And now here he is again, but different. Gifted with all the same promise and hope. A child born on the road as all their children are born and should be born: free. "He'll be incredible," Itachi promises her.
Hikari looks at him with so much love that it steals his breath away. "He will be, won't he?"
Together, they smile down at their baby boy.
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Karin Uzumaki wakes to the sound of a window shattering somewhere in the distance and she curls tighter around her newborn. Naruto, she thinks feverishly. Naruto. Naruto. Naruto. Because in her arms she held the reason she breathed and the reason she would thrive.
Konoha had spared her when Orochimaru fell. And she'd wished they hadn't. She'd been lost, listless and without purpose. But the Godima's generosity, the white-haired bastard, had given her this apartment (on the edge of the slums, but still more than the sofa's she'd spent her last months of pregnancy sleeping on) and a job working a desk in the lower levels of the Hokage Tower. And she will not throw it away.
She hates Konoha. She hates this petty, prideful village, the way they look down at her and the way they squabble amongst themselves. She hates them for taking Sound. She hates them for killing her Master. But she will hold her tongue and she will bow her back. Because Naruto deserved better, and she would give him better.
Anything for this child, she thinks. A child so full of hope; a child made for the future. "You will be brilliant, won't you?" she whispers to Naruto. He scrunches his face for a moment before relaxing, turning towards his mother. Red hair tickles her chin and she laughs quietly.
So what if his father will never know him. So what if the village talks? She will be enough. She will give him the world.