"Sasuke," Itachi breathes.
Against his better wishes Sasuke breathes along with him.
"Sasuke," Itachi's fingers, cool to the touch and trembling, brush across Sasuke's face. "Sasuke what have you done."
The eyes. He thinks you killed for the eyes. "There was another way."
His brother doesn't move. He doesn't even breathe. "You'll go blind."
"Not today." He reaches up to take his brothers hand in his own and feels...He feels. "And today matters more."
It almost puts a smile on his face to see his brother speechless but they're here for something else today. The yawning, stretching years of hate and love and desperation that knit his brothers soul so close to his own is held closed. Barely. By the skin of very thin skin. But still it is closed. Whatever he's done, whatever he's released into the world through his actions, for this brief moment before the war to end all wars all he feels is the absurd compulsion to be kind.
So he does. "You didn't kill all of them."
"You-"
"No." Sasuke shakes his head. "But they survived anyway. And as much as I would love to fight by your side-" he works through the decades old lump in his throat. The names of dead people and the white out he never deserved to know, "Children deserve families. So I have to live."
Itachi's face falls slack. Emotions start ticking over his face. Guilty and hungry in equal measure. "I love you."
"You too, big brother." He realises they're still holding hands. Noise from the outside filters in and he realises they must've been whispering. He steps back without letting go. And then he lets go, turns his back and goes to find Karin.
--
In the back of a tent buried amongst other less important ones sits a long beat up couch, a bottle of hard liquor on a nice table and Karin. The outside of the tent is pencilled in text. Some are well wishes most are swear words. Karin's tent has always been graffitied and she won't say why. Lying across the couch, drink in hand is how he finds her. The screen in front of her is linked into the same frequency as the civilians base. There are five armies milling along one side and just out of focus, just out of sight, is one lone man.
Sasuke is sitting down, lifting her legs to accommodate himself before she can object.
His hand plays across the skin of her legs, both familiar and not. Her breath picks up and he stops. He didn't come to fuck with her head. Or to make sense of his own. He came to be away from the bloodshed. To be away from what he used to think was right. "I can't." He struggles to find the words to make it make sense. "Not while he's fighting. Before I could have."
Karin tilts her head. And of course it would be now, at the possible end of the world, that he would realise that he could love her. Not with the passion he feels from one brush of Naruto's fingers but with the surety of the ocean. Here is someone who sees him even when he can't see himself. He doesn't love her and is more than sure that the path is closed now, but he could have.
Her eyes widen. "Sasuke-"
He shakes his head. "I can't fight him." To clash swords with his brother now would be to turn around, to refill the hate in him that has been spilling out inch by aching inch all these years.
"You can't fight at all."
He snorts. If Sasuke picked up a sword and walked out there all he would get is relieved sighs. This is Madara at full power. Any body between him and world domination is welcome.
"Is it because he's your brother? Or because now that you have something you want to live for you're afraid to die?"
His eyebrow goes up. "I'm not afraid of death."
"But you've wanted to die. So have I." She protests. "You know fear but you don't feel it. Now you do."
"I'm not afraid."
She pulls her legs up, away. "You're tired, you're here because you have to be, you're here because some part of you wants to be proven right. Or wrong. Proven, anyway. That's why I'm here. This is a last stand but you and I? Everything we love would be better served with us at home." She leans forward to brush his hair back. In her eyes burns a thousand years of power. Dragonborn indeed. "Why are you here, my love? Why come to the end of the world?"
He gives her a blank, tired stare. "Where else could I be?"
Karin laughs. "Right. Team Survival right to the end."
Rule of the wild. Always know who you're running with. He refills both of their drinks and leans back to watch the barely moving screen. Five armies. One man. One Uchiha. War starts at dawn and they're all fairly sure who will win.
Not them.
"Do you think we should run?" Sasuke asks.
Karin gives him a startled, pissy look. "The fuck for? I believe in retreat but it's not like there's anywhere to go."
"So we should stay."
"You're not going to stay."
"No?"
"I bet you can't get through the next forty-five minutes."
It's boring as hell watching the set up. Whole armies move into a loose formation of affiliates and allies. He keeps track of them until the bureaucracy of it all drives him nuts. It's been years and years but the memory of being stationed in the middle fuck you, fuck off and hearing that Otogakure had been taken comes back strong. He looks at Karin. "Where's Orochimaru?"
Karin grins around her drink. "About six hundred metres away annoying Jiraiya."
Sasuke grunts. That seems appropriate. War starts in about twenty minutes. The very civilly agreed upon time for this very civilly agreed upon battle being very civilly adhered to. Last meals are being served, last prayers said and last calls for defectors and cowards ringing out. It's a dreadfully civil affair, all told. He relaxes his body and waits, lets the steady increase of anxiety rock through him-
And sees himself walk onto the field.
It's 5 minutes to the end of the world now. He isn't on any drugs. "Karin."
"Yes."
"What is this?"
She's quiet for a moment. He can feel her pick up on the dark roll of chakra. "It was necessary."
His chakra flares. "To clone me?"
"It's not a clone. Physically-" She stops, panting. "There needs to be a living Uchiha out there. Madara-"
He grinds the anger to a halt. "Whose plan was this?"
"Orochimaru and Tobirama. That's why he had me retrieve your brothers head-"
"Where the hell did they get-"
"That's what I'm saying! It's not you. It's someone else's face and a body. Sasuke, I'm sorry, but they need another Uchiha out there and you said no. Tobirama had the remains of someone who strongly resembles you. You've never met Madara!"
We have met, he thinks, and realises that Tsunade knows. Whom he told without telling. Tsunade who could build a body in a day. Who would just need the knowledge of someone who has studied the sharingan. Like Orochimaru for years. Like Tobirama for decades before that. People who think of them as powerful before anything else, even human. Belatedly he thinks of the initials on that first cache of bought parts. ST. Senju Tobirama. Senju Tobirama who only ever loved one of them, and even then because of the way he was not kin to the rest.
"One chance, Karin." He relaxes muscle by muscle. "Why?"
"Itachi has a plan to use a genjutsu against him. You have-"
"I know." Sasuke closes his eyes. "I know."
"It'll work."
Only because he's angry. Only because he can't break free.
He needs to stop this. He can see, from the outside, why they would want to do this. Uchiha are susceptible to each other. Izuna's Laugh and The Crone's Shadow . The former Madara would know, his brother invented it. The later was used on Sasuke. He might know it. What is he missing? There are five such techniques but Itachi could only know four. One you can't even learn until after your 20th birthday or it leads to colour blindness. So two of them, neither one of them he knows. He needs to stop thinking about this. He needs to step back. He isn't here to fight he's here to witness.
"Does it need three sharingan?" He asks instead because he can't help himself.
"...yes."
"And they need to be related? From the same bloodline?"
"Yes."
"It's not going to work."
"What? Why not?"
Because Itachi was the favored son who never learnt there was women's magic. He didn't read the history of their family for ten years before the massacre and most importantly he did not read the hidden works of Uchiha Kazue and Jinta. Itachi doesn't know that he is of Michiko's bloodline, that the sharingan is carried on the mother's side and that they need to share that lineage for his plan to work. His brother doesn't know that Naoko and Michiko carried indicators for a blood disease that the old clan could ill afford and so they took pains to keep the blood separate. Itachi doesn't know that the only one who could have had children that would counteract Madara was a baker's wife named Chizuru. Itachi, horror of horrors, doesn't know what he doesn't know.
"Where is Orochimaru?"
"Annoying Jiraiya still. Why?"
"Get a message to my brother. His plan won't work because he isn't closely enough related to Madara. We get our sharingan from Michiko our grandmother, not our father."
"What, Sasuke-"
"No. Tell him he didn't listen to mothers stories close enough. He knows how to fight with the sharingan but he has no idea how it works. No one does." I might, he thinks with astonishment, if I live long enough. "I need to stop this."
--
The war started about fifteen minutes ago. It's already not going well.
Madara just...slaughtered them. He stepped forward and ripped apart the ranks like they were tissue paper. He's heard, they'd all heard, about the monstrous power of their forebears but this is a thousand shinobi. Surely, surely that's enough.
It isn't. By a lot.
He's being kept back. Tsunade was insistent that he not engage with the first wave. They'll need him, everyone said, when they found his weakness. From his perch several factions back he can smell blood and shit. He can just make out a familiar block of dark hair as it dashed forward in perfect formation with it's brother. Why Sasuke lied about joining the fight he'll never know. But that's the relationship: this absurd push and pull of attraction, understanding and complete loss. When he holds Sasuke's hand it's like the whole world unravels but he's had this awful certainty lately that they're making each others lives harder. Sasuke is wonderful, secretive, stubborn and changing swiftly into someone he is proud of but not sure he'll be allowed to love. That his twin dreams of his friend and the legacy he wants to build will diverge like forks in a river.
The dark head of hair shifts out of view. Naruto exhales longing and inhales more copper and smoke. Madara has started burning people alive. The fire is so hot he can feel it prick at his eyes. The screaming is somehow worse. It has been fifteen minutes and already war is something he never wants to experience again.
Naruto's breath freezes in his chest. A new chakra thunders across the field. It's strong, as strong as any kage he's ever felt. In less than a moment it's followed by dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of little flickers. Standing in rows upon rows of dark robes emblazoned with bright silver stylized edelweiss are missing nin famous, treacherous and dangerous. And right at the point, with her cloak thrown wide open and her hands on her hips, is Hashira Fuyuki.
She lifts a finger to her lips and blows, wind whipping right across the field all the way to where Itachi, Sasuke and Madara are having their violent family reunion. The wind whips them apart, Itachi and Madara landing perfectly still facing each other. Sasuke lands with no difficulty but turns his body towards the mass of black still amassing on the ridge. Fuyuki raises a fist to the air. Her chakra hits it like a shot raising the hair on Naruto's arms. "Hold it."
From where he's kneeling on the ground Naruto can see the jump in Kurotsuchi's shoulders and the blatant surprise and anger from the Kumo-nin. A's face twists into something truly ugly. Killer B hisses.
A man clears his throat. He's tall with a bald head. When he speaks it's with a long tone that sounds nothing like any accent Naruto's ever heard. "Are you the true Uchiha Madara?"
Madara smirks. "I am."
"I am Dosa, leader of the Western Arm of Giri, subordinate to Hashira Fuyuki former Commander of Lightning." He rolls his shoulders. "I don't suppose you will consent to disarming yourself and a period of imprisonment while we figure out how to try you for your crimes, the least of which is grave robbery and the most heinous attempted genocide?"
"No." Madara continues to smirk.
"Excellent. I didn't bring the army for nothing then."
And then they move.
--
He registers the flash and awe tactics of his former captain and commander but all of them are less important than finding his brother. There's a hilarious symmetry there he'll care about later. Now he has to run.
Itachi is on the field, he knows, but before the explosion of Giri's arrival hit he felt it flicker and move towards the west of the battle, to the end of the militarized zone. He slides around the right corner just in time to bodily hit the Commander of Giri.
"Sasuke?" She blinks at him. "What are you doing here?"
His mind puts together Giri-Tsunade-Itachi and comes up with provider of DNA for resurrection. He is familiar with Giri's foray into hypocrisy and keeps his teeth gritting indignation moving. His brother is the one he needs to talk to.
"Where are they?" He manages to sound dull and tired, not burning with rage. "The Senju and the rest?"
Fuyuki frowns, the one that says she doesn't care for his shit at all, but an achingly familiar sight comes around the same corner.
His brother and his...whatever Fuyuki is to him stare at each other for a moment. It's genuine befuddlement: the way you look at something that's fallen in to your line of sight by accident. We didn't like each other, she said, but we understood each other.
Fuyuki frowns. "Uchiha Itachi."
"Giri." He inclines his head. "Yuuna. You're still alive."
Fuyuki gives him the vaguely incredulous look she used to give Sasuke. There's a smidgen less condescension perhaps.
"Orochimaru brought him back." Sasuke provides. So Giri-Tsunade, not Itachi at all. An opportunistic ploy not an intended one.
"Of course he did." She sighs. "Why wouldn't he? What a pleasant idea."
The corner of his mouth picks up, mostly despite himself. "And you're not taking advantage of any dead-not-dead people."
"Why would I?" She smiles. "Because it's silly to put all your eggs in one basket? Because perhaps some people don't fall apart when I tell them no?"
"And some of those people may have also been princesses from lineages that utterly failed them and might be willing to talk behind someone else's back?"
"Because someone isn't stupid enough to miss that history doesn't fade," the pleased smile fades, "even when you are literally begging it to. Can we put this aside? Yes, Tsunade and Oonoki contacted me after the summit and we devised a plan without the Kages approval. Mei will get over, I don't give a fuck what Gaara thinks and A can-"
Itachi clears his throat.
"-have a civil conversation with me behind closed doors, really, Uchiha? You're not a child. He expects a full frontal assault. Of course he does. He thinks of this as the Warring States Era but I grew up waging a series of cold wars. I don't intend to be what he expects."
Sasuke doesn't actually know that much about Madara's tactics. He knows about his heart, his history, his long shadow that covers all that came after, but he doesn't know how he fights. Which pings as very strange in the back of his head. He does know enough that whatever Fuyuki's planning won't be enough. A Uchiha's heart is such a liability it has to be cut out everytime you fight and yet it's the very thing that has propelled them to become one of, if not, the most, powerful clans in history. A plan that's based in tactics won't defeat that. Hopelessness has only ever made them insane and powerful.
He suppresses a laugh. How many people have wanted to beat him? Or his brother? And all those people were asking the wrong question. It's not about how strong you are at all. You have to know what the Uchiha are fighting for and then, horror of horrors, you have to understand it.
"It won't work."
"Sasuke," Fuyuki says reasonably. "It's a three pronged approach with overwhelming force on all sides. The Coalition, Giri and the Uchiha. All of which have enough variability that if a weakness exists we will be able to find it and exploit it."
"Ah huh." Sasuke grins fully aware that he looks like a fucking maniac. "Won't work."
"Brother if you have something to add-" Itachi adds mildly. His brother, the genius, the only one of them to have ever been worth something from the way Sarutobi talked about him, and he doesn't get it. The only way to understand a Uchiha is to find his heart -whether it's his family, his lover, the roll of tokens that says that he is human- and there is no one left who has tried as hard as Sasuke has to understand the heart of the Uchiha.
" Brother what do you think Madara carries with him?"
Itachi scoffs. "He does not carry anything."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
He does. He has to. Sasuke has been to the end of the world, to where his family lay down their power. The warning was: be sure. He was. Madara is. To not want power is madness. To need it to be able to feel safe is grief. To grieve is to bottle your love and watch it acidify. And what is it but the deepest sorrows of love to bury your whole family?
"No. You're right." He feels peace settle over him. He understands, now. "You need to bring me Senju Hashirama."
"What-"
"You're right. He doesn't need to carry them because the last of them is walking around with Tsunade's eyes and his face carved on a mountain. You're a better soldier than I've ever been, brother, but you're not a better Uchiha. If obsession and destruction and pain is what we do then trust me, I know better, and I am telling you that if you want to beat Uchiha Madara you need to bring me Senju Hashirama." It took years of bleeding out for him to get it and he's not sure someone with over a century of festering in him will be able to let it go, but he has always been too stubborn not to try. "If they were brothers, if they were more than that, then he won't die until he's done whatever he thinks will bring him peace." Now he does look at his brother. "You have no idea how far a man can go on that."
Itachi looks at him with that hunger and pain again.
"Alright." Itachi says. "Alright. I will bring him. That doesn't change the immediate plan."
"And I need something from you," Sasuke says suddenly. "Do you still have them?"
"Have what, Sasuke?"
"Mother's scroll."
Every intake of air is audible. "Yes." Itachi chokes out. "I-"
"I need them." Sasuke doesn't want to know- to hear- That scroll isn't a holding space for trinkets; it's the last part of his mother's heart. The only part that isn't still breathing.
Itachi doesn't want to give it up. It's clear on his face. He owes Sasuke this. He owes him .
"And," he adds belatedly. "You need to let the others know you have a plan. Naruto will blow right through it otherwise." He doesn't say you have armies of people who believe they will die at that madman's hand. We can all stand here and know that practicality suggests that the Konoha method is ludicrous but I wouldn't want to be out there alone. At least let them believe there's a chance. "You all know him. Fate seems to bend his way."
Both Fuyuki and his brother grimace. They discount him because they don't know him. "Ask Jiraiya. Ask him what happens when you set Naruto on something."
Itachi sighs, put out. "Brother-"
" Ask. "
Itachi taps his ear. The message is relayed and acted upon. Sasuke can hear the arrival of Gamabunta.
Fuyuki takes a look at the averted eyes and shifting feet and decides a change of venue is in order. "Follow me."
She has her own tent, of course, and it looks exactly Karin's with the addition of a table map. The don't expect this to be a quick war. He can see troops and evacuation routes. They expect to lose, to have to run, to let Madara chase them across the country at large. He has the tailed beasts minus Naruto and Killer B. They don't think they can win. They'll do anything they have to. Tsunade and Karin are marked as exit points as are Hashirama and Minato. Should this be lost they will lead the survivors out and try to buy time. On the screens Madara is burning people alive with the same effort one might swat a fly. Sasuke sees fake Sasuke approach a decent replica of Kusanagi in hand.
Madara takes one look at fake!Sasuke and kills him where he stands. He looks at him and the fake just keels over and dies.
He says something. The monitor plays it back: Senju tricks? Do you think I haven't seen that before? And then he subsides to boredly waiting for the army to come to him.
After a shocked, scared moment, Sasuke hisses, " Get me Hashi- "
On the screen Madara sighs and brings his hands together. Fine. I'll do it myself. One moment he's still and the next bodies are piling up. Itachi makes a strangled noise in his throat. Then he's gone.
Madara rips through people like tissue paper. It's awe-inspiring to watch in the old sense. He's filled with awe at how easily he destroys. Years ago he would have hungered for that. God, he could have been that. Sasuke sits heavily in a chair and thinks, that could have been me.
Itachi returns long before Sasuke has wrestled that down. Long before he can do more than watch Madara kill with ease and no remorse. Hashirama comes to stand close enough he can feel his body heat. He seems to have reached the same conclusion.
"You have to be the one to end this." Sasuke says, after a beat of silence.
"Now hold on a minute." Tobirama steps between them.
"Unless you want to have a very exposing conversation about how you have eyes from an ancestor of mine that died well before the massacre step back, Senju." Sasuke keeps his voice detached, mind still rolling with I would have wanted that to be me.
Tobirama turns on him. Hashirama stops him.
"Enough." Hashirama says with power in his voice. "I will hear him out. We can do that much at least."
You could one shot my great grand uncle into the sun. Sasuke thinks uncharitably as Tobirama slinks away. Hashirama takes a careful cross legged seat on the ground in front of him. His face is open and expecting.
Sasuke inhales. Looks away from the monitor. "Do you know what I know about you?" He pauses, licks his lips. "I know that my mother made strawberries dusted with sugar on the evenings my father spent being important with the other men of our clan. I know that they never ate sweets because Itachi would steal some to snack on while he learnt at my father's knee. My mother and I weren't as important as they were. My mother, the last of Michiko's line and a reminder of one of our clan's darkest times. Your brother said my grandmother was strong, you don't know the half of it. You never knew anyone who could tell you.
"I was the second son. My future was assured, unglamorous and good. I wanted it. But this is about you, isn't it? I know you have the Mokuton, that you gained it when you were young enough to play by the river. Our river. I know that you must've spent time figuring out the right texture, the best colour and a way to make those strawberries last through the harshest of winters. I know that you must've made them by the river because they always taste a little too fresh. Madara wasn't a sweets person because -and this you couldn't know, his mother's mother was Akino. She hated sweets and so did all her children. But he ate them anyway because they were yours and you gave them to him. We all did, for that reason." He pauses, Breathes. "I know you because his sister inherited the plant after he tried to give it back to you. You fought over something transient and made it so big it literally split the world in two. Chizuru thought it was silly but she comforted him anyway. Madara couldn't scare her even when he made the world shake. She died loving him, one of the few of our blood who ever did. She married a good man and raised a friends son. They planted those strawberries in the back of her garden. There are only two now. Sister plants. One in your home and one in the last place anyone who loved him lived. The third grew wild in my home but died when it's people did. I know you because my blood sings back your name when I walk in the woods of my own home. We built the first fires on that bank with you before the Village Hidden in the Leaves had a name. Before any Village had a name. Our blood never forgets. That's why we're Blood Eyes. Demons. Whatever it is people want to make of us." His voice is thin and reedy by the end but Hashirama is still listening. Thank god.
He unrolls his mother's scroll. Two locks of hair, two hairpieces and two shards of porcelain. Then he unwraps his own. Whittled down by years it comes to this: his father's note to his mother, the receipt from the restaurant he ate at with Karin, Juugo and Suigetsu, the hilt of his old sword, the mission slip from his first mission with Team 7 and a copy of Kazue's last work, A Home Among Birds. It will never be as clean as his mothers. He doesn't think he can be that sure of himself.
If he has a heart it is here when it is not behind his eyes.
His hand drifts lovingly over his mother's shards. He can see Hashirama look at the studded pearls and red hairpiece with longing. "Some of it is because we have to cut out our own hearts to fight. Have you seen this before?"
Hashirama shakes his head.
"This is my mother's heart." He says simply pointing to one scroll and then the other. "And this is mine. This is so I never forget who I am. We can't bring all we are to the fight because if we did we'd rip ourselves apart. I know you because you've been apart of my life since the day you gave my ancestor a part of yourself. It dripped down through the years until it was just part of being Uchiha . Part of knowing where the borders of our homeland start. I might not always know how but the blood does. It always does. Everything in my life, in the lives of any one of my kin you have ever known, has been seen through the facet of a heart we can ill afford to break."
There is infinite sadness. An impossible grief. But there is also this: a completely unselfish giving of self. So much so that the self must be cut into symbols to survive. This is how Sasuke knows him: through the parts of Konoha he can't shake with the part of him that wouldn't die. They only love one way, so deeply and irrepressibly that it destroys the brain and brands their blood. There is only one answer and it is always love. Acidified, filtered, purified love.
"Do you understand yet?" Sasuke whispers. "You can't doubt your heart when it's laid out like this. What you'd die for, kill for and, most importantly, live for. It can't be betrayed or unloved, only dissolved into..." Rage. Trauma. A crucible of power in exchange for humanity. Hand over heart, a choice they all made even when it wasn't easy.
"I think I do." Hashirama laughs in a brittle sad way. "All this time..."
Hashirama tilts his back exposing the long tanned line of his throat. He looks nothing like Tsunade when he moves. The relation is in the stillness, inheritance in the soft silent way they consider things.
"He asked once," Hashirama whispers. "For a lock of my hair. I cut off half of it to give to him."
Sasuke relaxes. Maybe he does get it.
--
War. He's seen battles, he's committed a massacre, he's killed many for not very much reason at all. And still war is so much worse than he could have thought.
Hashirama left abruptly, a serene look that stopped Sasuke's heart and put ice in his veins on the mans face. Sasuke has seen what it is like when the best of them put their back into it. He is horrifyingly sure that he is about to learn what it looks like when the best of them has something to prove. The part of him that loves the fight is enthralled. Unfortunately that part of him has been long denied the bulk of his personality. Hashirama moves much faster than he does and by the time Sasuke is in a position to see what his words have brought forth it is already too late to add addendum's and culture notes.
A beast of a thousand hands rises over the battlefield. It's large enough to drown out the sun.
With a triumphant roar a giddy version of his ancestor leaps out up to meet it. Below the both of them people die. By fire. By wood. It's all they can do to avoid the two men fighting like the world has closed around them. Maybe it has.
They crash down near enough to Sasuke giving him just enough time to feel the roll of Madara's heat and the weight of Hashirama's earth. The blowback rattles his brain in his head. They're talking.
"-you've always been a part of what I need- What I-" Hashirama draws in a deep breath. "What we built."
"Come on now Hashirama," Madara drawls, "don't lose your nerve."
"I made a mistake."
"You made several," he replies, "and look, here I am to burn it all away. Say thank you."
Hashirama growls. "Must you make this difficult?"
"Yes." Madara grins. He flips through hand signs. "Zetsu!"
And god. It got worse.
Sasuke had known, peripherally, that Zetsu was some kind of chakra monster. It came up in the intel Karin sent him that was meant to be classified. Thousands of them crawl out of the ground, scampering on one or two limbs for the leftover shinobi. The Zetsu open their mouths and begin to chew.
"Watch out!" Sakura throws him out of the way and throws a punch. It shatters all the Zetsu in front of her.
He looks at where the Zetsu are eating, where Hashirama and Madara are fighting and his brain clicks back over flooding him with numb white. All his limitations, the what if's and the let's be betters fall under the weight of his history on his feet fighting. His body is not what it once was and the pull of chakra reminds him of every broken bone and fucked up joint he lived with for years. A body made for one thing and now no longer used to the wear and tear of it all. He is still himself though. Congenitally incapable of dying before he's done.
He ends up back to back with Sakura pushing out ream after ream of fire.
All around him he can hear the sounds of burning flesh and chewing bone. There's screaming too, begging, all that and much more but shinobi can ignore that. It's the...swallowing noise, the stench of black smoke and the clash of swords that he's having trouble with. Their vision is so obscured that all they can do is turn slowly in place waiting for one of the Zetsu to attack first. Hashirama's beast moves at the edges of his vision obscured as it is by all the noise but he can hear Madara yelling. He can hear them lock swords and meet blow for blow.
He just can't see past Sakura's back against his, the lightning and fire in his hands. The whole world is the smell of Sakura's sweat and his trembling vision.
He grunts, throws the Zetsu off his arm, ignores the weeping wound it leaves and finishes with a terrible fireball. "This isn't going to be enough." He's running out of fire. The smoke is getting too thick.
"Shut up!" Sakura hits out with a force of chakra. "Don't you dare give up!"
He rolls his eyes. "Excepting reality is not giving up."
His eyes hurt. They really hurt. The whole world is Sakura's breath stuttering out along with his, the screams of people he wants to stop dying, his friends and his team scattered across a wasteland, his brother and his lover lost and probably hurt and he can't breathe his eyes hurt they hurt they hurt they hurt they're bleeding they hurt-
Oh.
The whole world locked behind a heart he can ill afford to break. The price for unfathomable power that comes with a cost. His eyes in his head.
He can't see the battle anymore but he can see Sakura's hair, pink and bright and still fighting. He can't watch her die. Not if there's another choice. He guesses he can understand how his family folded themselves into police work. Begrudgingly maybe, but a family with a heart like theirs would relish the idea of something to protect. The lens of history twists power into violence and violence into a famine of the soul. The world may not like them, the world may not ever trust them, but by god Sasuke will no longer let them think they didn't care.
To accept that power means to be beholden to it always. He's not a good man, he tries sometimes but it died in the house with his parents. Good is gone. There's only trying to do better.
"I can do it," Sasuke says.
"Sasuke," Sakura whispers. "There isn't-"
"You have to give to get," Sasuke replies, "that's what you were trying to tell me, right?"
Sakura looks at him with heavy green eyes. In someway he's been trying to earn back her trust, not her devotion or her love, just the certainty that he could reach out to her and get what he asked for. Sasuke lost that, somewhere, and much like the weary set to her shoulders when she leaves a double at the hospital, he doesn't think it was all his own doing. He can make some of it up to her though. He likes to think he has.
He meets her eyes steadily. She looks back and sees something she needs to because she smiles, quick and sad, before squeezing her fist.
"Gotta give to get." Sakura reaffirms. "Let's do it then."
Sasuke smirks at her. Hopes it makes him look twelve again. "I'll hold 'em back. You get in there."
Sakura is less than convinced but she gets going. Whatever she does next he won't see, anyway.
He punches down past what he thought he could do and tries to find the fire at the centre of himself. There is something beyond this, beyond Susano'o, beyond the dragon, beyond the feral edges of the sharingan itself. That is what he reaches for-
-and falls somewhere else.
It's not unfamiliar. It's a bastardised version of the Kyuubi's cage. Dark and water filled and full of a sense of grandiosity. He can feel the edges of something that must be sealwork, the ebb and flow of chakra. The only problem is that it's on such an unrepentant, massive scale that it becomes incomprehensible that something as flimsy as sealwork could contain it.
That's because it didn't, some helpful hindbrain thing tells him, we are from before your dragons made voices. Not human in the least.
He makes to turn, to look, but his feet begin to slide into the floor. Chains wrap around his wrists, forcing him to kneel. A singular coil of silver wraps in his hair -the first time he's regretted its length on a practical level in quite awhile- and yanks until his throat is exposed. He can feel something pricking at his fingertips. Crawl inside his veins in a way that is forcefully reminiscent of Orochimaru's cursed seal. It burns and pulses its way up him and it's only the knowledge that this is far from the first time that stops him from throwing up. Was it always like this? He can endure, he has to, but the absence of that necessity, as brief as it's been, has chipped away his will.
After long agonising minutes in which he can feel his throat squeezing with blood and vomit it stops. The blood in his throat turns to molten heat, like swallowing a coal from a blazing fire.
Fantastic. Something else he's done before.
Whatever it is, whatever weird metaphoric hallucination this is, he accepts it.
A long sweep of fire curls around the cavernous walls and the floor. The fire writhes with malevolence and then settles into thousands upon thousands of red sharingan. It's a burst of deja vu. Eyes in jars, eyes catching fire in the dark room that is his dream and now this: all that have ever shared his bloodlines ultimate burden gazing down at him. Every single pair of those eyes is a family member lived and gone gathered here in this place, whatever it is, to pass judgement.
There's nothing to say to that, nothing to do, so he relies on the only trick he ever has: completely unearned arrogance.
These in-between places are malleable so he pulls on a thread of memory. His favourite sword, not special not Kusanagi, but a fairly cheap thing that was slightly off balance. It never was great for killing but boy did he love the woosh of it. He falls to an easy stance. "Come!"
Silence. Then it's complete and total opposite.
A blank moment of such intense pain he can't even sob and then an open room so wide he can't see the edges. He knows it does end, it seems important to know that, but he cannot see it. All those eyes are now in human faces from the furthest throwback ancestor -four inches shorter than average, wide, face too delicate for a body built only to survive- to Tsuki and Yumi holding hands in Uchiha blues. Their gaze is expectant.
He's on trial. His goddamn family is putting him on trial.
Well fuck them , he thinks, just a little . There is a fucking war on.
As if in response a dark mass forms itself into a woman in front of him. For a moment he thinks of Kazue as she is in his nightmares: crone-like and cruel. But for all of her beautiful cutting words she is still unbearably, hauntingly human. This thing is not.
I'll cut it away, the wraith says. Her long talons close around his throat, gouge his skin. Her face is full of teeth and a wide circling eye. Her robes curl around the both of them like a macabre hug. Even though her hands are claws he feels like he could hold them. Cut away all of his doubts. His melancholy.
No. He says it in his head, in his heart, with his bones. I do not accept.
And so it falls away.
Next the scent of lake water and stillness takes the form of his brother.
I'll use it. The stern soldier says. His mouth twists the way Itachi's did. Out of habit Sasuke looks to his pinky: his brothers only tell. Long and straight and sure are his fingers. The hands of the first son, who never needed to know the harsh truths and decided to damn them all anyway. It could be Itachi, yes, but his father and Madara too.
No. He wills again. Not them.
Wind kicks up and up and up into a figure made of Konoha's fall leaves and the surety of a homeland. A people that you can die for, the very essence of an idea that blooms into The Will of Fire. Half lie, yes, but only because they aren't good enough to make it real. He could be. He's strong enough.
I will be it.
He hesitates, of course, but- No.
The eyes shudder and close. What else is left to offer? The sharingan comes with a cost and he must pay it if he wants more power.
With a thousand eyes upon him Sasuke reaches down below what he thought was the bottom of his power, below his own foundations and frees his own chains. With easy motions he makes a dragon: the one that freed Oto, the one that freed Kakashi from his guilt, the one that freed him from himself. He finds it strong. He finds it good. And instead of accepting the mountainous history of his bloodline he offers an alternative. His own Will of Fire.
See what I can be, he thinks, and make it stronger. If it turns to poison then purify: let it die.
As all things heal so must they poison. He can't let go. Not now. Not ever. But he can't afford for it to kill him. Children need families. And he needs something too. Maybe closure. Maybe to say a proper goodbye to the brother he loves more than anything. He can't afford to let this kill him. He can't afford to accept the terms as they're written. So, this. As his mother would say: be responsible for what you have made.
The eyes widen and spin. The eyes spin and close. Lights go out and there's only him, his dragon and a fading hope.
His feet release from the ground and he floats. Air and fire turning to water. And beneath, far, far beneath: the whole earth the size of a marble. He's floating in some embryonic void long before humans had words to express ideas. Maybe long before there were humans as he knows them. There are lights underneath him, stones and carvings. A long mournful note as its singer emerges.
It belongs to me, the sad princess says. Her translucent eyes dip with sadness. None but me shall have it.
He can feel the edge of her reject him fully and totally. He isn't strong enough to turn the tide of the whole world. Who is he to offer a new way, when the old ones are right there. Blood for sacrifice, sacrifice for power and at the beginning of it all; the selfish wish for more.
Who is he to question the way of things?
Enough of that, a sharp rapping noise and the water gives way to solid ground. He gets the absurd notion of a child scolding their parent. If even one more freaky thing happens-
The eyes return full force. All of his ancestors stare down at him accusingly. He tries to make the offer again, to move the fuck on, be better, not drown in their own shit and blood, but he has nothing left. No chakra just stubborn will.
The eyes close dropping him into an annoying, familiar darkness. He's facing forward churning in his own failure when he hears the footsteps. One light and sure, the other pensive. Two boys who turn to men who turn to enemies who turn their backs on eachother. Brothers.
The older, taller one holds his hand out. Sasuke grasps it. He's Uchiha blood for sure, if Sasuke shaved off his eyebrows they'd look eerily similar. He can hear a cycle of whispers in his ears. Power, power, sacrifice, power. Obito, too: You're my blood, boy. I know it burns. Fire going down his throat and the knowledge that you must be sure, always.
To not want power is lunacy.
In the end it's all the little things that save him. Again and again it's that, that reminds him: how bad the dumplings he makes are, the way he knew the tune to some stupid jingle after ten years of not hearing it, his dumb cats and his dumb teammates who he loves so much it scares him. All the power in the world and he'd rather have his weird little house and the assurance of family to come home to. Thank you but the cost has been paid, god has it ever been paid. By child and mother alike all the way down the line to him. He broke even and he doesn't want to pay in to this anymore. He never would have if he'd known. He wasn't a clever child but he wasn't unkind either: if Itachi had asked he wouldn't have wanted to pay for it.
Power seems less like a lifeline and more like something running parallel. He can make their courses meet. He does not have to.
The thing, this shadow, that feels like it's been hanging over the family line recoils. Sasuke takes his chance and pulls, pulls for whatever is beyond even that. This may be the beginning of the obsession but it isn't the beginning of who they are. Life is too absurd for something so thematically simple.
It pushes back. It pushes hard but it has nothing Sasuke wants. Even less that he needs. Sasuke pushes and pushes and pushes until, with a sigh, it gives way to a bone deep knowledge. Something so well worn that Sasuke would know a whisper of it in a lake of water.
I loved him. Otsutsuki Indra says, almost wry. And in losing him I lost myself.
It falls away as so much before it has. Sasuke lets it, lets the grief and the love come and wash over him. He carries enough of it. Another man, maybe even a certain number one knucklehead, would try and hold it, but Sasuke knows this moment is a thousand years in the making. His kin can love forever, will grieve for twice that but sometimes what they need is a witness, to see the heart and let the flicker of it die out.
It is understood and thus no longer needs to burn.
The last thing before he closes the door on this: a woman, inhuman and inhumane. She's dressed in white and if she wasn't so clearly something else altogether she would remind him of his mother. She runs a hand down his cheek, eyes glowing with tears.
You looks so much like him. So much like...
The unearthly glow of her eyes pales as her hand falls away. Something gives way, gives in, and a spectre seems to fall right out of his soul. The Rabbit Goddess disappears.
--
He tastes his own tears as he opens his eyes. The battlefield is burning. He can see Sakura close to him, others nearby, but all that really registers is the Zetsu corpses littering the ground as far as he can see. His chakra is so strong is burns the air he breathes, curling and coiling and clean. He can feel it, feel that something came through him to do this. Something like-
Sakura coughs. It should sound pointed but she can't breathe through his oppressive chakra. "Sasuke. We need to move."
He grits his teeth an tries to drop it. Tries again when it doesn't work. Tries again-
Peace, little one. Indra's voice pulls right through his body. What the fuck. It is not your chakra doing this. Peace, or you will wake our grandmother, even after so thoroughly closing her route home.
What the fuck.
"Sasuke." Sakura drops low and approaches him. "I need you to stop this."
I can't. He thinks through gritted teeth. I am being possessed.
He can feel a thousand year old being sigh, ruffle his hair and let go. There's the firm feeling that they may talk again but for now the chain is broken. He is the first Uchiha to be truly his own since the line started. Sakura is on him the second she can reach him without burning.
"Are you alright?" She frowns. He both is and isn't, but before he can mention it a giant root comes straight out of the ground. Hashirama slides along it with his sword brandished. Apparently whatever Sasuke did it wasn't enough to make those two pause for more than a moment.
Sakura secures him and leaps to a point further back so they can take in the battlefield. Everyone else is creating space with the threat of the Zetsu clones minimised. He can make out Kakashi and Naruto zig zagging around making little openings for people to escape what has become a two man battle.
Madara screams something and then rips off what remains of his shirt. The pale flesh is marred by scars, blood and-
Well, Sasuke thinks, uncharitably, that he probably didn't need to expose the very essence of who he is to Hashirama if Madara was just going to literally put his face over his heart like an asshole.
Something intense flickers across both men as they land less than fifty metres apart, the whole world whittled down to the two of them.
"I loved you," Hashirama says aggrieved. "And I have misunderstood you."
"You think your mokuton can-"
"Be quiet." There's a harsh snap of power against the ground, heavy and unyielding. "It's a seed. It's a sprout that grows from love and care but also from suffering and death. It grows from blood. The world is a vine that wraps around itself always dying and always flowering. There's a moment of stillness and peace, a kind of end. That's the moment you have to live in: you know one man can't achieve everything."
"What bullshit," Madara chokes on his words. Hashirama keeps a firm hold on his face but turns the grip of his fingers so that he has his thumbs near Madara's eyes. Madara jerks back but Hashirama holds firm. There's a paleness stretching from his fingertips down the length of Madara's torso. "What the hell are-"
"No matter how much power you have you can only be a ripple," he says gently. There's a pallor to Madara's skin that grows with every passing second, veins turn purple and yellow under his skin. "You can only change the flow of the river, you can't dam it. Skipping stones, floating leaves, they're all picked up and thrown away by the flood."
" Fuck your philosophy," Madara kicks out of Hashirama's hold and begins the fight again. "What did you do?" A barrage of attacks so fast the eye can't follow happen. And if the sannin can make Sasuke feel small it is nothing compared to how microscopic he feels watching this. There are a dozen moves, two dozen, that should have ended it, both the war and everyone still technically fighting it. There are moments Madara should take advantage of to thin the herd but he's so focused on fighting Hashirama he's falling into old habits, minimising surrounding damage and redirecting what he can't take face on. God, what does that feel like, to fight someone so much that every battle could have happened today, tomorrow, a hundred years ago?
Hashirama says something, Madara doesn't hesitate, and when they make their move two things happen. One, Hashirama loses a leg from a katon jutsu that comes out of nowhere. Two, there is a horrible awful wrenching noise and the space where Madara's heart should be is opened up by a pure light that hurts to look at.
There's madness here too, Sasuke thinks wildly, grabbing Sakura under one arm and jumping back as far as he can. He knew there had to be something grandiose and terrible in the Senju blood. He lands on an outcrop of rocks still too close to the action. Sakura gets to her feet and ends her jutsu, with the instant healing ended she drops again. Her knees hit the ground with a heavy thud. "What the hell?"
"I don't know for sure," Sasuke replies, "but I think that's the Senju equivalent of the perfect Susano'o."
"What?"
"An ability that eventually consumes you," he says solemnly.
"Shit." Sakura wipes the blood from her mouth. "We're going to die."
More to himself than those gathered, Hashirama says, "An empty vessel for the light to pass through. No more, no less." Around his sage marks something like sunlight begins to glow. It is not the sun, it can't be, nothing meant to give life could be that empty and cruel but it shimmers all the same.
Sasuke bodily forces Sakura behind him.
Hashirama's flick over to him, his sword and the hold he has on his teammate. He looks consideringly at his hand and it's strange light then drops any pretense about what he is. All the hair on Sasuke's body goes up in alarm as the pinnacle of whatever it is the mokuton is at its core turns its back on him.
People begin to stream off the field all around him, as if they too feel the inevitable last blow oncoming. Sasuke settles Sakura more firmly behind the natural shield of the rock around them. Running won't help them now, and besides he wants to know.
Hashirama leaps, turns and strikes at Madara's left. Madara snorts and parries his sword cutting his hand along its length. Hashirama jerks forward running the edge deeper along his friends hand. He reverses backwards and lands a small distance away. Edo Tensei heals Madara's wounds.
With a deep breath Hashirama brings Madara's blood to his mouth and whispers a prayer.
Madara grunts, his just healed hand jerks. There's a beautiful flower blooming in his chest. It's red, tragic, awful. It spirals up and begins to eat the part of Hashirama that's been grafted on Madara's chest.
Madara just grunts,"I won't fail." And attacks.
"Neither will I." The end of Hashirama's hair shifts from brown to dirt. It's littering across the ground behind him like tiny specks of diamond dust. He meets another blow, coming within kissing distance before turning away. Madara is falling apart just a hair faster and by the enraged fury set in his eyes he knows it. He makes another dash at Hashirama cutting his shoulder. Edo Tensei reforms it in a flash, holds together for a breath of a second before exploding apart.
Madara grins. "You're crumbling before my eyes."
"Then you'll get your dream after all."
"That was never..." Madara stops for a moment. There's a bloom of red across his neck, along the curve of his jaw, curving threateningly towards one eye. Sasuke sees the bob of his Adam's apple when his voice drops, longingly, "What have you done to me?"
Hashirama smiles. A real one not the overdone confidence of a powerful man. "If you think it came with no cost then I'm afraid that makes you the fool, my friend. You know better than that. And as long as you think you can control it rather than work with it, it'll seek to control you."
"Ridiculous."
"I always thought so." A horrible, peaceful light blooms from between the cracks of Hashirama's skin. Sasuke can feel it calling Madara home. Calling all of them home. "We'll have our drink this time, eh, Madara?"
Their hands meet, fingertip to fingertip, and the light flows outward.
There's silence across the battlefield. No one moves a muscle.
Sasuke looks to Tobirama still kneeling by Sarutobi and Itachi. His hand is on the ground holding the barrier up. After a moment of sheer shocked silence he comes to life. Instead of shocked or triumphant he looks thoughtful and relieved. His right hand, the one on the ground, touches a stark scar against his throat. As the barrier fades Sasuke thinks he sees the first sign of loss on his face. He looks back at Sasuke and nods. Sasuke nods back.
"It's done," Sakura says. Her side is bleeding heavily. Sasuke can't imagine why she let go of her technique now.
"Yeah," Sasuke sits down so she can lean on him, "it's done now."
Sakura turns her head into his shoulder and cries. Across the battleground the armies begin to cheer.
--
Sasuke hauls Sakura into his arms and begins picking his way down the side of the crater to where he can see Karin and a group of Orochimaru's new lackeys setting up a medical station. There are two tents and the rolling feel of in use medical chakra. They're about fifth in line, after three broken legs and a jaw break that's more like a severing, so Sasuke hauls her more tightly against him to keep warm. She protests a little before settling down into a low murmuring sleep. Usually her chakra is a warm sunned earth or a crashing wave, right now it's more like a parched sea bed.
Sasuke clocks Karin's approach a moment before she bursts out of the tent, sleeves already rolled up. She walks right through her other patients to get to them. She holds up her arm. "Bite down."
"Sakura-"
"Geez, Sasuke," Karin rolls her eyes, "I know not you. Oi, pinky. Bite my fucking arm."
Sakura tries to sit up, since she can't support her own weight this ends with her sitting awkwardly in Sasuke's lap, his arms around her hips and her shoulders to hold her up. She gives Karin a loopy smile. "You're really cute."
Karin rolls her eyes again. "I'm adorable. Bite me." Since Sakura is clearly taking too long Karin puts her forearm in Sakura's mouth and forces her jaw. Immediately the chakra exchange starts. Sakura relaxes nearly completely in his hold and it's only by the grace of Sasuke and Karin's combined efforts that she doesn't brain herself on the ground.
Karin removes her forearm from Sakura's mouth. Sasuke swears that Sakura darts in and presses a quick kiss to the scar with a mumbled thank you, although a court could never get him to testify to it. Karin looks a little awestruck but with a flick of her hair regains her composure. She levels Sasuke with an unimpressed look. "Nadeshiko, you good?"
Sasuke tries to convey with his face that he's flipping her off in his head.
Karin smiles tightly. "Then you should get over to the Konoha encampment. They're about to release Edo Tensei."
Sasuke heart stops in his chest. "Now?"
Karin gently touches the side of his face with one hand and calls for assistance with the other. "I'll look after the girl."
"Thank you."
Karin presses a soft kiss to his forehead as a dismissal.
--
The Yellow Flash is standing amidst a pile of ashes. His son is of a height and the heavy weight of that dead-burnt-dirt crawls to his knees. From his approach Sasuke can hear wailing, shouting, the announcements of the dead. He can hear Hiki's steady voice calling for a sound off: Mitsu! Here! Natsu! Here! Goro! Dead, sir!
He's imagined fathers before. The answer to an age old hurt: would he be proud of me? But Sasuke has always at least known his father's own face. Watching Naruto watch his own as if he's never seen it before is...It's something. The honored dead -those felled all around them in the service of a righteous cause- are peaceful and quiet and so very, very dead. Sasuke has been here before. At Kimura. At Oto. Anywhere he's stayed long enough, really. Naruto's image of shinobi honor is false and delicate, this Sasuke knows better than anyone living, but it's always been his holy power to make you want to give it to him.
Sasuke moves his eyes to the father and watches him watch his son. Minato frowns once, quietly, then spins it into an open smile. "I am proud of you."
Naruto -and this is why, even after all this time Sasuke loves him- brings back the shadows from his own eyes and smiles back."Thanks dad."
"Eat your vegetables." Minato places a heavy hand on his son's head, "that's from your mother."
"Yeah, yeah." Naruto swats away the hand, grinning like a lunatic. "And stay outta trouble too, right?"
"You better believe it." Minato smiles at his son one last time. "We're always watching out for you."
Minato blows away in a familiar spiral. For Naruto's sake he hopes it's to see Uzumaki Kushina and tell them how at what was almost the End of the World their son still found a way to smile.
Itachi stands beside him for a few moments. His presence is warm, nebulous. Sasuke nods once. "Brother."
"I had thought we'd said everything we had to," Itachi says slowly, "but no matter how long we talked that would never be true."
"No," he agrees around the strange lump in his throat. "I'm not sorry I tried to kill you." Because he's fucking not. "I'm...glad I didn't succeed."
"Ah," Itachi exhales. "I had meant to...leave you with something. A gift. An explanation. I suppose it would be cowardly to give it to you the same way now."
"What?" He turns his head to face his brother.
"I'm coming home." Itachi's lips twitch in a soft smile. Momentary but there. "To Konoha. With you."
"Oi." Naruto yells from over yonder. He's clearly gesturing at Sasuke. It takes a few seconds to flip from what his brother said to what Naruto is demanding. Bright blue eyes burn into him as Sasuke gives him a dismissive hand wave. He's been serious a lot in their relationship but rarely when they're in the same place at the same time. Sasuke raises an eyebrow and hopes it comes across.
You can promise forever, but will it be your forever or mine? Will you be with me the way I need or the way you promised? And will you understand that they won't always be the same?
Now's not the time for that but by the way Naruto's face turns from his it will be sooner rather than later.
--
He's at odds and ends at the end of the War to End All Wars. There's body parts to picked over. Tags to be collected. Flesh and bone to be burned or buried as is expedient. The whole world used to be a huge funeral pyre for people like him. Just a procession of creating and disposing of bodies.
Karin collects him for funeral rites. They need someone with a large supply of fire to burn away the dead, after they catalogue and collect them of course. This is the provenance of lessers clans and med-nin. With a startled laugh he realises that the Uchiha clan, in what little way it exists, is a lesser clan. They hold no titles, little land and less respect. He prods that. There is hurt and shame and a weariness that feels stamped on his bones but he is done paying for the choices of his forebears. Let it be dead. There is no shame in trench work. Let pride be done with.
He looks forward and finds the horizon a shade lighter than it should be, maybe.
Not the War to End All, then. But not a pause either. Fundamentally there is a difference. The nations came together, other powers came too. The two figureheads who built the system are gone, appeased. It's all ghosts from here on out. That's alright. You can treaty with ghosts if you know how.
He starts stacking bodies the way he was taught; all in the same direction, heads in to keep away what might be lurking in the dark. He takes a machete from a helpful Kiri chunnin and starts hacking them apart at the joints where the death is too plentiful. It hurts somewhere deep inside but there is nothing to do now but move forward. It would be disrespectful to those who came and stood fast against the maddest of his blood. They came as shinobi, they died as shinobi and to try and take away the practicality of what that means now would serve nobody. They work quietly through a night and a day, his clean up crew. Far away, where the warriors are, there is drinking and carousing and singing.
He hears the first convoys of the deadly injured and the mostly intact leave. He stays his own course walking up a nearby slope to divert a river away from the mess of burnt dead and poisoned weapons. He hears the next convoy, messenger reports and Karin's swift footed supplies coming and going. The first wave of gawkers comes in the form of the paper ninja who need to verify the dead. Sasuke stays until there's noone left but the necessary and the victorious. Those too important to head home straight away.
Peripherally he knew that the Kage and their respective personal guard stayed behind to hash out the details of the war immediately. It will be done again, in Konoha, in four months time when there's more data but too many misunderstandings occur in these first new hours of a world balance. Everyone is too keen eyed on the famous Konoha Death Jutsu, on Giri's cooperation, on the utter failure of there forces to deal with one man, reputation be damned. And on Sasuke too. He didn't get away with killing the Zetsu.
Team 7 is around. As is Team Dosa. Team Hebi is split to the winds more likely forever than not, for which he is mourning and grateful in equal measures.
God knows how he's ended up with people who know to leave him alone. God knows why they care enough to do so.
In lieu of anything better to do and with the bittersweet knowledge that he will have to try to be worthy of all that he's been freely given before, he sets off to find Naruto. This is easier said than done. Describing someone as 'loud, orange, that's it really' isn't netting him the results he thought it would. A little Scribe from Iron takes pity and points him to one of the many man made ponds that are serving as wash-n-go's. There, gold hair reflected in the dying streaks of sunrise, he finds his other half.
He stops to note the slope of his strong shoulders, the bend of his back as he stares into the water. There's all the little things he has lost, loved and mourned in equal measure. The faintest start of smile lines, the way his jaw is just a little too canine for his face, the long eyelashes darker than the hair on his head -or anywhere else for that matter. He thinks that they've been role reversed. That look of vague horror and solemn denial is Sasuke's bread and butter. Walking clean handed and clear hearted from noble and necessary work should be Naruto's by rite.
Blue eyes move to him conflicted and wary. Sasuke waits for the words, for the demands, for the should be and the this must be now. Naruto looks back at the water.
Alright. He'll go first. "We need to talk about-"
Naruto charges forward and sticks his tongue in his mouth. It could be called kissing if there was less force involved. It takes the work of a few minutes to gentle it, to turn it from their first mostly failure of a coming together. The world is disappointing and if you're not used to seeing the ruins of what you thought true spread around you...well. Usually this is Sasuke when he's alone and a lot crazier than he's been in a long time. You can't talk to someone when they're like this, unless you're Naruto, but you can shoulder a tiny portion it. Brace it. God knows more more people than not have done it for him.
Naruto pushes into his space. The kiss goes from desperate to coaxing back to longing. Sasuke opens up his body and lets it all tumble down from his heart. He's grateful with the sweep of his tongue. Compassionate with every press of lips across his scarred cheeks. Demanding with the pressure on Naruto's head. It's freeing to give when your partner needs it. Naruto pays his own dues. His teeth draw blood when he nips over Sasuke's lips. He murmurs, croons absolute nonsense when he draws air. It's a whole conversation between people saying nothing at all.
And it's strange, even stranger than the wildest imaginings they could have had for each other when they first met, to realise that they will never be the same again. Without saying a word to each other Sasuke has laid down his ghosts and, judging from that look Sasuke knows so well it hurts, Naruto might have found somewhere he can't shine a light. It's been most of ten years and a war and a terrifying absence. You can't brute force whatever messed up idea of normalcy they have over that. Even if the connection between them is sometimes so strong reality is incomplete without it. At some point the two of them will have to learn what forgiveness means when it's just them talking
Naruto pulls him forward and places a chaste kiss on his forehead. They still need to talk, but maybe they're getting on the same wavelength. Together, or apart, it's going to be something to work on.
"Woohoo you dirty boy!" Ino catcalls. She's dressed in even less than usual, hobbling on crutches. She makes a waving motion over her shoulder. What was it he said, about being grateful?
"Oh my god." Hiki mock whispers, hand over heart. "You defiled him right in front of us."
"How could you." Yumi joins in. "Our perfect, virgin Sasuke. So pure in thought, body and deed."
"Pretty sure he straight fucked his way through the rear guard in Oto," Karin adds, "but go off I guess."
"I'd guard his rear." Yumi grins but subsides. "In all seriousness-"
"And only minimal jokes about butt stuff." Hiki adds.
"-we should all go home, yeah?"
There's a sombre moment, as everyone realises that it's time to find the other survivors and go back to the precarious balance of cold wars and skirmishes that is peacetime.
Haru bursts through behind Ino, grinning ear to ear. "Did I miss his first kiss?" He whines. "I was gonna take pictures."
Sasuke laughs, and soon everyone else is too.
Naruto flips him off. "By about ten years, yeah."
Sasuke scowls. "You can't fucking count."
"Does it matter?" Naruto grins maniacally, hooking his arm behind Sasuke's neck to bring their foreheads to touch. "Does it actually matter anymore?"
Sasuke smirks. "No. I don't think it does."