Home...
It was gone.
Not damaged, not scorched at the edges.
Gone, with flames still climbing through what remained of the roof, throwing orange light across four faces that had gone completely still.
Sakura's eyes had bled red somewhere in the last few minutes, her eyes fixed on the collapsing frame of the only home she'd ever known.
Beside her, Sukuna hadn't moved at all. No dry comment or calm detachment that he usually had in bad situations.
Just silence, and a stare that refused to leave the fire.
Nobody said anything for a long moment. Grief had a way of doing that, swallowing words before they could form.
"It was just a house," Kizashi finally said, quietly, though his own voice didn't sound entirely convinced of that either. "Wood and memories. We can rebuild the wood part."
Mebuki said nothing at all. She just kept watching the flames, one hand pressed against her chest like she was holding something in.
It was Sakura who finally broke, turning into her mother's shoulder without a word, and Mebuki's arms came around her immediately, both of them shaking with something that wasn't quite crying and wasn't quite laughing, relief and loss tangled together in a way neither of them had words for yet.
Sukuna stayed where he was, still staring at the fire, until Kizashi's hand landed on his shoulder.
"We're fine, son," Kizashi said, softer this time. "That's what matters."
"I know," Sukuna answered, and for the first time that day, his voice actually shook.
He sighed to himself, the shock of what had happened still lingering in his system.
Things started when he first noticed where all the smoke was coming from in Konoha. One place was suspiciously close to their house.
Even he wasn't certain what took over him, but he grabbed onto Sakura's hand and directly teleported them there.
For Sakura, none of it made sense. One second they were in the stadium, and the next Sukuna grabbed onto her and then they were here.
Her mind spun at the unannounced teleportation. She might have even tried to hit her brother if not for the giant wave of heat making her take a step or two back.
She saw fire...
A house on fire.
It took her brain time to process what she was seeing until it finally dawned on her.
It wasn't just any house.
It was their house.
And it was burning.
Not smoke drifting from a neighboring building. Their house, flames already through the second floor, the roof beginning to buckle.
"Mom."
"Dad."
Sakura's scream came out wordless before it came out as anything else.
That was the first thing that ran across her mind, and honestly, the boy beside her was the same.
Her eyes misted up faster than she could rationally think through the situation, and she'd thrown herself at Sukuna without thinking, arms locking around him like he was the only solid thing left in the world, sobbing into his shoulder with a violence that didn't leave room for actual words yet.
The human brain usually worked like that. The worst thing came to mind before anything else.
Sukuna's own brain wasn't performing like it used to, first from the heavy load he had put on it with his technique almost reaching overload, and then from the multiple teleportations.
However, those were mostly excuses if he had to be honest.
He'd stood there, arms not even coming up to hold her back, eyes locked on the fire with an expression that had nothing calm left in it at all.
Every calculation his mind usually ran through in a crisis had simply stopped working.
His mind was stuck on his parents.
Shocked and still.
Both of them were thinking the exact same thing, and neither one could bring themselves to say it out loud.
The worst part was that this caught him so off guard that he had no response to it. His body had simply gone into a state of shock.
Memories of him growing up alongside his parents resurfaced. The memories which he had once thought were mostly just him doing a job as their son now felt like chains around his neck.
As things go, only after losing what one has can its importance truly be felt.
He clenched his fist, his throat dry and his breathing uneven. Whether from the earlier actions or this shock, Kami only knew.
He just stood there, and slowly, almost unconsciously, his hands wrapped around Sakura's still-sobbing figure. He pulled her closer to his chest, and the girl's quiet sobs became louder.
Just as Sukuna's grief and shock were turning into anger, the kind which would most likely lead him to burn down villages and nations, the kind that would make him curse the entire world and, more than anyone, himself for not being here and trying to be a hero all over the village, Sukuna's eyes caught something from the corner of his vision.
Two figures had come jogging up from further down the street, having apparently been watching the fire from a safer distance, and broken into a dead run the moment they spotted their children.
"Sakura! Sukuna!"
Sakura's head snapped up first. Sukuna's followed a half-second later, and the sight of both their parents, very much alive and very much running toward them, hit somewhere between relief and complete disbelief.
Which brought them back to standing in front of the wreckage, the four of them together, watching what remained of their home finish collapsing in on itself.
The grief hadn't entirely gone. It was still their house. Still years of small, ordinary things now turned to ash.
But underneath it, once the shock had settled enough to let other feelings back in, something else had started creeping up on both Sakura and Sukuna in equal measure.
Sakura pulled back from her mother first, wiping her face, and the look she leveled at both her parents had shifted noticeably from grief to something far sharper.
"You were just standing there," she said. "Watching it burn. While we thought—" She couldn't even finish it. "Do you have any idea what that felt like?"
"We were making sure it was actually safe to move," Mebuki said, entirely too calmly for someone currently on the receiving end of that glare.
"You could have just yelled," Sukuna said, arms crossed now, the usual nonchalant calmness having already returned, at least externally.
Internally, though, he was a mess. Those two minutes had made him realize just how much he cared about his parents.
Yes, for a very long time he had never considered them his parents. But only when he thought he had lost them did he feel genuine grief.
It was honestly embarrassing.
He should have looked around, asked around for his parents. They might have left the house. Hell, even if they were inside, he should have cut open the very fire itself if needed to bring them out.
But what did he do?
He stood there like a statue.
That went to show how off guard this situation had caught him. He had taken no precautions for this, and the realization that he might have lost the only people he called parents had hit him harder than he himself had anticipated.
He had blanked out for two minutes back then.
His lips pursed, trying to control his heart rate.
"One word. 'We're fine.' That's all it would have taken," he responded, with a little more heat than he would have liked.
Kizashi at least had the decency to look somewhat sheepish. "In our defense, we were a little busy watching our house burn down too."
"That's not a defense," Sakura shot back.
"It's the best one I've got on short notice," Kizashi admitted.
Sakura exhaled something that wasn't quite a laugh, shaking her head.
"Unbelievable. We nearly gave ourselves heart attacks over nothing."
"Not nothing," Mebuki said, gentler now, reaching out to pull both her children in at once. "We're just glad you're both alive to yell at us about it."
Sukuna just leaned in, going through the motions, but internally he just kept wondering since when he'd gotten so attached to them that he would go blank over their deaths.
Maybe... I might want to spend more time with them from now on...
He thought to himself, alongside every other possible avenue he had to safeguard them.
"The hug is nice and all, but you know that we're homeless now, right?" Sukuna's simple comment froze all of them.
For a long time, neither of them spoke until he sighed.
"Leave it to me... I'll take care of it."
xXx
A/N : Ah, one of those moment when you realised you lost something you almost taken as granted. its a bad feeling let me tell ya.
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