Chapter 1: Article Four
The hawk came at four in the morning, which was how Sakura knew Kakashi had signed it himself. Shizune would have waited for a decent hour. Kakashi, who had never once been on time for anything in his life, had apparently decided that a travel permit was the exception.
She read it at her kitchen table by the light of one candle. Haruno Sakura, medical-nin, is assigned as escort and attending physician to Uchiha Sasuke for the duration of his journey beyond the borders of the Land of Fire, per Article Four of the terms of his release. Below that, in a looser hand: He leaves at dawn. He hasn't told you. I'm telling you. Don't make me regret this. P.S. Bring the good soldier pills, not the ones Ino makes.
She had packed the bag three weeks ago. It had been sitting by the door the whole time, and every night she had stepped over it on her way to bed and told herself she was being ridiculous.
The gate was grey with mist when she got there. Kotetsu and Izumo were on duty, both of them pretending very hard to be asleep at the desk, which meant they had been told something too.
Sasuke stood just outside the arch with his back to the village. Three years of probation had not changed the way he stood. He still held himself like a drawn blade, weight on the balls of his feet, and the empty left sleeve of his cloak moved a little in the wind. His hair had grown long enough to fall across the Rinnegan. She suspected that was deliberate.
He didn't turn around. "Go home, Sakura."
"Good morning to you too."
"I'm serious."
"So am I." She held up the scroll. "Article Four. You don't leave the Land of Fire without a medical escort. Lady Tsunade wrote that clause, and Kakashi-sensei signed it, and you initialed it, so either you read the terms of your own release or you didn't, and I genuinely can't decide which would be worse."
Now he turned. The right eye was black, the left a pale ringed violet half-hidden behind his fringe. He looked at the scroll, then at her pack, then at her face. She had seen him look at enemy formations the same way, counting exits.
"They'll assign someone else," he said.
"They did. They assigned me."
"Then I'm asking you to refuse."
Three years ago she would have heard that as a door closing. Three years ago he had stood almost exactly here, tapped two fingers against her forehead and said not this time, and she had gone home and sat on the floor of her room until the sun came up.
She was twenty now. She had spent those three years running the mental health clinic she had built out of a storage room, and visiting him every Thursday in the little supervised apartment the Council had given him, and bringing him tomatoes he pretended not to want. She had watched him learn to tie his own sandals one-handed. She had watched him refuse, four times, the prosthetic Tsunade grew for him from Hashirama's cells. She had stopped waiting for him to come back to her a long time ago. What she wanted now was different, and harder to explain.
"No," she said.
He exhaled through his nose. It was the closest Sasuke Uchiha came to a sigh.
"You don't know where I'm going."
"Land of Iron first. Then Lightning. Then the Grass, the old hideouts, the Rain." She ticked them off on her fingers. "You wrote a list. You keep it in the inside pocket of your cloak and you've unfolded it so many times the creases are coming apart. You left it on your table when I brought dinner on the second of last month and I read it while you were washing up. I'm not sorry."
For a second something moved behind his face that she couldn't name. Then it was gone.
"Every place on that list," he said quietly, "I hurt someone. Some of them will want to hurt me back. I intend to let them."
"I know. That's why I'm coming."
"To stop them?"
"To put you back together afterwards, idiot." She hitched the pack higher on her shoulder. "You can let them hit you all you want. I'm a medic. I don't get a say in your penance. I just get a say in whether you survive it."
Izumo coughed loudly at the desk. Kotetsu elbowed him.
Sasuke looked at the two chunin, then at the sky, as if asking it for something. The sky, being the sky over Konoha at dawn, offered him a single crow and a lot of pink.
"Keep up," he said, and walked.
She let herself have one grin, at his back, where he couldn't see it. Then she followed him into the mist.
He did not slow down for her, and she did not ask him to. That was the first thing they settled without speaking.
They went north along the old trade road through the Land of Fire, past rice terraces and tea houses and a shrine to the Sage of Six Paths that some enterprising farmer had repainted in Naruto orange. Sasuke stopped in front of it for a long moment.
"He's going to be insufferable when he finds out about this," Sakura said.
"He knows."
"He what?"
"I told him last night." Sasuke resumed walking. "He cried."
"Of course he cried."
"He said to tell you to make me eat vegetables."
"I've been making you eat vegetables for three years."
"I told him that." The corner of his mouth did something. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile would go, if he had been a different person. "He said to make me eat more."
They camped the first night in a stand of cedars above a river. Sasuke made the fire with a breath of Katon that would have impressed a Chunin Exam proctor and that he clearly considered beneath notice. Sakura unrolled her medical kit and checked his pulse without asking. He let her. That was the second thing they settled.
"You haven't been sleeping," she said.
"I sleep."
"Your resting heart rate is up and you have the eyes of a man who's been reading the same piece of paper by candlelight." She held out her hand. "Let me see the list."
"You've seen it."
"I saw it upside down while I was pretending to look for chopsticks."
He hesitated. Then he reached into the cloak with his one hand, pulled the paper free and passed it across the fire.
It was longer than she remembered. She had memorized the places but not the rest. Under each village or country he had written names, in his neat, small, slanting hand. Some of the names had question marks after them. Some were descriptions instead: Samurai, east gate, Land of Iron, didn't see his face. Kumo jonin, two, on the bridge. Under Konoha, at the very bottom, he had written Danzo, and then crossed it out, and then written it again, as if he had argued with himself about whether that one counted.
Under Konoha there was another line. She felt it before she read it, a small cold drop in her stomach.
Sakura. Bridge. Chidori.
And beneath it, in fresher ink: Valley. Genjutsu.
She folded the paper carefully along its tired creases and handed it back. He took it without looking at her.
"I'm not on your list," she said.
"You are."
"I'm not a stop."
"You're the last one." He put the paper away. "I was going to come back and do it properly. When I'd earned the right to ask."
"Ask what?"
He didn't answer. The fire popped. Somewhere below them the river went on talking to itself.
"Sasuke-kun." She hadn't used the honorific in months. It came out of her anyway, worn smooth as a river stone. "What were you going to ask?"
"Go to sleep, Sakura," he said. "We cross into Iron tomorrow."
The Land of Iron announced itself the way it always did, with snow. One hour they were walking through pine forest with frost on the needles, the next the trees thinned and the world went white, and the wind came down off the mountains with teeth in it.
Sakura had been here once before, during the war, in a field hospital that had smelled of blood and burnt pine pitch. She remembered the samurai being courteous and very tired and not much else.
They saw the first watchtower at noon. By the time they reached the bridge into the valley, there were twenty samurai lined up across it, in full armor, swords sheathed but hands resting on the hilts. Their breath made a single cloud above them.
Sasuke stopped at the near end of the bridge. Sakura stopped beside him.
"Friends of yours?" she murmured.
"I killed seven of their brothers," Sasuke said, "on my way to the Kage Summit. I was looking for Danzo. They were in the way."
He said it flatly, the way he said everything, but she was standing close enough to see his hand close at his side.
A figure walked out through the centre of the line. He was old and small and moved like water poured out of a jug, with a scar down one side of his face and a sword at his hip that had never, as far as Sakura knew, lost a duel. General Mifune stopped ten paces away and inclined his head to her first.
"Haruno-dono. You saved a great many of my men in the war."
She bowed. "General."
Then he looked at Sasuke. He looked for a long time.
"Uchiha," Mifune said. "Your Hokage's hawk told me you were coming. I did not believe him." He paused. "There is a woman in the eastern village who has asked to see you. Her husband guarded the east gate of the Summit hall. He was the first of my men to die that day."
Sasuke didn't move.
"She has asked," Mifune went on, in the same even voice, "that you come alone and unarmed. She has asked that the medic stay behind. And she has asked me, as her lord, to lend her my sword."