Chapter 2: The Widow's Roof
Sakura did not stay behind.
She wanted it noted, later, that she tried. She stood at the edge of the eastern village with her arms folded and watched Sasuke unbuckle his sword and hand it to a samurai who took it like it might bite him. She watched him walk up the swept stone path to a small house with a snow-heavy roof and a single red lantern by the door. She counted to sixty. She got as far as forty-one.
"Haruno-dono," said the samurai holding the sword, without much hope.
"I'm his doctor," she said, and went.
The door was open. Inside, the house was warm and dim and smelled of charcoal and pickled radish. Sasuke was kneeling on the tatami in the centre of the main room, back straight, his one hand flat on his thigh. Across from him knelt a woman in her fifties in a plain grey kimono, with her hair pinned up and Mifune's sword lying unsheathed across her knees. An old man sat against the far wall with a blanket over his legs, watching everything with bright, angry eyes.
Nobody looked at Sakura when she came in. She knelt by the door and made herself small, which she was not good at.
"You know who I am," the woman said.
"Your husband was Takeda Ren," Sasuke said. "He was at the east gate. He drew on me first."
"He drew because you walked through the gate with lightning in your hand."
"Yes."
"He had a bad knee. He was supposed to retire that spring. He was on that post because it was the easy one." She lifted the sword a few inches off her lap and set it down again, as if testing its weight. "Did you know that?"
"No."
"Would it have mattered?"
Sasuke was quiet for a moment. Sakura watched the side of his face, the set of his jaw. She knew what the honest answer was. She knew he was going to give it.
"No," he said. "At the time, nothing mattered. I wanted to kill one man and everyone between him and me was furniture."
The old man against the wall made a noise like a kettle starting to boil. The widow didn't look at him.
"And now?"
"Now I know his name." Sasuke bent forward, slowly, until his forehead touched the tatami. He stayed there. His voice came muffled from the floor. "I can't give him back. I know that's the only thing worth giving. I came so you could say whatever you need to say to my face, and do whatever you need to do. I won't defend myself."
The widow stood up. She held Mifune's sword in both hands, point lowered, and walked around until she was standing at Sasuke's side, looking down at the back of his neck. His hair had fallen away from it. Sakura could see the pale skin there, the knob of his spine.
Sakura did not move. It cost her more than any fight she had ever been in. She kept her hands flat on her knees and let her chakra pool in her palms, ready, because if that blade came down she would have perhaps half a second to stop the bleeding and she intended to use all of it.
The widow raised the sword.
"Mother," said the old man against the wall, suddenly and very clearly, "your tea's gone cold."
It took Sakura a moment to understand. Not the widow's father. Her husband's father, and his mind had wandered off somewhere years ago and only came back in pieces. The widow's shoulders dropped. She lowered the sword, and her face cracked down the middle, and she started to laugh in a way that was mostly crying.
"Yes, Father," she said. "I'll make more."
She turned back to Sasuke, who had not moved.
"Get up," she said. "I'm not going to kill you in front of him. He's seen enough." She held the sword out, hilt first, toward Sakura, of all people. "Give this back to the General. Tell him I'm sorry for wasting his afternoon."
Sakura took it. Her hands were shaking. She hoped nobody noticed.
Sasuke sat up. There was a red mark on his forehead from the tatami.
"I wanted to hate you properly," the widow told him. "I had it all planned. You were supposed to be a monster. You were supposed to make excuses. You're just a man who did something unforgivable." She wiped her face with her sleeve. "Go away. Go do whatever it is you're doing. I don't forgive you. I want to be clear about that."
"I understand."
"But you can fix the roof before you go," she said, "since you're here and you're apparently very strong. It leaks over Father's bed and my son-in-law is useless."
Sasuke fixed the roof.
It took him the rest of the afternoon, one-handed, in the snow, with Sakura passing him tiles from the ground and the old man shouting advice from the doorway that was occasionally useful and mostly about a dog he'd owned in his youth. When they left at dusk, the widow did not come out to see them go. But the red lantern by the door was lit, and somebody had put two rice balls wrapped in a cloth on the step.
They walked east in silence for a long time. The snow eased. The stars came out, hard and close the way they only were in the mountains.
"You weren't supposed to come in," Sasuke said finally.
"I know."
"You would have stopped her."
"I would have stopped the bleeding," Sakura said. "Whether she got to swing the sword was her business. Whether you lived was mine." She kicked a lump of snow off the path. "I told you that at the gate. I meant it."
He was quiet. Then: "Your hands were shaking."
"Shut up."
"When she gave you the sword."
"I said shut up, Sasuke-kun."
He made a sound she had never heard from him before. It took her a whole step to realize it had been a laugh, short and rusty, like a door that hadn't been opened in years. She stopped walking. He walked two more paces before he noticed and turned around.
"What," he said.
"Do that again."
"No."
"Please?"
"Walk, Sakura."
She walked. She was smiling so hard her cheeks hurt in the cold.
They crossed out of the Land of Iron four days later and into the foothills of the Land of Lightning, where the weather changed its mind every hour and the storms came down off the peaks in sheets of rain lit purple from inside.
They took shelter from one of them in a cave above a gorge. It wasn't much of a cave. Sakura had to duck to get in, and Sasuke's head brushed the ceiling. He built a fire anyway. She unrolled her kit.
"Sleeve," she said.
He gave her a look.
"You've been favouring the stump since the roof. You think I didn't notice? You landed on it when that tile slid."
He didn't argue, which was how she knew it hurt. He shrugged out of the cloak and the dark shirt beneath it and sat with his left side toward the fire, toward her.
The arm ended a few inches below the shoulder. Naruto's fist and Sasuke's Chidori had met at the Valley of the End and taken one arm from each of them, and Tsunade had done the amputation so cleanly that the scar was barely a seam. But the skin over the end was red now, angry, and when Sakura laid two glowing fingers against it he flinched before he could stop himself.
"Bruised the bone," she said. "Not cracked. You're lucky."
"Hn."
She worked in silence for a while. Mystical Palm was a quiet technique. It asked for patience more than power, a slow coaxing of the body's own chakra toward the damage. She had always liked it for that. It was the opposite of everything else she was good at.
The firelight moved over his back. He had more scars than she remembered. A long thin one along his ribs she didn't recognize. A starburst on his shoulder blade that had to be from the war.
"Why did you come," he said. Not a question, quite.
"I told you."
"You told me what you'd do. Not why." He was looking at the fire, not at her. "You could have had any life you wanted. You built a clinic. You're the best medic of your generation. Ino says three men asked you to dinner last spring."
"Ino talks too much."
"You turned them all down."
She took her hand away from his arm. The glow faded. The rain roared outside the mouth of the cave like a crowd.
"When you left the first time," she said slowly, "I waited. When you came back, I waited. When they locked you up, I waited. I got very, very good at waiting for you, Sasuke-kun. I could have taught classes." She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "And somewhere in the second year I realized I didn't want to be good at it anymore. I don't want to wait for you to finish atoning and come home and decide you've earned me. I'm not a prize at the end of a road."
He turned his head. The Rinnegan caught the firelight.
"So I came," she said. "If you're going to walk it, I want to walk it with you. All of it. The widows and the roofs and the people who want to kill you. I want to be there for the parts that aren't pretty. That's the whole reason. That's all of it."
He looked at her for a long time. She made herself hold his gaze. Her heart was going like she'd sprinted up the Hokage Monument.
"I tried to kill you," he said. "Twice."
"I tried to kill you once. We're practically even."
"That isn't funny."
"It's a little funny."
He opened his mouth. Whatever he was going to say, she never found out, because at that moment the rain outside went silent. Not quieter. Silent, all at once, as if a door had been shut on it.
Sasuke was on his feet before she could blink, shirt forgotten, Sharingan spinning red in his right eye. Sakura was a half-second behind him, a kunai already in her hand.
At the mouth of the cave, the rain was still falling. They could see it. But it was falling sideways, bending around something, and through the gap a voice rolled in, enormous and amused and rhyming badly.
"Yo, Uchiha, long time, no see, you tried to snatch my Eight-Tails and you snatched a piece of me..."
"Oh no," said Sakura.
"Hold still, hold still, don't run, don't flee," the voice went on, "'cause my bro the Raikage's here, and he's mad as can be."
Behind Killer B, in the lightning-split dark, a much larger shape stepped into view. Broad as a door, white-haired, glowing faintly blue at the edges where the Lightning Release Armour crackled over his skin. His left arm ended at the elbow.
The Fourth Raikage looked at Sasuke's empty sleeve. Then he looked at Sasuke.
"Uchiha," A said. "You cost me an arm. I'm going to take it out of you in fair combat. No eyes. No tricks. One hand each." He bared his teeth. "Your medic can watch."