Chapter 3: One Hand Each
They fought on a ledge above the gorge at dawn, which Killer B insisted on because the light was better for "the vibe."
Sakura sat on a rock with her medical kit open on her knees and Killer B sitting beside her, uninvited, eating a pear. Darui, who had arrived at some point in the night looking like a man who had been woken by his Kage's bad decisions many times before, stood a little way off with his hands in his pockets.
"Does this happen a lot?" Sakura asked him.
"Define a lot," Darui said. "This is the third time this year he's challenged someone on a ledge."
"Who won the other two?"
"Lord Raikage. One of them was a bear."
Down on the ledge, the two men faced each other. No Sharingan; Sasuke had tied a strip of black cloth across both eyes, and that, more than anything, made Sakura's stomach tighten. No Lightning Armour; A had let it fall away and stood in a plain sleeveless vest, the stump of his left arm wrapped in white. One arm each. Taijutsu only.
"This is stupid," Sakura said.
"Yeah," said Killer B, cheerfully. "But it's the good kind of stupid, ya feel me? Some men talk. Some men cry. Some men punch each other off a cliff till they find out why."
"That doesn't rhyme."
"It's a slant rhyme, Pinky. Learn your craft."
A moved first. He always moved first. For a man his size he was impossibly fast even without armour, and the first blow came in like a falling tree. Sasuke slid under it. The second blow he caught on his forearm and was knocked three paces back, skidding on wet stone, his sandals scraping toward the edge. The third blow he didn't block at all. He let it land, full in the chest, and went down hard on one knee.
Sakura was halfway off her rock before Killer B's big hand closed gently on her wrist.
"Wait," he said, quieter now. "Watch."
A stood over Sasuke, breathing hard.
"Get up," he said. "Fight back."
Sasuke got up. He didn't raise his hand.
"I said fight back, brat."
"No," said Sasuke.
The Raikage hit him again. Sasuke went down again. This time it took him longer to get up. There was blood at the corner of his mouth. Sakura's fingernails were cutting half-moons into her palms.
"You think this makes us even?" A roared. "You think you can stand there and take a beating and walk away clean? I tore off my own arm to stop your black fire from eating my body! I'd do it again! I'd tear off the other one!"
"I know," Sasuke said.
"Then why are you here!"
Sasuke pulled the cloth off his eyes. He looked up at the Raikage, mismatched and steady, the Rinnegan dark and still.
"Because you came to the Summit to kill me," he said, "and you were right to. And when the war came, you fought beside the man you'd sworn to kill, because it was right. You put down your hate for something bigger than yourself. I couldn't do that. Not then." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I wanted to see what it looked like. A man who could do that."
The ledge was very quiet. Even Killer B had stopped chewing.
A stared down at him. His chest heaved. The fist he had raised for the fourth blow hung in the air, then slowly, slowly opened.
"You came all this way," the Raikage said, "to look at me."
"Yes."
"Hm." A lowered his hand. He looked out over the gorge for a while, at the sun coming up through the mist. Then he reached down with his one arm and hauled Sasuke to his feet by the front of his shirt, not gently. "You're a strange brat, Uchiha. I still hate you."
"Everyone keeps telling me that."
"Good. Keep hearing it." He let go and turned his back. Over his shoulder: "Your medic is about to burst. Go let her fix you. Then you'll eat with us. B has been working on a song about you. It's terrible. You'll sit through all of it. That's the price."
The song was terrible. It had nineteen verses. Sasuke sat through every one of them in the Raikage's dining hall with a split lip and two cracked ribs Sakura had only half finished healing, eating grilled fish, and never once let his expression change, and Sakura laughed so hard she had to put her head down on the table.
Afterwards they walked out onto the long terraced balcony that wrapped around the Raikage's tower. Kumogakure fell away beneath them in tiers, a city built into stone pillars, lamps coming on one by one in the dusk, with lightning flickering somewhere far off in the peaks like a storm clearing its throat.
Sasuke leaned on the railing. Sakura leaned beside him. Not touching. A hand's width apart.
"Ribs," she said.
"They're fine."
"I'll be the judge of that." She laid her palm against his side, over his shirt, and let the green glow seep in. He breathed out slowly. She felt it under her hand.
"That was the bravest thing I've ever seen you do," she said. "Standing there. Not hitting back."
"It was easy."
"Liar."
"It was easier than the next part." He reached into his cloak and took out the list, and unfolded it one-handed against the railing, and found the pencil he kept tucked in the binding. Under Land of Lightning he drew a single line through the Raikage's name. Not a cross. A line, so it could still be read.
Then he turned the paper over, to the bottom. To Konoha. To her name.
"I said I'd come back and do it properly," he said. "When I'd earned it."
"Sasuke-kun..."
"Let me finish. I'm bad at this. You know I'm bad at this." He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the paper, at the small neat letters of her own name, Sakura, Bridge, Chidori. Valley, Genjutsu. "On the bridge I would have killed you. I want you to know I know that. Kakashi stopped me. Not me. Then at the Valley, after everything, I put you under and walked away and left you lying on the ground for Kakashi to find, because looking at you was harder than fighting Naruto. I told myself that was mercy." His jaw worked. "It wasn't mercy. I was a coward."
"I know," she said softly.
"You don't forgive me."
"I forgave you years ago. You were the only one who didn't get the memo."
He shook his head. "That's what I mean. You forgave me before I'd done anything to deserve it. And I couldn't stand it. That's why I left you off the road. That's why I said not this time. If you walked with me, I'd never be able to tell whether I'd earned anything or whether you were just carrying me again."
She took her hand off his ribs. The glow went out.
"You think I'm carrying you," she said.
"Aren't you?"
"Sasuke-kun, I have watched you kneel on a widow's floor and fix her roof. I have watched you let a man the size of a house beat you half to death on a cliff because you wanted to learn how to be a better person from him. I didn't carry you through any of that. I couldn't have. I just stood there and kept you from dying." She grabbed the list out of his hand. "And you know what? It doesn't matter whether you deserve me. That's not how it works. You don't get to earn me. I get to choose. And I chose a long time ago, and I chose again at that gate, and I'm choosing right now."
She tore the bottom strip off the list. The part with her name on it. She folded it small and pressed it into his palm and closed his fingers over it.
"There," she said. "I'm not a stop. I'm the person you walk with. Get that through your thick Uchiha skull."
He stared at his closed hand. Then at her. The lamps of Kumo were reflected in both his eyes, red and violet.
"What were you going to ask?" she said. "At the campfire. When you'd earned it."
He was quiet for so long that she thought he wasn't going to answer. The far lightning flickered. Somewhere below, a dog barked and was answered.
Then he lifted his hand, the one holding the scrap of paper, and tapped two fingers lightly against her forehead.
She closed her eyes. She waited for the words she'd heard at the gate three years ago. Not this time. Maybe next time. Thank you.
"I was going to ask," Sasuke said, very low, "if you'd still have me."
His fingers slid from her forehead down along her temple, and his hand came to rest against her cheek, rough and warm and a little unsure, as if he had never done this before, and he hadn't. She opened her eyes. He was close. He smelled of woodsmoke and the iodine she'd dabbed on his lip.
"Yes," she said. "Idiot. Yes."
He kissed her.
It was clumsy. He'd misjudged the angle, and his split lip must have stung, and she was laughing a little against his mouth, and he made an annoyed sound and did it again, better. She curled her fingers into the front of his cloak and held on, and for a long moment Kumogakure and the list and the whole long road behind and ahead of them went quiet, the way the rain had gone quiet in the cave, as if someone had closed a door and left the two of them on the warm side of it.
When they broke apart, he rested his forehead against hers. She could feel him breathing.
"You're still coming to the Grass," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Try and stop me."
"I wouldn't." He paused. "I'd lose."
She was opening her mouth to agree with him, smugly, when wings beat over the balcony. A messenger hawk dropped out of the dusk and landed on the railing beside them, feathers ruffled, a scroll capsule on its leg stamped with the seal of the Sixth Hokage.
Sasuke unrolled it. She read it over his shoulder. It was short, and in Kakashi's handwriting, and it was not at all the kind of joke Kakashi usually wrote.
Someone has been visiting the stops on your list. They're always a few days ahead of you. The Grass village reports a stranger asking after the Uchiha by name. He wears a mask. He says he's family.