Chapter Text
For it’s not the things you do, the things you say, but rather the way you feel.
Sasuke, in all his glory, appeared to be a prideful man.
If you were to paint him ignorant, he’d agree.
However, even through Sasuke’s endurance, no word would catch his attention more than that of the adjective, “shameful.”
At that statement, Sasuke would never agree, but he would live it, as eternally as he would convince himself to.
Sasuke’s first day back in the village was slower than he’d predicted it to be.
While there were moments he’d pictured to move calmer than others, he’d spent the weeks leading up to his return bracing for wads of action, emotion, as well as a mix of disregard. The bits he’d see in his head as somewhat obnoxious tended to include a hue of tan, blonde, and loud emphasis. Those same exclamations he’d think to be followed by a shift of pink, sprinkling in slowly. Something he didn’t have an interest in or concern for. Something he didn’t think even made sense to him.
So when Sasuke walked into Kakashi’s office and was greeted with a slow, raised look from behind a book of filth, and the words, “Look who showed up,” he was filled with stuttering disorientation.
Discernment, he mentally critiqued himself for.
“Ah,” Sasuke responded, striding towards his desk.
Kakashi stood up, hands pushing against the hardwood of his paper-crowded table. He released his neck in a pop to the side and glanced at Sasuke before his eyes crinkled.
“Convenient, you know? It’s only been three weeks since your probation was decided. Now you turn up for the first time in 2 years?”
His tone bore a hint of warning.
Sasuke narrowed his gaze carefully, prosthetic hand creating friction against his pants as the fabric shifted with the bandage.
“Coincidences happen. You wouldn’t have that eye if they didn’t.”
“Were you actually planning to come back today? Or were you to run further if the hawk I sent said you’d serve a prison sentence?” Kakashi asked, tapping his finger frustratingly against the red oak.
While it was true that Sasuke had been in the dark regarding his hearing, he wouldn’t avoid it. Prison would be merely different from his recent lifestyle. His years with Orochimaru had prepared him well for isolation.
“I planned to come back after the sentence, regardless of circumstances.”
Sasuke hadn’t wanted to watch the elders, whom he held no respect for, sit in a room, discussing his fate as if they hadn’t already done so years prior.
Kakashi sighed, propping himself against one planted arm. “I won’t question you further. Your actions did well for you.”
His eyes thinned again.
Sasuke didn’t prefer the bracing. “My conditions?” He began, deciding that he had been better off exiled, that his reasons for staying with the village weren’t so important. The irony in his fate was spiraling.
“Well, the hearts you kept came in handy. Between two up-and-coming sanins and your brilliant former teacher, the three months won’t be too bad,” Kakashi inquired, turning his gaze out the window.
Sasuke’s jaw flexed, “Get on with it. You have a knack for avoiding the point.”
Kakashi raised an eyebrow in amusement, wiggling a finger in Sasuke’s direction.
“Don’t forget who you’re talking back to,” he challenged.
Kakashi walked around his desk, lifting his head once. He met Sasuke with a firm gaze. “You’re going to assist in physical training for the up-and-coming Anbu. Four days a week, 6 hours a day. The war left our recent generation nimble.”
“My probation is training?”
Kakashi scoffed behind his mask, finger raising once again in an attempt to tease. “It could be worse than you think.”
“That’s all?”
It was small. Sasuke knew how he was portrayed in Konoha.
Kakashi exhaled. “As I said, you’re lucky to be cared for.”
Sasuke soon realised that the lack of sound on his return likely resulted in his failure to communicate it.
As he moved through the crowd of unsuspecting people towards his old apartment, he grasped that no one paid him attention because no one knew.
He turned the key to his unit as he arrived, bracing for dust, but the door flew open by another hand. Before Sasuke could observe the thought, he was being smacked in the shoulder by a bandaged fist, slammed against his doorside table.
“I totally got your sorry-ass!” Naruto wailed, folding in on himself in a fit of gasps.
Sasuke cranked his neck towards him.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he breathed, slamming his door shut.
Upon looking at his space, he noticed the mess replaced by a scent of lemon and fresh air. He narrowed his gaze back down at Naruto, who was currently bracing himself in heaps of laughter, hands on his knees.
The blonde choked as he stood up fully. He grinned, waving an arm at Sasuke’s apartment.
“Big thanks, I get. Kakashi paged me just an hour ago to let me know you were back. I told Sakura, hoping she’d get a moment to come up with something to do, but she just shoved a list in my hand and told me to clean your place instead.”
Naruto rubbed the back of his head as he turned back and forth, analysing the place, scrunching his nose as he sniffed the air dramatically.
“Hinata had to help me at the last minute. I had no idea what I was doing, but we still timed this perfectly.”
Sasuke stared at his space blankly. “Good for you.”
Naruto launched forward, finger pressed firmly against his chest as Sasuke glared down at him. “A ‘thank you’ would suffice.”
He backed up again, strolling comfortably towards Sasuke’s couch and bouncing atop it.
“I think I could make a living off of this.”
Sasuke released his cloak, kicking his shoes onto the mat by the door in a silent hum. He made his way to the living room, leaning against his bar counter.
“Don’t make yourself at home.”
Naruto sat up, crossing his arms behind his head and leaning against the couch. “Yeah, yeah. I’m still pissed you missed the wedding.”
Sasuke considered him for a second.
“I didn’t see a point in that.”
His presence would have bothered the three million in attendance who still disfavored him, drawing attention away from the actual event.
“You need to stop being like that.” Naruto retorted, shrugging to himself.
Sasuke sat down on one of his stools, resting his head in his hand.
After a moment of silence, Naruto fell, forcing Sasuke a smile. “I’m glad you’re back, man.”
Sasuke turned towards him with a hint of civility.
Sasuke had only remnants of reasons for returning on this day. He’d previously decided he would return soon after the hearing. However, Sasuke’s decision was composed of nothing more he could explain than urgency. A sense of which he hadn’t connected to anything. In his head, he knew he had sequences to make, but he had no real desire to do so.
“It was time.”
Naruto clapped his hands, tossing them onto the coffee table and standing up.
“Glad you agree. We’re going to Ichiraku’s tonight.”
Sasuke shot him a cold eye.
“No. Things to do.”
He slid off the stool, making his way into the kitchen to wash his hands.
Naruto quirked a brow, meeting him across the counter.
“I would rethink that. I invited people. They really want to see you,” he said, drumming his hand against the granite.
“I don’t need to see anyone. You’ve already invaded my space enough.”
Naruto rolled his eyes. “Wow, you’ve softened up.”
He eyed Sasuke, thinking in silence. “Sakura will be there. I know you guys have exchanged letters.”
Sasuke’s neck burned into a silent hum as he considered Naruto’s words.
“She did most of the writing,” he claimed, turning from the blonde and grabbing a noticeably shiny glass from his top cabinet. It was conveniently chipped.
“And never clean my shit again.”
Naruto leaned further over the counter. “She must not write enough if you were sending letters back.”
“Your presumptions are dull,” he responded, hand falling.
At that, Naruto’s smile grew; he tsked as he walked towards the door.
“See you at eight.”
The door slammed shut in a swift pull. Sasuke turned back towards his glass, lifting it to his lips for a quick swig. Returning it to the sink, he started to drag his shirt off, striding towards his bathroom.
Upon examining himself in the dimly lit room, he considered Naruto’s words.
The first letter between them was from Sasuke.
He didn’t plan it, but one day, as he fought sleep against the trunk of a cracked tree, he searched for a pen, ripped a scroll from his bag, and began writing. He barely remembered the contents.
A man at a stand said he knew you today. Said you were nice. He knew I knew you. He told me to say “thank you” to him next time I saw you. His name was Ikin. Didn’t say what for.
As the seven weeks passed until her response, he calculated how deep her animosity had grown for him.
Sasuke more often encouraged it.
It was on a rare, warm fall evening that, as his hawk screeched down to him from the clearing of pine trees, Sasuke reached out and unwound a message folded neatly. On top was a carefully taped red cloth.
A symbol he’d later become normatively familiar with.
I remember him. I healed his daughter on a mission to the Sand once. I didn’t expect a letter. She had pneumonia. Don’t get sick out there. I think her name was Suki. Well, take your time, Sasuke. –And don’t forget us, okay, be safe. -Sakura.
He remembers scanning the words several times, trying to make sense of whatever it was she was saying, eventually deciding she wrote the way she spoke: in rambles and without reason.
He folded the letter back up and tucked it into his sack. He bargained to send a letter back exactly seven weeks later.
After tediously peeling off his arm wrap, he moved. Stripping down and stepping into the water. Slowly, he adjusted to the heat, concluding to himself how accustomed his body was to the sensation.
Sasuke scraped at his skin, erasing his previously held habits of bi-weekly showers and his relationship with grime. He sensed a buried feeling in his throat. He was thrown off balance.
While nothing was happening, he felt that, silently, things were going against his own will.
He analysed the scars lining his abdomen, crawling up his skin in the same nature of parasites. Marks earned through distraught. He traced the line of one that stretched from his right ab to his middle back, biting his tongue. He held his past through those physical reminders.
Sasuke stepped out of the shower.
After applying a deodorant he hadn’t touched in 2 years and shuffling on black mission-sweats that cuffed at his ankles, he leaned his arms against his bathroom counter, observing his hair.
When he had left, it barely reached his ears. Now, it almost touched his shoulders, providing a harsh curtain to his Rinnegan.
Sasuke picked up his tool pouch, still connected to his discarded pants, and slipped a kunai from the pocket. He rinsed it quickly under water, dried it with the rough fabric of his sweats, and held it up against his head, squinting.
Without thought, he grabbed a piece of hair from his neck that stretched lower than the rest and sliced off seven inches. It left a strand that was shorter than he’d seen before.
He continued, tearing off chunks at a time until the bangs over his face only stretched three-quarters down his forehead. The hair behind his skull poked outwards, and his face was revealed at a level of potency he wasn’t familiar with.
Deciding he’d gone too short but was at no point of reversing, he wiped the cut strands off his shoulders with a wet cloth and began to dress for the dinner he’d only just decided in apathy to attend.