Work Text:
She stands next to him in front of the large bed, he knows how comfortable it is and his body aches to sink into it and sleep immediately. Sarada is sleeping in the next room, Karin is doing something in her lab.
They're truly alone for one of the last times before he'll have to drop his family off at the A-Un gates and leave this dimension altogether to try to save their world.
He feels her hand brush against his and he wonders if she feels the electricity when they touch too. "Sakura," he whispers.
She doesn't turn to him but he can see the blush on her cheeks when he looks at her profile.
"What are you thinking?" He asks.
She blushes deeper. "I was thinking about the first time." She says back, embarrassed.
He smirks. "And?" He prompts.
"I thought it was going to be the only time," she admits for the first time. She finally looks at him and she's so hopelessly beautiful that he almost drops the conversation altogether.
But she looks sad, so he asks, "Why?"
She laughs at him for a minute, not explaining until she realizes he's not going to laugh too. He raises an eyebrow at her.
"I had no idea why it was happening, Sasuke. I wanted it to happen so badly," she blushes again and he finally gives her one small laugh. "But I never imagined in a million years that you would ever actually want me."
The admittance seems to punch him in the gut. "If not you, then who?" He asks almost sarcastically. She really is still annoying, how could she ever think something so stupid?
She looks a little offended, her chin shoots up with pride. He smirks and lays his head on her shoulder, a silent apology.
"Well, no one really." She decides.
He looks at her as if she's told a joke but she looks at him with sober eyes. "If you ever got… better," she apologizes with a smile for her wording. "Then I assumed you'd isolate yourself for the rest of your life. Naruto of course kept telling me you'd be home any day. I never believed him."
"He has an annoying way of being right," Sasuke says against her shoulder. She laughs and her hand reaches up to stroke his hair.
"I never seemed to be able to reach you, I wonder when that changed." She says thoughtfully.
He thinks for a moment before responding, and when he does he makes sure to look her in the eye. "You always reached me, Sakura. I just had to stop running from your hand."
There's that invisible change in his wife's eyes then. He swallows, his throat is dry under her gaze. She looks hungry in a way she's only ever been with him.
It fills him with a need to show her exactly how much and how long he had wanted her, even in his solitude. Her version of their present would have included a yearning that would have eaten away at him as strongly as the darkness once had.
He touches her face before he kisses her, tracing his fingers from her forehead down until her cheek fits in his palm. She smiles up at him with the sweetest smile, and he wonders at how he used to ignore it.
He kisses her gently, besides a few pecks they haven't truly kissed since she devoured him a month ago, when they had learned that their time as a family had an expiration date. She had been a wild animal on the side of the road. He'd let himself be devoured, and still felt the loss when it didn't work.
She doesn't pick up the pace and the sweetness of it breaks him into microscopic heart broken pieces. He thinks maybe this is what Sakura felt a month ago. The difference of this visit to Karin's has struck him. It feels very much like one of the first "lasts" they'll have. The feeling is overwhelming.
It dissects him atom by atom until he returns to star dust. Destined to forever float alone in the vacuum, drifting away from the star that once enveloped him. She is the star, she is his light after all. He'd told her as much that first night.
Without her not even the flames he produces will have light. Like his soul in solitude the flames will be black, they had been black since he killed his brother. Since he lost his last tie to family. Now here he is, a month into the last year that Sasuke Uchiha will have a family. Again. He's even in the same hideout, the same redhead will even send them off tomorrow.
She's stopped kissing him and he hears the lullaby he never asks her about. He realizes they're on the bed now. Did he really turn into star dust for a moment? He thought he'd imagined it.
He hears it then, a noise he hasn't heard since the day his brother died. Sasuke Uchiha is sobbing. He hears the cries of his daughter join him, Karin is at the door with her but she quickly leaves as if she's going to be caught up in the super nova too.
His wife holds him in the silence. His sobs come silently now, turned to gags. His tears and snot mix with his drool, just as they had on every other day that he had lost his family.
Guilt overtakes the loss for a moment because he hasn't lost them, even when he does they'll be safe and sound surrounded by friends who love them. He also has eleven more months with his family. It feels like a betrayl to his parents, to his brother, that he would cry like he did for them.
And yet his muscles go slack when he's done. All that comes with calm breath is an overwhelming hollow loss in his chest. He's familiar with this feeling, it was once his best friend. This was once the only reprieve he got from the images his brother seared onto his very soul.
Now he curses the feeling, he hates it more than he ever hated Naruto. It doesn't allow him to be a husband, it doesn't even allow him to be a person. And this new life, these new eyes of his, make him want to be a person for the first time since he was 7 years old.
"Sarada and I will be okay," Sakura whispers into his ear. Her words pierce his brain but the spark isn't enough to restart his nervous system.
He needs her to know, it becomes the only need he's ever had. He doesn't ask her consent as he grabs her head and stares a bleeding eye into her wide jade eyes, but he doesn't show her any of the nightmares.
He starts with the memories his brother gave him, of him as a baby. Of his mother holding him, his brother holding him, his father.
He shows her his first memory of her, he'd gotten a question wrong and she'd confidently corrected him. It was a month before the massacre. He was only annoyed because she when realized it was him she corrected, she got red and apologized.
He shows her the forehead taps next, every single one he remembers.
He shows her the first time he tapped her forehead, how the only thought that cut through the shame of leaving her was how pretty it was that her cheeks matched her hair.
He shows her how powerful and small she'd looked standing over him as a child. Her freshly cut pink locks flowing around her face at sharp angles.
Next he shows her how she looked during the war, when her seal first appeared. He makes sure the memory includes how he chuckled and thought 'About time.'
He shows her the nice parts of Sarada's birth, so when he was alone with the girl. "Hello, Sarada. You're my daughter." He'd said.
He wants to end with her laugh, mixed with that of their daughters on their last normal day of playing family. He adds though, without deciding to, his favorite memory of his mother's laugh. He's never told her that she's always made him think of his mother, but he shows her. Annoying when she was happy, annoying when she nagged or was concerned with him. He shows her that his anger wasn't at her, it was at the loss of control. He didn't want to listen to his mother laugh when he looked at the girl, his mother was dead. He makes sure she feels the joy in his heart when she reminds him of his mother now, especially when she holds their daughter.
They fall back on the bed, both breathless when his eye bleeds black again. She wipes away the tears of blood just as she had his real tears. And his blood.
Just as he had wiped away her sweat and sick and blood to grow and deliver their daughter.
The people who lay in this bed now are not the people who'd taken off on his journey of atonement together.
Just as the door to their childhood has closed, the door Naruto had tried so vehemently to open for years, the door to their youth itself has closed.
"It can't end, even if we're apart." She says quietly, her hand on his cheek. "Because this is forever."
And he knows she's right.
Just as desperately as he believes Naruto had always been his brother, he's also always hoped that the afterlife is pink.
It had always been Sakura. It would always be Sakura and Sarada.
They fall asleep with her hand still on his cheek.
He dreams of binary stars, orbiting each other for eternity. If they touch, they could both be destroyed. They had both tried to destroy the other in times long passed. The stars don't care. The stars know even if an eccentric orbit takes them far apart, the gravity between them will always hold them together.