Chapter Text
Sasuke meets Kushina Uzumaki at Ichiraku ramen on a rainy Thursday. It’s a nice type of rain, warm and sticks to his skin.
The rain in Ame was cold.
The meeting is entirely accidental, though perhaps he should’ve known to stay away from Ichiraku, given the clientele. He refuses to admit to the vulnerability that had him walking up to the ramen stand.
Even when he saw the shock of red hair, it didn't quite click until he sat down. His first thought was of Karin, but the oppressive weight of her Chakra meant the thought didn't last long.
He doesn't turn to look, but he's not so naive as to think that she doesn't know exactly who he is.
“Pork miso ramen, please,” he tells a much younger Teuchi. He's lost most of his stress lines, his hair is black instead of gray, but his eyes are the same.
“Coming right up, Uchiha-san,” Teuchi replies, turning to begin making the food.
“Minato won't shut up about you, y'know,” is the first thing she says. Her bluntness is unsurprising, but he still feels somewhat fascinated by her audacity.
He doesn't really know what to say to that. Sasuke wouldn't describe himself as personable on the best of days. “...Hn.”
Kushina turns to look at him and barks out a laugh, fist hitting the table in her mirth. She shakes her head, grinning. Her teeth are sharp.
“You really are just like him,” she huffs. At his nonplussed look, she elaborates. “Fugaku.”
Sasuke feels his heart slide between his ribcage, compressed in his chest until he can barely feel a beat. He blinks as the world shifts out of focus, distorted like he's looking through a peephole in a door.
“Ah,” he says, with a softness that still manages to sound grating. He has nothing else to say. He’d never thought of himself as like his father, but he barely knew him. Didn’t know him as an adult, only saw him through the idealistic gaze of a child, and then as a corpse, cold on the ground.
He never allowed him to wonder if he was like either of his parents. He knows he looks a lot like his mother, but his father is… an amorphous figure in his mind. As for either of their mannerisms, well. He didn’t know them well enough to tell.
(He could, now. He has every opportunity to get to know his parents as the people they were outside of their children. Unmoored by the weight of their clan’s impending demise, able to become themselves fully.)
Kushina tilts her head to the side, clearly unsure what to make of him. “Didn’t mean to offend you, dattebane.”
Teuchi puts the ramen down before Sasuke and he stares into it. For a moment, he sees Naruto’s face reflected in the broth.
He’s losing it.
But he has to say something , he knows that much. “It’s fine.”
He isn’t looking at Kushina, can’t . It would ruin him, he knows. To see the twist of her lips, her raised eyebrow.
“Doesn’t look like it, kid,” she huffs. Sasuke finds it in him to be distantly offended.
She can’t possibly be much older than him.
It’s a sobering thought. He knew it, of course. That he’d be older than a lot of the people he knew. He’s older than Kakashi and the rest of the senseis. The Fourth Hokage only has a year on him. He’s older than Itachi. Will be older than him now. Forever.
He must be, what, 2? Maybe 3? It makes his gut twist. Itachi was 5 by the time Sasuke was born, but his only memories of his brother are agonizing.
Sasuke gives Kushina an annoyed look, though his gaze doesn’t stay on her face. She holds up her hands in surrender.
“Alright, alright.” She downs the last bit of her ramen and leans back on her chair. Her bowl is set onto the table with a clink.
His ears ring dully, body pinned like a butterfly on display.
10, 9, 8, 7–
“It’s going to get cold,” Kushina’s hand slides into his view, poking the ceramic bowl before him. There’s no more steam coming off it and Sasuke hasn’t touched it. The taste will make him terribly ill, he’s certain.
8, 7, 6, 5, 4–
“You can have it,” he decides. He pushes the bowl towards her, holding onto his chakra with both hands. He’s not going to flatten this block because he couldn’t bear the weight of his own weakness. There was a time when he would’ve wanted to, but it’s far away, now. In a timeline that will never exist, following tragedies that will never happen again.
He has no past anymore.
6, 5, 4, 3–
“Hey,” Kushina barks. He thinks she’s been talking for a while now. Maybe. Her voice makes him want to be sick. It’s so similar, the slight rasp, the sincerity.
There is the sudden, but recurring thought that he cannot do this . It’s strange to passively watch his heart tear his mind to shreds. Stranger still to know that the only person who could’ve managed to put it back together has now been reduced to a figment of his imagination.
He feels ground beneath his feet and is surprised to find that he still has strength in his knees. Movement comes to him later, one foot in front of the other.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
He isn’t sure where he’s going until he approaches the Hokage Tower. The genjutsu obscuring the Hokage’s office from the view of an ordinary civilian unravels before him, only for him.
The door opens before he gets there and he is stupid. Here is the last place on the planet he’d want to be.
His gaze trails out the window instead of at Naruto’s face on a different body.
“Have the Yamanaka’s been cleared?” he hears himself ask. His voice is too nasally, he thinks. It sounds like noise squeezed through a pipe.
Namikaze doesn’t seem to notice. He hums, pen stilling against the paper. “They have. Thank you for that. Inoichi wanted to thank you in person, but you are quite difficult to find, he says.”
There is no energy in his body to respond to that. His relationship with Namikaze is sometimes friendly, sometimes they banter when Sasuke is alive enough to differentiate him from Naruto.
Today, he isn’t.
“Jiraiya is next, then,” he continues. He wonders what his face must look like, wishes he could carry a mirror visible only to him so he could dissect each twitch of his lips, each time his eyelids so much as flutter.
He counts again.
10.
“…Yes,” Namikaze allows. He sees it in his mind’s eye, the way his eyebrows probably furrow, lips thinning. He surely thinks Sasuke is unwell. Naruto would get the same look of concern so soft that Sasuke could only smother himself with it and hope he would never wake up.
“You want to leave now?” the Hokage continues when Sasuke says nothing.
9.
“He has defected. The sooner the better,” the words feel humourlessly ironic. Who is Sasuke to talk of defectors? There was a time when he was Konoha’s most notorious nuke-nin.
His ribcage might be collapsing.
8.
“True, but…” whatever Namikaze was going to say doesn’t come out, and Sasuke allows himself to look at the man. He looks in time to see his tongue wet his lips, to see his chest rise when he inhales sharply.
“I am fine,” Sasuke says, for some reason. He feels stupid soon after. The quickest way to make someone worry is by pre-emptively attempting to assure them of one’s mental stability.
7.
Namikaze does Sasuke the favour of pretending to consider that statement. “You don’t look it.”
Rude.
“It’s the truth,” the Hokage replies. Sasuke hadn’t realized he’d spoken, or maybe it showed on his face.
There’s a long pause before either of them speak. Namikaze seems particularly hesitant, like he’s about to ask the wrong thing. “Are you… ill?”
6.
It certainly feels like it, but he doesn’t really get sick. Orochimaru made sure of that.
It’s a bit of a weird thought. He hasn’t considered Orochimaru in a while, it seemed wholly unnecessary, given everything else that’s going on.
But he’d still be in the village.
5, 4.
Not experimenting on children anymore, with any luck, but still. Alive. Un-murdered.
Granted, he was alive in Sasuke’s time too, but he. Well. That was different.
(Was it? If he had any anger left by the time he got out of T&I, he thinks it would’ve driven him crazy to see Orochimaru wander the streets.)
3.
“…Is that your answer?” Namikaze wonders warily, like Sasuke is a wounded animal.
“Excuse me?” he asks, confused.
2, 1.
There is a heavy pause. “To my question. I asked if you were sick?”
Ah, he had, hadn’t he? Embarrassing.
“I’m not,” he disagrees, which is certainly very convincing. He’s starting to think that counting isn’t helping him very much.
0.
“Alright,” Namikaze exhales, reaching into his desk. He pulls out a file and sets it on his desk. Jiraya’s picture is clipped to the cover and there’s a big, bold CLASSIFIED in the middle.
Sasuke picks it up, flipping through the pages. His sharingan flicker on absently, memorizing every single page.
It’s information networks, last sightings, old pages in the bingo book, associates. Everything that Jiraya has been doing since he left, compiled into a nice little folder and now sits in Sasuke’s brain, sandwiched between his ongoing mania.
He sets the folder back down on the desk and nods.
He can guess the answer but asks anyway. “If he resists?”
There is a lot going through Namikaze’s mind at a given moment. Sasuke can never quite parse all the emotion tightly coiled behind his eyes, but he can see it now. Grief over a mentor who consistently failed him and rage .
“Do what you can to keep him alive,” the man speaks slowly. The words don’t come easy to him, but he says them anyway. “If that’s impossible, do what is necessary.”
Sasuke wonders what he would do if he had to send someone to kill Kakashi. He thinks he’d rather do it with his own hands, if it was necessary, but he’s tried. Tried and tried to kill him, and somehow it never quite…
He doesn’t know if it was because of the start contrast of their relative skill levels or if it was because he just couldn’t do it. If it was a physical failing or a moral one.
Kakashi had a sharingan. Sasuke would rather bury himself alive than admit that he sort of thought of him like family. At the end of the war he was, to Sasuke’s knowledge, the only other person with one. But if it was necessary, could he? Not for the sake of the village, almost assuredly, for some other grand cause.
All this introspection is useless. He will find Jiraiya and if he resists, the man will die.
“Understood,” and he finds it’s the truth.