Red and Blue make Purple

lilmikomiko

she reminds him of someone. he can’t pinpoint who, but logically it should be his mother. she doesn’t quite look like her though, with her rounder eyes and her wider forehead, and her wild temper is completely wrong. he doesn’t know how they’re related, but her sharingan – underdeveloped as it may be – seems to glow in the darkness of madara’s hideout, and sasuke finds himself strangely protective of this lost, little girl.
“i want to go home,” she whines.
madara doesn’t imprison her per se, but it’s clear she isn’t allowed to leave. not until they know who she is and where she came from.
sasuke crosses his arms and leans against the wall. he watches as she paces, muttering under her breath and then running a hand through her cropped black hair. he hears a sniffle and almost sighs. he doubts she’d actually cry in front of him, but then she shifts her glasses and quickly swipes at her eyes and her cheeks and whimpers for her mother.
it’s clear she’s talking to herself, because she slips down to the floor and draws in her knees and begins to weep softly.
“stop that,” sasuke orders, uncomfortable and almost a little embarrassed for her.
“no!” she tries to yell. she aims for fierce but only ends up sounding like the child she is.
he’s not really sure how old she is, but he thinks she might be eleven – twelve, at most. he thinks back to himself five years ago. he never would have cried in front of a stranger for his mother like this.
sasuke nears her like she’s a wounded animal that may lash out. she watches him, wary that he might hurt her, but instead he finds himself patting her shoulder much like itachi used to do for him when he was a boy. it doesn’t seem to help her, but it certainly doesn’t make her cry more, so sasuke continues until she finally shuts up.
“how annoying,” he mutters.
she sniffs and manages a half-hearted scowl. “you’re annoying!”

her sharingan is different

this is the first thing that madara had relayed to him when they interrogated the child. she seems immune to any manipulation and mind extraction done by their doujutsu.

(sasuke couldn’t explain the sudden burst of relief that he woke up to her soft cries of kaachan, than to her screams )

madara treats her fairly, even if she’s their current prisoner in the lair. she’s a genin-level ninja, and it’s very apparent that she recently graduated from konoha.

but war is imminent, and he heard that nations and villages have been dissolved to unite against madara. surely, academy trainings and qualifying exams have been dissolved.

it’s the third day, when he sits again besides her desk, where blank scrolls and mid-level shuriken trajectory notes were scattered along with brushes and pens, the candle light lights up the dark of her hair, playing shadows across her face, and the realization hits him like a punch.

the reason for his need to protect this girl.

(sarada, he commits her name to memory, the only thing that they have gotten out from her)

sarada is…

“you’re family.”

“duh.” she continues to scribble her equations, rolling her eyes at this monumental truth. "we are family, sa-“ she breathes deeply, bracing herself. “sasuke-san.”

he slowly scrutinizes her, small and defiant, mouth in that familiar frown, returns his gaze without any fear at all.

“you know me.”

the girl huffs impatiently, and turns back to her paper, striking a harsh line on a wrong equation. she’s obviously bored.

“who doesn’t?” she tries to sound petulant, but she’s smiling like she knows a funny, little secret.

sasuke hates secrets. he deeply hates not knowing anything. but when she ignores him in frustration for not getting the answer right, he silently points the variable she missed.

she glares, and tries to wave him out of the room.

what disturbs him is how casual this is to her; sarada doesn’t hesitate to prod and sass back to him.

he’s not sure how to handle this.

i’m tagging @ohsasukes :))))

ohsasukes

he quickly becomes fixated on this newly known fact.

it isn’t important, but he tries to place a familial name to their relationship. his first guess comes when madara orders him to take her to the river nearby to be bathed. the well-disguised rude remarks are not lost to him and, sasuke notes, it isn’t lost on sarada either.

smart girl, he thinks as they walk through trees and shrub, just a couple of feet away from the cave. perhaps she is a niece twice or thrice removed?

“you can’t watch,” she haughtily tells him, hands on her hips and small legs spread apart to brace herself and to add to her intimidating pose.

sasuke snorts and turns around, drops to the ground and crosses his arms in front of his chest. “what do you take me for?”

her reply is the splash of her jumping into the river. for a moment it is silent with nothing but the rustling leaves and the moving water to make noise. for a moment he is surprised that there is no need to look over his shoulder and assure himself she’s still there.

“family,” he mouths to himself, weird lightness in his limbs that start at his fingertips and stretch through all his insides like lightning. she is family.

but, he thinks, when she appears next to him, hair drenched and her clothes growing damp against her wet body, he doesn’t think she is his niece, removal of any kind.

it just doesn’t fit.

not entirely.

later, when he strategically shifts to block her from madara’s hard stare, he thinks perhaps she is his cousin?

he sits with his legs crossed, their backs mere inches apart and the noise of her scribbling equations ringing in his ear. perhaps she is a cousin?

“you really do look like you have an upset tummy when you think hard,” she snickers when madara leaves.

the back of sasuke’s neck heats up, twisting his back to face her, expression outraged. “who–”

but she’s lost in a fit of giggles before he can finish. he has a scowl on his face but inside there are ten different kinds of panic mixing with one single kind of elation.

how should he even handle this?

i’m tagging @windsilk

windsilk

she begins looking at him shiftily, out of the corner of her eye when she thinks he doesn’t notice. it happens the first time when he laces his fingers together and hunches over to think.

she has a small smile on her face.

when he turns to look at her, she averts her gaze and continues to scribble what looks like a letter on the paper in front of her. he might be wrong, but with the dull lighting, it looks like her cheeks turned red.

the second time, it’s when he’s eating. this time, she finds the courage to talk. “do you like an pan?”

he sets his chopsticks on the edge of the plate. “I’m not really into sweets,”

“oh, oh, yes.” she says it like she knows. but how could she? she puckers her lips. “I like onigiri,” she mentions like it’s an offhand fact, but her gaze is steady, calculating.

he frowns. “I see.”

the third time is when madara walks in, silkily inquiring about her origins with the bargaining chip of freedom. with a hand pressed to her shoulder, he crouches to her height and asks “all right, you got me,” she huffs sourly, masking the trembling fear in her shoulders with hard words, “I came from my mother’s uterus. I was put there when these sperm–”

madara walks out of the room then, shooting sasuke a find out what she’s hiding look. after all, it had been he who had wrestled her name from her tight lips.

sarada, sarada, sarada.

so sasuke does what he knows best: he makes a plan. it’s a simple one, but he thinks it might just work. the next morning, he wakes her from the small cot she sleeps fitfully on, and she bolts upright, her head blocking the sun from the small, dirty window behind her.

silhouetted and shadowy-eyed, vulnerable and messy-haired, she goggles at him. the shape of her face catches the his eyes. that part of her is familiar–but in a different way. his mother’s face fades, and someone else’s…

she looks visibly annoyed. “yes?” she prods.

“there’s a small village nearby. I was thinking maybe you’d like a change of clothes. and something to eat.”

the hollow look in her eyes is replaced, yet again, with that calculating look, and she agrees, running her fingers through her hair and splashing water on her face to get ready. she thinks he doesn’t notice, but she tucks a piece of paper in her pocket.

when she finishes her business in the bathroom, he rifles through the rest of the paper they’d given her and finds the one missing is the one she’d started on the day prior.

the walk is quick, filled with the crackle of broken branches and dead leaves, and soon they are meandering into a small shop, darts of cloth hanging on the wall and an aged tailor smiling a golden-toothed smile. racks of essentials hang around, and she is quick to grab what she wants.

when she exits the changing room, the paper tucked into the back of her pants is gone. he can tell by the way her top drapes naturally, and when she doesn’t notice, he slips into the stall she was in and snatches it from where it is tucked into the edge of the mirror.

he pays, and then they walk down the street to a small restaurant. she splits from him to visit the restroom, and she knows better than to try an escape. even away from his watchful eyes, he can feel her movements.

in her stead, he unfolds the paper and reads. it is short, filled with crossed out words and smudged ink and what looks like water marks–tears?

please send to ~~konoha’s hospi~~ the seventh, whoever finds this!
kaachan,

~~I’m with ot~~ I’m safe. I know it ~~feels~~ sounds like things might be ~~waterfalling~~ bordering on unhinged, ~~and sometimes I’m scared~~ but I’m strong like you. you would be so proud. it’s easy to be strong when your lo precious people are beside you. I love you.

sarada

tagging @peonydee

peonydee

what strikes him first is the depth of emotion fueling the words of bravado. this time, she unmistakably reminds him of his mother, though not from something as superficial as their similar coloring. he can see himself writing such a note, not at 11 years old, but at 7, when he still had a family to love, a family to please.

a family to deceive.

she obviously understands that though her captors have yet to force her secrets from her, she is not completely safe in their company. something puts her at ease enough to banter, to press for boundaries, sasuke can only guess what. maybe her familial relations to him and madara is enough to make her hope their better natures prevail. that being her family, albeit distant, they count among her precious persons.

a long stretch, sasuke thinks, as he conceals the note up a sleeve. the girl herself soon reappears, a quizzical tilt to her brows. she suspects subterfuge on his end, but is completely clueless of his purpose.

they select a serviceable tea shop that serve handmade sweets, a reasonable choice for someone so female and so young. she picks their tea leaves like a connoisseur; sasuke nearly gags at the bitter kick of her chosen concoction.

“you did that on purpose,” he says.

she nods, an expectant look coaxing him to expand his accusation, as if she had actually expected him to like it?

“i-i can’t expect everyone to have my oto– my refined palate. you don’t have to drink it.”

he does, he reminds her, he’ll be paying for the entire pot.

despite her efforts appear cavalier about the issue, she looks disappointed, unhappy, again eerily similar to someone he has not seen for a long time. sarada’s coloring is exactly the opposite of this pale person’s, but the similarity is in the hunch of their shoulders, in the twist of their lips.

he takes another sip of the tea, oddly preferring her impudence over this uncertainty.

“it won’t be as bad once offset by the sweetness of the odango,” he points out.

“obviously,” she says, quite pleased with herself.

she is soft, he realizes. not a bad trait necessarily. she simply did not grow up in conditions that necessitates her constant vigilance, a fact he might have begrudged her, five years ago.

he knows better than to mock individuals for such softness, not when the trait confers a certain resilience even he cannot refute.

when their food finally comes, he watches her manners, the particular way she neatly eats the odango. her words of bravado come back to him in the silence.

first the obvious:

-her mother can be found in konoha’s hospital, perhaps a mednin or a civilian ancillary worker

- she expects the hokage to know her by name, to know her mother by association to it

but konohagakure no sato had no seventh. a fifth, they had, and even the nomination of a sixth would have been notable enough to alert madara’s network of informants.

sasuke has seen too much in his short life to simply dismiss anything as impossible, simply because his prior experience excludes it. each time he thinks he has faced the apex in power, something, someone, shows up to prove him wrong. he himself has crossed that limit a few times before.

it makes sense. the haunting sense of familiarity. the familiar regard she offers a stranger like him. her familiarity with him.

to have a soft uchiha like her grow up in the konoha of now is simply impossible. to have any uchiha grow up in konoha at all is also impossible—unless madara attains what he had always wanted.

“sarada,” he decides to ask her point blank. perhaps she’ll be caught off guard enough to drop more hints. “from when did you say you are again?”

tagging @blanket-fictions

blanket-fictions

for a moment there is alarm, and if not for his singular fine eyes, sasuke would have missed it. in the next blink, she is smiling, cat-like.

“i didn’t say. it should be fairly obvious but in case you haven’t noticed, i’ve been trained not to answer to enemies like you, uchiha-san.”

the change in address should unnerve sasuke, but her voice is lilting, almost jocular. this child does not fear him, and while he should disabuse her of any notion of immunity to his whims, something stays his hand. instead, he finds himself fixed on her words.

uchiha-san. uchiha-san. sasuke realizes rather abruptly that he has gotten used to her easy, informal, albeit unfriendly manner toward him; his father had been uchiha-san, and so had his brother. madara is uchiha, and so too is this child.

so too, is he.

(once, he had been sasuke-kun — but hers is a memory sasuke shuts away. this arid land, in the shadows of wind, is no place for softness.)

the reminder of this commonality, at once grounds and destabilizes him.

“and who trained you,” he returns, after a contemplative sip of the brew she had chosen. “your father?”

a soft gasp.

(inwardly, sasuke assigns himself a point in this game they have been playing, he and madara. it is a point of pride, his ability to glean information where his not-mentor has failed so spectacularly.)

“hm,” sasuke, says.

sarada’s eyes seem to search his for some time, before she looks away, and sighs.

“no, uchiha-san. that i can tell you — my father has had no great hand in training me.” she pops a morsel of sweet in her mouth and bares her teeth at him, her eyes curved, almost sweetly. in another light, he might have thought her happy.

he wipes at his mouth with his sleeve, ignoring her wrinkled moue of distaste.

“i got napkins for a reason, you know. just because we’re in the wild, it doesn’t mean you ought to forget your manners.”

there it is again — that strident, assured voice relaying his mother’s sentiment, if not her words.

“you know,” sarada says, looking up at him, her eyes large and dark in the moon paleness of her round face, “you’re not at all what ma—I thought you would be.”

sasuke smiles. smiles.

“so i know her — your mother. or she knows me.”

sarada sticks her tongue at him.

“i don’t know, does she,” she sing-songs. “that depends. when are we, uchiha-san?”

—

by the next week, he is sasuke-san again.

if they had not been on the brink of annihilation, sasuke supposes he would care a bit more. as it was, speeding through the landscape of his childhood home, rife with the truths he had learned from the newly resurrected dead, what the girl calls him seems to matter very little.

“the village is a lot shorter than i remember,” sarada murmurs, as she keeps pace with him. “where is everyone?” sasuke does not think she means for anyone to overhear her, but he does. he makes a note to press her on this observation later. for now his mind is whirring, his heart is in his throat. he focuses his energy on getting them both to where he had last sensed the battle thrum of war.

“get behind me,” sasuke says, as they land. he has to grab sarada, and cover the gasp readying itself to claw out of her throat as they come to a stop.

it seems fitting that she would be his first sight. she has lingered in the background of his memory for years, the last sight of home he had left for power. her green eyes catch his, and for a moment the battlefield wavers. even madara, who is beginning to exchange words with the newly arrived first, seems to sink to a low monotone — everyone is background noise.

the younger girl against his side stills, even as she gasps something into his palm. sakura’s eyes flicker between them, and her mouth drops open, a soft pink ‘o’.

“sakura,” he rasps.

their eyes lock; he notes the dirt smudges on her cheeks, the scratches on her face. he wets his suddenly dry lips, and watches, as sakura follows the motion with rapt attention. her hands fall to her side, and beside her, naruto squawks, indignant at being ignored.

“sasuke-kun,” she says breathily, “sasuke-kun…i—”

sarada chooses that precise moment to bite his hand.

“mama,” she yelps, when he curses and releases her. “mama!”

(ok tagging @anthropologicalhands 8D)

anthropologicalhands

trying to control his shock, sasuke looks to sakura again.

sakura’s eyes snap to sarada, eyes wide, and even if he had only briefly entertained the thought of their passing resemblance, the way sakura’s expression shifts, from confusion to firmness, confirms it.

sakura doesn’t say, ‘I am not your mother’ outright; a reaction for which he would have hardly blamed her. instead, she comes from a different angle, to figure out the why–the why of this girl she has never seen before calling her ‘mama’.

“what’s your name?” she calls out, not moving closer but her eyes, alike in shape but not in color to sarada’s, firmly on her. on the girl who is still frozen in front of him, who has been staring him down and sidestepping and dodging all attempts to discern her true identity these last few weeks.

he is impressed by sakura’s composure. inside, his organs feel like they have rearranged themselves.

if sakura is her mother…

well, it closes the question of how sarada is related to him.

(it should probably worry him that he can make this jump in logic so simply.

it doesn’t.)

so sarada is his and sakura’s daughter (their daughter, something in his heart is pulsing hard and fast with either pride or a prelude to a swoon; he’s not certain) is here, which means somewhere, there are versions of themselves desperately seeking her out, fearing her dead or in peril.

that, at least, he can actually take action to prevent.

“don’t be foolish; remember where you are,” he snaps harshly, pulling sarada back by the arm as he places his body between hers and anyone who might take this child as an easy target, though he leaves a gap to not block her from sakura’s view.

“mama, please,” sarada calls again and when he looks at her, her eyes are watery behind her glasses, the irises turned red. Her face is scrunched up from the effort of not falling apart entirely, and Sasuke can see the anguish mingled with the fierceness of her love; she knows that sakura will not know her; however, she cannot help but reach out.

naruto is gesticulating madly, pointing between sasuke and sakura and sarada. one can practically read the visible question marks above his head as the math comes up wrong again and again.

as amusing as this display of confusion is, sasuke does allow his rival some sympathy; of the three of them, he is the one who has the most pieces of this puzzle and it is still not yet coherent.

sakura looks to him. her eyes hold a question. sasuke averts his down to the expanse of dirt between them, and inclines his head; acquiescence to her request for permission.

(something inside him flickers with satisfaction, this evidence that they still can, and do, read each other so well)

her afterimage is barely fading from naruto’s side (“sakura-chan, wait!”) before she is suddenly at sasuke’s side, kneeling in front of sarada, her defenses down and her eyes soft and focused entirely on the girl’s startled face.

“and who are you,” she asks, her voice low, one hand hovering just above sarada’s cheek, glowing green as she checks for injuries.

sarada responses, gasps out her full name at the gentle question, and while she does not lean into sakura’s touch, one small gloved hand wraps around sakura’s wrist, and stays there. sasuke can entirely believe that she is sakura’s child, to look to her with such devotion, as much as he can believe that she is his, to feel such devotion for the woman in front of her.

sakura smiles at sarada and presses her hand once to the girl’s cheek, before straightening up, careful not to break sarada’s grasp. she looks to Sasuke, a thousand more questions reflecting at him.

he shakes his head. he has shamefully little that might be useful in this moment, though he can say how even with the little time he has spent with sarada, that she is intelligent (like sakura) and stubborn (like both of them) and so, so soft (like her mother again).

he could tell her all these things, and she would smile at them, but that is not what is needed here and now. what is needed is to return sarada to whence she came, for somewhere across dimensions, her parents are missing her.

“no, wait, don’t you dare! sakura-chan, teme—”

naruto’s roar warns them, turns his and sakura’s attention away to the impending attack. sasuke curses himself inwardly, for allowing this to happen here, for not grabbing both of them the second this connection was revealed and taking them far, far away from the battlefield. this is no longer a uchiha matter this is his and sakura’s, madara and war have no place here anymore—

the enemies (anyone with weapons pointing towards sarada is an enemy, in the reasoning of sasuke’s mind) rush forward, blades out, maybe on madara’s orders or maybe simply triggered by sakura’s entrance into their side of the battlefield. it should be nothing to dispatch, though the surprise of it means he is not nearly as quick to draw his blade as he would like. sakura’s fists flash green, and sasuke allows himself a brief moment of satisfaction that they will not last more than a moment—

it is lost when sarada rushes out from behind them, so small in front of them, arms raised.

“sarada!” sasuke’s shout is nearly drowned out by sakura’s, and sarada’s fist swings out—

out—

down

the ground shudders as it splits beneath them.

(Tagging @coronagraminea)

coronagraminea

It is majestic – this unabashed display of raw strength stemming from such a small, soft creature. He cannot help but smile with pride, even as he braces himself against the shockwaves rippling across the field. To be twelve and this strong, amazing. He almost feels ashamed the he ever tried to compare himself to her.

But she is turning back to them now, a wide smile on her face, her feet braced apart, her fists glowing green, the red tomoes of her sharingan spinning wildly, and he is rendered speechless.

He can feel his heart hammering in his chest, impossibly filled to the brim with both arrogance and humility. This girl – Sarada – she is his, she is Sakura’s, she is theirs. They made her – or will make, if his patched up understanding of this complex conundrum is halfway correct.

By his side, he can hear Sakura’s soft gasp at the revelation of this mysterious child’s powers, the uncanny amalgamation of him and her. If she had any doubt of the girl’s claims of being true, then surely they would be dispelled now.

Softly, so only the two of them can hear, he tells her, “Her name is Sarada.”

“Sarada,” she repeats almost reverently, barely a whisper, “Sarada.”

Sasuke notes with wonder that the knot of confusion and pain and restraint and want and regret that usually settles in his stomach while in the presence of his once teammate is now gone, replaced by a calm certainty that he can and will take the affection she so insistently, irrationally offers him. They might still have a mountain of problems to get over and a gaping abyss of lost trust and betrayal and abandonment between them… but they will have the time to fix everything. Somehow, his future does not have to be a bleak nothing. Somehow, there is something good in his life that he will not mess up. Somehow, everything will work out.

And she might not yet be his family as of this moment – but she will be, she, Sakura, and this amazing girl standing before them—

“Sarada!”

The strangled scream is ripped from his throat as he watches a large monster emerge from the smoke, looming over the girl. For a moment, he is frozen, panic gripping him in a way that hasn’t happened since the massacre. He is too far, he is too slow, he is not enough. There is already a sense of loss enveloping him, rendering him helpless, again, again, no, no no, not again—

But there is movement this time, from his side. He is not alone. He does not have to be alone. Not alone, never again alone. Not alone not alone. Never again. The thought repeats itself inside his head until he can breathe again. Sakura is already moving, faster than he has ever seen her, and suddenly he too is released from the shackles of his panic. All at once, his sword is out, and he is running. He catches up with Sakura quickly. And he knows that this time, this time, he will save his family, he will—

A flash of light flares up behind Sarada, a portal. Through it, a dark, cloaked figure emerges, and almost too fast for him to fully process, makes quick work of the threat. Through the confusion, he hears Sarada exclaim, voice high-pitched with excitement, “Papa!”. She jumps up at the man without the smallest smidgen of hesitation. And he deftly catches her in one arm, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. She wraps her small arms around him tightly, burying her face in the man’s neck, tears now falling from her face without restraint.

A surge of fierce protectiveness passes through Sasuke, even as a voice inside his head tells him there is no need for it and even as that same voice tells him that he is no match for this man, and he grips his sword tighter.

Through the smoke, the flying debris, the chaos, their eyes meet. Disappointment meets distrust. Red meets red.

( tagging @runtedfiction um and i’ve been told that if you want to finish the fic, tag @sun-summoning )

runtedfiction

And then—a flash of lavender.

Sasuke blinks once, twice, feels the strain in his eyes. But this is no genjutsu. Because here is the Rinnegan in the man’s left eye, ringed and rippling. Here is the man’s arm clutching Sarada so tightly Sasuke sees where his fingers dig into her waist.

Here is the man Sasuke sees himself in, because this man is Sasuke.

Sakura mouths something, stunned, and Naruto looks like a gaping idiot fish as this man destroys other monsters with an effortless katon.

Sasuke imagines he’s no better than the two of them. He’s winded. When the man turns back after surrounding them with a circle of amaterasu, every moment he watches him is another punch to his stomach.

“Papa,” Sarada says, and the man looks down at her. Sasuke sees it now, the lines in his face, the concern etched into the furrow of his brows. The fierce protectiveness Sasuke felt a moment earlier, multiplied by infinity.

“We need to get out of here,” the man—Sasuke?—murmurs to Sarada. “Timelines are tricky, Sarada, and dangerous to play with. And do you know what you’ve put okaasan through?”

He looks up, and Sasuke still can’t speak. “You three,” he says, and Sasuke starts, as do Naruto and Sakura. His eyes flicker over the three of them, and Sasuke thinks he sees the tiniest hint of—of longing. Softness. “You have a war to fight. Go.”

Then, quickly as he entered, he makes to leave. Sarada is still in his arm, and she pushes at his shoulder to stand on the ground, her mouth opening the same time Sasuke’s does.

“Wait!”

The word is desperate, a cry, nearly, from the both of them.

Sasuke’s grip on his sword tightens as the man turns. “You…..you have answers.”

The man nods, slowly. “I do,” he says, clipped.

“You, you—what do I need to know?” Sasuke hates how lost he sounds, and shame wells in his voice.

The man keeps his unnerving gaze, then sighs. But it doesn’t feel like condescension. It feels like a bone-deep exhaustion, one that understands.

“Keep home close,” the man says, gaze steady. Sasuke swallows. “Keep the ones you love closer.”

There’s a silence, where Sasuke can’t think of anything to say. (What do you say, after all, to someone who has given you a piece of your world?) And then—

“Thank you, otousan,” says Sarada. She’s looking right at Sasuke as she says this, and he freezes.

Sasuke sees a little girl with a forehead too wide, crying in Madara’s lair for her mother. He sees a little girl that did differential equations by candlelight (calculating the Zetsu population size, he suspects), that bathed in a river and sassed him to no end, that cried over a letter she wrote where she said she was strong because it’s easy to be strong when your precious people are beside you.

Sasuke believes her.

He sees a girl that he knows this man would give the world for.

“I,” Sarada continues. Her fists, so powerful a moment earlier, shake with a determined strength. “I’ll see you next time, Papa.”

And—oh.

She walks toward Sasuke, and he’s shaking now too. But he does what’s natural in this situation—raises his index and middle fingers, and taps her forehead.

“Next time,” he says.

Next time because there is a future. Next time because they have a future. Next time, they say, because there is hope.

[tagging @sun-summoning]

sun-summoning

epilogue:

he finds her features early on. sarada is a happy baby, overly fond of her mother and finding amusement from teasing her father. she likes to gesture to him to pick her up or hug her or kiss her only to turn away when he’s near. she’s a little shit, but she’s his, and he loves her more than anything.

all the while, sasuke finds his clues. he learns more about kaguya otsutsuki as sarada learns more about her motor skills. he tries to hide his little trips into the dimensions he hadn’t been to since he was a teenager as sarada tries to hide the juice spill on the couch or the toy she broke while playing shinobi.

sakura notices though, and sakura questions him, and when his suspicions are voiced to her and then to the kages, he realizes what he has to do – what only he can do.

and after getting permission to take on that mission, sasuke realizes why the sarada he met those years ago spoke about him the way she did:

sasuke doesn’t get to watch his daughter grow.

the night before he leaves, he sits at her bedside and takes in her little nose and her rounded cheeks and her peaceful, sleeping face. he doesn’t cry, nor does he curse, but he leans forward, pressing his forehead against her tiny, three-year-old hand.

“i’m sorry,” he whispers.

the sarada he met only knew of him. she knew stories and traits and while she leapt into her father’s arms so eagerly when he came for her from their timeline, sasuke suspected that that relationship was still something new.

he hears sakura approach them from down the hall. she pauses in the doorway, likely assessing their situation, before coming to his side and resting a warm hand on his shoulder.

“sasuke-kun…”

“she won’t know me.” he shakes his head, remembering the girl whose perception of him came mostly from her mother’s anecdotes. “not for a long time, at least.”

he pulls away from sarada as if she’s burnt him and faces his wife. she doesn’t cry, playing the rock for both of them. she wraps her arms around him and guides him back to their bed and holds him until she falls asleep as he feigns it.

he imagines sarada uchiha, but not his three-year-old princess who secretly had papa pick out the onions from her dinner or who refused to go to bed without pressing a kiss to his cheek. rather, he pictures the twelve-year-old genin that stared at him with fire behind wet eyes as she stopped crying for her mother. he thinks of the girl that sassed him and that helped him and that, he thinks, saved him from straying down a path that may have resulted in more headaches and heartaches.

she was a good kid, smart and strong and so very much like her mother.

when it’s time to go, sasuke doesn’t wake sakura and he doesn’t wake his little girl. he dons his cloak and takes his pack and silently leaves his home at the crack of dawn.

sarada grows up without him, he finally understands, but she grows up loved and cared for and safe, so sasuke closes the front door behind him and takes a deep breath.

hers is a future he’ll do anything to protect.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Red and Blue make Purple

hey, let’s play round robin:)

Head cannon