A Nerd in All Her Glory

“Sakura,” Sasuke pleaded urgently as she continued to bend over the veranda. “Are you alright?” Her forehead was sweaty, and her eyes were clutched so tightly that her nose wrinkled in discomfort. One hand was clutching her stomach desperately as if the pressure might prevent more vomit from travelling up her esophagus. Sasuke panicked, using his only hand to push the dangling rosy hair back from her face. Without a second more of hesitation, he activated his Rinnegan privately to check on the tiny sun. It pierced through his lethargy with its brightness, the steady and even pulsing steadying his own beating heart.

“Morning sickness, I suppose,” Sakura moaned a second later. She leaned her shoulder into him, and he clutched her tightly as another wave of nausea wracked her body until it, too, exited. After a few more times, Sakura leaned back against the wall next to the open door, wrapping the blanket tightly around her body as the nausea subsided. He sat beside her in the icy chill of the still morning, the sunrise doing nothing to warm them, but shining on them through the snow-covered trees with that spreading pink and gold vibrance only belonging to winter sunrises. It illuminated the ground with streaks of color, as if the snow were a blank canvas to mirror the sky. 

“We shouldn’t make the trek into town today, if you’re feeling like this again,” he whispered in the stillness. When she shuffled toward him, to lay her head on his shoulder, he didn’t say anything more, content to bring it up again later after she was through the worst of what she was feeling. 

They were both startled, a few minutes later, when a small little creature swung down from the wooden rafters with a greeting as it dropped to the veranda. It chirped when it recognized Sasuke and came up to him expectantly. He was tempted to shoo the little ape he had apparently befriended last night away due to Sakura’s condition, but Sakura cooed at the monkey, saying, “Hello, little guy.” 

The creature turned its head curiously at the sound of her voice but then reached out and tugged on the hem of Sasuke’s pant leg, as if to say, “Hurry—get me some food.” 

“I don’t have anything,” he deadpanned to the creature, who took hold of Sasuke’s hand and lifted it, turning it over back and forth to see if he had anything in the palm of his hand. “I’m out of fish.”

“We’ll get you more in town today,” Sakura promised the little beast, who hopped away from Sasuke disappointedly into the snow. The minute he walked out onto the snow, other macaques sprang down to investigate their friend’s gatherings, and too, were disappointed that the monkey hadn’t conned Sasuke out of more rations. “A lot more,” Sakura amended with a snicker and Sasuke felt the urge to roll his eyes at her obvious lack of concern at traveling in her condition—as if he had said nothing a second ago. 

The little monkey turned back to Sasuke as if he were blaming the Uchiha, pointing him out to his friends, to say that it wasn’t his fault, but Sasuke’s. “Little cretin,” Sasuke chided, “tricking me with the loner act.” 

“How did a monkey trick you, exactly?” Sakura laughed again, leaning forward to look into his face with a smile. 

“I thought he was alone,” Sasuke clarified, “but look at him.” As if on cue, the little creature bounded off with the troupe of tail-less apes through the sun-dividing trees until they disappeared completely. Sakura only laughed before rising to her feet and retreating into the warmth of the indoors. The Sasuke of the past wouldn’t have recognized him seeing how hastily he jumped up to follow his wife through the doorway, his only hand pressed supportively against her back. 

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Sakura had left Sasuke in the town library to browse for any and all medical texts the library possessed. She was going to need the heavy reading material if she were going to often confine herself to the snowy glen of the minka’s desolate hiding place. She could tell that Sasuke was reluctant to part ways, but when Sakura had explained to him the long and laborious process of medicinal shopping, talking with other medics, and getting the supplies she would need from the doctors, he relented with great difficulty—she could see the battle in his eyes—but he exhaled unenthusiastically and nodded silently before she skipped away under the heavy study of his following gaze. Sakura had taken her time, conversing long hours with the Land of Spring’s hospital and had even met Princess Koyuki along the way. The Princess had been very interested when she discovered Sakura’s real reason for coming back into town. 

“You think you might be…?” she rolled her hand slowly to indicate that she was both listening and waiting for more clarification.

“You know,” Sakura blushed, looking around to see that no one was watching, before rounding the space in front of her stomach with her hand. 

Koyuki’s eyes enlarged upon understanding what the Leaf Kunoichi was implying. “Pregnant?!” she gasped, before Sakura shushed her with a wave of her hands and a back and forth searching with her eyes to ensure no one had overheard. “Why the secrecy? What’s wrong?” 

Sakura rubbed the back of her neck. “I should have informed you about this from the beginning, but it’s really nothing, now, and Kakashi is taking care of it.” And this is how Sakura had started off the long explanation of the Zenshin, to Koyuki’s extreme surprise and apparent concern. 

“Wait a second,” she interrupted, exhaling to regulate the information drop through the lens only carried by the leader of a country, “There are enemies following you?” 

“Um,” Sakura stuttered, realizing that this was probably really important information that needed to be shared sooner. “Well, we handled them for the most part. The Hokage is hunting down the rest.”

The Princess grimaced. “We don’t have a shinobi force like the Hidden Villages. If other shinobi are after you and pursue you here—”

“Then we will take care of them, Princess Koyuki,” Sakura reassured her quickly with a steadfast promise. “I will finish them myself if they dare to come this far.”

“Unless you’re huge and carrying a child, of course,” the princess stated with a stare that traveled up and down Sakura’s body consideringly. 

“You’d be surprised at the sort of fight I can put up. But Sasuke is here, too, you know. You have probably heard of his involvement in many things, but specifically his role in the war. He’s one of the world’s deadliest opponents. He, alone, is more powerful than several shinobi forces combined. The Land of Spring has never been safer than when he stepped ashore, I promise.”

She arched an eyebrow as she considered Sakura’s words. “I actually might believe that,” she informed her, easing some of Sakura’s guilt, before continuing with, “If you are—you know—, I’m assuming that he’s the father?”  

Sakura could only nod before one of the Land of Spring’s doctors called her back, and Sakura bowed to Koyuki before she lost sight of her. She didn’t tell Sasuke that she was going to visit a doctor for a solid pregnancy confirmation and examination—she didn’t know why she made him believe she would be performing the test herself back at the Minka. Maybe because she didn’t want him to be disappointed if something came back wrong. Or see her disappointed and distraught over the loss of the idea she hadn’t been willing to even hope to believe in. 

She took a heavy breath, her exhale a small prayer, before nodding and walking into the examination room. 

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Sakura entered the library with a stream of endless tears running down her cheeks and dripping from her chin. She tried to wipe them away when the two bookkeepers greeted her with shocked wide-eyes. She waved them away kindly, reassuring them by saying “I’m fine.” They nodded and after offering to get her something with wary expressions, they returned to their work with doubling glances to ensure that she was, indeed, ‘okay.’ 

But their distress was nothing compared to the look that Sasuke gave her, freezing mid-way from pulling another text from the shelf as if time had stopped when she revealed herself. She only cried harder as she ran to his isolate figure deep in the shelves, and she collided into his chest, clinging desperately to his clothing. He divulged nothing, but she felt the anxiety in his stiffness. Sakura tried to stop crying, she really did, but she hadn’t been able to stop crying since seeing the ‘positive’ scripted on her discharge paperwork. It was an out-of-body experience, seeing that, and knowing that a life that had once not even existed, now grew inside her lower abdomen. Hearing Sasuke say it was one thing, but seeing the confirmation of that in medical terms she could have written herself, was enough to make her start hyperventilating. She tried to think like a doctor and not a patient, telling herself in her mind what she would tell a patient, but she wasn’t a doctor in that moment. She was a woman. A patient. A new mother that had just learned the undeniability of her child’s beating heart. And she was just now feeling the delayed response of learning this fact despite what Sasuke had been telling her with absolute confidence for over half a day now. 

Sniffling and wiping her eyes repeatedly on her clothing, Sakura pulled back from him to try and calm herself, because hugging him was only making her cry harder. That snotting type of cry where you couldn’t catch your breath to even speak. 

“What is it?” Sasuke whispered, looking into her eyes with an intensity she was starting to become familiar with recently. She shook her head, and she saw Sasuke glance over her shoulder at the nosy, almost gawking older librarians. With urgency, he took hold of her hand and pulled her with him deep into the maze-like stacks. She only half-registered the towering stack of multicolored books and scrolls he had pulled off the shelves for her, a steeple of medical texts that he was now abandoning to retreat with her deeper into the library. So deep, in fact, that heavy metal lantern sconces became the primary lighting, and their surroundings became archaic and ancient, modern research fading into yellowed pages and leather-bound journals and giant scrolls of brushed ink. In the depths of her mind, Sakura admired the labyrinth as a scholar, but she was busy being a new mother at this moment, and could only really register the newfound privacy. 

When they were alone, she tried to tell Sasuke that it wasn’t a trick, or a false-hope. That she was pregnant, just as he had claimed. That they were going to be parents. But her voice continued to fail her, so she pulled out the paperwork and pushed it into his hand. He narrowed his black, angular brows in confusion, his face paling when he realized this was an official medical document in his palm. He glanced back up at her with worry-widened eyes, and then back down to scan the wording. When he found the verdict that Sakura knew he would, his eyes flicked back up to her with a gleam of revelation. 

“You got your confirmation,” he sighed in relief, before closing his eyes with an inhale that indicated that he was accepting the verification for himself, too. He leaned his shoulder into one of the shelves they were pressed in-between, but his onyx eyes found hers again when she continued to cry. “Why are you crying?” he asked nervously, his fingers reaching out hesitantly to her own in that subtle, special way that had become theirs. “I thought you wanted this.”

She nodded vigorously and smiled shyly through the falling tears in the only way she could communicate at the moment. He glanced around once more to ensure their concealment before smirking and pulling her the rest of the way to him. His arm wrapped around her neck and breathed her in as he folded her into him. “Congratulations,” he murmured into her hair, pulling the strands away from her damp face. 

She pulled back to smile broadly and congratulate him, too, but rolled her eyes when she caught his own goading smirk. She knew the words he was holding back: I told you so. She knew he wanted to say them but was holding himself back for her own singular benefit. It was enough to help her regain her composure. “Yes, you were right, are you happy?” she snorted out. 

“Yes,” he nodded, ducking his eyes while he schooled his facial expression once more. He released all of her but the fingers of her left hand, their hands dangling between them, and turned back to lean his back against the bookshelf. He looked up at the dark ceiling as he continued with a whisper, “I am happy.”

And, of course, that made her cry again. 

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Sasuke had insisted that he could pull the sled of books, food, and medical supplies back to their little cabin in the woods, himself, but Sakura teased him when he decided to “take a break.” It was in good nature, especially since their royal host’s minka-maintenance crew offered to add their newly acquired things to their transport list, but Sasuke had denied the help. When Sakura suggested the idea of storing their extra things in more summoning scrolls like they did with everything else, Sasuke had shook his head, claiming that the ones he carried were full and that they’d do this the traditional way. 

“Are you sure that you don’t want to switch? I think I may be just a tad bit stronger than you.” Sasuke scoffed loudly at her jab but turned to face her with raised brows of exasperation when she added, “I mean, I do have two arms.” 

In a moment of offended silence, she saw Sasuke consider his options as she grinned mischievously. What would he do, she wondered? Goad her similarly? Insist she prove it with a ‘go right ahead, then?’ This wasn’t the first time she used his disadvantage against him, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. After flashing his eyes down to her abdomen, she witnessed her husband choose to swallow his next words, instead retorting with: “that must be extra handy.”  

Her laughter skipped along the snow like a rock on the water’s surface, until the white hills swallowed it. 

“This is nothing, even if you want to hop on top of your hoard like the little dragon you are,” he remarked with a suggestive side-ways glance in the direction of her acquired research. Ah, Sakura thought to herself. That was the reason. Her stomach swooned a little. Of course that was why. He had insisted to cart their things in case she tired-out on the trip back. 

She laughed at his cleverness. The Uchiha would always be his Sasuke-like self, going to great lengths to reroute everyone’s perception of him in order to disguise his thoughtfulness, kind-heartedness, and consideration for others. Even her. But it was just the dialect of Sasuke Uchiha, that language she was becoming more and more proficient in the closer they grew to one another. 

Sakura wasn’t helpless; even in the long days ahead when her body rounded with fullness and life, her feet swelling, and body cramping, she wouldn’t be helpless. And there would always be that little feminist urge to insist on reminding her shinobi husband of that fact. But when did a woman allow herself to be taken care of, and allow a man to trust in his own masculine itch to dote on his pregnant wife? She was lucky, she supposed, to be one of the strongest human beings on the planet, but have a man in her life that cherished her and her unborn child like fragile treasures in his life, something to tend to carefully in order to witness the successful growth. Sakura felt similarly about all of her patients. A gardener about his crop. A florist about her flowers. A mother about her growing child. A husband about his wife.

Even still, Sakura didn’t want to always set the precedent to her husband that she needed this type of support, especially a husband that wouldn’t be there during a lot of this process. She didn’t want to present an image of helplessness for Sasuke to recall and fret over while he was away. And on that same train of thought, Sakura allowed herself to bend, to be taken care of, because she suddenly realized that this was the only way that Sasuke thought he could help while he was here. She reminded herself that he absolutely didn’t believe her helpless. He just wanted to care for his pregnant wife, and so, she would let him. Because he certainly wouldn’t be there in the future to do so.

She climbed into the sled, testing her weight as she burrowed down into the clunky stronghold of her ‘hoard,’ wrapping herself in the furs covering the bulk. Once she was nestled like one of the apes in the warmth of the hotspring, Sasuke took up the attached rope and smirked. “I certainly hope that this arm doesn’t give out on you.” 

“I’m sure the Susanno would be an adequate substitute,” she countered with another helpful and senseful suggestion. 

“You want me without chakra and nearly blind on top of being an amputee?” he scoffed while he jerked the sled forward. “Forget the dragon. You’re like one of those cannibalistic female spiders who devour their mates after reproduction.”

“Don’t forget it,” she smiled deviously at his turned back. But Sakura noted the increase of his stamina, the ease of his posture as he towed her, and the relaxed cadence of his breath. Which had her highly suspicious that he had only faked needing the break in the first place. 

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In the night-time comfort of the fire-lit minka, Sasuke tucked himself into one of the many newly acquired texts he had selected for Sakura’s reading material. This one had intrigued him immediately among the selection of books on pregnancy. It was on shinobi genetics and the fetal development. Sasuke was infinitely curious to the potential of the little sun’s genetic predisposition. He also feared it greatly in the same sense, the legacy of the Sharingan a heavy burden on his Uchiha descendants. It wasn’t a one-hundred percent chance, but Sasuke was also aware of his clan’s history and chromosomal makeup. Whenever anyone had married into the Uchiha family, it didn’t matter what diversifying features and shinobi ninjutsu were mixed in, almost all children born from that marriage inherited their clans’ proudest lineage of power. Not always, and it was considered a profound sadness when the revered Sharingan didn’t present itself in one of the clan’s young members. Sometimes, the Sharingan would develop later in life when a traumatic event snapped it into place. However, for the few without it, it was an ostracization within the brainwashed mindset of superiority and supremeness harbored by the clan majority. 

It wasn’t until the death of his clan that Sasuke developed the single tomoe in each of his eyes, and every subsequent pang of loss or devastation afterward, developed it into what it was before he transplanted Itachi’s irises to form the Mangekyo. At the time, he had felt that Uchiha pride, believing that he was the last member to sport his clan’s black and red banners on a battlefield, but now… Now, Sasuke felt different about the Sharingan. What had it brought him, truly, other than the pain, corruption, and responsibility that came along with it? How many times in the past couple of months did Sasuke wish that he could pass his power to someone else, in envy of a simpler life? Was it such a bad thing, to hope that his child might be born without the kekkai-genkai at all? His child might get to live a simpler life, a life filled with the peace Sasuke would earn them through his sacrifice, and become a regular person without the weight of expectation. But he knew it was a very, very slim chance. 

On the other hand, if the worst came to worst regarding the Otsusuki, would his normal child be defenseless in the absence of power the Sharingan might afford them? No, Sasuke reminded himself, as he glanced over the textbook to admire his wife again. Sakura, like himself, was also several chapters through a book, sipping tea and occasionally looking up as she tapped one of those modern pen contraptions against her bottom lip in thought. He couldn’t help but imagine her dropping that pen and a little boy with pink hair and green eyes picking it up mischievously and running off with it into the snow despite his mother’s declarations to ‘get back here.’ Or a miniature Sakura, lacing her fingers behind her back as she peered over her mother’s shoulder to read what captivated her mother so thoroughly. The potential of the future was beautiful, if their children turned out like their mother, full of life and vibrancy, wisdom and intelligence, and maybe even that precise chakra control that allowed them superhuman strength. Sasuke smiled privately to himself behind his book’s pages at that vision. 

But then the foil of that vision came to the forefront of his mind, and he saw a miniature version of himself, frowning at the wall and ignoring all of his mother’s lecturing to be polite to others. Sasuke saw the evolution of that person, the traumatic events of life evolving those tomoe pricked red irises. Sasuke’s smile faded to a frown. But no. Sasuke wouldn’t let that happen. Because he was going to bring peace to the world. Even if his child was born with his black hair and onyx eyes demonstrating the dominance of the clan’s bloodline, the Sharingan would never get a chance to develop because the world would be peaceful. He would be sure of it. 

“What are you thinking about so intently over there?” rang out Sakura’s voice in the stillness of the room. It startled him back to the present moment, pulling him from his unspoken fears. She was beginning to see through him, to the very thoughts of his mind, with the way she was analyzing him of late. 

When he didn’t respond immediately, she crawled over to him to investigate his book, but Sasuke snapped it shut and tossed it into his pile before she could make out the title. The action caused her to assume something else. “Oh. You must be searching for your own confirmation,” she grinned innocently, coming to straddle his hips and wrap her own arms around his neck. 

He coughed loudly to disguise the choke, because she was obviously about to bring up sex again. Rubbing the back of his neck, he looked up to meet her eyes. “No, but I do remember skimming through a section at the library about hormonal changes in women during pregnancy that can cause them to have a—what was the term—oh...fluctuating libido. And from the looks of it, I’d say that piece of information has turned out to be true for the most part.” He followed that up with a teasing smirk. 

Sakura’s eyes widened and she scoffed in disbelief when he freed himself from beneath her, making his way over to the tea she’d left abandoned. He turned back to face her, sipping at the steam with that Uchiha smirk. “Yeah, well most husbands would take advantage of it,” she snarked, finding her feet and coming over to him to steal her tea back. “So what’s your problem?”

He blinked slowly at her, indicating that he wouldn’t rise to the bait. “I don’t have a problem,” was all he responded with. 

Sakura curled her lip at his lack of admission before grumbling, “Fine. If you need proof that it’s safe to have sex, then I’ll find it myself.” She sat determinedly back down amongst her pile of books and began speed-reading the indexes. Sasuke laughed privately to himself and returned back to his own book, already knowing that he had been the one to pre-read the indexes and purposefully slipped any and all mention of sex back into their catalogued locations—after reading them for himself, of course. 

And what he found wasn’t a thorough education on the topic, but it was enough to both reassure and make him wary at the same time. Sasuke wasn’t quite ready to resume the very same trajectory that resulted in their current predicament despite the textual evidence claiming that it was generally safe to do so. As soon as he had seen that little sun throb with life, he had swallowed his personal desires, because it felt intrusive, disruptive, and no longer…private? He wasn’t sure exactly how to put the feeling into words. It didn’t mean that he no longer found his wife sexually attractive now that he knew; in fact, it was quite the opposite. He just wanted to be careful, for the time being. He was simply high on other things right now and felt fulfilled in other ways to even care about sex. 

He attempted to feign sleep, until it became real sleep, that is. He hadn’t even known he had drifted off until Sakura practically yelled “I found it!”

And even in his sleep-induced haze, Sasuke let a small, muffled “fuck” escape from his lips as he rolled onto his back to gaze up at her. She walked over to him with a book, sitting down beside his parallel form, practically shoving a line of script in his face. It was a footnote, to be precise, a very minor note that he obviously missed from an angle he hadn’t considered. She read it out loud to him: “many women will report a decrease in sexual activity during pregnancy due to false beliefs and myths surrounding fetal safety during intercourse. This conclusion is due to a lack of formal sexual health education from healthcare professionals during antenatal visits, which emphasizes the need for trained professionals…” 

Sasuke retrieved the book from her hand before she finished, flipping it over to glare at the title he had specifically picked out with her in mind. Medical Advancements in Obstetrics. He let out an exasperated huff when she crossed her arms after he handed the book back to her. 

“Well, there you have it,” she announced proudly. “I guess we both have learned today that we need to trust each other more.” 

He sighed again before confessing—which was very much unlike himself—that he had in fact read up on the topic. “There are some rare instances where it can be considered unsafe,” Sasuke tried to say, but Sakura interrupted with: “very rare.”

“Hn,” Sasuke agreed. “Let’s just take it slow when we are both ready for it.”

Sakura laughed and it prickled the back of his neck in that way that let him know she was going to resort to some banter again. But to his surprise, she gripped him around the waist and tucked her chin onto his shoulder and smiled at him with those bright green eyes that did things to his stomach. “You’re not comfortable and I get it. That’s normal for all couples at first.” He pretended not to know what she was talking about. But then she added, Sasuke suspected because she couldn’t help herself, “I’ll keep my ‘fluctuating libido’ in check for your benefit, then.” She was relentless, Sasuke thought, as she jumped up to return to her own stack of texts.

And her hormones did fluctuate. The next morning, and several mornings after that, she was very sick. If she wasn’t vomiting, she was too hot or too cold. And if she wasn’t sick, she was tired. So incredibly tired. Sasuke had never seen Sakura this tired. She slept endlessly, to his worry, but all the texts reassured him that this was a normal part of the first trimester. Her appetite picked up steadily when she wasn’t sick, and to Sasuke’s immense annoyance, so did the snow monkeys who had developed the habit of periodically checking in on the couple. He made several trips back into town, just to keep everyone fed. His wife with the bizarre cravings for winter oranges, and the monkeys’ preference for the fish that Sasuke could no longer even eat in front of his wife because the smell of it alone caused her to lapse back into vomiting. Eventually, when Sakura began to show, he consented to the help of the royal minka’s groundskeepers. They came periodically, and to Sasuke’s surprise, Princess Koyuki came too. 

After about the fourth or fifth visit, Koyuki had suggested that Sakura return to the Land of Spring to stay with her whenever Sasuke was away in Kaguya’s realms. Sasuke hadn’t known that Sakura had relayed the details of everything, including the Zenshin, to the Princess, and wasn’t sure how he felt about their newfound friendship. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere for the time being, even if his eyes roamed up the mountain and the Otsusuki mystery began to plague his nightmare and felt like a crawling sensation in the back of his head when he was awake. 

“Go,” Sakura had told him softly as the two of them handed pieces of fish to the army of monkeys off the veranda. “I know delaying your mission is starting to get to you.” 

“I’m not leaving you alone,” he responded instantly, within a millisecond of her suggestion. It would go against all of his instincts to do so. Sasuke had learned his lesson in Sunagakure, and though his nightmares often included the Otsusuki, they equally plagued him with visions of his wife, rounded in pregnancy, facing off a hoard of Zenshin assassins. He felt like he was caught in a mental game of tug of war. Which threat was the biggest? Which decision would cost him? Because Sasuke was still habitually living his life in the anxious belief that the Universe would punish him—it was waiting for when it could punish him in the way that would hurt the most. That everything was too good to be true simply because he didn’t deserve it or because he still had yet to pay his due penance. 

Sakura sighed, and Sasuke couldn’t tell if it was out of frustration or pity because she knew his mindset. He bristled, but she came up to him to simply offer him the comfort of her hug. Their tiny sun throbbed between them, folded into their bodies as Sakura embraced him. His fingers slid from the roundness of her abdomen to the curve of her back to press the two of them closer. He pressed his forehead against hers when Sakura’s fingers came to hold his cheeks. “I won’t be alone. I’m going to accept Koyuki’s offer. I’ll stay with her while you’re away. I’ll be fine. We,” she clarified, with a small hand to her stomach, “will be okay.” 

Sasuke only breathed heavily, still at war. “Now come back inside. Let’s talk this out further with warm blankets and hot tea.”

And when Koyuki came to retrieve Sakura the following week, and every other week after that, Sasuke unenthusiastically watched his pregnant wife giggle with the princess, turn back to wave at him from the back of a horse-drawn sleigh, and disappear over the hills, taking that little sun of life with her. Eventually, long after the trace of that light faded from the view of Sasuke’s Rinnegan, Sasuke unstuck his feet from their rooted spot by the hotspring. He turned to the mountain, sighed, and pressed forward, the increasing crowd of snow apes happily content to follow on his heels as he traveled. He tried to turn his mind to Kaguya, focusing on his mission, but when he reached the top of the mountain, and the monkeys dispersed as Sasuke reached an uncomfortable altitude, Sasuke turned to survey the landscape. His eyes traced the path along the forest hills his wife would have taken, hoping, and yet knowing he wouldn’t find her.

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As Sakura grew by the weeks, the delicate quickening inside of her intensified into full blown fetal movements, flips, and kicks; they gave her as much life as her own heartbeat. Sakura was relieved to return to the Land of Spring each and every time she visited, eager for the warmth and looking forward to her doctors’ appointments. She knew that the Land of Spring didn’t have access to the modern ultrasound machines that Tsunade had implemented into Konoha’s medical practice, but Sakura was excited all the same just to have another medical professional confirm the health of her child. She couldn’t even find it in herself to care when the doctor made the note that that she was gaining more weight than was technically considered the appropriate amount for the second trimester—Sakura just simply didn’t care. She was too busy enjoying the pregnancy and the fact that she was getting to worry about weight gain to begin with, to really allow her weight to occupy her mind with any pressing worry. She picked up walking the snow perimeter of the forest after she returned to the Minka, just to satisfy the nagging professional thoughts in the back of her mind telling her to listen to the doctor. 

On one particular trip, when Sasuke spiraled from a portal into the foyer a night before he was supposed to return, only to discover that Sakura had beaten him there, he frowned as she threw her arms around his neck. 

“You came back early,” he criticized, ignoring her attempts to embrace him. “What if I hadn’t done the same? You’d be alone right now.” 

“I’m fine,” she whispered, just eager to touch him, and wishing he’d drop the lectures all together. She had only been incredibly keen to see him again, which is why she had retuned tonight instead of in the morning. This was the longest yet they’d been apart—an entire two weeks—since marooning themselves to this house like a ship to an island. Her hands were desperate and her mouth eager to meet his own, but he prevented her advances and stared into her eyes with displeasure. 

“Please,” she spoke into his scowl, imagining a different time and place, their private room in Sunagakure. She pushed her hands beneath the hem of his shirt, warm fingers finding the coldness of his bare skin. “Let me touch you.” 

She saw the moment he caved to her, his shoulders slackening slightly as he bowed his body over her, even though his frustration was still present. “If you give me your word that you won’t do this again, I’ll do whatever you want.” 

“Okay,” she bargained, considering it an easy trade. “You have my word.” 

His hand found the back of her neck, crashing his mouth against hers, as she began to strip his outerwear. When both of their backs were bare and exposed to the hearth at their feet, Sakura saw Sasuke’s eyes fall to the protrusion of her abdomen with a flicker of concern. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

Sakura could only nod as she tried to lead them across the room to the cushioned space against the wall they had taken up as their permanent sleeping arrangement. But Sasuke turned her to the table instead, pulling her down to sit atop him, to straddle his lap and face away from him. Sakura gasped as she sat down with her full weight against him—that nagging doctor’s note of weight gain suddenly springing forth to the forefront of her mind—but Sasuke didn’t seem to mind in the slightest at this position, only guiding her back and holding the front of her neck to position the back of her head against his shoulder. “Fuck, you’re everything,” he moaned against her skin when he glanced down over her shoulder and ravaged the bend in her neck. His hand found the new fullness of her right breast, and he cussed again. “Damn, I need two hands.” But he made do by draping his elbow across her chest to switch between the two. 

When he finally pushed into her slowly, Sakura moaned in surprise at the relief she felt to have him do so. Sakura had waited patiently for months, skirting around this desire in favor of ‘taking it slow.’ But she couldn’t wait anymore. She needed him. And she knew he needed her too, even despite his other demand for playing it safe. 

“Tell me if I need to stop,” he whispered in a pained sort of desperation, revealing his desire of the exact opposite, “or if you feel any pain whatsoever.” He stopped his movements when she let another sound of pleasure escape her mouth instead of acknowledging his words. The standstill was unbearable, and she found her words. 

“Okay, okay.” She whimpered. His hand found her shoulder as he angled her forward to press her more securely down upon him.

“Promise,” he moaned, “—promise me first.”

“My word, okay?” she choked, using the same phrase sardonically in her impatience. And then the true attention to her body began. He switched between pulling her flush against his chest, his fingers dancing along her throat as he tipped her chin skyward, and reaching beneath the swell of her stomach to find the spot that would bring her release. Sasuke’s hands were so very cold, but when they slipped across her nerves, they felt like unfettered fire. He edged her, his touch retreating just when she felt like bursting, and she would cry out from the loss of his performing fingers. 

At one point, he succumbed to his own moaning, choosing to move her back and forth atop him. Each thrust was a building of that explosion between them, and at one point, Sakura thought it was going to happen for both of them, but Sasuke slowed the pace to draw it out once more. “Harder,” she complained. 

“Say that again,” he whispered, “I liked that.”

She ground herself against him punishingly and he cussed from the sheer bliss in loss of control. Sakura moved herself against him at the pace she wanted because she was becoming desperate. But she felt awkward, the swell between her hips preventing her from managing the exact closeness that her husband had been able to achieve. She begged. “Please. Please.” 

Sasuke smirked into her neck before kissing it, trailing his tongue and teeth along it like a taunting succession of tingling magic. He gave her what she wanted eventually—the release she needed. And she threw her head back against his chest as she found it, the sound that left her throat sure to penetrate the minka’s interior. Sasuke pulled from her before, he too, shattered. And in the back of her always active medical mind, Sakura knew why. He had done his research in that library, after all, it seemed. It bothered her slightly, that he would deny himself, due to the fear that sperm would “ripen” the cervix as some medical texts claimed—texts he had obviously read. Some myths claimed it could cause a pre-term labor, but Sakura knew better and she wished he would have asked her. 

“I promise it’s okay,” she reassured him as he buried his forehead between her shoulder blades and caught his breath.

But when he carefully helped her stand, Sasuke cussed again lowly and terrified. “Shit, Sakura!” 

She looked down as he surveyed himself just before his eyes jerked up to find that, she, too had traces of blood between her legs. He ignored the blood on himself, grabbing her and taking her to the bathroom. His Rinnegan was activated within a moment, watching their child in a way that only he could. Sakura tried to reassure him as they moved. “It’s okay if there’s spotting. It’s all sensitive and swollen tissue, which can bleed. It happens.” She felt her uterus contract and bit back the whimper, turning the reassurance inward. Orgasms had this sort of effect on a pregnant body—it was normal to cramp some afterward, too.

But Sasuke’s worry never left his brow, even after she managed to convince him that nothing was incredibly serious, that it was okay, and to be expected. He didn’t deactivate the Rinnegan for a long time, until Sakura saw him wince from the strain, his chakra draining quickly. She placed a hand over his eye until he neutralized it. “I should have warned you beforehand, but sometimes it doesn’t even happen at all.” 

“I’ll hate myself forever if I fuck this up,” he confessed with shaking fingers, his hand coming to fully rest atop the life in her womb. He hadn’t been able to feel it yet, the movements. And the child remained still despite his concern for it. 

“You won’t,” she reassured him, placing her fingers atop his over her stomach. 

He was able to coax her into the bath, his lips tight and brows furrowed in concern as he watched her glide into the hot water that he had brought in from the hotspring. The blood furled from her skin, curling away from her legs in ribbons as the water whisked it clean. It barely stained the water, but Sasuke was watching the evidence as if she had just been stabbed in battle. She pulled him in after her, angling their bodies just as they had when Sasuke first realized she was pregnant. His hand found her stomach just as it had then, and for the first time, Sasuke felt it. The slow roll of their child’s body beneath their palms and the following kicks that came. He sighed from relief and Sakura laughed. “See? He’s okay.”

“He?” her husband whispered after a moment, and Sakura grinned with a flush at the slip. 

“I just keep picturing you,” she admitted timidly, “with your pouting lips and pinched expression. You know, little you from the academy.” 

“Hn,” he acknowledged, but Sakura could detect through his silence that there was something left unsaid. His overall tone didn’t hint at anything either, and Sakura wondered if maybe that was his intent. To not reveal any sort of opinion on the matter in fear of disappointing her with it.

“What is it?” she probed curiously, trying to turn in the bath to look over her shoulder at his expression. 

He held her against him, his palm sliding back to the swell between her hips. She was several months along now, her stomach round but still in the earlier stages—the roundness was made more pronounced by her shorter frame.  

“Nothing,” he reassured her, leaning his head back against the tub. 

“There’s something,” Sakura urged, “you’re just not telling me what you’re thinking.” 

He leaned forward, the water sloshing as he placed his chin atop her right shoulder. “I’m worried—about having a son like me.”

Sakura’s stomach tightened at such words, predicting the direction of this conversation. His forthright nervousness made her flinch, and Sakura already had a sinking feeling about why he was saying such things. She immediately bristled in defense of their unborn child. “There’s no reason to be.”

She felt Sasuke stiffen, and Sakura pursed her lips in frustration. Because biting his head off about it wasn’t going to ease his anxiety or keep him talking. But the anger was still there, no matter how hard she tried to filter it through her reasoning. “A son is not a curse.”

“Sakura,” he began, but she cut him off. 

“No,” she said indignantly, turning to face him now. The water threatened to spill from her movements. “Don’t drag the history of the Uchiha into the present. Don’t assume things about him before he’s even here.” 

Sasuke sighed again, speaking into her shoulder. “The world doesn’t need another me. I’m only saying this because you’re envisioning me in our child. I hope they’re nothing like me.”

“Nothing like you, huh?” she grumbled, her patience ebbing and indignation threatening to overflow in the same manner as their bath water. “Sasuke, you were an innocent child when you witnessed your own parents—” she cut off, shaking her head when she felt his body go rigid at the mention of that horrendous event. “You were a baby—a good kid forced into a mold the environment of a war-torn shinobi world made you. You became who you were and did what you did as a result of that. Being an Uchiha had nothing to do with it.”

His silence was thick with unspoken sentiments and Sakura turned and straddled his legs in the tub. “Do you hear me? Anyone would have done what you did. You just happened to bear the Uchiha last name, in addition. It’s more coincidental than anything else.”

She saw him struggle with words unsaid. And even though they were unexpressed, she knew what they were. He wore them like some sort of armor of repentance—like a banner of perpetual apology for his past actions. 

“You are a good person,” she headed him off, before he could even voice the opposite of her statement.  

“The Uchiha have the Curse of Hatred,” he whispered, ignoring her declaration, his fingers trailing up to strum along her ribs. The soft touch melted her stern expression immediately and her frustration with the man before her unspooled from within her just as the ribbons of blood had. “When we lose our loved ones, it turns into blackening despair in the form of a new Sharingan, remember? It’s why I fear loving you, loving our child. And if they’re like me, that hatred can destroy them—”

And Sakura’s fear regarding Sasuke reverting back to a life of vengeance suddenly held less weight as she truly stopped to think about it. After Sasuke’s threats to Kakashi and Gaara in Suna, and after Shikamaru had personally come to her about this very topic, Sakura had made Sasuke vow out of that same fear. Because at some point, she had begun to doubt Sasuke’s resolve and how it might affect his dedication to the peace of the future—her doubt fed off her own trauma of his past actions and the insecurity that she may be his stumbling block, and in effect, the world—just as Shikamaru had phrased it to manipulate her the most. But now, she could see through all of that to the truth of it. The last year of back and forth about this very topic came down to a simple fact. 

“You want to know something—” she voiced it aloud to him. “You’ve proven one can come back from that. Naruto may have been a light for you Sasuke, and I know that you think his life, and now mine, are what keep you on the straight and narrow path. But you walked out of darkness on your own two feet. Naruto may have shone for you, but you followed the light out of it. Because you’re good—you chose to be good in the end. Don’t ever forget that.”

And Sakura realized why she suddenly felt so unwaveringly certain about this fact, and wondered if it was because she was a mother now. It gave her unimaginable empathy and the ability to see Sasuke as someone’s child. It gave her the perspective of what his mother might say to Sasuke now. 

He nodded and swallowed thickly, and Sakura watched his eyes grow as glassy and reflective as the water. Absent-mindedly, he reached up and traced the Uchiha symbol between her shoulder blades. 

“The fact alone that you’re an Uchiha, now, gives me hope. A new generation of Uchiha for the new era of peace. It’s why I’ll have to leave you both—to protect that.”

“Yes,” she breathed, a sad smile curving her lips and creasing her eyes. He was coming around to accepting his role again. They both hated to think about it.

“I like the idea of another you skipping around the academy though,” he confessed after a silent moment, a smirk vanishing those wistful tears. “It would give me comfort knowing you have such a companion with your likeness.”

Sakura snorted, leaning back to cross her arms in the water. “Why, so you can call us both annoying?”

“If she’s as foolishly boy crazy as you were, I might,” he scolded, pulling on his wife’s ear teasingly. 

Sakura pouted, reaching up to touch her forehead despondently. “Now this is a real curse. The only thing we should be worried about is our poor child inheriting this ‘billboard brow.’” 

Sasuke reached up to poke it roughly. “But it’s perfect for that.” She scowled at him and he laughed. The water rippled around them and Sakura liked to imagine that the weight of an actual laugh from her otherwise stoic and brooding husband was enough to drop into the tub and create a resounding effect on both of them. The water stilled, clinging to their skin as it leveled.

“She’d be bossy—” Sakura added. 

“And sassing Naruto’s kid around, too,” Sasuke added. “I think I’d like to see that.” 

Her laugh made its own gentle ripples. 

.

.

.

It was in the early hours the next morning when Sakura curled her arms around Sasuke’s waist and pushed his book aside. He had been flipping through Medical Advancements in Obstetrics for more info about bleeding after intercourse during pregnancy. He had read up on the topic of sex during pregnancy in the library with what little resources were available, but he was needing the extra reassurance at the moment. He had woken in the middle of the night from a nightmare, that midnight worry drowning his common sense, but despite his headache, he pushed back his hair and activated the Rinnegan to check on the little sun. It seemed steady, but Sasuke had this sinking feeling that he wasn’t doing enough and sought further reassurance from the text. However, he was coming up short and was now cursing himself for not checking out what literature was available about it in the first place in order to read it twice. 

Sakura’s voice came from the floor, beside his leg. “I promise it’s okay. It has stopped. If it comes back, I’ll go back into town for a checkup. Does that help ease your concern?”

“Fine,” he yielded, rubbing his eye tiredly. Sakura made to pull him back down beside her in the warmth of their bed, but the both of them shot straight up as a riot of angry monkey chatter picked up from the roof and veranda. “Stay here.” Sasuke was on his own two feet and heading for the door when the chatter turned into shrieks of panic. He threw open the door, fully expecting to see some sort of predator picking off one of the snow monkeys from the ever-increasing numbers that had seemed to coagulate along the veranda, the minka’s roof, and residing regularly in the hotspring of late. In the back of his mind, Sasuke wondered when exactly he had become such a person that was willing to dart outdoors at the ungodly hour of sunrise to fight off a creature posing a threat to the monkey hoard he had become the caretaker of. He looked around at the small explosion of chaos, some of the creatures darting into the woods, others bouncing along the snow-laden eaves with angry stomping and screeching. The little monkey who had selected Sasuke as his personal roost chose to mimic the others atop Sasuke’s shoulder. 

For goodness sake, what is it, Sasuke wanted to shout at all of them. But then he saw their source of alarm. Not a beast, after all. But a man. A lone figure trudging down the hill with a small pack horse behind him. Eventually, as the man drew nearer, most of the monkeys scattered into the trees around them, their instincts urging them to flee from this stranger. Sasuke narrowed his eyes as the man got closer, the Uchiha not entirely sure what to make about the entire situation. Whereas the apes caved to their own flighty natures, Sasuke’s initial reaction was something more along the lines of defense. He grew instantly alarmed at this man’s sudden presence, Sasuke’s fears always keeping him ready for when their hiding spot would be discovered. He met the man in the middle, and Sasuke raised an eyebrow when he recognized the old man from their first visit—the Minka’s lead private groundskeeper. 

“Help an old man, will you?” the stranger greeted, tugging fiercely on the little pack horse’s lead. A shaggy, squat little creature shorter than the man himself. It stubbornly stretched out its neck, barely trudging along in the snow in protest of the cold. 

“What are you doing here?” Sasuke asked coldly, his tone sharper than the wind. 

“Forgot you’re not the most polite youngster I’ve encountered,” the elder grumbled, giving another tug on the loaded down animal. He fished out a carrot from his pocket to entice the poor creature, but the monkey still attached to Sasuke at the shoulder jumped down to snatch at it. 

“Shoo, you little thief,” hissed the elder, concealing the carrot once more, to which the monkey hissed back, darting back behind Sasuke’s leg. Sasuke raised an eyebrow. No wonder the monkey reacted so intensely—they obviously had a history with this man. Sasuke could see how the local ape population might have negative experiences with a groundskeeper who wholly ignored them or treated them like pests. 

Sasuke stood in silence, ready to wait out the man’s answer, and was annoyed when he didn’t do so, but continued to make his way to the Minka, pulling the supply horse past Sasuke altogether. “We restocked recently, so I don’t know why you’ve come all this way.”

“I work for the Princess, young man. She tells me to make my way to her winter retreat to make a delivery, then I do so. Foo, here, is not so obedient—come, girl! We are so close!”

Sasuke was trying not to bite the man’s head off, stop him in his tracks, singlehandedly unload the immovable horse right then and there, and send the elder back on his way. But he heard Sakura’s voice from over his shoulder. “Good morning, Sugimoto-sama!” 

The old man instantly smiled and waved, continuing to trudge past Sasuke toward his wife. He reached into the pocket of his many winter layers, pulling free a small scroll of parchment. “A letter for you miss, from the Leaf!” 

Sasuke’s eyes widened as he watched the man hand Sakura the little scroll, the two bowing formally in greeting and thanks. A letter? From the Leaf Village? Sasuke scowled as he processed this. He had strictly refrained from creating a paper trail to the Leaf, despite his curiosity on Kakashi’s progress and pursuit of the remaining Zenshin organization members, because Sasuke was keenly aware of how Sakura’s continued safety depended on their privacy —but here was his wife, abandoning all caution as usual, and communicating with the Leaf without concern whatsoever. He massaged his aching temple, the Rinnegan headache becoming all-consuming for another reason completely. 

Sakura performed all her traditions of good-mannered hosting of a visitor, including tea, and exchanging conversation with Sugimoto while Sasuke was given the task of unloading the fresh food, rice, and firewood from the tired horse’s back. If he weren’t peeved about the current situation, Sasuke might have smirked when the lazy horse suddenly picked up speed as it was turned back toward its home in the Land of Spring, and practically dragged the old man back up the hill. 

Sakura seemed entirely oblivious to Sasuke’s mood as she tore open the letter almost as soon as Sugimoto was out of sight, smiling widely at the written script unfurled on the floor in front of her. She was already poised to write a response when she spotted Sasuke scowling deeply from the doorframe. 

“What?” she asked, pen frozen in mid-air, her knees bent and feet splayed out on either side of her to accommodate her growing baby bump. 

“How long have you been communicating with the Leaf since we arrived in the Land of Spring?” he asked, and she frowned with a sigh. 

“Just one or twice this past week, why? It’s not a big deal.”

Sasuke stood dumbfounded at that revelation for a second, before turning to slide the door shut behind him, the blinding white light from outside suddenly dimming the room in fire-lit darkness. “Not a big deal? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is right now? I thought we had agreed to lay low—to keep this a secret.” 

“I was afraid you might overreact like this,” she disclosed crossly, turning back to the letter.

“If you thought I’d react this way, then why did you do it in the first place?” The latter part barely made it out without his tone and volume of voice shifting. She had waited to both write and send those damn letters when he was unaware. In town, without even telling him. 

“Look,” she exhaled, mirroring Sasuke’s irritation with the same sort of bewilderment. Like he was in the wrong and she had no idea where he was finding the audacity to be angry with her. “You didn’t tell me I couldn’t write to Lady Tsunade. And I didn’t mention the baby, just—”

Sasuke shook his head. “You’re missing the point! We shouldn’t be leaving a paper trail to our location, Sakura. You’re a ninja—how do you not know this basic thing?”

She found her feet beneath her at this, struggling to look as fierce as she hoped with her prominent stomach. “You’re quite right. I am a ninja. And you need to start treating me like one. I have responsibilities back at home that I need to take care of.” 

Sasuke wanted to throw something, but all he managed was the widening and flashing of his eyes. He was too level headed to react like a lunatic in the presence of his very pregnant wife. He exhaled the urge right out his flared nostrils. “What could be more important than you and our child’s safety? The Zenshin are still after you, dammit.”

“For your information,” she responded in that miffed and proper inflection that had Sasuke grating his teeth. “I thought it pretty important to inform Tsunade that the clinical trial runs of the H. Perforartum should cease until my return—since it has a pretty significant interaction defect, wouldn’t you say?” 

Sasuke seethed. He didn’t care in the slightest what occurred back in the Leaf—not at the moment. Not when his entire world was reduced to three facts: Sakura was pregnant, a group of heretics still wanted her dead, and Sasuke had a mission to complete that kept him at a distance from her. The very minute he found out she was pregnant, he should have carried her kicking and screaming back to the Leaf if she was so insistent on being involved—that way, Sasuke could have joined Kakashi in the hunt for the Zenshin and irradicated them personally just as he had originally planned. 

“I thought this was better—” she frowned, waving up and down to suggest that he, or something about him, was at fault for what she believed to be his unreasonable behavior. “Your fear. I thought you were over this—you said you were okay now—that it was okay if I went into town.”

He stiffened in his own self-defense. She was hitting where she knew it would hurt because it regarded the true essence of himself. “I also said not to throw all caution to the wind. Remember that part?” 

Sasuke wanted to leave just as much as he never wanted to leave her alone again-- to storm out as he always did when things got uncomfortable, or he got angry, or flustered. Literally any reason to leave, he would take it. And right now, he wanted to have a minute to calm down. 

“Just forget it,” he sighed, opening the door and stepping back onto the veranda. “Do as you like, Sakura.” She didn’t say anything to stop him. He waited for her to, to pull him back by his hand and tell him she was sorry, that she would stop endangering herself, stop being so reckless. But she watched him leave stubbornly, and Sasuke remembered who his wife was. Determined. Selfless. A leader in her own right. She’d never put herself first. Sasuke stomach sank at that realization as he summoned shadow clones and scouted the perimeter for any sign that their location had been compromised. 

.

.

.

That evening, when Sakura’s feet hurt from swelling, and the child in her womb strained and pushed against her ribs, she finally stretched and stood from the layers of bedding near the center hearth. At some point, she had fallen asleep after she’d collapsed from the exhaustion, frustration, and guilt from arguing with her husband. Where he had gone off to, she didn’t know. She didn’t think Sasuke would just take off toward the mountain again, fleeing back to Kaguya’s ice dimension—their promise to let each other know when they were leaving was one she’d never let him get out of now—but how angry was he? Would he retaliate for her own actions by choosing to do the very thing he knew would upset her? Hadn’t she done that to him by choosing to secretly mail those letter to Tsunade while she was in town—the action alone was evidence that she knew it would upset him if he knew she was corresponding with the Leaf at present. She had told herself it wouldn’t be a big deal, she was a capable shinobi, that she had a responsibility to her patients back home--and wasn’t he over the whole Zenshin thing anyway? But she had known the truth of it, that he would react like he had, and chosen to do so anyway. 

Groaning, she placed her palm on her aching back as she walked toward the door, trying to balance herself with the round heaviness teetering her front like a heavy sack of millet. The child kicked her bladder in protest of the new position she was implementing, and Sakura’s breath hitched from the tiny jab as she struggled to move across the room. The minka was dark and gloomy, a blackness radiating beyond the sphere of firelight, and when Sakura slowly opened the front door, her breath hitched for another reason. 

Standing vigil and surrounded by sleeping, ruby-faced macaques, Sasuke Uchiha leaned his left shoulder against the post of the veranda, his knee propped under the curve of his right elbow. He was looking out across the wide expanse of snow that led back to the Land of Spring, his steaming exhalation of breath in the bitter black weather the only sign of life within him. The snoozing monkeys around him were more animated than Sasuke was, as if he were an unmovable wall, a shield steadfast in its mission of being impermeable. 

Seeing him prostrated so, keeping watch in a merciless environment…it made the knife of guilt in her chest a million times sharper. “Sasuke, come inside.”

He said nothing in reply, making zero movement to even indicate that he had heard her, but a few of the monkeys startled as she spoke, moving off into the woods at their disturbed sleep. 

“If you insist on sitting there, at least take up your post in the hot spring to stay warm.” 

No reply came. Just persisting silent stillness.

It wasn’t until she knelt beside him and touched his hand, a block of ice against her fingertips, that Sasuke’s staring eyes moved to the right to observe her position beside him. “Go back in,” he finally spoke when she held firmly to his fingers and brought them to her lap to enfold in her own. 

“Not until you come with me,” she pleaded, breathing on his fingers to warm them. His eyes met hers and they both stared at each other, each with their own emotions, feelings, and fears. It was like two waves rising on the sea to face each other. Would they crash again, or bend and fold into one another to become of one mind? Their eyes bounced, searching the others for something. Confusion. Clarification. Understanding. Anything. 

After a long moment of locked and diverting eyes, Sakura whispered “I’m sorry,” into his hand, placing her cheek against the top of his knuckles. 

“No, the fault is mine,” he responded immediately, eyes finding the snowy path ahead of him again. “I’m trying to not be so fearful—”

“Shh,” she hushed him, as she turned his palm face up in her lap. “I shouldn’t have said that. Let me be the one to apologize. I know how much trouble you’ve gone to keep me safe, and even if I don’t agree with your fear, it doesn’t mean that I should disregard your concerns, and I am sorry for that.”

Sasuke shook his head. “I’m just—” he sighed, the steam of his breath filling the air. “I’ll be better once the Zenshin are out of the picture. It’s hard enough to leave you alone when I know they’re out there somewhere.”

She nodded slowly. She knew this. She may have run out of patience for his secrecy, but it was still his fear. And fear was so innate in a person. So immovable and almost impossible to overcome on one’s own. She knew this as a medical counselor and was berating herself for starting to lose sight of Sasuke as a patient, too, while she focused on herself and growing a baby. 

“I’m not trying to be controlling,” he added quickly. “I just—” he attempted to explain, but his voice gace and fell away like the snow on the breeze. 

“You need the peace of mind,” she finished for him. “I get it, Sasuke. If every variable can be controlled, you feel like the worst case can be preventable. That’s a very common method of coping with fear and anxiety.” 

“How am I supposed to continue my mission, when you’re here, alone, vulnerable and pregnant, a troupe of killers after you, and now our location might be compromised? At least before, I felt like we had some measure of secrecy—that we couldn’t be found.”

Sakura’s stomach twisted as the weight of what he just revealed and her own actions settled into her chilling bones. “I’m sorry. I was selfish. I want you to be able to proceed peacefully. At the very least, I should have communicated my plans with you. The letter from Tsunade blindsided you—I won’t send anymore.”

For the first time, his fingers squeezed her own. “I understand why you did it the way you did. I would have prevented you from your work—something I promised myself not to get in the way of. I keep breaking that. Send your letters. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

When Sakura made no reply, Sasuke stood from his frozen position, pulling her by their connected fingers. When he closed the door behind her, Sakura found his eyes again. “You’re not going to go back to the Ice Realm, are you?” 

They both knew what she was referring to. If Sasuke was promising to stay by her side again, it was because he had decided not to keep pursuing his mission. 

“The baby is growing quickly,” he stated, already confirming her suspicion with that alone. “It’s been months, now, and I haven’t been able to make much progress with the ice fortress. We should begin making our way back to Konoha. I want you home and when the baby comes.”

Sakura shook her head. “Sasuke, no. We still have plenty of time. I promise we are fine. Tsunade is the only one that read my letter and I didn’t even tell her where we are or mention the baby. We’re secure and I won’t send any more.”

“Let’s go home, Sakura,” he exhaled, burying his face into her shoulder. His head was so very heavy, and she knew he was tired of it all. Tired of arguing with her. Tired of the travel. Tired of his mission. Tired of the stress he was under. He was hoping to relieve that stress by removing them from the picture completely. She felt his fingertips brush against her abdomen, their child unmoving and asleep between them. “I’ll come back on my own after the baby’s born. I want you safe. I want you warm and surrounded by the people who love you.”

“You love me and you’re all I need,” she interjected and she felt him reinforce himself at her resistance. “And I love you. So let me help you, now. One more month. If we can’t figure it out together in one month, we’ll go.” Sakura felt bereft. Like she had genuinely made a mistake and now it was like a domino effect of cause and effect. Because Sasuke believed Sakura had potentially revealed their location, he didn’t feel comfortable leaving her alone now, and because of that, there was no point staying here much longer, which would delay his mission again, risking the shinobi world’s exposure to the Otsutsuki. Shikamaru’s words haunted her: “Do you need him more than the world does?”

“I can’t bring you with me through the portal, remember?” Sasuke replied with steadfast determination, like he was mentally preparing for her arsenal of techniques to have her way again. “And one month is too long. You’re due in April.”

“I know,” she waved her hands, pulling away and retreating to their pile of paper and notes and books they’d acquired at the beginning of her pregnancy. Sakura tore a page free. “Show me what it looks like.” 

Sasuke sighed again, turning away from her completely. She could tell he was almost there, almost done participating in this conversation completely. “Sakura just focus on you and the baby.”

“I’ve been doing nothing but for months.” She argued, walking forward until she was in front of him again, and held out a paper.“Just draw it. Please.”

And that was the first move Sakura made to get him to see her side of it again. They discussed it long into the night and into the next morning. So immersed were they in the discussion, that Sakura hadn’t realized she had skipped a full night’s rest until the sun began to rise. 

“You think there might be more White Zetsu inside?” she asked, realizing just how little she knew anything about what Sasuke was doing in the Ice Realm. 

“That or an Otsusuki member,” he informed. “Why else would it be impenetrable? There are access points all around it, but they have been consumed by ice.” 

“Can you melt your way inside?” she inquired, even though Sakura already supposed the fireball jutsu was the first thing Sasuke Uchiha had tried.

“No,” he clarified. “Even the Amaterasu doesn’t melt the ice.”

“Lightning style,” Sakura skipped to the next thing he would have tried. “What does that do?”

“Nothing but skip along the ice as if it were nothing.” It sounded like he was amusing her curiosity while simultaneously trying to prove that he had already tried everything. He was ready for all of her questions the way a ninja was ready for a barrage of attacks.

“This domed portion of the fortress would be strong from the outside, but the weakest part from within.” Sakura was running her fingers along the curve of it. “I can tell you from personal experience. One kick from our child could pop it like a balloon.” Her hands roamed to the towers raising up beside it. “The steeples are stronger, but not if pressure is applied from the side.”

Sasuke brow rose suddenly. As if he were surprised by something she had just said. “Wait. Say that part again.” 

“Which part?” 

“The Dome. What you said about the dome.”

“If you apply pressure from the inside, it might be weaker,” she thought aloud again and Sasuke’s eyes widened as they skittered across his rough sketch, picking it up with his fingers for the first time since drawing it out. Sakura continued. “But how are you supposed to apply pressure from the inside, if you can’t get in?” 

His eyes found hers, jumping up from the sketch to land on her, and creasing from the smirk. His Rinnegan flashed behind his bangs. “Planetary Devastation.” 

Sakura was filled with the vision of it, the ground lifting in jagged pieces to crash against the black chakra ball until whatever was in the way was encapsulated with earth. She was familiar with the Rinnegan ability—she had seen it used when Pain destroyed the village and again during the Fourth Shinobi World War. But it was a costly jutsu.

“That would cost you too much chakra,” Sakura deduced. “You’d already be depleted when you got there. You’re already having to rely on the chakra pills. You’d need a lot of time to recover.”

“Yes,” he confirmed, eyes sidecast, his palm gripping his chin thoughtfully, the fingers mocing back and forth against his lips.

“How much time?” she asked. 

“I don’t know,” he admitted, sitting back. He was stealing himself again, the temptation of a new plan being squashed under his heel. “But it would be too long and I’m not leaving you alone. I’ll come back after the baby gets here.”

Sakura pushed, pressing against his resolve like a persistent wind. “We can’t just leave without any progress after being here for seven months.”

“Yes, we can,” he declared, pushing up from the table and concealing the sketch in finality. “And we are.”

“Would it take longer than a week?” she suddenly asked, a spark of an idea springing to life. Maybe it wasn’t too late to fix her mistake. 

“It depends on various factors,” he sighed. “One of which is what’s inside.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Why?”

Sakura gave it her final effort. “Even if our location was leaked—which I highly doubt, by the way—travel to the land of Spring is restricted in February due to ice. So, if you went now, you’d make it back before any potential Zenshin members could even get here.”

.

.

.

He had told her no again and again, that it was too risky now. That he wasn’t going to cave to her this time. That he was going to demand they return the Leaf no matter what she said to try and convince him. 

But she had promised again, in the ways that her promises always began. With lips, tender pressure, and persisting hands. In the way that drowned him and he’d give her anything she wanted. Because he fucking loved her. Was consumed in the worship of the woman bearing his child, and she knew that. “I promise I’ll return with you to Konoha after you get back. I won’t argue anymore. We will leave for the Leaf as soon as you return. You have my word.” 

And god, it was so hard to resist her. Why was it so damn difficult? Well, he thought, probably because he also wanted to make progress. He kept halting all advancement toward the one thing that kept him from a life with his family. Maybe, just maybe, the Otsusuki were inside, or whatever was inside, would give him the breakthrough he would need. Maybe he was only one battle away from being done with all of this. And then he wouldn’t have to miss anything. It was a thought that had driven him up the mountain countless times in the last few months, and with more urgency the larger his child grew in Sakura’s expanding abdomen.  

“You’ll keep your promises? Both of them?” 

“Yes,” she whispered against his lips. She knew she had him. She had won again.

“Ok,” he breathed with his head against her forehead. “One more week. That’s it. And then we are leaving.”

“One week,” she sealed her words with his lips.

And it was that future he wanted so desperately with his family that had Sasuke bending like the trees in the winter wind one final time. He didn’t know at the time that bending in this moment would utterly and completely break him.  

.

.

Sakura’s own heart fell to her feet at his sudden stricken posture and wide eyes, and her head immediately sorted through the possible scenarios that would cause Sasuke Uchiha to look at her like that. Her first thought was that he had found them, the Otsusuki in Kaguya’s ice realm, and he had come back to retrieve her and run… but then Sakura witnessed Sasuke flinch and clutch his temple, and she reassessed her conclusion, hypothesizing a new answer to his panic. His knee hit the ground from the fatigue of the continued use of the Rinnegan, his visual prowess steadily draining the chakra that he no longer had after two consecutive dimensional jumps. But he was still staring at her with it despite the blood flowing freely from it now, like he couldn’t deactivate it no matter what it cost him. 

Sakura used her rising momentum of greeting to meet him the rest of the way, falling to her knees with him and bringing her hands up to the sides of his face, already beginning her medical assessment. “What is it? Is it the Rinnegan?”

But he didn’t answer as his breathing grew ragged. He pulled her hands from his face and held her back at arm’s length, staring at the small space between them before the purple of the Rinnegan found her own eyes, heavy with something Sakura would describe as distress. He was afraid. No, it was utter dismay in his face. 

But the words that came next, Sakura would never have expected in any scenario she could have ever conjured in her mind to explain Sasuke’s behavior. Not ever. Because it was impossible. “Sakura, you’re…” he began, stumbling as he began to search her eyes for any sort of reasoning. “You’re—”

“I’m here,” she finished for him, trying to check him over. Something terrible was wrong with him. 

He shook his head. “You’re pregnant?” It was a question that he had to swallow before voicing. 

She just stared down at him, a wave of confusion sweeping her up in a tidal wave until she broke the surface for a breath of clarity. “What,” she asked, taken aback and blinking at him like he’d just said something as ridiculous as the time he had announced “I will become Hokage” during the Fourth Shinobi World War. “Pregnant?” she questioned with a small laugh of pure relief that he was okay. Obviously delirious from the chakra loss, but nothing more. “No, of course not.”

But his Rinnegan never left her, and it fell once more to the space between them, directed above her knees and to her stomach. He swallowed and his shaking hand found her arm and clutched it firmly. “I can see it.”

“What?” she asked again, trying to move back, but his hand firmly held her in place. “What are you talking about?” She laughed nervously again, reaching for his face to cover his blood dripping eye. She knew how much pain it was causing him, and she covered it with her hand. “Did you hit your head?” she questioned seriously. 

“The Rinnegan can see the soul.” He whispered it urgently with urgency and a tremor in his voice that made Sakura’s own eyes widen. 

Sakura’s right hand fell away from his eye and followed his line of sight as it landed once more to her stomach. “It’s like that girl’s,” he continued with heavy breaths. “The girl at the brothel who was..” he didn’t finish the sentence.

Sakura pulled her arm away from him, sitting back to create space, and gaped up at him. What was he saying? She couldn’t wrap her head around the information. Her hand found her stomach instantly as she shook her head. The Rinnegan could see souls? He’d lost his mind. Of course, she wasn’t--. “What? That’s not possible. Sasuke, I’m not…” she, too, couldn’t even say the word. 

When she looked up from her guarded abdomen, Sasuke stared wide-eyed between them at the floor, like he was going into shock. His face was pale and he clutched at his Rinnegan, the trail of blood now oozing between his fingers at the strain. His breath was labored, but he was unbelievably still. 

“Sasuke, I don’t know what you think you see, but I’m telling you—”

He started to rise, pushing against his knee, until he was standing above her. Sasuke’s gaze was unseeing, internal, and utterly distraught. Like his world had just been impacted by an asteroid of life-altering magnitude. It was an expression of devastation that would haunt Sakura for months to come. “I need a minute.” His words were a ragged whisper. And Sakura could only stare after him as he stumbled back toward the exit as he clutched at the Rinnegan. There would be no pleading with him to stay like she had on the border of the Land of Waterfalls, taking his hand and asking him to take that minute at her side. Because Sakura was equally stunned, transfixed on his form as he vacated the space, and letting out her own ragged gasp. 

She also felt like she had just been struck into a million fragments of herself, and she didn’t even know where to begin to pick them all up. “No,” she whispered to the now empty room. “It’s not possible. I did everything right.” 

She scrambled to her feet and rushed to her bag, spilling the newly organized contents recklessly on the floor until she found the canvas bundle of contraceptives, unrolling the labeled vials of carefully measured doses. She charted them in her mind, the proof of her consistency right before her. She hadn’t missed anything, and a single dose lasted a month, and she had packed several doses for the future for both of them. So, it was impossible… Wasn’t it?

Sakura reflected on her symptoms of the last 48 hours and her heart stopped from the jolt of the coincidence. The nausea. The motion sickness that came and left like the wind. The mood swings. No. No, no, no, no. Her brain was moving at rapid speed, and she fell into her medical persona to deal with the shock of it. Absolutely not. She laughed at the absurdity. Three times! That was it. They had only had sex the three times! She had marked the dates on her log. Two times they were both protected, so it would have to be the first time that they slept together if she considered the lack of coverage on her husband’s part and the medical timeline of fetal activity. In the cave, she had let him... Stop. Think. Back to the timeline. Because of her mission at the brothel, Sakura had been a couple weeks into a dose of contraceptive before their joining in the cave. So, if Sasuke was right, and he was seeing a pinpoint of life in her lower abdomen with the Rinnegan, why hadn’t that contraceptive been enough to prevent pregnancy? 

Sakura glanced down at the pile of bottles and medicines with labels now scattered at her knees. The yellow capsules within one large bottle shined brightly up at her. She snatched up the bottle of H. Perforatum with a shaking hand and brought it up to eye level. She’d taken this to test it for Rugo as an antidepressant the day after her and Sasuke had... Oh shit. Her other shaking hand fell to her stomach once more. H. Perforatum was of the family Hypericaceae. It warded off depression by boosting the metabolism and.. oh no. No, no, NO. Had it interacted? She’d only chewed up a tiny piece to test it. The evening after Sakura had taken a metabolism boosting herb that had the potential to burn off and clear the body of chemicals, reducing their levels and effectiveness. Like her freaking birth control. She had been overconfident and been careless. She’d had her eyes set on a patient and forgotten to take care of herself, a habit she’d developed since the Fourth Shinobi World War. The H. Perforatum. It had nulled all her other medications the morning after she’d given herself to Sasuke Uchiha in a cave of stars.  

.

.

.

Sasuke tumbled out of the mikan into a snowstorm. It was one of the coldest of colds he’d ever found himself in, but he couldn’t feel it. The blizzard wind tore at his lungs, but he wasn’t able to breathe anyway. The sharp stabbing ice of the air did nothing but numb him completely. He tripped through knee high snow into the woods beside the mikan, colliding his shoulder into one of the looming cedar trees. He fell to his knees, his palm and shoulder digging into the blanketed trunk. 

Sasuke stared into the whitewashed blackness, the panic of his chest as whole and black as the endless darkness beyond the woods. Had he ever had a panic attack like this before? Sasuke had once been trapped by the eyes of Orochimaru in the Forest of Death, a prey locked in fear by a predator, the killing intent so strong that it paralyzed him at Sakura’s side. He’d had to stab himself in the leg then, to break the paralysis and save them both. But now, Sasuke felt like that once more, staring and caught by that black unknown of the future that would come to fruition as a consequence of his own actions. 

He had known immediately what he was seeing when his eyes had found his wife. He’d seen it before. The iridescent glow of life that only the Rinnegan, the eye of gods, could detect. That girl at the brothel whom Sakura had gone to great lengths to try and help, also concealed such a life deep within her abdomen. No amount of staring at Sakura’s stomach had made the little sun change. It glowed. And glowed. And glowed in its undeniability. 

It was one thing to fantasize about such a scenario in a future pretense after Sasuke had established the unwavering peace for generations to come. After he’d done his duty to the world. But now that he was faced with the collapsing present, Sasuke felt himself go absolutely pale. Drained from blood like he had become the walking winter of his past. A past he’d never, ever live down or be able to account for now. How was the spring of life ever supposed to bloom in the wake of the frozen path he’d leave his descendants? He’d have to turn and face his child with all of his recorded history, admit to his wrongdoings and crimes, and one day try to explain it all to them. How he’d turned on the Leaf. Betrayed his friends. Had tried to kill their own mother. He almost threw up right there, coloring the white snow with bile, at that sudden realization. The shame alone would cripple him before he even got the chance to try to confess and explain.

With every labored breath, came the critical voices that Sasuke had internalized in the last several months: 

“If you want to know what I think, I think it would be best for both Naruto and Sakura if you left and didn’t come back—even I can see that Sakura suffers greatly because of you,”

“I have to ensure that you are the man that Naruto says you are,” 

“You’re not going to do this—this isn’t who you are anymore,”

“The devil—he’s finally come for me,”

“Naruto and I will not let you be a monster,” 

“It is my business when you go and threaten the Leaf and shinobi world again,”

“Shikamaru said I needed to cut ties with you—that being with you was a risk,”

“Tell me how I can love you and still protect the world from you,”

“He’s just worried about us. Just about what being together might mean for you. What a child might mean.”

Every phrase came forward like a reminder of how big of a fuck up he still was and Sasuke’s unwavering inability to be a decent human being. It was a myriad of stones cast upon his person, each and every word, even though Sasuke had tried to pretend none of those comments had bothered or affected him at the time. But now, it would transcend beyond him. Every declaration would reach his children’s ears one day and hurt them, too. Even though Sasuke had envied the role of father in recent days, when it came down to it, Sasuke knew he wasn’t the sort of man who deserved to be one… or was even capable of being a good one. Not after everything he had done and continued to struggle with. He was already a selfish bastard for being weak and selfish and binding Sakura to him regardless of his endless isolatory mission and now he’d… he’d…

Fuck. He hit his fist into the tree and snow rained down on him from the branches punishingly. 

He’d gotten his new wife pregnant almost immediately. Despite their conversations, despite private wishes and concrete plans, her hopes and disappointment—none of it had mattered. Only his actions. And his actions had just ruined her entire future. She was a medic, a revolutionary paving the way in science for the benefit of her village, and Sasuke had just made her a mother. And the worst part was that his fear of the past few weeks had just come true. If he continued his mission to investigate the Otsusuki, he’d make her a single one.

Fuck. FUCK! The anger bloomed into a hotness that spread across his body, but it wasn’t the sort of fire to warm him. It only made him feel colder, an icy burning that spread into his head and heart. He hit the tree hard enough to splinter it before bowing his throbbing head over the snow in defeat. His Rinnegan deactivated against his will, the chakra reserves of the pill he’d taken expiring completely. He ignored the pain as the blood now trailed a frozen path down his chin from his eye. 

He couldn’t do that to Sakura. He wouldn’t do that. Even if the Leaf Village needed him, could he leave her now? Even if the entire world needed him, would he choose to complete his mission over his own wife and child? Had he just dammed them all? Dammed himself, dammed Sakura, his child, and now the village? 

Sakura’s words to Toka in the Shikkotsu Forest came back to him like the convictions of a deity on his conscious: “They’ll be in more pain to know you had a choice and your choice wasn’t them.” He had supported Toka’s decision to risk leaving the forest to become a father; he’d told Sakura it was the “right choice.” But Sasuke felt like a man who had tried to cheat during the Chunnin Exams of life and had gotten everyone in his team disqualified for his actions—scratch that—the entire village and shinobi world sacrificed for his own selfish choice. Sasuke Uchiha had really thought he’d be able to take a chance on love, take risks by being careless with that love, and still be able to choose the world when it came down to it. That he would be capable of such selflessness if this exact scenario presented itself. He’d thought things would go his way and that’s how he’d rationalized his actions. But he had been wrong. The power to destroy them. It had manifested. What had he done?

What could he do? 

What do I do?

What do I do?

Oh fuck. 

“What do I do?” It was an echo in the windswept dark. 

And for a long moment, Sasuke stared into the black as he forced his breathing to calm, waiting for an answer that wouldn’t come. He thought of Naruto suddenly as his lifeline, a man who was a husband and soon-to-be-father, himself. And Kakashi, too, with his persisting wisdom as their sensei. Sasuke imagined their presence before him in order to ground himself, and he squinted up into to the raining snow to see their reacting faces. He pictured Kakashi rubbing the back of his neck as he looked down at his student with a sigh, giving Sasuke some ridiculous fatherly speech about sex and about how “these things happen,” but Sasuke cut off the imagined voice before it turned into something more lecturing that he couldn’t swallow right now. He shook his head and pictured Naruto instead and what his blonde friend might say to him in this exact moment. Naruto wasn’t smirking or smiling like Sasuke might think Naruto would be at hearing the unbelievable; instead, his friend was squatting before Sasuke, blue eyes boring into black with that calm stillness of a sure mind. “One step at a time,” the vision of Naruto told him. “Going back in there is what you’re going to do first.”

Oh fuck. Sakura. He’d ran out of there, fleeing as soon as he’d found out. He’d done it to protect her from his reaction, knowing that he was about to completely lose it, but bolting is exactly what she would expect him to do. What everyone would have expected him to do. His self-criticism returned: which is why you’re a shit husband and already a poor excuse of a father. He hadn’t even given her a chance to react, hadn’t stayed when it counted most. He’d dropped the truth on the both of them and left her to deal with that revelation on her own while he ditched to process privately. He couldn’t even imagine what she might be thinking right now. 

The comprehension steeled his spine, and Sasuke pulled himself off the frozen ground, reanimating his own frigidness into a slow movement. He faced the mikan and took a steadying breath. Breathe and move. Breathe and move. He took Naruto’s advice and focused on the steps, down to the very basics that his overwhelmed mind could handle. He might not be able to handle this new outcome of events, but he could put one foot in front of the other and move his damn lungs. 

He stumbled, the chakra depletion making it difficult to find his footing. He ignored that, pushing forward, until he was once more at the entrance to the mikan. He stared at the door, expecting to hear the devastating crying and desolation that he’d left behind, but there was only silence. It worried him and gave him the remaining courage to slide the door open silently. His heart wouldn’t be able to handle seeing her so shattered over this and he mentally braced himself.

But what he saw was worse. Sakura was on the floor, on her knees with her legs fanned out to the sides. She was bending over something in contemplation, and when Sasuke came into the room to witness the scene more clearly, he had a new, more intense sort of panic attack. Laid out before her was an unfurled canvas bundle of small bottles, needles, and medicines, and Sasuke had seen something like that before. In a vision in a brothel as Sakura handed Tabi an identical assortment. Sakura’s voice from that vision came to the forefront of Sasuke’s mind. “Do you suspect that you’re pregnant?” “Do you want to keep it?” “Do you want this baby? There are ways to—”

In the dim firelight of the hearth, he could see Sakura holding a glass bottle of pills in her right hand, a serious expression on her face as she weighed it up and down. She twisted the cap back on after dumping a few of the pills in her hand back into it. Sasuke reacted before he could even think it through. She gasped in surprise as his hand found her wrist and he confiscated the bottle. He projected it across the room, a shatter of glass against the wall freeing the capsules within. “What are you doing?!” he hissed, kicking away the rest of the medicines laid out on the ground before grabbing her chin. “What did you just take?!” he flustered distraughtly, reaching out with his fingers toward her mouth and pushing firmly against her teeth to pry them apart. 

“Sasuke! What are you—” she stood suddenly, pushing his hand away from her and he took a step back. “Why did you just do that!” she responded in astonishment. She stared at him with confused frustration and Sasuke’s anger faded to desperation. 

Sasuke could only conclude that she might have done something drastic. Something like taking matters into her own hands to guarantee their agreed upon future, the one where a child “comes second to everything else, or not at all” as she had declared back in a cave of stars. It was the sort of self-sacrifice she would make, if Sakura thought that Sasuke wanted her to. And Sasuke had fled the house like a fucking idiot and given her every reason to believe he didn’t want this child. And oh god, he just realized he wanted this child. Nothing else mattered when he believed she had just taken measures to… to rid herself of the problem. And now he couldn’t even activate the Rinnegan to witness it; he had no idea if that little sun still throbbed.

He slid to the ground before her, dropping to his knees and placing his hand on the floor in front of him. “Tell me you didn’t.” He wanted to beg her, to slide his hand to the back of her knee and clutch the fabric there and beg her to undo it. But he couldn’t even bring himself to touch her, and he felt like he had no right to make such a request with the situation he would put her in. So, he just knelt there in his own panicked stillness. “If you want to do this for yourself, that’s one thing—" he tried again, but shook his head, because he couldn’t bear to think about that, to agree to it, even if he should. “Wait, no. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll do whatever you want. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

.

.

.

Sakura stared down at Sasuke in absolute shock. He was covered in snow, pale as a ghost except for the crimson stripe of blood down his face, and his icy hands against her skin had been a shock to her system, more so than his unpredictable behavior of taking the H. Perforatum capsules in her hand and throwing them across the room. He was bowed before her as if for once, his Uchiha pride meant nothing. As if he now understood the depths in which Sakura had once suffered in his presence as she pleaded with him to come home. It broke her to see him so, because she also saw herself. He was mumbling apologies, asking for forgiveness, and when his hand twitched in her direction, Sakura fell to her knees before him, too, joining him on the floor once more. 

“What are you talking about,” she asked, reaching for his hand and trying to look into his face, but he dropped his gaze away from her. “What is going on? Sasuke, listen. We don’t know for sure if I’m really…, so let’s just be calm and think about this—”

“I know for sure,” Sasuke swore, eyes imploring hers and he grabbed her hand in return. An action that had started all of this. Reaching for eachothers’ hands in an alley, on a wall in Suna, in the desert climate, on a blue medicine room sofa, in a cave of stars, in every space to ever exist between them. “Tell me you didn’t just take something to stop it—”

“What—” she began before comprehending just what had caused Sasuke Uchiha to react so strongly. His words and behavior clicked into place in her mind as she glanced over at the scattered canvas bag of contraceptives and medications. Did he think that she’d just done something to end a pregnancy? “No. Sasuke, I wouldn’t. Even if you asked me to, I wouldn’t.” She saw him sigh and sway, either from his chakra depletion or the relief he felt at those words. She would remember it later to soothe her worry about Sasuke’s true feelings about having children with her. 

“I’m trying to figure out how this happened, if what you’re saying is true, but I think we are getting ahead of ourselves,” she said, trying to bring them back to ground zero. Trying to reduce their anxiety and return level-headedness back to the equation. She wouldn’t believe she was pregnant without a firm diagnosis and medical examination. She was a medic, yes, and knew her body thoroughly, but she wasn’t going to panic right now without a clear verification.

“I’ll go see the doctor in town to confirm—" she began again, but Sasuke was shaking his head. Everything else about him was still, unmoving, their hands clutched together on the floor before them. But he was saying no to this? To a resolute diagnosis?

“No,” he exhaled. “No. No one can know. If word gets out, it’ll put you both in danger.”

“Sasuke,” she groaned. “This is an overreaction—” He wasn’t back at ground zero where she was trying to put them. He was beyond it. He was problem solving, paving the way for the future, and Sakura was still trying to convince herself that she was in fact, not pregnant. 

“Tell me what you need to confirm it, and I’ll get it for you myself. If it’s not an emergency, we need to keep the secret. Especially if the Zenshin are still after you.”

She rolled her eyes at the mention of the group but didn’t deny his rationale. She moved on. “Is there any way that you’re wrong? At all? What if it’s a mistake, if there’s something going on with your Rinnegan…”

He steeled his jaw in way that revealed he was biting back the words on his tongue, and he looked away from her, but Sakura didn’t know which words they might be. Was he angry that she didn’t believe him? Sakura knew, knew he wasn’t wrong. But she wasn’t going to let herself believe it yet. She wasn’t going to get swept away by an unconfirmed dream and imagine that future yet, not with a measurement that she couldn’t prove or see herself. Not to have it ripped from her grasping and greedy hands. 

“I’m sorry, Sakura,” he whispered, releasing her fingers and bringing his hand to his own face to clutch his eyes. “I’m sorry I did this to you. This is my fault.”

“Stop,” she ordered, closing the space and reaching for him. Her palms enclosed his jaw and brought his eyes to her, looking deep into his non-squinted, bloodless eye. “It’s not your fault.”

He scoffed bitterly, disbelievingly, pulling his face free from her hands to avoid her eyes once more.

“Let me explain,” she confessed, trying to steer him back to her with her left hand, a pressure against his stone-cold cheek. “I messed up, okay? Don’t blame this on yourself. If I am pregnant, then it was my fault. I mislead you and told you we were okay—and I thought we were at that time—but that day in the Shikkotsu Forest, I made a mistake by sampling the yellow flowered plant intended for Rugo. It must have interfered with my contraceptives chemically. I can explain it in more detail, if you’d like, but…”

Sasuke said nothing, as unmoving as the ice of which he felt like. After a moment, he shook his head again. “It doesn’t matter. It was still my recklessness that got us here.” 

Sakura wanted to laugh at the absolute absurdity of the likelihood. The one time. All the stars had aligned for their plans to be derailed. Pregnant. Pregnant?! Ha. She couldn’t believe such odds: the first time they’d had sex, she just so happened to be ovulating, had taken a contraceptive, and then also made an honest mistake in chewing on the one native plant in the region that might interfere with birth control, resulting in the cellular big bang of life. That night. The night when they’d talked of orbits and cellular bodies of mass, it had been the official beginning of them. But it had also created something else. Something new. As a byproduct of their celestial collision.

“If I am pregnant…” she tried to begin, swallowing and emphasizing that word for herself as much as Sasuke, but Sasuke interrupted her, clutching her hand and slowly pulled her closer to him. 

“You are Sakura. You have to believe me.” His black, unseeing eye roamed down her chest and stomach to land on her abdomen. He squinted as if he might be able to see it without the Rinnegan. “It’s a sun, you know. The pinprick of life. All souls look like that. It’s an unmistakable identifier of life. You already know the truth, Sakura. I know that you know because you didn’t need the Rinnegan to diagnose that girl at the brothel. I only confirmed it for myself after you told her yourself.”

Tears formed in her eyes at his words. He was imploring her to accept what she could not and rely on her own medical knowledge to confirm what she refused to believe.

“Do you not want it?” he whispered, those bitten back words from earlier finally breaking free. There was a flash of pain behind his usually blank eyes. “Is that why it’s so hard for you to accept what I’m saying?”

How could he even ask her that? She retaliated with his own question directed back at him. “Do you? You’re the one who doesn’t want a family, Sasuke. You’re the one who has said over and over that you can’t do this. Not until your mission is over…You just stormed out as soon as you saw it—as soon as you found out—IF you found out!”

He wrapped his arm around her neck and brought her the rest of the way to him, holding the back of her head as she burrowed her nose into his neck and her sobs broke free. “I know,” he rumbled into her hair. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t want you to see me like that.”

“I can’t accept it yet,” she confessed brokenly into his chest. “Because what if it turns out that I’m not? It will devastate me. To suddenly have what I have always wanted when I never thought I would, and then to be wrong, and learn that I never did. Or to find out that despite how badly I want this, you don’t.”

Sasuke nodded stiffly against her but gave no response. His silence gutted her. Because what did it mean?

“I know what this would mean for me,” she continued. “I’ll be a mother, with or without you. There’s nothing you could do, or nothing you could say, that would make me give it up. I don’t know what this will mean for you.”

His breathing was growing steady, turning back into that calm steady breathing he normally possessed. “I never told you how often I’ve imagined it these past few months, having children with you. I didn’t want to give you any false hope.” 

She moved her palm to his right cheek, the blood there from the Rinnegan smearing her fingers. There was wetness on her cheeks and Sakura didn’t know if it was from the thawing blood dripping once more from his face or from her own tears; for a minute, she thought that maybe Sasuke was crying, too.  

“I also don’t know what this means for me,” he whispered in the delicate air between them, his voice deep with sentiment. “You’re going to have to tell me what you want me to do. Because if it were up to me, I’d abandon everything else. My mission. The village. Everything. To make the choice I want to.” 

.

.

.

Sasuke sat upright, staring for a long time after a long, uncertain silence fell between them. He didn’t move from Sakura’s side and his head was leaned back against the wall behind them. Sakura reached over to pull on his shirt to coax him into laying down beside her, but he was unmoving. “You need rest. You’re exhausted. You overused the Rinnegan again.”

“Hn,” he acknowledged, but said nothing more. His silence was like frostbite. A slow creeping condition that increased in sharpness and darkened his thoughts. Just like the degrees of frostbite, Sakura could practically see the progression across his face until he was numb with his thoughts. Sakura could only imagine those contemplations, and it worried her that he wasn’t sharing them. 

“Sasuke,” she sighed, pulling the blanket up with her into a half sitting position. “You’re freezing. You’re depleted of chakra. You must rest.”

“I can’t sleep,” he admitted, his voice a frost in the cold air around them. The hearth in the fire was beginning to die and the room was growing more chilled by the second. Sakura didn’t even know if Sasuke was in a state to notice the drop in temperature. He was still practically an ice sculpture; Sakura had barely managed to strip him of his stiff, snow-laden overcoat and pull the dampened wrap from his brow because he had just sat there like he was already frozen stiff. Maybe he really did have frostbite.

She made to remove the blanket fully from herself and cast it over Sasuke’s outstretched legs before shuffling on hands and knees to tend to the fire. She threw another log on, poking the embers until the fire beneath greeted the new tinder with a fluorescent glow. “If you’re not sleeping, then neither am I.” 

Looking back at him, Sakura watched his brow furrow, his gaze refocus on her without the deadness, the clarity of his presence coming back into his face. There he was. That had gotten him to thaw slightly and it relieved her immensely. If she knew Sasuke Uchiha at all, she guessed he had been having a silent conversation with himself. Something self-critical. Or he was planning and couldn’t see a way to be two people at once. Sakura had been lost in her own thoughts, too. Had been for the past hour, but Sakura had had enough of the silent heaviness, the quiet doomed contemplation of the future they had both fallen into. 

Sasuke exhaled a long sigh as he finally registered her statement of sacrificing sleep, the type of sigh that usually came before the words “annoying,” but he didn’t take the opportunity to say it. The mood was too fragile, the situation too delicate, and the context now convoluted for any sort of teasing. He stood to rid himself of his damp clothing, and while he changed into a set of dry clothes from his travel sack, Sakura prepared and hung the kettle for tea.

Sakura gave Sasuke a little more silence for the duration it took the tea to boil, but when the kettle and empty cups sat between them, Sakura poured herself a hot drink and stared down into the dark liquid. How odd, Sakura thought, to find herself once again having tea with Sasuke Uchiha after a battle of wills. That night, all those months ago, when Sasuke had first come back home, Sakura had confronted him at the ruins of the Uchiha compound during a strong rainstorm. 

“I’m not going anywhere.” Sasuke had said to her when she had told him to follow her back home.

“Then neither am I,” Sakura had said before planting herself firmly on the ground to make her point.

Just before caving to her demand, Sasuke had raised his hand to massage his temples and under his breath had said, “I see you’re just as annoying as you’ve always been.”  

These were the words Sakura suspected that Sasuke had habitually wanted to say to her just now, but bit back the teasing due to the gravity of the situation and this let Sakura know that this was all real to him. All very real. His suspicion, what he thought he knew to be a fact without a doubt. She swallowed heavily. 

Just like months ago, Sakura had served Sasuke tea to help ease them into the serious conversation of them. They had made promises to be friends, then. They had talked about regrets and made apologies. Despite his insistence that she shouldn’t, Sakura had told him that she forgave him for everything. And now, she was going to do her best to reassure him once more. He wasn’t going to be able to compartmentalize this or pretend it wasn’t happening like she was. 

When Sakura broke the silence, she thought for a second she saw him flinch. “Sasuke, please. Just look at me.”

He shuffled uncomfortably, doing the opposite of what she asked. Her notes and expertise on psychology sprang to the forefront of her mind. Eye contact could be difficult to maintain when there was shame or guilt or anger. Which one exactly was it for him?

“Ok, don’t look. Just listen to my voice,” she said, placing his untouched mug of tea in his hand. It hung loosely from his grasp. “I know this is scary for you. But I can do this without you, Sasuke. This changes nothing. We will stick to the plan--”

He visibly winced like the words were blows to his person. He broke his silence with a scoff and shook his head before setting his mug back down between them, casting it off like he couldn’t even process this conversation and hold something at the same time. “This changes everything, Sakura.”

Sakura stared into his eyes when they finally found hers. There was exasperation in the black and purple, but she implored him to listen and consider what she was about to say. 

“Listen to me carefully. I meant what I said back in the cave. I’m not going to ask you to make that impossible choice, Sasuke. I’m making it for you. You asked me to tell you what to do, and I’m going to. You have a mission. The world needs you.”

He just stared at her before narrowing his eyes. He looked away, brushing his hair back away from his face. He turned back to her. “And you don’t? How can I just go? How will you not hate and resent me for abandoning the both of you?

Did she need Sasuke more than the world did? Shikamaru’s recent words pushed forward from the depths of her consciousness to remind her of his plea. “Do you need him more than the world does? I care about the ninja world, Konoha, and our current peace. That should be your priority as well, Sakura. If cutting Sasuke off is something that will save all of us, I am begging you on behalf of the world to do so.” Sakura looked down at her flat abdomen, as if by squinting hard enough, she might be able to see that tiny sun Sasuke claimed changed everything. Sasuke, too, followed her gaze. Realizing what she was doing, Sakura pulled her knees up to her chest to hide herself. Sasuke was right. This did change everything. Before, she would have been selfish. She would have said “stay with me.” But now, if she were really pregnant, Sasuke would be securing the peace for the world, all the shinobi nations, Konoha, and their unborn child. That realization alone gave her the strength to be selfless. 

She sighed in resignation. “Like many women before me, I’ll do what I have to do.”

“And what? Give up everything? Your work? Who you are. Because of me.” 

“If I have to, yes.”

He shook his head. “Sakura, I can’t ask that of you.”

“It’s always been the plan for me. It wasn’t your plan, Sasuke. But I want you to know that I wanted this. Maybe not in this way, or this soon, but it was always what I wanted eventually. I want this more than anything else.”

Sakura took a moment to reassure herself that she didn’t have to give up her work to become a mother. She knew that life moved in seasons and that whatever path she decided to take in motherhood, she wouldn’t be alone even if Sasuke was as far away as other worlds. Sakura knew the kind of support system she had back home, and she knew it would be a difficult adjustment, but she could do it. As many women before her had, and some were half as lucky as she would be. 

Sasuke sighed. She knew he was cracking, the stoic façade crumbling. He was so close to telling her how he truly felt, but he was holding back. Perhaps he didn’t want to burden her with his words since he already believed he was burdening her to a life of single motherhood. 

“Say it,” she urged him. “Just say what you’re thinking.”

Her words were the pressure against the cracks, like the increasing accumulation of snow on a roof, to collapse the ceiling and walls of his reluctance entirely. “I wanted this, too. Later. Eventually. At a time where I could be present for it. But you and everyone else…you’re asking me to let it go. To miss it all. And I know it’s what I should do. It’s what I’ve already committed my life to do.” 

“We will figure it out, Sasuke. We don’t have to have it all sorted in one night. We have time. If what you’re saying is true, then we have nine months, technically.”

He looked away from her then, more unsaid words frozen against his chattering teeth. “What?” she asked. 

“I think we should go back to Konoha. I should have stuck to my resolution for you to stay where you are safe. I have put in danger being here, and now—”

“That’s enough of that.” Sakura stretched and yawned. “I’m not going anywhere. And I am still helping you. Maybe together, we can find some real evidence for the Otsusuki and speed your mission along.”

Sasuke sighed and Sakura could detect the anxious annoyance in that frustrated huff of air. He narrowed his eyes, and Sakura could tell that he was debating the strength of his will against hers. He had caved several days ago when she pushed him to come here directly instead of pursuing the Zenshin, but she could literally see him mentally preparing to put up a fight about this. Even though his face was carefully blank, Sakura had traveled with him long enough to know his tales. That casting down of the eyes to the floor before closing them for a second, the slow roaming of them back over to her feet—it was all revealing of his indecision. 

“I found something,” he finally revealed to her, casting his gaze up back into the embers of the floor hearth. “In the ice-realm.”

Sakura started at that, setting her own cup down with a clatter in disbelief. “What? What did you find?” Her mind was spiraling with the possibilities. 

“A fortress,” he explained, launching into a detailed description of his experience in the ice-realm hours before teleporting back to her. He illustrated a picture so incredible, that Sakura’s eyes could only widen as Sasuke revealed the complexity of the castle. He compared it to the tower in the central dimension, explaining that he was currently trying to analyze how exactly he was supposed to get inside. Sakura had lots of questions about this, primarily how Sasuke was going to solve the chakra issue. If he were using an immense amount of chakra to bypass the central dimension, and then rely on the chakra pills to return, it left him without any flexibility in between if he needed chakra to fight or perform any ninjutsu. She realized suddenly what would have to happen. 

“You’re going to have to stay,” she assessed calculatedly, and disguised her disappointment. “For longer periods.” 

“It’ll have to wait,” he announced matter-of-factly, rubbing at his temple. “I was considering bringing you with me, but that’s no longer an option. If you’re not going to return to the Leaf, I need to think about this.”

Sakura frowned at his last sentence but perked up at his discarded idea. “Why is that no longer an option? I like that idea. It’s why I came with you—I could try to help you—"

“No,” he interrupted immediately. “I don’t want my pregnant wife anywhere near the realms of the Otsusuki.”

“Sasuke Uchiha. Don’t start treating me like I’m helpless just because you think I am pregnant,” she chided, poking him in the side. He waved her finger away. 

“I know it,” he grunted. “And we don’t know what sort of effect traveling across dimensions could have on you. You can help me brainstorm from here.”

Sakura made to argue some more, thinking about saying something along the lines of the science behind the idea of teleportation, but he gave her that narrowed, Uchiha eye as if daring to challenge him, and she just grunted. Maybe he was right. Sakura didn’t know with a hundred percent certainty that it would have no consequences, but she bounced her knee, feeling a bit diverged. She needed to find out for certain if what Sasuke was claiming was true before planning anything else. Otherwise, they were wasting time deciding Sasuke’s next move. 

“We need to make a trip into town,” she announced suddenly. 

Sasuke rolled the back of his head against the wall in her direction until their eyes met again. “I thought we already had this discussion. We should lay low for now—”

Sakura sighed and inched her body closer to him, closing the space between them. He exuded the cold like a draft on her skin and she was beginning to be concerned about his medically low temperatures. His eyes widened when her hand found his frigid cheek. “I know what you’re afraid of, but don’t be. Your fear. It’ll consume you, Sasuke. You’re imagining the worst-case scenario for everything.”

He attempted to pull her hand down from his cheek, but her hand was unmovable. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose everything, Sakura. I do. And now, I’ll have more to lose. Why do you think I walked away from all of you back then and severed all attachment?” 

“Look at me,” she pleaded, and his opened eye found her face. “I promise you. You’re not going to lose everything twice. Even if the world faces another threat like Kaguya, we won’t fall. Because we’ve already proven that we won’t.” 

Sasuke didn’t nod or make any sound of acknowledgment, but when Sakura made to pull the rest of his stiff and icy clothing from his person, he obliged by shrugging out of it. “You need to move closer to the fire,” she whispered, but Sasuke only reached for her. When her own eyelids grew heavy, the steam of the tea giving to the remaining chill in the air, Sasuke was the one to pull her back against his frozen chest, pull the blanket up to their chins, and rest his forehead against her shoulder blades and murmur, “Don’t continue to be stubborn and just sleep. I’ll follow you soon.” It was the last thing she had heard before succumbing to her exhaustion.  

.

.

.

At some point in his midnight musing, the chill that had stolen into his body caused Sasuke to shiver violently, and he soon realized that Sakura’s warmth wasn’t spreading to him. In fact, the opposite was happening because Sakura began to tremble in her sleep from the contact. 

He retreated from the blankets, his body convulsing with tremors and teeth chattering violently. He stacked more wood on the fire until the warmth permeated the room. He took silent reassurance in the fact that Sakura resumed sleeping peacefully, but the warmth just wouldn’t touch him. His instincts implored him to seek additional heat and he headed toward the hot spring. But when he opened the door, he was surprised to be greeted by one of the russet mountain apes. It startled Sasuke at first—if narrowing one’s eyes could be considered startled—with its dark silhouette crouched against a backdrop of illuminating snow. 

It stared at him. And Sasuke stared back for a long moment, two creatures regarding one another as they predicted the other’s next move. Was it separated from the rest of the group? Alone, like Sasuke often found himself? When the animal didn’t scurry away from fear like he thought it would, Sasuke allowed the little creature to play on his emotions. “Fine,” he sighed through chattering teeth. He retreated back inside quietly, digging through his clothes for a discarded ration. Sasuke had often been hungry on the road, so it wasn’t unlike him to share his food out of sympathy with a wandering critter that happened to cross paths with him. Sasuke ignored his own insanity and crouched down despite his shivering and shakily handed the reaching monkey the small piece of dried fish. The ape chattered excitedly before darting off a few feet and devouring the snack. 

Sasuke grunted humorously before making his way through the snow to the hot spring that bubbled in greeting. He slipped into the heat with a sigh of relief. His teeth immediately ceased to clack together, and he reclined until the water was up to his nose. But he heard a small noise behind him and looked up to find the small ape had followed him and was currently studying him curiously. 

“I don’t have anymore,” Sasuke grumbled, choosing to ignore the creature’s imploring gaze. After a moment of receiving nothing more from the human, the monkey plopped down on its hind legs and sat there, content to groom itself. Sasuke sighed when he realized the animal wasn’t going to go on its way and he decided to ignore it. But after about a half hour of mutual silence, Sasuke decided to engage his new silent companion. 

“Don’t you have a family?” he asked, half expecting the ape to run off at the sound of his voice. “Did they send you off on an errand for the good of the rest of them?”

The ape didn’t make a move or a sound, just continued to groom itself at Sasuke’s shoulder. “You seem young, so I’m assuming you don’t have any children waiting back at home for you. Or a woman.” And at that phrase, the monkey slipped into the heat of the hotspring, too, warming itself at a respectable distance. Sasuke sighed at its silence; he needed to stop talking to animals because he was obviously losing his mind due to recent events. 

Seeing that tiny orb glowing in Sakura’s abdomen had done more than frighten him. It had rattled him in ways that he would never be able to explain to anyone. The fear of what could be, what might happen, and what had yet to occur made Sasuke feel like he couldn’t catch his breath. Sakura was right though—it was the most genuine of fears that consumed one’s soul and one’s mind. Like a cancer in his head that was growing and spreading in severity, the source of all his symptoms, and even though he was aware of its existence, it didn’t change the anxious manifestations of his body. Sasuke knew there was a layer of trauma that was causing him to continue to have this response to any and every attachment. He had to start conditioning himself to let go of the details that he couldn’t control and to trust Sakura and her wisdom. It would be the only treatment effective enough to overcome his mindset. That, and that throbbing sun. 

He wasn’t going to tell Sakura how many times throughout the night he had activated the Rinnegan to his own detriment just to see the tiny sun flare in her lower abdomen. He watched its fluttering rhythm, counting in time to the fetal heartbeat he believed might be the source of the light’s pulsation. It was an undisputable sign of life that Sasuke wished Sakura would take his word for, but she was still in denial about this despite her pregnancy symptoms. She wanted undeniable proof in medical jargon she could read like it was the only language she could understand. Sasuke wasn’t a fan of the idea of traveling back into the heart of the Land of “Spring” where her condition would undoubtedly be exposed to medical staff who Sasuke wouldn’t be able to prevent from possibly sharing that information like a small flame with the potential to become a wildfire. It was a risk to reveal her location and condition when the Zenshin leader was still out there, but he knew that Sakura was entitled to healthcare even though she was a medic, herself. Sasuke didn’t want anything to go wrong, and he couldn’t only rely on his Rinnegan to check on the status of his child’s health inside the womb. And what if Sakura got sick? If something went wrong with her own health during this pregnancy, what would Sasuke even do to save her? She was right. She had to go into town, but Sasuke would be there the entire step of the way. 

Despite the recent discovery of Kaguya’s dimensional ice fortress, Sasuke was now distracted by the discovery of his own wife’s pregnancy. The Otsususki hunt was going to have to wait. Again. Sasuke closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as he felt like once again, he was halting all forward progression toward that goal. He was also shocked to realize how much it paled in importance to the current situation at hand. 

At some point during Sasuke’s silent contemplation, his small ape companion must have silently retreated back into the trees. When his body was warmed thoroughly and the stinging feeling of bloodflow returned to his fingers and toes, Sasuke, too, retreated from the pool of bubbling heat. Now, his naked body radiated the heat of strength, a steam rising from his skin like the physical display of chakra. When he turned, he was surprised to detect Sakura’s supervising silhouette in the open doorframe. 

“What are you doing up?” he asked her, walking toward her through the snow as he readorned his dry clothing that hadn’t done nothing to keep him warm moments before. Now, it felt as if he’d overheat from their layers. 

“Admiring the view,” she admitted with a teasing grin which had Sasuke scoffing in embarrassment. “And eavesdropping. You are capable of making new friends, I see.”

He raised an eyebrow at that, realizing that she had probably just heard everything he’d said to that little imp of a creature.  “Animals are tolerable,” he said. “Most people are not.”

Sakura only laughed as Sasuke came near, and she reached up under his shirt to place her cool hands against the steam of his skin. “You’re so warm now.”

“You should get in, too,” he instructed, realizing how cold she felt now that his body had returned to a normal temperature. 

She shook her head. “Onsen aren’t recommended for pregnancy, if you’re right about that.”

“Oh,” Sasuke sighed, feeling completely ignorant about the rules and guidelines of growing a life within you. He suddenly realized that they’d already made the mistake of her entering the heated pool, which made his heart drop with that new fear again, but Sasuke remembered that was before he’d seen the sign of life, so the tiny sun must be okay. He was already brainstorming how he would transport hot water to the house to cool in order for Sakura to bathe from now on, when Sakura pulled him inside and whispered, “I have a better idea.”

Sasuke sucked in a breath when he felt his wife reach up and pull him down to her lips, his mouth as hot as the steam coming from his skin. She pulled at his shirt as he fumbled to close the door. His mind instantly fogged in response to her reaching intensity. He allowed her to seek out his radiating skin and she sighed when she leaned into the warmth of him. He was upon her with hunger, his instincts imploring him now to share his newfound heat. She guided them toward the fire as he roamed his heated hand over her backside. And then he realized she was barefoot against the cold ground and so he lifted her and wrapped her legs around his waist. He was a husband acting on pure desire, his hot mouth found her neck, and she groaned loudly before grabbing his face with her palms to bring his mouth back up to hers. 

But it wasn’t until she pressed her body down onto him in the ways that they would fit best that Sasuke snapped out of his dizzying hot lust and remembered that he was no longer only just going to be a husband. “Wait,” he panted against the bend of her neck as she started to undulate her hips against his pelvis in search of the friction she craved. “You’re pregnant.”

“Maybe,” she breathed a sigh to match his own. “Or I will be after this.” Sasuke shook his head to free his mind from the words she panted with an unfulfilled hunger, words that were as potent as a drug in his blood. 

He walked her to the hearth before setting her down next to it. She was still tangled around his neck so Sasuke guided his body down until he was stretched out above her, swallowing the coolness of her skin with his own heat. She was still imploring his body with her own, thinking that this was Sasuke continuing the pace, her ankles tied behind his back did not release him. But he straightened his arm and pushed himself back against the floor until he was on his knees between her legs. 

“You’re pregnant,” he said again when her eyes grew wide at the realization that he was stopping. 

“And?” she emphasized, elbows pushing against the ground until she was sitting up too.

“I don’t want to do anything that could hurt you..or...” he gestured to her abdomen. “What if something goes wrong?” 

Sakura stared at him in disbelief. “If I’m pregnant, you won’t. It’s okay. It’s normal to still have sex.”

Sasuke clucked his tongue at her continued denial and reached behind him to detangle her ankles. 

She panicked as he pulled away and grabbed his shoulders to halt him before he could remove himself completely. “I’m a doctor, remember? It’s not going to do anything.”

His annoyance bled through his tone. “A doctor who is insisting that she isn’t pregnant, when she knows that she is, and I know that she is.”

The glare she sent him twisted his stomach. It was rare to see such genuine frustration from her, his own annoyance mirrored back at him. “So, you’re allowed to have mental hangups, but I’m not? I told you. I’m not ready to believe it yet.”

He sighed in defeat, already hating that this discussion was turning into an argument. A real argument, if Sasuke continued to force the issue. She was right though. He needed to give her the time and space she needed to process this instead of forcing her to accept it. 

When he didn’t say anything, she continued staring in disbleief, “So what? You’re not going to sleep with me if I’m pregnant? For 9 months?!”

He smirked, already planning his next words. “If you need confirmation that you’re pregnant, I want confirmation that fucking my wife into the floor won’t harm our unborn child.” 

Her mouth opened. She visibly gaped at his crass language. Her eyes narrowed as she considered his words and Sasuke held her gaze. “I have amazing self-restraint,” he added for good measure. “I was a virgin before we slept together. I can wait a very long time.”

Her narrowed eyes became challenging, and it unnerved him just a bit, not prepared for what she would do next. “You think so?” she contested, reaching for the hem of her shirt. She pulled her tunic up slowly, the fabric trailing the flat plane of her stomach and across her breasts. She pulled her simple black bra-let up as well, the small swells of her chest bouncing as she freed them from the restraint. Sasuke blanched at her firelit skin, her flesh as pink as her hair and hardening from the brisk cool air. He sucked in a sharp breath when she rolled onto her stomach and made him watch as she slipped the hem of her leggings slowly over her ass in the exact same slowness so that her flesh would spring free of the tension. 

Fuck. His hand twitched to take a fistful of her skin. He thought he had self-restraint. But she knew him. She knew the thirsty man in the desert was who he had become now because she had become the oasis that beckoned to him. Sasuke closed his eyes to try and control the rush of blood south. He was grateful he had slipped his pants back on as soon as he had crawled out of the hot spring, or his own flesh would be breaking free. 

Sasuke turned her back around so that she faced him, and she let out a small little moan at the movement. Fuck. If she kept making sounds like that, she was going to win. He stared hard at her abdomen. There was a baby in there. She could deny it all he wanted, but that child was alive and growing. Sasuke would be damned if his weak flesh caused an end to this unbelievable dream. He wouldn’t risk it. No matter what. 

“There are other things to do.” He pulled her to him, her knees cast over his shoulders. He went down on her as he had never done before, with absolute fucking thirst. 

Eventually, when they both were finished experimenting in new ways of pleasure, she stared up at him with those gorgeous green ivy eyes, the only sign of spring in this land of ice. He shuddered and moaned, panting hard as he bowed over her head. And he realized suddenly that she was the only spring of life that would bloom in the wake of his frozen path. His descendants would bloom simply because Sakura did.

She was smiling. “I’m all warm now.” 

He kissed her mouth, tenderly. “I’ll draw you a bath.” And he did. There was a bath attached to the house that hadn’t been used in some time. Conveniently, it was closer to the hot spring than any other part of the building. And when the tub was full to the brim, cooled to a comfortable steam, Sakura pulled him into the tub with her until her head rested against his chest and they both closed their eyes in appreciation of the warmth. 

“You brought up confirmation. Does this mean you’ve relented about going into town?”

He nodded. “I thought about what you said about my fear and you’re right. My fear for you could ruin this, too. The temptation to hide you away will persist, but I realized what this means. It’s doubt. Not in you or your abilities, but myself. I wasn’t able to do anything back then when my brother slaughtered my family. I spent my entire adolescence chasing power because of that. And instead of using my power to become a protector, I became an avenger. I’ll live a life of redemption for that. But now, I can have faith in myself. I won’t sit by if someone comes after my family. Never again will I be the helpless child of that night. And you and I together, are a fearsome thing to mess with.”

She smiled so broadly that Sasuke could feel it even with her back to him. She laid back against his shoulder. “Bravo, love. You’re right, and I’m proud of you for coming to that conclusion finally.” 

“It doesn’t mean I want to throw all caution to the wind,” he amended quickly. “But let them dare to come. Naruto was right, too. You don’t even know the depth of power within you until there’s something worth protecting.”

His palm reached down until his fingers were splayed wide over the plane of her still-flat abdomen. He felt Sakura’s breath hitch as he touched the space where she supposedly grew a new life, a new sun. “When do women begin to show?” he asked curiously, feeling a little guilty now in his post-sex clarity for sexualizing his wife’s pregnancy in the heat of the moment earlier. 

Her palm covered his own in the water. “It varies. But usually anywhere from sixteen to eighteen weeks.” 

His lips found her shoulder when she sucked in a shuddering breath. “God. I hope you’re right about all of this. I don’t want to face the disappointment if we find out otherwise.”

“Close your eyes. I’ll try and describe our child to you again.”

And she closed them tightly. Sasuke activated the Rinnegan and in the dark warmth of the bath, he tapped her abdomen every time the little light swelled. “I told you it was like a sun. A tiny throb. Like this.” And he tapped. Tap. Tap. Tap. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. “Picture a tiny living heart of light.” 

She inhaled before exhaling a sob and tears fell from her cheeks. “I want this. So bad, Sasuke.”

Sakura was convinced that she would be fine if they didn’t hunt down the leader of Zenshin and had assured the Uchiha as much to persuade him to skip forward to hunting the Otsusuki instead, but Sasuke had written three letters as they camped just outside the border of Takigakure. First, he wrote to Kakashi to confirm the Hokage’s plans, not because he didn’t believe Sakura’s detailed explanation of their sensei’s interference, but because he wanted to assess the process for himself and compare it to his own. He had to be sure, before stealing Sakura away across the sea to the Land of Snow. His second letter was addressed to Takigakure’s current leader, Shibuki, requesting permission to pass through and seek safe seafaring passage from Takigakure’s northern harbor. It was the same route Team 7 had taken when they were assigned to guard the actress “Yukie,”—an alias for the Land of Snow’s princess, Koyuki, that Team 7 had been unaware of at the time of accepting the mission—which is why Sakura was familiar with the road that would take them through. Which brought him to his third and final letter, addressed to said Princess Koyuki, informing her of their intentions to arrive in her land. Sasuke hated to leave a paper trail of their activities considering Sakura still had people after her, but considering his past and his travels recently, it was always better to inform and request permission from those in charge. 

As they waited on Sasuke’s letters to reach their destinations via messenger hawk, they set up camp lounged by a fire, sitting close to the flames that warded off the northern air that sought to chill their skin even in August. Sasuke eyed Sakura’s gooseflesh as she wrapped her arms around herself, determined to suffer in silence rather than admit she had hastily packed an unprepared bag. To his credit, Sasuke had repacked for her after her hasty exit, trying to discern which of her clothing might be the warmest, but found her wardrobe entirely lacking for winter climates. He thought they had more time before heading to the Land of Snow, so had packed her bag accordingly, refolding and organizing the bag in order to fit more in. Sakura had noticed as soon as she opened it for the first time, and immediately made to thank him, but Sasuke felt awkward as usual and chose that precise moment to flee in the name of firewood. 

Seeing her shiver and wipe away the prickling flesh along her upper arms made Sasuke feel inattentive, and so the Uchiha pushed back his reserved nature once more and reached for her, taking hold of her by the waist with his right arm. She jumped in initial surprise but smiled complacently when Sasuke pulled her between his legs to settle her back against his chest. The poncho, once again, came down over her head as Sasuke positioned them to sleep in a reclined position together to share their newfound warmth. He quite liked it, the excuse to bundle her into the fabric of his person like she was an extension of his body (she was as far as he was concerned, that valve in his heart he’d decided she was the last time they had found themselves at a fire on the road at the beginning of a journey. He remembered moving away from her that first time, deciding the distance alone would be enough to keep their lives from entangling further. He had never been more wrong. And now they had come full circle, no amount of distance preventing the inevitable.

“We need to stop in Takigakure to get you some suitable outerwear,” he stated, her body shivering one last time as the caress of warmth greeted her.

She burrowed against him, fitting in all of Sasuke’s angles as if she had been designed to be the missing pieces of him all along. She sighed and leaned her head back into the bend of his shoulder, and Sasuke intimately tucked his nose into her hair as they drifted to the crackling melody of the firelight humming heat.

Until Sakura spoke with a small content laugh, saying the very last thing that Sasuke would ever imagine in that moment. “I saw Kakashi’s face.”

Sasuke couldn’t help himself. He practically jolted as if he had been shocked with his own lightning blade. The elusiveness of Kakashi’s face had been one of those Genin curiosities that had never really left the realm of Sasuke’s curiosity, and the Uchiha had privately theorized with Naruto that the ninja had something to hide with that mask. “And?” he immediately investigated, eager to know what she was withholding. 

“And what?”

“Don’t ‘and what?’ You know exactly what. Tell me what he’s hiding under there.”

She snickered against his chest, a pleasant shifting motion against Sasuke’s sternum, as if her laughter could reach into his own body via vibration and demonstrate just how one could lose oneself in something funny. 

“Not hiding much, other than the fact that he’s a complete and total hottie.”

Sasuke could have choked on the air in his lungs alone. “That’s it? Nothing out of the ordinary? No big secret? Sort of anti-climactic, if you ask me.”

“Oh trust me,” she sighed. “Nothing anti-climactic about it—”

“Stop talking,” Sasuke shushed into her hair, immediately covering her mouth with his right hand to completely cut-off her crude direction of speech. Since when had his shy genin teammate become so unreserved? They’d had sex twice, for peat sakes, and weren’t in the habit of making these types of jokes. It was even worse that she was making a go about Kakashi, their old, decrepit, retiring sensei. Or at least, that’s how Sasuke would forever regard him. “You have spent too much time with that Yamanaka girl,” he chided.

“That’s all from Tsunade, actually.” Sakura admitted with a small laugh at his innocence. 

Sasuke grunted, and Sakura picked up the conversation again. “Do you think Kakashi is alone by choice? Because he’s the Hokage? I feel bad for him, always to himself when he isn’t working.”

Sasuke knew the answer immediately. He suddenly recalled several of Kakashi’s lectures whenever Sasuke found himself angry about being alone.  “Kakashi was alone a long time before he was the Hokage and even our sensei. He lost many of his loved ones, everyone who was ever close to him. I imagine that he’s afraid to form a bond that intimate being who he is and the role he has to play.”

“Sort of like you, then.” Sakura acknowledged. 

“Hn,” Sasuke affirmed, but added, “He’s right to guard his heart so. I tried, but someone’s chakra-enhanced strength punched through my rib cage.”

Sakura laughed before interjecting with, “You know, I always sort of theorized it might be because Kakashi sensei’s preferences leaned more towards men.”

Sasuke’s brows shot straight into his hairline, the first real emotion to present itself upon his carefully constructed face tonight. He thought about it, truly. And as he thought about it, he wondered. Truly wondered. “Hn,” he said again with a tilt to his head, “who knows.” He could honestly see his sensei having no particular preference at all. As he reflected on his genin days, Sasuke would say with confidence that he was definitely the sort to appeal to both. Everyone they encountered always had some weird obsession with him. 

“I hope one day, whatever the case may be, he chooses to be selfish, too.”

“I think he’s more excited about retirement than anything else. I think he’s just ready to choose himself for once.” And he’s dog obsessed, Sasuke thought privately. And sometimes, maybe pets were all you needed for companionship. Back when Sasuke imagined a lonely life without anyone else in it, he pictured a pet or two in his future. A hawk. Maybe a cat, even. That sort of life had once appealed to him, but he was choosing one of attachment, instead. He was choosing her, even if it was half-lived and intermittent. 

“Definitely,” she chimed, before stilling and growing quiet against him. Was she falling asleep?

But then, she said something else that rennervated Sasuke, and he was thoroughly trapped of his own making, the shared overgarment preventing him from fleeing from the question. “You helped Toka, didn’t you? Back in the Shikkotsu Forest.”

Sasuke didn’t answer. He didn’t breathe. Because how was he going to explain his actions of that night? He had thought it had completely escaped her notice, the hand he had played in Toka’s chances in escaping that night. 

“It’s okay if you did,” Sakura rested back against him more firmly, seeking to give him comfort. “I just want to know why.”

Sasuke still couldn’t breathe as he thought of the truth. The truth was rather simple in his head. Sasuke envied the choice the man had been given. Sakura had given Toka an out, a condition. If he made it through the Shikkotsu Forest on his own, he could leave and not return to a life of imprisonment for his crimes. It would certainly mean his death, to risk the snare that was Shikkotsu Forest for the 1% chance only a soon-to-be-father would take in order to possibly have a life with his family on the other side. Sasuke had heard Sakura break the news to Toka about his impending paternity, and had felt it like a stab to his soul, because Sakura was giving the man a choice to risk it all for a chance at a life with his woman and unborn child. Sasuke still remembered that tiny little throb of light that woman had concealed within her, and he had made a choice that night, too. The choice to help Toka, even if he less than deserved it for the part he had played in Zenshin.

“He made the right choice,” Sasuke admitted to the back of her head, recalling how at the first sign of Toka’s departure, Sasuke had performed his own silent summoning, a winding camouflaged python ascending the monstrous trunk to greet him. 

“Lord Sasuke,” it had hissed in an inaudible tongue only Sasuke could hear. “You have become like a stranger to us. A mere rumor of existence. We wondered if you were even still alive.”

“Let’s catch up another time, Sutsuma,” Sasuke had greeted cooly in the formal way of snakes. “Follow that man. Assist him out of this jungle. You’re familiar, aren’t you?”

“Katsuyu’s forest? Of coursssse we are,” hissed the python, turning its yellow eyes this way and that. “Not like the Ryuchi Cave, but we have brethren here all the same.” 

He had watched the snake make its way toward the retreating man, and Toka had glanced back at Sasuke, when the snake revealed its good intentions by not eating him and waiting for the man to follow. 

Sasuke hadn’t known if Toka had made it out, until Sutsuma found him once again in the morning, having slithered the miles back to him. “He livesssss. Barely, but he survivesssss.”

“Appreciated, Sutsuma,” Sasuke had amended, already prepared to reverse the summoning.

“Lord Orochimaru extends his greetingssss,” the snake informed, sending a small chill down Sasuke’s spine at the mention of the Snake Sannin.  “And Aoda remains unbound despite Lord Orochimaru’s great displeasure, pledging his fealty to you only Sssasuke Uchihaaa. Do NOT forget such kindnesssss from ssssnakes. We do not do kindnessss freely.” 

Sasuke simply nodded before the snake had dissolved into nothingness. Sasuke had felt a pang of guilt toward Aoda, a loyal friend from the past. When the situation had called for it, Sasuke had relied on his other summons after the war, the two hawks he had formed close connections with of recent days. He hadn’t realized that Aoda might have taken the Uchiha’s absence personally.

Sakura shifted against him, asking in finality, “So Toka made it out, then?”

Sasuke only nodded, saying “unfortunately,” but then added to assure her he hadn’t made the choice at the risk of her life, “and if he ever shows his face again, I’ll personally drop him back in the Shikkotsu and watch as the forest claims the life I took from her. He only got to live for the sake of his unborn child.” 

Sakura didn’t respond, as if there was so much she wanted to say, but couldn’t. What was she thinking silently to herself at learning this information?  Sasuke was suddenly worried, an uncomfortable ice replacing the burn of his annoyance. “What’s wrong? Are you angry that I interfered?”

“No, of course not,” she assured him, the curve of her skull moving back and forth against his sternum, but he heard the emotion in her voice. As if she were fighting back tears. 

He suddenly stiffened. “Then why are you crying?”

She swallowed before saying, “I’m not.” The pause alone before answering gave her away.

“You are. Tell me what’s wrong.” He moved so he could see her profile in the dim light. Sakura’s tears now affected him in ways he couldn’t explain. Because he had always been the reason for them, and even though Sasuke had changed, chosen her, she still ended up crying for some reason connected to him. And cursed heavens, he hated it. 

“Nothing,” she confessed, “Just, I’m happy you did. I am happy for them.”

And Sasuke’s stomach dropped, because he had been right to fear those tears. So much that was unsaid, was verbalized with those words. Sakura was pleased that Toka had chosen his pregnant lover despite the risk to himself. Happy that they would be together, and delighted for their baby and the family that tiny throbbing light within the woman’s womb would make them.

He had said this before, but he felt the need to try to explain this again.

“Sakura, if things were different—” he tried, but she interrupted him.

“I’m not pressuring you,” she defended. “I meant what I said back in the glowworm cave. You can’t make that choice right now, Sasuke. I’m not going to ask you to.”

“You’re right, Sakura. I can’t. Not until the Otsusuki are handled. I know that they’re out there.” But it wasn’t because he didn’t want to make that choice. In fact, it was such a temptation for him, which is why he downed that contraceptive in her presence. Did she even know that? He hadn’t technically been entirely transparent with her about his feelings about their future, his secret desires, and jealous fits about the choice he wasn’t able to make but others were. They had briefly discussed it after their first uniting in the cave, and he’d kept the rest of his thoughts about the matter private. For some reason, Sasuke felt like telling her all this would disappoint her if, for some reason, it never came to be. Gods forbid it, but if Sasuke’s search continued on for years and years, stuck on his isolatory orbit away from Sakura, what then? The devastation on her face when she had asked him if he never wanted kids had made Sasuke confess that he didn’t not want that when and if the time came. But—“I have to make sure the world is a safe one for the next generation.” Because that was the Uchiha’s promise to himself, and to Naruto, and the rest of the world—not because he wanted to live Itachi’s life of sacrifice or redeem himself—but because it was the right thing to do and it was still going to be his role to play, no matter what. 

“I know. And it’s okay,” Sakura turned to him under his loose-fitting poncho, grabbing his fingers between their chests. “We won’t take the risk. Just like I said to Kakashi, it won’t even come to that —”

Sasuke’s eyes grew wide before narrowing at the mention of his sensei about something so private. “What the fuck does Kakashi have to do with any of this?”

There was a silence as she realized her slip, and Sasuke felt an anger rise in him about secret conversations that the Uchiha hadn’t been included in because they were about him. He could already hear the words of others in his mind. Could already hear Kakashi and Shikamaru and whoever else approaching his wife and putting their noses in places they didn’t belong.

“What was said to you?” he seethed, pulling his hand away from her as he ducked free of his own outerwear until only she wore it. 

“I didn’t mean—” she tried to recover, but Sasuke’s patience had suddenly collapsed in on itself. 

“Tell me what he said to you. Why would he ask you about that?”

The excuses and stalling came to an end at that. “It’s nothing, really, so don’t be upset. He’s just worried about us. Just about what being together might mean for you. What a child might mean.”

Sasuke got very still at that. What a child might mean. What being together might mean for him. Not Sakura. Him. And with the context of the last forty-eight hours, Sasuke knew what those words were implying. Kakashi was worried Sasuke would develop a true weakness. Sasuke was suddenly recalling Sakura’s words of two nights ago: “Are you going to avenge me? Are you going to become an enemy of the world again if someone else is taken from you?” and “Shikamaru said I needed to cut ties with you. That being with you was a risk.” Sasuke let out a scoff and his upper lip curled. It wasn’t only Shikamaru who had talked privately to Sakura, apparently. The puzzle pieces were finally connecting, clearing away the confusion like an assaulting wind. This was about that damn threat Sasuke had made. They had told Sakura that she would be his undoing, and to Kakashi, apparently, his unborn future children would damn him even more so. Had Kakashi honestly asked her not to have children with him? Was this the Hokage’s attempt to control him as a threat? He made eye contact with Sakura as he deliberated this, and knew that his wife saw it in the dim fire light. The churning fury in his eyes. The absolute indignation that was coursing through him like the visual manifestation of the strongest of chakras. And she panicked. 

“It’s not what you’re thinking. I had told him there wasn’t anything to worry about, anyway. That this was between us, and no one else.”

And Sasuke took a heavy breath. He was irate. Not with her, of course, but anger blurred the lines to others and Sasuke wouldn’t be able to explain those lines right this second. “I need a minute,” he admitted, already trying to pull away from her, but Sakura clutched at his hand. 

“Please don’t leave. Take that minute here, with me. I won’t deny you space if you really need it, but I’m asking you to stay here. I’ll give you silence to think if you want it.” She said it with panic, and Sasuke was suddenly confronted once more with his habit of running away. She was afraid he’d leave and abandon her again despite his promise to always tell her before actually leaving from now on. “Please don’t go.”

And he sighed, letting out that breath, the most volatile of that anger leaving his body with it. Regret flooded in, and while it didn’t replace the anger, it gave him a clearer head. It pained him, deeply, to have such things said to her about him. Even more so because they weren’t far from the truth. They believed him capable of atrocities, and Sasuke knew that he was. But once again, he found himself thinking that he didn’t want to be. 

“We don’t have to talk about this,” Sakura said, placing the neck hem of the poncho back around him before turning to lay back into his stiff body, urging him with her own to relax once more. “Because I already know what would happen in a worst-case scenario.”

“And what is that?” he sighed bitterly. He wasn’t ready to let his frustration go completely even if he forced himself to remain sitting and listening.

“You made a vow that the world will not pay. And it won’t. You won’t ever have to seek vengeance because I will do it for you.” Sasuke stilled at her words, eyes widening, and a sharp stab of fear coursed through his blood at her ever being in such a situation. It was like being dunked in cold water, hearing her say those words. “I didn’t tell Kakashi this part, because I didn’t know what he would say. But if someone were to go after my child, I’d take care of them myself however best I saw fit. So, you don’t have to worry, because I will do it for the both of us. No one will be able to get to them in the first place anyway, having the two of us as parents. And Naruto and Kakashi as weird, and likely too-involved, uncles.” It reminded him of Naruto’s statement back in Suna: “Her association with all of us keeps her protected. Who’s going to risk the wrath of us in order to get to her?” But just like then, Sasuke knew better; there would always be those who tested the boundaries, who believed they were superior, who thought the lot of them had exaggerated reputations. 

But Sasuke thought about Sakura’s stance for a long moment. It was everyone’s habit to underestimate Sakura and she knew that, which is why Kakashi and Shikamaru did not fear the potential of her fallout. Sasuke’s actions, no matter what, would damn him to the world once more because of his past. It would be seen as his fall back into darkness. Sasuke didn’t know if Sakura would be ostracized or criticized for vengeance, but she was viewed as wholly good. Would allowances be made for her actions? If a child would tip the scales for Sakura, then maybe it would be more than enough for him to lose it, just as Kakashi feared. He already knew he would avenge any member of Team 7, especially Sakura. A child would be no question. 

Sasuke was suddenly afraid of that possible future for the both of them, despite how much Sakura wanted children that he had sworn to himself to give her one day. But it had him asking himself why? Why would he ever allow something to transpire for either of them? And perhaps that was Kakashi’s reasoning, to get them to evaluate this. He had wished his old sensei would have left her out of it, had the courage to speak to him directly, even if Sasuke had an impossible-to-reason with sort of personality. 

There was a moment of hesitation before Sasuke voiced this concern aloud to Sakura: “If something like a child has the power to destroy us, then why do we do it? Why do we bring our own weakness into the world?”

“The same reason you chose to let me in, to care for me,” she breathed, smiling in confidence. “Remember what Naruto has taught us? Love brings us unbelievable strength.”

“And unbearable pain.” Sasuke sighed, seeing the cost and reward of his choices. His heart was resolved to never go through it again. He was terrified of it. He thought that as long as he hunted down the Otsusuki, the future would remain a good place just as Naruto promised. He knew Sakura could take care of herself, but recent events alone made him evaluate the future with Kakashi’s lens. A child would be vulnerable. Sasuke was already practically throwing his heart to his enemies by loving her. If the world were safe from the Otsusuki, would he still choose to bring children into the world if random threats appeared while he was distracted with his own mission? He couldn’t keep Sakura with him forever. He felt as if he was already stealing time, bringing her along.

Sakura’s declaration interrupted his critical thoughts. “I’ll face all the pain in the world for the opportunity at such love.” She said it with her back to his chest, but Sasuke didn’t need to see her eyes to see the weight of those words and the meaning behind them. At his silence, she continued, “But like I said, we aren’t taking risks right now anyway. It’s not happening. So take a breath. I can practically feel your low oxygen levels. You’re breathing like a statue.”  

Sasuke didn’t respond verbally, but he forced himself to inhale and coax himself back into rhythm. At some point, she had fallen into sleep, and Sasuke debated silently to himself the remainder of the night. Was Kakashi right? Would a child be the tipping point for him? Sasuke shook his head clear of all thoughts beside his one goal: he needed to rid the world of the Otsusuki, first and foremost. The rest would come later. He must have followed Sakura into sleep sometime later despite his heavy thinking, because it wasn’t Sakura moving away from him that had woken Sasuke up the next morning, but rather the small silhouette of his messenger hawk ruffling its feathers against a backdrop of tree-dividing, morning light. 

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.

Sakura shuffled in her warm parka, grateful for the scenic stop in Takigakure to purchase something to cover and replace her summer attire. She still wore the red Uchiha tunic Sasuke had had designed for her back in the Leaf, but she now paired it with long legging-style black breeches and a crimson knee-length overcoat that sported a thick lining of white fur along the hood. It had been one of the more expensive options, but she was grateful for the splurge now as the ship that her and Sasuke had boarded that morning lurched violently against winterized waters and winds as it headed toward the Land of Snow.

The movement below deck in their room had made her very motion sick, so Sakura had sought refuge at the edge of the ship’s deck, hoping the night sky would help ease her nausea. Unfortunately, the intense, horizonless darkness did nothing to alleviate her, and she had ended up seeking the railing to hurl over. Sasuke had followed her every step of the way, standing vigil with a concerned expression etched on his usual blank face. She could barely see him in this wind-whipping dark, but his presence was consistent and concentrated solely on her. 

“Sorry,” she moaned, embarrassed to have him watching her motion sickness so closely. “I didn’t know that I could get seasick like this.” She certainly hadn’t the last time she’d made this journey, but she still cursed herself for not being more prepared medicinally for such occasions. She had encountered many sicknesses as a doctor and her immune system of steal usually was impervious to common illnesses. But her immunity was no match for seasickness apparently; she almost wished she had a cold. It was something she could treat nutritionally. The idea of trying to eat anything right now made her hurl a second time over the railing, her fingers digging into to the salt sprayed wood that was beginning to crystalize. It was very bitter up here, but the thought of going back down below made her stomach clench tightly. 

“Don’t apologize for being sick,” Sasuke chided her, hand reaching up to clutch her arm, as if she weren’t currently channeling chakra to her feet and might careen over the side at any second. “We just have to get through the night; we’ll be there by morning.” He turned her away from the railing and she slid down the side, her head falling forward against his shoulder with a groan. He offered her water and Sakura was suddenly remembering months ago when she had gotten drunk and Sasuke had been there to take care of her then, too, a dark shadow in an alley forcing water into her mouth. “Try to drink something so you don’t get dehydrated. And hold on to me. I’ll steady you.”

Sakura didn’t know if his efforts could make that much of a difference, but she was feeling a small warmth in her chest for his offer and so in the dark starry night, where nothing but black careening sea surrounded them, she clung to him desperately, wrapping her arms weakly around his torso. 

“I can use the Susanoo. We could fly and bypass the journey by boat completely,” he informed, chakra flowing to his feet to steady the both of them as a particularly violent waved crashed against the side and sprayed them with ice.

Sakura’s teeth chattered violently. “Save your chakra. You’re going to need it for the dimension jump.”

A couple of the ship’s sailors passed by at that moment, noticing her bent form clutching at her stomach, and they stopped to check on her. They eagerly made suggestions for various seasick remedies. One of them, a younger, less seasoned sailor returned a few moments later to offer her some peppermint leaves he admitted he still sometimes used himself or kept close for regular passengers, saying, “Ninja aren’t usually affected by the sea, so I’m surprised you’re this queasy,” to which Sasuke immediately scowled. 

“Have anything more helpful to add?” came his derisive voice, colder than the lashing wind.

Sakura gave the Uchiha her best chiding stare in the dark—she was much too weak to elbow him or anything else of the like—before demonstrating an exhausted peace offering of a smile to the sailor. “First time for everything,” she sighed helplessly. 

“You know,” he added, “you have a room in the guest corridors just below deck, but I’m sure the Captain wouldn’t mind you seeking refuge in the hold. It might not seem logical to you, but the lowest decks are the best place to be if you’re seasick. The swaying lessens the farther you go below.”

“Thank you,” she tried smiling again, breathing raggedly as she accepted the peppermint leaves, smelling their sharp twang to confirm the herb, before shoving them in her mouth as the kind seafarer wished her luck, gave her one last pitying smile, and walked away. 

And when Sakura was certain she had nothing left to vomit, she took the man’s advice and allowed Sasuke to help her to the lowest level of the ship, the cargo hold. And the sailor had been right, the rocky back and forth evened out as she sought the inner-most spot of the ship amid boxes and hanging nets of supplies meant for the citizens of the Land of Snow. She tightened her hood around her, noting that while it may be a smoother ride, it was certainly colder down here. But Sakura could handle that, she couldn’t handle nausea. The floor was ice against her cheek as she curled straight into the fetal position around her stomach. Sasuke immediately came to sit beside her, tucking his thigh under cheek for head support. She clenched her eyes shut as she clung to his pant leg, too sick to even tell him she appreciated his uncharacteristic doting. When his hand came down on her hair, smoothing it back like she was a small child, she whispered one final thank you as the comfort of that gesture soothed her into sleep. 

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.

Sasuke was beyond concerned about Sakura’s condition. It had started with motion sickness, and he had been up to ask the captain twice of their journey’s time and progress. “Fourteen hours, lad. Can’t rush a storm into settling. Better settle; wishing brings terrible luck.” And then again, at pre-dawn, “Storm set us back, but we will be there before noon. If you’ll stop insisting we be there sooner, Lady Sea might do us a favor simply for being content.” 

But Sasuke was not content. Sakura hadn’t eaten anything in hours, and Sasuke was regretting this part of their plans. Even as time passed onboard, she wasn’t getting better. Maybe he should have pushed away the peppermint leaves that sailor had given her. He almost had, Mako’s poison attempts still very fresh in his mind. But Sakura seemed to be desperate for anything, so he had let her shove it down her throat, already mentally prepared for another allergic reaction. Instead, it helped her fall asleep which was at least some improvement. When the sun calmed the waves the following morning, Sasuke had expected Sakura’s sickness to improve, but it didn’t. Instead, her vomiting returned with the sunrise. 

“That’s it,” he let out an exasperated breath, standing rigidly over her doubled over form in helplessness. “I’ll use the Rinnegan and take some time to recover if needed. I’m not so weak that I need to let you suffer to conserve every last drop of chakra.”

“Wait,” she moaned. “Just wait. It can’t be more than a few more hours.”

“I don’t care,” he hissed, bending down to sling her arm over his shoulder. She didn’t complain as he marched them up several flights of stairs, practically mowing down anyone who happened to be in his way from reaching the sunlight bathed deck. Her silence was the biggest indication that she wasn’t well. 

He’d activate the Rinnegan as soon as he had the space to allow his full-bodied Susanoo to transform. But just as their heads broke free of the levels below, the white, ice-camouflaged shoreline of the Land of Snow greeted them. Sasuke didn’t hesitate for a second, jumping down from the starboard side of the ship despite the shock and protests of the most useless sailors Sasuke had ever had the displeasure of knowing (well, most of them, anyway).

With Sakura’s weight fully supported, he landed on the water gently, his chakra an anchor the uneven surfaces, floating chunks of ice solidifying the closer they got to the coastline. The ship was faster than his careful gait, docking well-before Sasuke could be considered ashore, but Sakura seemed to improve somewhat just from finding her balance in Sasuke’s steadying hold. “Almost there,” he told her, shuffling her against his side as she made to move her arm from his shoulder. 

“I already feel like I can catch my breath again. Like the ground isn’t going to flip me upside down.”

Even though the Uchiha was relieved to hear such words, Sasuke didn’t let up or relax his support until both her boot-clad feet landed firmly on snow. She pulled her arm free, kneeling into the snow. His arm reached down for her elbow, but she shrugged him off, rolling over onto her back. He immediately panicked before he realized she had begun waving her arms and swinging her legs until she created a celebratory snow angel. “Aww, dry land!”

If he wasn’t so concerned, Sasuke’s didn’t know if his eye would have twitched, or he would have smirked. “Snow doesn’t exactly constitute as dry,” he corrected sarcastically. Her persistent snow angel-ing loosened a bit of the worry in his stomach, but he still implored, “will you please get up before you catch your death and become the very thing you're making?”

“I’m a doctor, remember—”

“And look what good that has done you in the last twenty-four hours.”

“I’m ‘grounding.’ It’s healing me from the seasickness.” 

The Uchiha sighed and cast his eyes dramatically to the side, before honing them on the trio of sailors crunching their way through snow toward them from the docked ship. Instinctively, Sasuke took a step around Sakura to block her shenanigans from them and he knew the sort of picture he presented: black figure with a rolling sea of ice behind him. It was a perfect metaphorical picture for how he felt and could make others feel in a matter of seconds. “Is the lass okay?” they hollered, and Sasuke bit his tongue before returning their question rudely. “From the looks of it, she’s keeled over and died!”

“I’m fine!” Sakura called from the ground, attempting to roll over and find her own feet before Sasuke turned back toward her to assist her further. She shooed his only good working hand away as if she didn’t need the help, the stubborn convalescent. What was she trying to prove?

“Do you know if there is a doctor nearby?” Sasuke intercepted the sailor’s soon-to-be attempts at an inquiry about Sakura’s health. “It’s been a long time since we’ve been to the Land of Snow. We are unfamiliar.” 

“Not needed,” Sakura interrupted, faking a bounce to her step that had Sasuke scowling at the obvious lie. “Will you direct us to the Princess Koyuki?”

.

.

.

Despite Sakura’s insistence that her health had returned, Sasuke forced the both of them to stay overnight in the rainbow-inspired village homes of the new “Land of Spring,” the name for the colorful homes unaffected by the intense winter climate of the rest of country due to the Land of Snow’s ‘treasure’ winter-defying generator. Even though Koyuki had furnished them with a minka in the mountains where they could refuge in-between Sasuke’s interdimensional jumps, the Uchiha was firm in his resolve to stay overnight in town where they could at least remain “close” to a doctor should Sakura’s severe symptoms return. 

“As long as I don’t step foot on a ship in the near future, I think I will be fine,” she had stated embarrassedly in front of the Princess Koyuki, whom hadn’t changed in the slightest. Maybe a little nicer, but she was more than accommodating, greeting them as old familiar friends, but inquiring the most about Naruto. She was surprised to learn a lot of the details about the post-war modernizations of Leaf Village and events leading up to the war. Sakura learned rather quickly that every time Koyuki would ask a question, she was really circling the conversation back around to Naruto and his involvement. Except for the one time when she smirked, glancing between them knowingly and said to Sasuke, “When you sent your letter, saying that you and your ‘wife’ would be passing through, somehow I knew it was the final member of your infamous Team 7 trio. I wonder what exactly that means, when you picture someone in your mind, and your thought becomes reality. I would call it coincidence, but I imagine Naruto would go on and on about Fate and the Will of Fire.”

Sakura had thought she had been blushing before from Sasuke’s mothering, but it was nothing compared to the scarlet that spread across her face at hearing how he’d addressed her in that letter. Wife. He was using that word freely, now. And it did all kinds of things to her. 

Sasuke was completely unaffected by Koyuki’s words, ejecting that emotionless acknowledgement of ‘hn’ before moving them along.  

As they said their final partings with Koyuki and the villagers the following morning to head toward the snowcapped mountains beyond the generator, Sakura made a mental note to remind Naruto to pay a visit to Koyuki and the Land of Snow soon—whenever fatherhood would allow him, that is. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay in town?” Sasuke had asked her lowly in the hours of the previous night, taking up the small space between them. “What if your sickness returns?”

She had pinched his cheek to his immense annoyance, eliciting a hiss like a snake whose body had just been violated by reaching hands. “I’ll acquaint myself with the medical staff in your absence, just as I did in Suna. I’ll make weekly visits and pick up some supplies before we head out in the morning. Will that assuage your needless concern?” 

“Fine,” he had grumbled, before reaching up and pinching her own cheek in return. 

And during the long trek into the winter wilderness, Sakura soon realized that she had underestimated the length of the journey and wasn’t so confident about those weekly trips back and forth. Sasuke stopped several times to wait for her to catch up, each time starting to probe about her wellbeing before she finally shot him the annoyed glare for once. He arched an eyebrow, but didn’t ask again. Just when Sakura thought her feet would fall off as blocks of ice to join the snow around them, she found herself at the base of the mountain, the steepled, snow blanketed minka a beacon of relief sending smokey signals in greeting. She shivered in anticipatory warmth just looking at it. Koyuki must have sent someone in advance to prepare it for their arrival. 

She had been correct in this assumption, because they weren’t alone when Sasuke pushed aside the screen doors. One of Koyuki’s men greeted them warmly, showing the two how to utilize the space during the harsh elements, along with unnecessary demonstrations of the open wood hearth and quilt bordered kotatsu in the center of the floor. Sakura had immediate plans for diving under it to warm her feet but was diverted by the elderly man as he pointed to the rising steam coming from the private onsen just on the eastern side of the house. “This is Princess Koyuki’s private mountain home,” the elder announced in pride, “the water is heated from magma deep beneath the surface. In other words, some of those mountains are volcanic. The mountains are home to the snow monkey population. You may see some stragglers, but they won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”

“Please share our thanks to the princess for her hospitality,” was the last parting word Sakura had for the man as he outfitted himself for the return journey back to the Land of Spring, assuring her that he would return with supplies for the duration of their stay. 

Sakura couldn’t help herself. As soon as the man departed, she snaked her arms around her husband who was already tending to the hearth. “This is amazing! This is beautiful! And to think you’d be experiencing this all alone without me if I hadn’t come with you.”

He answered immediately. “If you hadn’t come along, I imagine I would have received the same neutral greeting that I do everywhere else. I’d probably be taking refuge somewhere up along the mountain side, closer to the source of the hot springs, surviving as the monkeys do.”

“Having a wife has it’s perks, then,” she grinned, stripping her bulky outer layers to dive under the quilt of the kotatsu just as planned, the floors warmed naturally by the streams funneling below. 

Sasuke bent over the stone-laid irori, placing more wood on top and checking the steaming kettle hung by bamboo from the ceiling. He spoke up from the other room. “The Kazekage was much more accommodating knowing that you would be in company, remember? And that was before you were my wife. It’s just you in general.”

Hearing him nonchalantly verbalize the word ‘wife’ for the third time made Sakura’s stomach swoop and toes curl in that dramatic teenage way that often plagued her as a Genin. She hadn’t been able to appreciate it when he’d dropped it during their argument before, but Sakura just realized that he wasn’t just writing it, he was saying it and doing so consistently! She hid a giddy smile to herself, her inner-Sakura absolutely rioting inside with glee. When he glanced her way at her suspicious silence, she rubbed the back of her neck with an embarrassed grin and tried to return herself to the present moment.  

“I’m going to check the area,” he said seriously, breaking into Sakura’s daydreaming with reality. “Will you be okay alone for a bit?”

“Of course. I’ll start cook—” she began, but he shook his head. 

“Just rest,” he interrupted, before ducking through the door and closing it to encase her fully in the warmth of her new surroundings. 

She promptly curled around herself beneath the kotatsu and let the sound of snowfall lull her to sleep. 

.

.

.

Kakashi’s response letter had come that morning, and Sasuke found it difficult to not let his thoughts return to it over and over throughout their journey. 

Sasuke,

 You are investigating my plans regarding the remaining Zenshin members who remain, despite telling me yourself that it would be you taking care of this, instead of an old man like myself. I am assuming this means that Sakura has convinced you to leave matters to me. No news as of yet, other than that the search is headed West toward the Hidden Rain and Hidden Grass villages, in the hopes of flushing the leader and any remaining members out. The hounds are on it. Burn this after reading. If I don’t receive a response, I’ll consider the information compromised. 

They should be in the clear then, Sasuke assumed, if the pursuit for Zenshin members was heading South-West. Sasuke had responded quickly and decisively with no further information about their location or Sakura’s condition. It would be unwise to risk frequent communication in the instance that it might alert Zenshin to their whereabouts. This is the last message you’ll be receiving from me. If it’s crucial for me to know, alert me. Otherwise, I’ll trust you to handle it. 

Even though he had been a little reassured at Kakashi’s efforts, Sasuke still took it upon himself to create a few shadow clones to check the immediate area. The suspended snow around and above him created a silence so deep and thorough, that all Sasuke could hear was the cracking of the white shrouded limbs of the forest trees encompassing the base of the mountain. It was so isolated, so off the beaten path, that Sasuke hoped the Land of Snow’s Princess kept the privacy of her mountain house a closely guarded secret from the rest of the population. But Sasuke wasn’t going to drop his guard completely, considering the staff she probably kept to maintain it. Sakura was going to have to be mindful if she was planning on making visits and supply runs back into town. 

When his shadow clone jutsu released and he learned that there wasn’t a single living person within twenty-five kilometers in either direction, Sasuke returned to the house. Sakura had fallen asleep at some point in his absence, the fire crackling and tea-steamed air knocking her clean out. Sasuke watched her carefully for a few minutes, ensuring that she seemed well. Maybe it really was the sea that had made her so sick, and she would be better now that they were comfortable. He was anxious to make the first inter-dimensional jump but decided to wait until tomorrow morning. He was going to spend the day resting and ensuring that Sakura slept through the night without issue. 

And that’s precisely what the Uchiha did, stretching out on the opposite end of the kotatsu and promptly knocking out. When they woke in the evening, they shared their first hearty meal in a long time—Sakura picked at it, really, something Sasuke didn’t miss—and despite his refusal, she dragged him out in the darkness toward the private onsen. The cold air was brutal against their skin, and Sakura slipped into the hot water in record time. He didn’t even get a second to appreciate her nakedness, while she openly watched him undress with a blush. When he raised an eyebrow at her obvious gawking, Sakura tried to make the excuse, “The heat is already getting to my head.” He smirked and snorted at her lie, if ejecting air out his nose could be called that, before wading into the steaming decalescent water. 

They were wrapped in darkness, but the winter landscape outlined everything in white. The ground was patchy in some areas where the geothermal water flowed underground in a path directed toward them and beyond. Sakura sighed and rubbed her feet, claiming her toes had frostbite, and Sasuke assesssed them carefully to humor her, pulling at each small digit and admiring their dissimilarities from his own. Again, he was taken aback about how odd it was, being in love. It wasn’t the first time that Sasuke was noticing something about another individual that he never would have even bothered paying attention to in the past, but here he was admiring and evaluating the shapes of her feet. “You’re going to lose credibility as a physician if you claim those toes are even capable of developing frostbite,” he teased, releasing her perfectly pink and healthy foot back into the water.  “The length of those nails should lift you five inches off the ground. They practically curl under.”

Her face reddened before she returned what Sasuke had given. “If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been travelling nonstop with you for months now. I don’t chew them off like you do apparently.” 

“Mhm,” he responded, ignoring the jab altogether. He had been exaggerating good-naturedly just to get a rise out of her, and it had worked. 

“Let’s see yours then,” she probed, snatching his foot from the water like she had just caught a fish in a Leaf Village summer pool. Before Sasuke even had a moment to defensively react to her words, his head submerged completely as his foot lead his body into reverse. He had quite literally never been yanked up by his foot before. He turned underwater and reached for her immediately, but she had already jolted from the bath, making a naked run toward the house. Sasuke didn’t run. He didn’t have to. He stalked after her with that slow sulking certainty of knowing your prey has nowhere to go, and Sakura knew it too, because her panicked laughter ricocheted throughout the mikan as she slammed the screen doors shut behind her and fled farther in. 

Sasuke teleported—yes, it was a blatant waste of chakra, but the shock on her face and squeal of defeat when she collided into his dripping wet chest in the main room of the house, made it a worthy waste. He had her on her back next to the iori before she could even attempt to use that inhuman strength to free herself. Pinning her hands above her head, Sasuke smirked into her face with a victorious “hn.” 

“I’m pretty sure running through the snow barefooted is how you actually get frostbite,” he chided, dipping his nose to her throat and trailing it tantalizingly down her collar bone. She stopped fighting at once but her facetiously laughter continued. “You’re going to pay for that stunt,” he rumbled in finality before ravishing her mouth, his hand slipping from her wrists to meet the back of her neck.

It wasn’t the sort of resting Sasuke had planned on doing, but their heavy breathing and mutual attention and indulgence of each other’s bodies once more brought the both of them an immense amount of respite and contentment. To Sasuke, it was still resting, in a way, because he knew that these moments were few and would one day be very far-between. Every second, every minute, every hour he got to be with Sakura in this way was collected eagerly as rest for his soul. And, god, it was a blessed sort of deliverance to break apart into a million pieces. Witnessing Sakura in peak performance and taking with full ferocity did things for his mental state, too. Sasuke’s anxiety about her health significantly improved as she varied their positions and he watched her rock above him in that desperate attempt to break into a million pieces, too. He was thankful the snow around them deafened everything.

.

.

.

“I’m going to travel to the ice dimension in the morning,” he had told her in the night, when their bodies stilled and their hearts leveled back out. “I’ll have to hike to the top of the mountain to get to the coldest point. In theory, that should make it easier.”

Sakura had immediately examined his plan, problem solving in her mind. “Won’t the height be an issue? Back at the inn in Tanigakure, we fell the distance of the top floor once we were through the portal.”

“It would be,” he admitted before clarifying, “but if I can skip the central dimension successfully again, the Ice Realm is full of mountains, remember? I’ll probably be stepping right out onto another one.”

Sakura nodded and pursed her lips as she considered. 

“I’ll do everything I can to return before nightfall the same day, but if I can’t make it back immediately, don’t panic. You’ll be okay here alone until I get back?”

“Of course,’ she responded immediately, but he still eyed her carefully in that all-knowing way of his. “And if I get bored, I’ll head back to town and get supplies or find some work.”

“It goes without saying, but be cautious. Kakashi may be hunting the Zenshin, but their reach has been large so far and their numbers surprising. Who knows what connections they may have in all sorts of places.” 

She bristled; she couldn’t help it. Sakura didn’t know why his concern was irritating her at the moment, but she just looked away and nodded. Sakura decided that it wasn’t just him—in the back of her mind, his concern overall was adorable, and she knew he wasn’t insinuating that she lacked mindfulness. Except for having too much faith in Mako, but Sakura wasn’t in the honest sort of mood to feel like counting that one. But it was more than his concern. It was this gnat-like dispute with Zenshin that just wouldn’t go away. She hadn’t said it aloud, but this was practically a honeymoon to her and here they were still having conversations about this group whom Sakura was practically sick of hearing about. She was done. Done with Zenshin. She didn’t care if they weren’t done with her, she was done with them. Sakura just wanted to hole up with her new husband, the man of her dreams, in this winter traditional home against a snow-capped mountain and do more of what they had already started. 

In the dim firelight of the irori, Sasuke scowled at her lack of a response. He could sense her irritation and sighed. “I know you can take care of yourself, I wasn’t saying—”

“I know,” she cut him off with sharpness, that annoyance bleeding through despite her resolve to contain it. He stared at her for a second before looking away as if he didn’t know what to say or do about her sudden attitude. This type of behavior had only ever been directed at Naruto. “I’m sorry,” she sighed. What was wrong with her? She was hormonal, she deduced, due to start any day. That godawful week before her actual period must have snuck up on her in the form of sudden mood swings. “But I’ll be fine. So you don’t have to worry. You can stop worrying.”

“Do you stop worrying about me when I am gone, even though I can take care of myself?” he asked calmly when she tucked her chest against his side. She felt him pull the strands of her hair in his fingers, touching it lightly so that she wouldn’t feel him doing so. She immediately felt his words like a guilt-inducing punch. 

She sighed. “Of course I do.”

“I can relate more so now, is all. Especially since you’ve been sick.” 

 “I’m not sick,” she sighed again, tossing a leg over his own suggestively. “Obviously.” 

He didn’t fall for the distraction. “You’ve barely eaten anything this evening.”

“I said I’m fine,” she sighed, rolling back over onto her back. “Honest.”

But much to Sakura’s surprise, she was not fine. Sasuke had rolled over well before sunrise to tell her he was leaving, just as he had always promised he would from now on. No empty beds upon her waking. No surprise escapes or lack of goodbyes like the past. She sat up groggily, and her breath froze in the air before her face, but Sasuke pushed against her shoulder to encourage her to return under the quilted covers. “I’ve stoked the fire. I’ll try to be back before sunset. Leave a note if you leave.”

She nodded sleepily and grasped his hand in parting. “Be careful. I love you.”

“Hn,” he murmured in response. And in typical Sasuke Uchiha fashion, he chose a voiceless reply, reaching down to tap his fingertips against her forehead. She rubbed at her forehead fondly long after he walked out into the frigid pre-dawn of the Land of Snow.

And when the sunrise woke her a second time, Sakura shuffled on her knees to the irori and poked the coals to aerate the steady flames before adding more wood to an already dying fire. But the ground flipping nausea from the sea voyage returned with a vengeance and hit her hard in her stomach. She doubled over, hardly avoiding the hearth before she vomited the meager contents of her stomach. She clutched her head with a moan. 

Drearily, and confused by the returning sickness, Sakura crawled on hands and knees back to the blankets, dry heaving along the way. She dove back into them, chasing the sleep that might rid her of the vertigo and nausea. If this persisted for long, she would definitely not be making that three-hour snowy trek back to the village. It was in her plans to consistently make chakra pills for Sasuke so his stash wouldn’t diminish, but a supply-run would have to wait for now. She couldn’t walk to visit a doctor even if she wanted to. And she was too prideful to not treat any of her ailments herself.

Thankfully, Sakura had thought to purchase some nausea aid back in town when Sasuke insisted she see a doctor. It was one of the ways she appeased him, gathering the herbs for the medication herself. But she didn’t have the energy to brew her ginger and peppermint concoction until well into the afternoon when she was finally able to move around without vertigo. If she were her own physician right now, Sakura would be telling her to write down her symptoms along with times in order to track and identify this random illness, but she was struggling for brain power. She was just tired. Sotired. She deduced it was probably a bad reaction to her new batch of contraceptives, since she took another one last night before falling asleep. She would study the ingredients again later. After downing the brewed nausea tea, she promptly fell back asleep with ragged breathing. 

.

.

.

Sasuke found the ape population almost as soon as he took his first step up the mountain, the ice sloped surfaces and tree coverage a flurry of activity the higher up the mountain he travelled. They must have been well-acquainted with human occupants occasionally traversing this way because they ignored him, just as the mikan manager claimed. And Sasuke disregarded them in return, grateful for the indifferent species of monkey who acted as if they were almost bored by his presence. Their eyes barely roved over him before choosing to move along to whatever they had found to eat beneath the snow.

Despite the hot springs woven into the mountain, the weather was brutal, especially in the hours before sunrise, and only increased in ruthlessness as he hiked. Sasuke tried not to think about the easiest way to reach the top of this mountain was in the same suggestion he had made earlier: the full body Susanoo could simply fly him to the top. But he refused, because he needed the chakra reserves. He had to get back to her tonight, and even with the help of the chakra pills, he couldn’t waste a single drop of his own reserves if he hoped to return. He hadn’t pushed himself to teleport so far twice in the same day yet. In Suna, the chakra pill had simply allowed him to bypass the center dimension, and Sasuke was going to try to make the initial jump and return all in the same day, if it worked. The greeting fuchsia sunrise at Sasuke’s back, bleeding the white foot-print dotted landscape a rosy hue that reminded him of his wife—who he’d had to leave behind again—would be what Sasuke would use as a tether back to this realm when it fell again in sunset. He strengthened his resolve as the time was already slipping away and turned back to face the top of the mountain. 

The sheets of snow turned into ice as he ascended, and with every cracking step and swirling vapor of heated breath frosting his eyelashes, Sasuke couldn’t help but confide his thoughts to the mountain. His own life had been seasons of winter, an ice spanning the years of his youth, and no matter the amount of sunshine the season of the present now granted him, the seasons of his past were like the unmelting snow that lingered in the shadows of warmer weather, reminding all who looked at Sasuke of his history of frigid darknesses. Just as recollecting citizens often reminisced to one another during the first drop in temperatures, “do you remember the storm of ten years ago? The snow was waist-high…” So too, were the rumors of Sasuke Uchiha and his crimes. The ice of his past would never melt. Maybe Kakashi was right about one thing. How would he ever be able to truly embrace this summer without causing worry? All anyone ever saw when they looked at him was the reminder that Sasuke Uchiha was of the winter, a dark, icy monster. They were right to fear his growing attachments. Revenge, in any form, would be a returning winter that everyone expected. 

But then, there was Sakura. A literal walking sun that warmed the steps he left behind before catching up to him with her radiance. She blinded others of Sasuke’s transgressions just by standing by his side, persistently bleeding into that snow of his past like that sunrise. And the question that everyone wanted to know was who would win, the ice or the sun? Because if he had a child born to and taken from him, it was no longer a matter of if Sasuke would fall, but when in their minds. And they were counting on Sakura to keep him in check, not knowing that she would bring her burning, incinerating power down, herself. And Sasuke was no longer creating that ice. Alongside his wife, Sasuke was a black burning sun with his own Amaterasu flame, an Uchiha with a fixating love. Maybe they would burn the world together, and that’s why the others were begging them not to take the chance. And Sasuke couldn’t decide if they were hypocrites not holding themselves to the same standard, or if they were right. 

But, just as if Naruto were matching his trek, walking beside him in this unbearable cold, he could hear his voice. “I won’t let you. Either of you.” It was a promise that burned in the distance. Maybe they were wrong; maybe they were only burning stars of variation and Naruto was the sun who kept them all in gravitational pull. 

Reaching the top was an exhilarating feat and the sunrise peaked through the winter haze, sharpening into the round outline of the sun. He inhaled, and exhaled deeply, closing his eyes to memorialize this feeling as all his troubled thoughts left him. Sunrises and sunsets, he’d seen so many. But this one sanctified him, reminded him of the man he wanted to be, but he didn’t yet know just how memorable and marking this one would come to be to him. He would find that out later. 

For now, he turned his back, activating the Rinnegan and fracturing time and space, refraining from relying on Sakura’s chakra pill just yet. Push, he demanded of himself, when the portal wavered as he sharpened his focus on the realm beyond the core dimension. He could do it. He could do it. The portal flared to life at the expense of his chakra, the icy mountains corporealizing before his eyes. He didn’t even hesitate long enough to take in a victorious moment before jumping through the portal. Preparing for a long fall, just as Sakura had pointed, the Uchiha braced himself as he plummeted. But just as he theorized, something precipitous rose up to greet him. But it was not a mountain as he first thought. It was a spire, tall and ethereal beneath his crouched form. And Sasuke’s eyes widened in shock. He couldn’t believe it. He was standing on top of an icy fortress. It was a castle.

.

.

.

Sakura woke mid-day to sounds coming from outside. She rose on her knees steadily, relieved that her sickness had gone, and her appetite returned. Her stomach growled angrily at its recent neglect, but she ignored it as she cautiously sidled up to one of the screen doors leading outside. Her ninja senses were suddenly on high alert as the soft crunching of snow met her ears and her hand inched down to her calf where a kunai was strategically hidden. She held her breath and took the risk to crack the door open to peer outside. What she saw was not what she had expected. The steaming onsen had attracted a few more guests from the mountain residents. A handful of monkeys, pale felted and red-faced, bobbed in the water with closed eyes. They groomed each other lazily, occasionally jumping out and back in. Sakura opened it wider to admire them with a smile. They noticed her, but paid no further attention, one monkey even going as far as to jump on the roof of the mikan to sit and dry. 

Turning back to the iori, Sakura brewed her ginger tea and cooked a small meal for herself while she watched the monkeys soak up the heat of the onsen. For the first time in a long time, Sakura found herself at a complete rest. There was no demand for her help, no rush to her schedule, no one else to look after. It was just her now, in the middle of nowhere—Sasuke was in another dimension and was actually farther away than anyone else—and while she felt guilty about her continued absence in Konoha, Sakura took a greedy breath of winter solitude. She told herself not to feel the restlessness of the pressure to be productive and to just enjoy the winter landscape and the snow monkeys. Because it might be one of the few moments in her life of truly ever being alone and there was something special about facing the world by yourself and feeling yourself alive in a vastness that continued and continued regardless of your presence and your busy life. How otherworldly nature felt, when you stopped to witness it. She could see why Sasuke felt more at peace alone in nature than in a crowded village most of the time.

And besides, she had been ill of late and deserved this little respite. Sakura highly theorized that her unrelenting pace of recent months had caught up to her in the form of illness. Being a medic, she knew the challenges faced by an unrested body. It caught up to you eventually, but she had the habit of ignoring her own medical advice. Maybe if she modeled resting, Sasuke would catch on and rest too. She was proud of him for doing just that yesterday, choosing to stay with her and not jump at the first chance he got, which would have been the more Sasuke-like thing to do. It was the little things like that, that reminded Sakura of how much he actually had come to desire her presence. She tried to not think about the fact that the both of them might be trying to grab onto as many memories that they could before the inevitably of their lengthy separation prevented them from making more. She sighed dejectedly. 

Sipping the ginger tea did her lots of good, and with the absence of her nausea, Sakura forgot just how sick she had been just hours ago, moving on with her day in the most mundane way possible. She read. And read. Underlining medical texts she’d picked up back in town, until her knee began to bounce from inactivity. After a while, Sakura explored the house more fully, admiring the various trinkets and belongings she encountered which probably once belonged to the princess. She cleaned and organized the space before going over to her supplies she’d brought with her to sort. Among her things, were ingredients for her burn solvent that she planned to pass along to the medical staff here just as she had in Sunagakure for the benefit of Gaara’s people. And now, she also brought along more of the anti-depressant plant H. Perforatum to capsulize for the Land of Snow as well. She would have to check in with Tsunade about the plant’s clinical trial progress back in Konoha before sharing it with anyone here, but it was on her list to do. 

When she ran out of things to do, Sakura admitted to herself that she wasn’t the best at resting. She longed for Sasuke, and it hadn’t even been more than half a day since he’d left. She realized suddenly that she just might have to make a trip to town as early as tomorrow just to fill the time in his absence. As the sun nodded toward the horizon, Sakura watched the snow monkeys answer the call of home and retreat back up the mountain where they had come down from, while also yearning to see the mountain return her husband to her in the same way. 

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Sasuke had explored Kaguya’s ice castle for the entire day, but just like the red-sand mountain back in the core dimension, it was abandoned and full of deceptive architecture. It was designed to trick him in the same way as the last building he had found—Sakura had pointed this out back when she had teleported with him after they had been ambushed in Tanigakure. However, unlike it had been with the tower, Sasuke couldn’t find the entrance of the ice castle despite circling the building twice and combing all the terraces and the domed top for a way inside to the central building. Every crevice or hole he discovered was a dead end, which staggered him. According to the theory Sakura had developed in the core dimension, the tower was constructed to lure and distract instead of prevent entry, but it didn’t seem to entirely hold true in this case. Sasuke supposed he might be able to use the Amenotejikara of the Rinnegan to swap places with something inside, but that would require chakra he wasn’t quite willing to sacrifice because he still needed to return to Sakura tonight. His Rinnegan and Sharingan revealed no one inside the castle structure as far as he could tell, but wasn’t sure others from the Otsusuki race might be detectable with his visual prowess. Kaguya was his only example, but if any of the Otsuski were still alive and operating as Kaguya had, then they would come eventually. Which is why Sasuke desperately needed to find away through the walls at whatever cost. Even if he had to blow the roof in, he would. But he couldn’t at the moment, not with the hours waning and his chakra vanishing rapidly. They would be spending longer than he had expected in the Land of Snow if this was the rate of his progress after discovering something so critical.

With a plan to return, Sasuke turned South in the direction the base of the mountain would be if he weren’t in another dimension. He’d walk the distance here instead of down the mountain at this time of night. For some reason, it was cold, but tolerable to an extent here as the light of this dimension was in full effect. As Sasuke made the long trek back toward his wife, he wondered if it might be a good idea to ask her to return with him once he had recovered from the aftereffects of repetitive teleportation. He didn’t like the idea of bringing her with him, the threat of the Otsuski was always a risk he wasn’t ready to take with anyone else, but she was the smartest of all of them, impressing even Kakashi at times. Sasuke knew she would figure out the puzzle of deception in no time at all if she came. He thought about the pros and cons of her tagging along with him as the travel time passed. 

When he came close to the spot Sasuke believed would be the mikan’s approximate location, he dove into his weapon’s pouch and produced one of Sakura’s chakra pills. He exhaled, swallowing it down, and inhaling as the rush of chakra flooded his system. It was going to work. He just knew it. He willed it because she was on the other side of it. 

The portal spun and widened, and his head cracked from the pain of it and Sasuke clutched it, squinting through the pain. He stepped through the black and purple vortex before it could minimize and leave him trapped here in the cold overnight. Sasuke had miscalculated a bit about the precise location of the mikan’s entrance, practically stepping out onto the iori and stumbling to avoid stomping out the flames completely. When he raised his eyes to search the house, he saw her in the same place he’d left her, under the blankets of their shared pallet on the floor. She was staring wide eyed at his sudden appearance, and Sasuke could tell that she was obviously not expecting him to teleport almost directly on top of her.

“You’re here!” she beamed, standing from her place of warmth to run to embrace her. He reached out his hand for her instinctively to close the distance.