AN: Some lovelies over on Tumblr requested I post my contributions to SasuSaku Month 2019 on , so here we are. These will be short and sweet. Let's celebrate our favourite ninja together!

Day 1: Far From Home

Sasuke's wanderlust is in his bones if not his blood, and he has been places, seen things that the warm people of Fire had never nor would never experience. It's there, right at the very edge of the world, where Sasuke looks out onto the endless ocean and thinks I am far from home.

He does not think of the streets of Konoha, still new enough that the patina of people hadn't sunk into the stones; and he does not think of the land of Fire itself, though he carried its heat within him always. No: Sasuke's home is in the easy acceptance of Naruto and the fond indulgence of Kakashi, the way that Sakura's eyes trace the essence of his being and even in the curious stares of her parents as they watch team seven train.

Home, to him, is people and memories more than places and things. And with this thought in his head Sasuke turns his back on the never-ending sea, places his pack on his shoulder, and counts out the rhythms in his head that would lead him back.

It was lucky, he considers later, that his sense of home is at once so transient and so strong, because when he is still three months away from where he expected to find it, a part of home finds its way to him.

Sakura has changed once again in his absence. Where they'd parted at the gates of Konoha she was a medic recovering from war, her entire body bent in the service of other people and her gaze focused on finding his hurts and healing them. At the riverbank where they meet, far from home, she is every inch the explorer of her own destiny. And he is, Sasuke sees when she skips stones along the water before she notices him, only a part of it.

"Sasuke-kun," she says, and her surprise is so genuine that Sasuke wonders once again at Kakashi's talent for coincidence. "Where are you-"

He stops her with a look, because if she asks him where he was going then he will have to tell the truth: to her. Instead, the wanderer turns the question back to his fellow traveller, and Sakura pauses in unpacking her lunch to smile up at him.

There is a hint of ferocity to it.

"Kakashi-sensei sent me out to find Tsunade," she intimates, and then shrugs. "But I never did. And since I still have a month left before I need to return, I thought I'd go to see the end of the world."

Sasuke has looked at it both literally and metaphorically, and it is nothing special. "It's not worth it," he says, sitting down next to her, and he thinks they are not talking about the same thing when Sakura replies,

"Isn't it?"

Still, when he shakes his head she seems satisfied, and even deigns to share her food with him, a set of tart onigiri that speaks of civilisation more than his fading rations.

"What will you do instead?" he asks, and because Sakura knows him very well she reads underneath the underneath, hears the question that he's really asking.

"I thought," she hums, and grins when he doesn't stop her stealing the umeboshi from the centre of his rice, "that I'd try my hand at being a wanderer."

There is a kind of quiet that steals over Sasuke at these moments; he has been places and experienced things no other ninja has seen nor will ever see, but they cannot compare to the mysteries that reside in Sakura's eyes when she looks at him in her special way. He watches her long enough to see the blush that fights its way onto her face, colour hard-won in the face of her maturity. And he's silent for almost the length of time it would take for her to retract her statement.

It doesn't happen, though, because he leans back on his arm and says,

"I think you'd be good at it. Better than me."

Sakura laughs, and in it is the sound of lunches at Ichiraku and dinners in her house and afternoons spent on the rooftops of Konoha's summer spots.

"Better than you?"

She is incredulous. "Sasuke-kun, how could I be a better explorer than you? You're so far from home!"

He smiles at that, a hairline fracture in his immovable features that she picks up like the dervish of the desert wind.

"No," he replies, "I'm not."

AN: The last line killed me.