DISCLAIMER: I DON'T OWN IT.
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His life is vibrantly bright outside of the confines of those four walls- sun passing over greens and reds, flashing yellows, waving purples and pinks. His eyes hurt.
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Creeping along the edges of his vision is a darkness he knows well. His doctor snapped his plastic gloves off, wrote something in his file, readjusted the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, called this dark thing "blindness".
He remembers another doctor, another pair of glasses. He remembers another time, another place. A cool voice and a dark room.
His curse mark begins to throb. He leaves the office, locks himself in his room. Tries to sleep.
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More and more he senses that the brightness he has been subjected to all those years is finally fading, leaving his mind achingly numb.
He leads a quiet life. Retired life. Too angry to fight, too afraid to seek out companionship, too lonely to leave his house.
He never talked much to begin with, he reasons, and shutters his windows as night approaches.
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He knows how he looks. Doesn't need a mirror. Black hair, bright white skin, black eyes. He stands in front of his bathroom mirror anyway, sees nothing but a gray-blue swirl of color in the approaching light of dawn. He activates his sharingan.
When he deactivates it, there is nothing.
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He guesses that maybe its better this way. He can't fight anymore anyway. His curse seal flares up too often for him to ever approach even a training session. His body aches in strange places. He's old. He's twenty years old.
His friends don't knock anymore.
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Ironically enough, he discovers that his eyes aren't completely useless now. He's found that his eyes can disguise his blindness easily. He pinpoints a noise, focuses in on it, and lets his eyes move in that direction. He has perfect hearing. Perfect muscle control. Perfect movements, swift.
Nobody suspects.
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Years creep by and he's forgotten what was so important that he had to return to this place to do it. He misses with surprising sharpness the shapes of objects, the weight they held in his sight, the color... and oh god, the color.
His heart aches.
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When he wakes up in the morning there is a soft sobbing from outside his house.
He is twenty-three years old.
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When he wakes up in the morning, there is a soft sobbing from outside his house, and he pinpoints the exact location at his front door.
He goes to the back of his house to wait it out.
"SASUKE! SASUKE!"
So its Sakura, he thinks.
"Sasuke please open the door. I know you're inside!"
He says nothing.
She left him. She had promised but she left him. She had promised to stay his. She became Kakashi's instead.
His petty anger keeps him from opening the door.
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Two-weeks later he feels guilty, so he decides to take a walk. Time has begun to mean nothing to him. Two-weeks was a moment, a day, a year. The same repetitions in his thought patterns produced a sort of trance. This new event needed time to sink in.
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So two weeks later he's knocking on her door, not quite remembering what he had come there for in the first place.
"She's not there," comes a familiar voice from behind him. Naruto.
He turns around.
Inclines his head.
"Hn."
"She'll be back at six."
"What time is it now?"
"Four."
"Hn."
"Look, Sasuke-"
He's already disappeared.
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Sasuke sits above her building. Feels her approaching. Smells her.
Tastes her...
His curse mark thrums idly.
Something inside him clenches. This is what he had been afraid of.
Before he can stop himself, his control is gone.
The next morning he wakes up next to her.
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She never explains if it was voluntary on her part. She doesn't need to. He can sense the answer in her gentle hands. In her trembling voice. Her muscles are twitching. He can sense her bruises.
She gets up out of bed and when he speaks his voice cracks.
"Did I- I can't... are you hurt?"
She is shocked, doesn't answer for a moment.
"Yes, no, I'm um...," she can't seem to find the words to explain everything.
"I want you," he groans. She can now see in the light of day why he had secluded himself to the Uchiha compound.
His sharingan is activated, but he seems unaware. His eyes keep flashing red and black, and the curse seal is leaking over his skin.
He can't help it. There is no color anymore, no light, no shapes, nothing but a gray fuzziness that felt both cottony and solid at once.
In her he had found- finally, finally- a happy medium. His blindness dulled him to the intensity. She brought the images, the visions, his sight. The vibrancy of his vision.
So to speak.
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"What happened to-", Sasuke asks Naruto a few days later.
"Dead."
"Hn."
Sasuke is silent a moment before speaking again.
"How-"
"Mission."
"And Sakura-"
Naruto proceeded to hit him, Sasuke didn't fight back. Wouldn't allow himself to.
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"Sasuke, oh my god Sasuke, what happened? You're covered in bruises and you're-mmpf!"
Sasuke pulled her with him into the bed.
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His hands see for him over her skin. Feels her flush through the throbbing vessels beneath her skin. Feels the sheen of sweat. Her wide eyes, shining hair.
She steadies him over her and whispers softly words he can't quite hear, but soothes the curse mark and thus establishes his control.
"You're blind," she murmurs, as if just realizing it, tears leaking down her face. "Blind, blind blind."
"Hn," he whispers. "Blind."
He nips her neck and smirks.
Finally. Blind.