note: A switch in POV.

"The woman left."

His son's expression is unwavering under Fugaku's scrutiny. The Uchiha patriarch does not think that it is a surprise that the girl fled. Cowardice is an area where the Haruno have always excelled. He was a little sorry to have had to tie his youngest—his only—to the girl, but it had to be done for the betterment of the Uchiha name.

Sasuke is a dutiful son. Not as talented as Fugaku would have liked, but the boy listens, and obeys.

Fugaku does not care why his daughter-in-law has left, he only knows that it is an abandonment of duty, and thus distasteful.

"There must be no gossip." His son's dark eyes flicker to his face, and Sasuke nods, a quiet word of agreement the last sound heard at the breakfast table.

—

—

4

—

—

Sasuke pretends that nothing has changed. He does not deviate from his routine, he does not act as if the chair by the window in his study or the space next to him in his bed was ever filled. He doesn't even acknowledge that they're empty, because emptiness implies an absence, and absence implies loss.

Uchiha Sasuke does not—will not—feel loss.

—

—

The Uchiha clan used to be as influential as the Haruno, the Senju, the Hyuuga, with blood that could be traced as far back as the Muromachi jidai. When Sasuke was young, Fugaku had been fond of telling his sons that the Uchiha were rumored to have been descendents of the old gods themselves. A tacit reminder that Itachi and Sasuke could never forget where they came from, no matter that their name had been disgraced for a generation. What are decades to centuries of near godhood; of honor and history?

Uchiha Madara was Sasuke's great-uncle, and his betrayal had been just recent enough for Fugaku to remember the taste of prestige, of respect and ancestral obligations. It also meant that he could remember the cutting embarrassment of the clan's downfall, of the way it had felt to have the Uchiha name ground into dust underneath the soles of Haruno feet.

Sakura had only ever been a pawn in the war.

He concedes to this difference:

In the year they'd been together, Sasuke had slept deep and long. Now that his bed is doubly large, he is back to twitching awake at random hours in the night, the afterimage of nightmares lingering behind his eyes, the space next to him a chasm of cold.

He'd been left behind before. He'd walk through this just as well.

—

—

(Sasuke hadn't been able to sleep the first night after Mikoto's death. The house had felt too soundless—too still—like all air and light and life had been stripped away in the absence of his mother. He'd lain awake for hours while his panic built, until he'd felt as if he was dying, that he was being buried alive and he just hadn't realized it yet.

Just as he was sure he'd suffocate in the darkness, his bedroom door had opened and Itachi had soundlessly slipped inside. The two brothers regarded one another for a moment, Sasuke's eyes wild and Itachi's thoughtful and calm as always, and then his older brother had crossed the room and cracked open a window. The rush of night time sounds broke the crushing vice around Sasuke's ribs, and suddenly he could breathe again.

Itachi had then wordlessly sat on Sasuke's bed, putting himself between the door and his younger brother. He'd stayed long after Sasuke finally fell into fitful sleep. The last time the brothers had slept this way had been when Sasuke was four years old.

A month later, Itachi was gone, and Sasuke learned to forgo sleep to guard his own door.)

—

—

The original Shiraga that used to hang in the entryway disappears.

And then the celadon vase; the chaise in front of his office window.

When Sasuke walks in the door early one afternoon and catches workers moving the beautiful antique tansu from out of his bedroom, he doesn't even have to ask. His father, physically purging Sakura from the estate. His father, scrubbing what amounts to a blemish from the Uchiha name.

He makes them put the tansu back.

(Sakura had always liked that piece best.)

—

—

When Itachi left, his room had been emptied, repartitioned, and repurposed for storage a week later. Mikoto had fared slightly better; there is still a small, framed photo of his mother hanging in his father's bedroom.

Sasuke supposes appearances must be kept for the dead.

The Uchiha obliterate, even the memory of their own. It's what they do best.

There are, after all, always expectations to be met.

—

—

Growing up, Naruto and Sakura had tried to help Sasuke deal with being Fugaku's version of Uchiha in different ways.

Naruto had driven Sasuke to succeed, urged him towards the goals he'd set for himself and the expectations that his father had wanted him to meet. Sasuke did the same for the blond. Their friendship had been a constant storm of comparative adjectives: stronger, faster, smarter, better. It exhausted; it distracted.

Sakura had taught him—Sakura had taught him how to find the center within himself. She'd forced him to stop.

She'd made him feel like he'd been enough, just as he was.

—

—

He'd thought she'd moved past her elementary school feelings for him years ago.

That's why, when Sakura turned from the view of the city spread below them, hair a windswept mess, Sasuke hadn't been prepared for the severe line of her mouth, or her trembling hands. Sakura's whole body had thrummed, and the green of her eyes were made electric by tears and the bright noonday sun.

I love you, I can't—I can't marry your brother, Sasuke. It's too—

Newly seventeen, and Sasuke had been unthinkably stupid. Sakura, who'd always worn her heart on her sleeve, Sakura, who couldn't keep something from him to save her life—

He had to close his eyes, had to cut himself off from the sight of her

He'd said: Think about your mother and father.

He'd said: They're your family.

He'd said: I don't love you that way.

Moments passed, and the sound of the rooftop door shutting with a careful thump was the only noise that had told him she was gone. Sasuke'd tried not to think about how her expression might have crumpled—how the way she'd looked at him must have changed—in the four minutes that had taken her to leave.

—

—

(Uchiha Sasuke realizes that he is in love with Haruno Sakura when they're both twelve years old.

A week later, he learns that her parents have promised her to his older brother.)

—

—

"You fucking bastard!"

At the very least, Sasuke thinks before Naruto's fist connects with his jaw, the idiot had waited until they were somewhere private.

The fight doesn't last long; Naruto knows full well that there are far better ways to hurt him.

"It's Sakura-chan," he pants, doubled over.

In a similar state, Sasuke looks away, hiding from the inflection in the blond's voice, "I wasn't the one who wanted a divorce."

"It's Sakura-chan," Naruto repeats, and there's reverence in every syllable. "She didn't just decide to leave for no reason, she's loved you since you were a stupid kid."

(And hadn't Sasuke loved her for just as long—?)

Sasuke doesn't answer, wiping the blood from under his nose and straightening to lean against the hood of his car. The garage door hangs half open behind them. In the west, the sun is setting.

"She gave up everything for you," Naruto says, and there is that inflection again: it sounds like inviolable holiness. For a second Sasuke wonders if Naruto is still in love with Sakura.

(Only a second, because he knows the difference between them is that Naruto's love had known how to adapt and change while Sasuke's had only ever known how to fester.)

"I never asked her to give up a single thing."

He sinks down to his haunches, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, "I just wanted her to be Sakura."

"Then why the hell did you cheat on her?"

"I didn't."

The bleakness in his voice sounds pathetic even to himself. Hanamura had always seen a need to violate his personal space; he'd been about to shake her off when he'd heard the click of Sakura's shoes.

He'd wanted…

Something. Anything other than the placid acceptance he'd seen in her eyes for the past year.

Naruto slides down next to him, "You're really fucking dumb, you know that?"

Sasuke doesn't bother dignifying that with a response.

They sit in silence and watch as the sky flames bright for a while before the day fades into dusk.

Finally, when it's completely dark, Sasuke says, "It's better this way. It was never going to work out."

Shaking his head, the blond clambers to his feet and dusts his pants off, "For fuck's sake, Sasuke. For once in your life, man up."

—

—

"Go see her, you don't deserve her but she deserves the truth."

—

—

Sometimes, as he is swiping through emails or skimming the news on his phone, Sasuke realizes that only half of him is in his office, or the elevator, or the car, and that the other half is thousands of miles away in a sunny bedroom in France, or an empty high school classroom. Or: the shade of the tallest tree behind her old house.

Inevitably, he will look down and realize that he already has half her number—committed to memory—dialed.

He leaves the screen open even after he puts his phone away.

(He regrets not pressing call when he still had reason to.)

—

—

(A piece of poetry she'd picked up in the States:

i exist in two places / here / and where you are

She'd sent it to him on a whim late one night. After Mikoto, before Itachi, and years after that day on the roof. This is how I feel, all the time, she'd said, and he hadn't been able to answer. She'd apologized in the absence of any response from him, had become angry as the hours wore on before he'd finally replied with an inconsequential question or the other. He doesn't do inconsequential questions, so it was as good as an apology. He couldn't tell her that the reason it'd taken him so long was because he'd wanted to scrawl an answering verse on paper, and he'd had to distance himself—had to fight the urge:

my body's actions / speaking of wanting to ride / a cloud to the western paradise— / why is it my heart / calls only north, towards you?

Despite his father's best efforts, despite what he knows a good Uchiha should be, Sasuke is a romantic at heart in the truest, most antiquated sense of the word. Duty, at the cost of love. Family, at the cost of self. And Uchiha do not pine, he does not yearn, but...But. Uchiha Sasuke had fallen in love with Haruno Sakura when he was twelve years old.

He thinks of her, and even though the words are not his own, even though the words that he does possess are clumsy and dusty with disuse—:

love

my body / stained by yours. )

—

—

Naruto insists on feeding him scraps despite Sasuke's very descriptive threats of visceral dismemberment.

"I saw Sakura-chan for lunch yesterday and her arms—she says Granny Tsunade's got her into boxing and kickboxing again."

Sasuke continues to leaf through the contracts on his desk, glasses on, head bent, lips pressed into a thin line. Naruto sprawls lazily on the sofa in his study, the lone lamp in the room throwing flickering shadows across the walls. It's Saturday night, and the other man had shown up on his doorstep at half past twelve, claiming that he was too drunk to make it all the way home and too broke to get a taxi.

(Sasuke had promptly handed him 3,000 yen, but the blond waved him off with a cry of I could never!)

"Naruto, I don't care."

A beat of silence follows, and Sasuke thinks that maybe, finally Naruto has fallen asleep. But when he looks up, he meets the blond's lucid blue stare.

"You should."

Sasuke closes his eyes, and slowly counts to ten.

"You still don't deserve Sakura-chan, but you should care. I'm going to make sure that you care."

He takes the 3,000 yen with him when he leaves.

—

—

(Seeing her again doesn't bring an epiphany or any new realizations.

He knows he doesn't deserve her, and he's never stopped loving her.

It'd been a little like seeing the dead come back to life. For a year, he'd lived with the ghost of the woman he'd smothered, and now here she is—rumpled, tired, determined—alive. There's a metaphor about cherry trees here, somewhere.

Uchiha Sasuke doesn't feel loss, because she should never have been his to lose in the first place.)

—

—

His older brother delivers the divorce papers.

Is it like a fist to the gut, seeing him standing in the back garden? A shock? Like the ringing in the ears after a slap to the head?

No, it's a slow slide. There is Itachi under a fall of red maple leaves, and here is Sasuke slipping back into the skin of little brother.

"Otouto."

"Get out."

Itachi approaches him slowly, his expression schooled in the same maddening calm that he'd used to outlast Sasuke's tantrums when he was still young enough to throw them.

He barely registers the plain brown packet of papers Itachi offers him.

"Get the fuck out of this house."

(Not his house, but this house.)

"You've changed," Itachi murmurs, and like a sheet of rain broken by the cliff-side the older man's impassivity drops—just for a moment—and Sasuke learns that his older brother's disappointment is as cutting as ever.

"You left."

Itachi inclines his head, the brown envelope still held out between them, "How did you drive her away?"

—

—

His brother leaves. He opens the heavy envelope. He'd known what it was. He'd been expecting it. But in his heart of hearts, nestled underneath his breastbone, Sasuke had pretended; he'd made the workers put the tansu back.

He skims the papers detailing the settlement. Fair, he notes distantly.

At the end of the stack, his fingers brush against something short and heavy—cardstock.

Itachi had left a note: a time, a place, and a single sentence.

—

—

Mikoto's grave is nestled deep in the Uchiha familial plot, crowded and lost among a rabble of long dead ancestors. Sasuke visits during Obon and all the other appropriate times, but his favorite place to remember his mother had never been her grave.

Uchiha Mikoto had held a fascination for the sea. She'd loved the vastness of it—the potential for losing her way, of being swallowed and then spilled at the feet of a new land. He remembers the daytrips his mother used to take with her sons to Wakasu Park; she would walk them to the easternmost tip and point out the rough waves past the calm of the harbor. She'd always leaned her whole body into the whipping wind.

Wakasu Park had been the last place Itachi had gone with Sasuke before he disappeared.

Sasuke looks at the neatly written characters on the worn piece of cardstock, deeply creased from the day it'd spent in his hands. It's a beautiful summer evening, and dusk is just beginning to color the water when Itachi quietly walks up to him from behind.

She is in trouble, his older brother had written, and Sasuke had had no choice but to come.

Itachi says nothing for a while, and the two brothers watch the waves in silence. The copper tang of blood floods his mouth, and Sasuke realizes he's bitten his cheek.

"I have been with the Akatsuki for the past two years. They killed our mother, and they will kill Sakura."

—

—

(if you returned / even for the length of the flash—

/ seen and then gone—

/ of lightning at dusk)

tbc

note: The first scrap of poetry is from Margaret Atwood's Corpse Song and the rest are snippets of Izumi Shikibu. Terribly melodramatic, yes, but I honestly do believe Sasuke's an old-school romantic at heart (I mean he refused a prosthetic arm for penance). I'm not totally happy with this chapter; it's choppy and probably really confusing as well but it probably would have taken me another two months to rewrite otherwise.

Thank you for everyone's kind words in the last chapter, and I hope you enjoyed pt. 4! As always, feedback is appreciated.