Chapter Text
In the dream, he and Rin are fourteen, or something close to it. They sit on a wet bench outside the Academy; the medical tape is peeling off his face, and Rin is biting down on a cigarette. He thinks he made some joke to the effect of a healer smoking, but he can’t remember. He’s too tired to try.
There’s a rhythm to existing together. She exhales smoke; she taps his knee, drums her fingers against the bench - there’s a kind of musicality to it. In exchange, he settles his elbow on her shoulder and they lean together, and apart. Comradery in misery is the one thing they still share. Kakashi, if prompted, would follow her to the ends of the earth. It’s a bad look.
“I have a shift in three hours.”
He feels the way she breathes; an extension of breath against the clavicle. Kakashi only knows his anatomy post-mortem. He’d be more suited to a morgue than a hospital room.
“Don’t go.”
She raises an eyebrow at him, mouth quirking up at the corner. It’s midnight; Minato was supposed to get on the medical director’s ass about kids taking the graveyard shifts, but his word holds little water as far as he’s concerned. Kakashi hates him, hates him, hates him. Rin looks like she belongs in a body bag.
Lately, she’s sleeping more than she isn’t. When she’s not at work. She doesn’t have time for anything that’s not the hospital or missions - and he doesn’t either - and she’s working through half a pack a day. If she wasn’t a healer, she’d probably be dead. She doesn’t care. Kakashi tries - tries to scrape the wet, coagulated feeling off the bottom of his ribcage, the spot that the world had missed - but it’s hard to muster up much of anything on days like this.
“You trying to get me fired, Hatake?”
“You’re the best nurse they got. Fukuda would have a heart attack if you didn’t come in. Whole hospital would fall apart.”
“Oh, so you’re trying to kill my manager, then?”
“Yeah, fuck him.”
She grins and knocks his elbow off. He misses hearing her laugh, but this is progress. He’d had to drag her out of bed last week after a mission in Kusagakure. The kids, she said, the kids, they-
He hadn't let her finish that sentence.
Kakashi rolls his wrist until it pops. Everything aches. “I think I have arthritis.”
“You’re a little young for that.” She grins, “Did your body finally catch up with your hair?”
“Hey, at least I don’t have smoker’s lung-”
She elbows him in the ribs.
“Ow.” He whines. “You’re so mean.”
He hangs his head and she scoffs, leaning closer so he can rest his head on her shoulder. The silence that hangs between them is completely still, like the dead.
“So. A year.”
She sighs, the mood souring. It’s just the two of them. Obito was the glue that made them stick together - the only thing he and Rin had in common now is their mutual loss. Maybe that was stronger than anything else. They cling to each other through the worst of it because there’s nothing else to hold onto.
“A year.” He agrees. A year since Obito left him with the worst gift he could think of, as if to spite him from beyond the grave. He must have loved you a lot. A year since this nightmare began. He must have loved you. So he sat through every trial he had to, proved himself in every way that mattered, learned the ins-and-outs of the more gruesome Uchiha traditions. He must’ve-
Fuck you, Obito.
“I don’t suppose you’re gonna let me look at your eye?”
It had been a minor graze. It was really the subsequent panic that landed him in the ICU, the thought of having destroyed the eye that Obito gave him, the fear and shame so intense that he was still gripping the sink hours later.
He leans back and drapes his arm over his face. “You’ve got a couple more hours before you’re on duty, doc.”
"Yeah," She exhales more smoke. “That’s what I thought.”
The next morning, Kakashi tries his hand at breakfast - tries to shake out the numbness, the static. The smoke sets him back a little; he hasn’t touched a cigarette since. Pakkun trots out some half an hour later and figures it out immediately - he is promptly banned from the kitchen and Sasuke has to salvage whatever is left.
“You’re an embarrassing excuse for a jounin.” Sasuke tells him. Kakashi nods along, because that’s probably true.
“Ah, Sasuke is still so mean.”
The look of disgust on his tiny face is far more amusing than it has any right to be.
“Don’t you have a job?”
“I got the day off, aren’t you so happy?”
“Go bother someone else.”
He’s being kicked out of his own living room. Pakkun snickers - and that, perhaps, is deserved.
It’s been a year. The situation isn’t ideal - it isn’t good - but it shuffles along anyways. The world keeps turning, and Kakashi keeps waking up, and a while ago, he might’ve resented that. They keep waking up, and nothing is better, but nothing is worse, either. They inch down the road. It is, all things considered, the best they’re going to get.
Sasuke is fiercely independent, which is probably for the best. Kakashi wouldn’t get anywhere with a kid clinging to his legs. He doesn’t know how his father did it.
He cooks when he feels like it, and leaves leftovers in the fridge for when Kakashi gets back from work. They keep training. When Sasuke manages to summon Chidori, he walks them down to the vendor down the street for dango. He learns he doesn’t like sweets - strange, that he’d never noticed it before.
Kakashi is in the habit of letting things slip by. An international mission robs him of a month; he spends his time in the jungle-region of Kusagakure defending the land of a high-paying client from guerilla warfare. He learns later that the owner of the oil plant had taken his territory from the very people they were defending against.
It’s hard to look at Sasuke after things like that.
The kid doesn’t notice - doesn’t care, more likely. He doesn’t care for much anything that isn’t his single-minded determination to kill Itachi that Kakashi can’t iron out of him. He doesn’t feel like it’s his place, can’t make him stop no matter what he says.
This he understands too - he gives into his bad habits too easily.
Minato told him once that discipline was his greatest vice. How the times change, he thinks. He would try to be a better example if he thought Sasuke was watching for one at all.
The brother thing - he’s fixated.
It’s his own fault; for not noticing, for not stopping it, for not stepping in sooner, for not being around, for letting it get this bad. Of course Sasuke wants him dead. That kind of thing is unforgivable.
(That’s the kind of thing Minato would do. That’s the kind of thing ANBU did).
So it’s been a year, and nothing is the same, but nothing is different, either. It takes them a year to find a routine.
“I’m giving Pakkun your food.” Sasuke says. Kakashi inwardly despairs the loss of his dinner to the dog bowl, and goes on a dramatic tirade for several minutes about the demon-spawn that he lives with. Sasuke does not find his soliloquy nearly as entertaining. Sasuke finds few things entertaining; he really should get a hobby.
He’s got that not-entirely-here feel to him, like Kakashi will reach out and it will be another illusion. He would look with his Sharingan, just to make sure, if not for the fact that Sasuke hates looking at it.
Kakashi grabs his arm. “Sit out here to do your homework. Your room is too gloomy anyways.”
“I don’t have homework.” Sasuke sneers. Right. He’s three months ahead of the curriculum in his textbook. He can name every significant historical event in Konoha forwards and back because he cheats with his Sharingan. Kakashi is incredibly proud.
“Right, of course, my mistake.”
Sasuke glares at him with all the hatred he can muster in his nine-year-old body, and sits on the couch.
Kakashi taps his forehead. Sasuke squawks. “What’s going on up here?”
“I would say more than you, but that’s not a high bar.”
“Mm-hmm, right.” He replies, not offended in the slightest, “I totally believe you. Your attempts at deflection are getting better, though.”
The kid has already figured out how to crawl under his skin. Pakkun likely told him, because he’s slightly less mean on the bad days. Sits on the couch when Kakashi is let out of work and nudges him to be an annoyance, to keep him grounded, even if he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Some days are bad days. That’s just how it is. This is no different.
His mouth twists. Kakashi could fight back more, but that never goes anywhere. Nothing but blunt-force honesty gets through to him.
He watches him deliberate. Brute force is, coincidentally, also Sasuke’s way of escaping situations he doesn’t want to be in. But Kakashi isn’t like that. He’s not about to force him.
“... Tsukuyomi.” He says eventually. “Is the name of what he did.”
The day after Rin dies, he tries to resign from ANBU. Nevermind that you can’t resign, never mind that there is no way out but death, he throws his gear on Minato’s desk, blood-splattered, hysterical, “I quit.”
Maybe this is the point at which Minato realizes his mistake. Kakashi is meant to endure a lot; he is so, so good at his job. So good at it, in fact, that he’d killed another friend. Whatever his intentions had been signing him up for ANBU, he had not anticipated this, because who could’ve?
“I quit.” He repeats, when Minato doesn’t say anything. The Hokage has more important matters to attend to, but no one had stopped him at the door. No one throws him out. “I can’t do this.”
Why did you think I could do this? Why did you put me in this position? Why would you do this to me?
He doesn’t have the right to any of that anger. Rin is dead because of him. Rin had to do it herself because he couldn’t. That thought alone nearly sends him spiraling again. He white knuckles his sword until the ground stops dropping out from beneath him, closes his eyes when they burn. He refuses to cry in front of Minato - not for anything.
“Kakashi-” He says his name with some approximation of concern. That same voice had guided him away from a path of self-destruction, but that was it. This is worse. At least at that rate, the only casualty would’ve been himself.
“Don’t pretend.” He snaps. “You know she’s dead - you knew-”
He hasn’t cried since Obito. ANBU scraped it out of him. There’s no catharsis - it just hurts. His throat tightens until he can’t breathe.
Minato frowns, eyes softening, “I’m sorry, Kakashi, that shouldn’t have happened to you.”
It isn’t what he needs to hear. His throat is too tight to speak - if he could have, he might have cursed his teacher to hell.
“Take a break. I’ll sign off on it now.”
He gets a month off. The days come and go, and when he sits on the bench outside the academy, he is alone.
Thirty days later, he goes back to work.
Kakashi doesn’t make a habit of being angry. He allows it, sometimes, in extremes. He allows it now.
Sasuke’s hair tickles his chin, but he doesn’t let go. He makes a terrible, throaty noise, and with no idea what else to do, holds him tighter. Kakashi isn’t good with contact that he initiates, but they’ve lived with each other for a year now. He thinks he can afford it.
“You suck.” Sasuke says, squirming. He shudders, like his forehead isn’t pressed to his collarbone, like he can’t feel him shaking. “Idiot. Let me go.”
He doesn’t try to free himself - which he could very easily do - so Kakashi keeps holding on.
He doesn’t get angry often, but-
Today he is willing to make an exception.
“You’re a terrible liar.” Kakashi tells him. He can’t ever remember being this small, enough to fit in someone’s arms, can’t remember the last time anybody tried to protect him from anything.
That’s not entirely true. Sasuke holds onto his sleeves on the bad days, sits on the couch for hours and watches, goes out of his way to make noise to announce himself. He’s a kid. There’s something profoundly awful about that in ways that Kakashi can’t place.
Sasuke’s nails dig into his ribs. He approaches affection in the same way he does violence; with single-minded devotion, with the aim to win.
“Shut up.” He says. “Just shut-”
He does. And in that moment, he festers in the discovery of Tsukuyomi, a technique that is absolutely vile. Nothing has managed to dredge up hatred in a while. Too volatile an emotion, too unstable, etcetera, etcetera. Inoichi gives him the same spiel every year when they do psych evaluations and Kakashi has to pretend he’s holding himself together better than he is. He lost the ends of all the threads tying him together a while back, and now every sudden movement threatens to unspool him.
He wonders why the hospital didn’t inform him. A genjutsu of that classification had the ability to completely destroy a person’s mind. He’d seen the effects in his own teammates; a decline in cognitive ability as the mind and body decayed. Sasuke hasn’t presented with any of those symptoms, but it should have been something to watch out for. Maybe the nurses were otherwise indisposed at the time, but still-
Massive oversights, when it comes to Sasuke, seem to be the norm.
“...shouldn’t have told you that.” He manages eventually. He pushes himself up and away, carding his fingers through his tangled hair. “You should forget about it.”
“That…” Kakashi starts, thinking back to what Inoichi told him, “Sounds incredibly unhealthy.”
Sasuke makes a face. “I don’t care. Forget I said that name.”
Kakashi mock-salutes. “Right. No name, got it. Maybe do inform me of major medical history in the future, though. Not that I know of any genjutsus that were hypothetically placed on you.”
His nose wrinkles. “Yeah.” He says, flat, and trudges back to his room like it’s nothing. Shakes it right off, like he flipped a switch. That’s the kind of dissociation he would’ve killed for when he was fourteen.
Right. Fucking hell.
“Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.” He tells Pakkun. Make sure he doesn’t do anything I would do. “I’m going out for some air.”
He ends up at the bar. Hypocritical of him, considering what he was trying to preach, but he can’t really say he cares. The goal for tonight is to drink enough that he can sleep straight through tomorrow morning. The goal is to get absolutely fucking plastered.
That had been his method of choice from ages fourteen to seventeen, after Rin and before the promotion. During that month off, Inoichi had prescribed him some cocktail of medication that was supposed to keep him functional, so he could get back on his shift fast enough. He wasn’t supposed to mix them with alcohol, and then he had anyway, because why the fuck not? He paid half the price to get twice as drunk.
He finds Anko there, eating cocktail cherries. Kakashi doesn’t want to eat. It’s gotten better recently, but those food-pills really did a number on him. Maybe next time he’ll actually heed Inoichi’s warning about them.
“Damn. You look like you had a rough night, Hatake.”
“Thanks.” He says, dry, and then orders the strongest thing on the menu.
“I haven’t seen you around lately. I thought you were trying to get ‘clean’ or whatever, since you’re taking in strays now.” She laughs. “Who thought? You with a kid.”
“First of all,” Kakashi tells her, vaguely incensed but not sure why, “He’s not my kid. Second of all, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Right, sure. Saying that doesn’t make it true.”
“You’re the worst drinking partner. I stopped coming because of you, I’ll have you know. I do have a reputation to keep.”
“Everybody who knows anything knows that the Uchiha brat’s got you wrapped around his finger.” She nudges him. “You really do not look good.”
“Such a charmer.” Why does he already have a preemptive headache? This is what he gets for being sober so long. She pokes him harder in the leg. “Stop. Anko. Why are you like this? I just heard, like, some of the worst shit of my life. Maybe not the worst. Top ten.”
Kakashi is ANBU, and that means he completes whatever job they give him. The worst kinds of jobs. As Captain, he takes on some of the more dangerous missions, which usually means that the only people he kills are as dangerous as he is - people who signed up for it. People who can fight back. People whose hands are as stained with blood as his are. It levels the playing field a little.
Sometimes, there are unintended casualties. Sometimes there are jobs that involve targets of a lower-pay-grade. He hates those the most. That’s what makes Tsukuyomi as horrible as it is. He knew that the slaughter was thorough, objectively. He’d seen the emptiness left behind. Most of the wounds left behind had been clean, but there was something to be said about the sheer brutality of that genjutsu. There was no explanation. There was no excuse.
“Huh.” Anko says. “I didn’t know you had any heart left to break.”
“You are so incredibly unhelpful.”
“I don’t remember you being a sad drunk.”
“I don’t remember being a sad drunk.” He doesn’t remember anything about being drunk, actually. “You must be hearing things, Anko. Emotional vulnerability is such a turn off.”
She knocks her knuckles against his forehead. She’s one of maybe two people that can get away with that, “You’re sick in the head, dude.”
He hums lightly. He eyes the block of knives behind the bartender’s shoulder. His job is so, so easy. Practically second-nature. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to think about work.
Anko sees where he’s looking, and pats him on the shoulder, sympathetic. She orders another round.
A month and five days after Rin died, he went back to regular missions, demoted as per Inoichi’s suggestion. His position would be recovered in time, but not for another few weeks, to keep some of the pressure off his back. He has no idea if Minato had any hand in this, but he suspects not. They haven’t spoken since. He saw him at the memorial stone once, and left before they had a chance to talk.
Rin and Obito would laugh at him for being a petty coward.
He lost sight of the target five minutes ago. He was surprisingly fast; Kakashi made the mistake of underestimating his willingness to throw his teammates under the bus.
Eventually, he corners him in a depression of rock. He holds his blade, listless.
The man’s eyes flick up and down, settling on his bandaged hand. His vest has gotten too loose for him. It makes him look young and disenfranchised - this is perhaps not far from the truth.
“How old are you?” He asks.
“I don’t think age has much weight in our line of work,” He replies, mild. He decides to humor him because he doesn’t want to go back to headquarters.
“You - you don’t have to do this.”
“You’re right,” Kakashi agrees, blank and unfeeling, raising his weapon, “I don’t.”
At work, they don’t talk about it. No one has breathed a word of the Uchiha since Kakashi threatened disciplinary action. It’s best if he appears impartial, but even he has his limits. Hare doesn’t look him in the eyes anymore - Kakashi pretends he doesn’t hear him talking in the break room about it.
Kakashi’s such a hardass, it was just a joke.
You too, Tiger. Don’t be such a bitch.
Sometimes, Kakashi considers bashing his face against the floor until there’s nothing to recognize him by. None of them should be in ANBU; he can barely trust them to make a decent cup of coffee, let alone conduct this kind of work. Moreover, this was the mistake they made with Itachi, and with himself. The Sandaime has learned nothing.
Some distant part of him sometimes wishes he had gone through with the execution - if only because it would be satisfying.
The problem with letting kids into jobs like this means they never grow out of their worst stages. Kakashi is lucky. Itachi was not. It isn’t difficult to imagine himself in a similar situation - fourteen and grieving and barely there, a weapon cut from the worst of Shinobi ideology. Hare is a prime example. All that power and none of the wisdom to back it up. He’s a tragedy in the making; inevitably, when he crosses a line that management is not comfortable with, Kakashi will be sent out to put him down.
What they can justify up to that point, however, is not reassuring. It’s probably why no one clued onto Itachi.
Tiger, at least, maintains some measure of decency. She’s good with rules, and she finds every loophole she can. She gets promoted. Hare does not.
In the locker room, when there’s no one else around, she asks how Sasuke is doing.
“He’s fine.” He always says. “Doing well in school.”
“He sounds like a good kid.” She’ll reply. Then, she always pauses, like she means to ask something else before professionality gets the best of her.
Tonight, she says, “I’m sorry about Hare.” And then she leaves.
Minato is having a son. Kushina is the one to make an announcement, a bright smile on her face and enough conviction behind it to make him stumble. She breaks the news right when he gets back, still blood-drenched and aching from the cold.
“Congratulations.” He tells her. He’s happy enough for them, he supposes. Minato has shed enough blood to earn his new gold-plated lifestyle as the Hokage. Minato has killed enough, served the village long enough, was born strong enough, to live a life mostly separate from the rest of his Shinobi. No matter how many people Kakashi kills or how powerful he becomes, he will never have this right.
It isn’t his place to feel anything in particular about it. So, he supposes, good on them for finding something to hold onto. He hopes to any god still sticking around that he doesn’t fuck that kid up like he did the rest of them.
“I know you two aren’t on the best terms right now,” She says, “The nerve of that man is astounding, sometimes.”
“It’s fine.” He says. He isn’t looking for an apology. Minato wouldn’t know what to apologize for in the first place. “What brings this up?”
“We’d like you to be involved with his life. My son’s. Minato is assigning you to be my personal guard.” She rolls her eyes. “Again, the nerve, I know. As if I need it and you don’t have better things to be doing. But I wouldn’t mind the company, and I feel like you wouldn’t either.”
“Alright.” He agrees. She is infinitely more bearable to be around than Minato is. “I accept.”
The next day, he picks Sasuke up from school like a proper adult. He waits outside the gates with some of the other parents - waves to a few he recognizes - and watches the children scatter the second they leave the door.
He spots Sasuke scowling at the entourage gathered behind him. Pakkun suggested that he could make a business teaching the other kids proper chakra control, until Kakashi kindly reminded him that it would be considered fraud. Sasuke probably wouldn’t be a great teacher anyways; he barely tolerated the kids in his age group.
Sasuke trips Naruto on his way out; a few parents scowl at that, though he doesn’t know if that’s because of Naruto or Sasuke, and then look at him. He doesn’t care that Sasuke’s picking fights as long as he’s winning them.
“What are you doing here?” He asks, squinting at him. Kakashi has only done this once or twice before, and that was so he could talk to Iruka about his progress.
“I got off early and thought I should pick you up! Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Almost never.”
Kakashi will take it.
“Whatever. It saves me a trip anyway.”
“Oh?”
Sasuke doesn’t elaborate. He grabs his hand and walks faster. Kakashi falls back into an easy pace as he drags them down the street, and he realizes where they’re going: the compound.
He keeps his mouth shut the rest of the walk, just in case Sasuke decides he’d like to explain. Neither of them speak until they get to the gates.
“Don’t talk.” Sasuke tells him. “I’m doing something important.”
“Why bring me along?” He ducks underneath a flowering vine, growing off the adjacent wall. “Is this where you’ve been going all the time?”
“You didn’t say I couldn’t.”
“I’m not upset, just curious.”
“Be curious quieter. And yes.”
He leads him through the dilapidated streets. It looks like some effort was made to maintain them - probably Sasuke’s goal in staying here - but the fountains are full of leaves and overturned crates and wet newspaper pulp. Sasuke walks with purpose, paying no mind to any of it. Kakashi wonders when the loneliness stopped consuming him.
They walk until they reach a house he doesn’t recognize.
“Take your shoes off.” He orders, and Kakashi does. He leans back with his hands in his pockets as Sasuke uproots a tile on the ground, and then slips into the crawl space beneath. Kakashi follows him down carefully, brushing aside cobwebs, as Sasuke lights a fire.
“This was a clan meeting space.” He explains briefly. “I wasn’t old enough to come.”
Kakashi nods along while he pulls a box out, containing any number of papers.
“Usually letting clan members down here is taboo.” He continues. “But they’re not here.”
He slides the box to the side, gathering the papers on his lap, before looking up to glare. Maybe it has no malicious intent and Sasuke just isn’t used to looking at people that aren’t trying to hurt him. “Tell me about Obito. The full truth. And then I’ll show you something.”
Kakashi opens his mouth and closes it.
“Alright.” He manages eventually. “I suppose you deserve to know.”
So he does tell it. He leaves some of the more gruesome details out - the gore on Rin’s hands and the tears on her face as she transplanted the eye, how hot and muggy the forest was even in the night, the soldiers and the death and the smell of infection - but he recounts how he and Obito fought. How Obito refused to leave him alone. How they had held hands under the table in his house. He remembers that he could never show up on time, that he was the lowest-ranking member of their class, his determination to win and to be good and to do good.
That’s the Obito he remembers. That’s the Obito he wants to remember.
“He was dying, at that point. He figured that I should have it - as a gift, but I figured it was something more than that. Not even he could get hung up on something that stupid.”
He has lived his entire life up to this point based on that ideology, and has failed at every corner. This might be the only thing he’s ever done right.
“It was a gift,” Sasuke confirms slowly, “but not that kind. An eye like that - it’s like a piece of you. He wanted you to have a piece of him.”
Kakashi takes a shuddering breath.
“We can’t write their names on the stone until we have both their eyes. That’s why Shisui - that’s why his name isn’t there. They’re not dead as long as they’re living through someone else. That’s why - that’s why he gave it to you. You were the person he trusted.”
Sasuke’s fingers go white-knuckled. He pushes the paper over. “I think he was an idiot for giving it to you, but I get it. You were his person, or - whatever. It’s not up to me to choose. I want to know why he gave it to you.”
It’s a family tree. Obito had never known his parents - now, it looks like they’re crossed out.
“I looked. His mother was Uchiha but his father was Senju. That’s why he had trouble with his Sharingan. That’s why they’re both blacked out. It’s not allowed.”
Kakashi traces his thumb over the name, halfway reverent. This is something Obito likely didn’t even know about himself.
“You take it. I don’t want it. I’m tired of looking at his face.”
“Alright.” Kakashi settles.
“There’s something else.” Sasuke unrolls another scroll from the box. It has a list of names - he realizes belatedly that it’s a record of everyone in the clan.
“You’re technically a member.” Sasuke says. “Because of Obito, which is why I let you down here. They never added your name to the paper, even though they should’ve.”
“Sasuke-”
“Shut up. You don’t have to do it or anything, I guess, but it’s-”
“Proper.” Kakashi finishes. “I understand.’
When nothing else remained, tradition was one of the few things left to cling to. Besides that, he understands what Sasuke is trying to do, and recognizes that kindness for what it is. They are both the last two members of dead clans. There is nothing left to inherit but all the emptiness that comes with that title. This way, neither of them are alone.
“I guess this gives me actual legal precedent to be your guardian.”
Sasuke hangs his head, exhaling. He looks tired - that exhaustion is disconcerting on his face, the darkness of his eyes. “I don’t want to come back here anymore.”
Kakashi wants to grab his hand and walk him out of this room, this building, the compound - out of Konoha, away from here. Anywhere but here. He wants there to be somewhere safe for them to go.
“Then let’s go home.” He replies.
On the way back, Sasuke asks something. His brows furrow, like he’s trying to choose his words carefully.
“Do you ever wish it had been the other way around?”
The knife twists. This kid and his uncanny ability to see right through him, Sharingan or not - or maybe they’re seeing each other.
Sasuke knows better than anyone else that indulging in hypotheticals is pointless.
“Sometimes,” He concedes, looking down at him, watching the pinched line of his mouth, “But then I figure there are some things that would be difficult to leave behind.”