Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Being so attuned to his moods she strikes into the heart of the matter, like always. Her whisper breaks through the gloom of his thoughts. “What is it that you fear, Sasuke-kun?”

He adjusts his hold on their newborn infant, tucking the blanket around her more snugly. Sasuke considers his wife’s question in silence, choosing to fix his gaze on Sarada. The firelight in their makeshift camp paints soft shadows across his sleeping daughter’s cheeks. She’s perfect, he thinks. He feels the strangest urge to cry.

“Sakura, I-“ he begins, scrambling for the words to express himself. It takes him a moment before he could go on. “Sarada… I want for her inheritance to be hope, and happiness, but…” He hesitates. The past flashes through his mind’s eye, and bone-deep sorrow overwhelms him, stealing away the words he was going to say.

Sakura reaches out to caress his face, the action an unspoken demand to meet her eyes. He does, and he is floored by the emotion he sees shining back at him from her emerald gaze. She speaks the words he couldn’t say. “You are afraid, then, that you won’t be able to give her that which you didn’t have?”

“I have you,” he protests, softly. Again, he wills her to understand she has nothing to do with his darkness, with his sins.

“Yes, my darling, and you always will,” she says lightly, and he knows she understood. Gently, she pulls him closer, and touches her lips to his forehead. She then leans her head on his shoulder. “But you have to know this, too: you’re already doing so well.”

“Hope and happiness are things that can be learned, my love,” she continues. “And that fact that you’re here—isn’t that proof of how far you’ve come?”

What an incredible woman, he marvels. With a touch and a few words she has once again shattered his insecurities and set his world back on its proper axis.

He kisses the top of her head. “If I have learned much, it’s because I have an excellent teacher.”

She laughs. “You see, you have nothing to worry about. We can do this.”

“Aa," he agrees. He finds that he believes in this, completely. "Together.”

Chapter Text

There was a time when Sasuke believed that his heart had shriveled up forever—grown hard and impossibly small inside its cage of flesh and bone.

Grief played peculiar tricks on the mind’s eye. Even after all his losses the world was bright and beautiful around him, but he had failed to see it. He simply did not have it in him: if the heart was a traveler, then his heart had no other path to follow but a funeral march. No other destination but six feet under.

It was fortunate that he awoke from that terrible delusion, reconciled to true vision by those who were dogged enough to love him despite his brokenness.

No longer could he deny the world’s beauty nor the surety of his place within it—not when he stirred awake every morning to the sight of his wife’s face. He would run his fingers through the brightness of her hair, luxuriating in the loveliness he had been blind to for so long.

Not anymore.

The heart inside his chest was no longer the same hopeless creature, with no other horizon but death.

In fact, the journey shone so invitingly before him now. As he held his tiny daughter close, he seemed to glimpse new possibilities of being in her eyes.

Here was new territory for his wanderer’s heart, made entirely out of love: from the tips of her toes to her wealth of dark hair.

Sasuke kissed the little girl’s forehead, his feelings rushing past what he could contain.

She would lead him to transformation, he knew. He could not wait to follow.

Chapter Text

People have said that the struggle of a son is to overcome his father: to defeat the man by exceeding all that he has accomplished.

But what of daughters?

Sarada knows what her father would say: that there is no need to measure up to him, that she has already exceeded him.

Being the manifestation of Sakura's kindness and Sasuke's hopes—together—Sarada has eclipsed them both.

Sasuke would insist that there is nothing more that she must do, that there is no feat that she needs to fulfill to be worthy.

She is enough.

Still, she cannot shake the feeling that there is something she owes to him. She has not yet learned the entirety of her clan's tragedy, but she has the gist of it. Her father traversed the impossible to make her possible. Surely this requires something from her, somehow.

Sarada thinks, perhaps it is guilt then, or duty. Perhaps a daughter is a personification of these feelings.

The thought wrinkles her brow as they take a rest from training. Nothing escapes her father's notice, and he is soon tapping at her shoulder to know what weighs on her.

"Everything okay?"

“Just some thoughts.” Sarada has never been an impeccable liar; she can only veil her unease by pulling back. Sasuke drops his questioning, but his silence is invitation. So she gathers her courage and allows herself to ask.

“Papa, what do you want my life to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you’ll say I can be what I want, but there has to be something else to it.” She lowers her gaze, ashamed that she hasn’t yet figured it out. That she still has to wonder—“What does it mean to be Uchiha Sasuke’s daughter?”

He pauses in thought, with a peculiar look of sadness on his face. As if this is some line of inquiry he had pursued himself, only to be let down by the answers. Sasuke smiles when he looks at her again, and Sarada feels the tender caress of his hand against her cheek.

“It means you get to dream, Sarada.”

“But the clan…”

“… has been made new. The clan is now you.  The past isn’t meant to be your burden.”

“Just like that?” The question bursts out of her, spurred by warring awe and disbelief. He nods.

“Just like that.” His assurance falls from his lips like wisdom, and some semblance of peace descends upon her.

Sarada marvels at the softness that the setting sun imparts to her father’s face. This moment will be etched forever in her memories now.

“To be my daughter… means that you get to know the precious boon or terrible affliction that freedom could be.”