Chapter 577: Bonds
"So it's done. How does revenge feel?"
Adult Naruto watched young Sasuke walk back toward him.
Young Sasuke's face held no expression.
Not the cold kind -- the distant kind. The kind that came from still being somewhere inside what had just happened, not yet having brought himself fully back to the present, not yet having truly absorbed the fact that Danzo was dead.
"...I don't know."
There was no particular satisfaction in his voice. When he said "I don't know," it was genuine -- he actually couldn't tell what he was feeling.
This was nothing like the original story's Sasuke after killing Danzo.
"But I have something I want to ask you."
Young Sasuke pulled himself out of the daze by force. His eyes settled on adult Naruto.
"This power you gave me..."
"I get the feeling that before you gave it to me, you didn't find much to approve of in me either. So..."
Something showed in his eyes that rarely appeared there -- an uncertainty, a hesitation. The particular carefulness of someone testing the ground before they put weight on it.
He was worried. He was worried that if he made the wrong decision -- if he chose a path adult Naruto didn't want him to choose, if he used these eyes for something he shouldn't -- Naruto would take the power back.
And beyond that: what if adult Naruto was going to require him to forgive everyone else? Not Danzo -- Danzo was dead, and the dead were beyond forgiving. But the people who had stood alongside Danzo. The ones who had pushed from the shadows. If adult Naruto said "it's time to let go of the hatred" -- what was he supposed to do with that? Could he refuse? Should he refuse?
"...I don't want to make decisions for someone else's life."
Adult Naruto spoke.
"But I think these eyes are a form of help, not an interference. How you use them is your choice. If you're asking for a condition -- there's only one thing I want you to remember."
Young Sasuke's heartbeat quickened slightly. He waited for the condition. Waited for the answer that might reshape every decision he made from here forward -- the answer he both feared and wanted to hear.
"Don't harm innocent people."
Young Sasuke blinked.
"...That's it?"
"That's it."
Adult Naruto shook his head. "Nothing else."
"...Just that?"
He had expected more. Expected adult Naruto to say something like "you have to use these eyes to protect the village" -- the kind of thing adults always said to children at a moment like this.
"Though don't draw the definition of innocent too narrowly."
Adult Naruto added the qualifier.
"Killing Shimura Danzo, killing the person who set the Nine-Tails incident in motion, or even killing the Leaf leadership who drove the Uchiha to that point -- none of that is a problem."
"But if you take what some people in positions of power decided and direct that rage at an entire village or country -- if you start wanting to kill civilians who had nothing to do with any of it -- that's not something I want to see."
"...I'm not that extreme."
A faint note of offense had entered young Sasuke's voice.
He thought adult Naruto had underestimated him.
"Good."
Adult Naruto's mouth curved slightly. "In any case -- I hope you can manage your need for revenge the way you're managing it right now. Not extinguish it. Just manage it."
"I won't interfere with your life. And I can understand -- what the Uchiha clan experienced in the Leaf..."
He stopped himself from saying he fully understood. But he knew, at minimum, that kind of pain was not the kind that dissolved when someone said "let it go."
"So even if you choose to leave the village, I'd understand that too."
He was giving young Sasuke the right to choose. Not obligated to return to the Leaf. Not obligated to forgive anyone. Not obligated to walk the path someone else had laid out for him.
He could leave. Go wherever he wanted. Live whatever kind of life he wanted. I won't stop you. I won't let anyone stop you.
"Wait wait wait! No! Sasuke! You can't leave the village!"
From the trees behind them came a voice -- frantic, urgent, the voice of someone who had just been stepped on.
It was a voice too familiar to mistake. Young Sasuke knew who it was without turning around.
Young Naruto had finally sorted out his teammates -- returned the ones who needed to go back, settled the ones who needed settling -- and then followed the sounds of battle and the unmistakable chakra signature that he knew better than anything, and tracked them here.
He had been pushing through the trees thinking "I wonder how things went with Sasuke" -- and then, just as he got close enough, he caught the tail end of adult Naruto's sentence: "even if you choose to leave the village, I'd understand," and everything in him ignited at once.
Young Naruto burst out of the trees somewhat disheveled, a few leaves caught in his hair, completely ignoring the body lying in the clearing not far away.
Young Sasuke glanced at the idiot sprinting toward him, sweating, face still decorated with foliage, then turned back to the front.
"Shut up, you absolute moron."
"What was that even for?!"
Young Naruto reached young Sasuke in three steps and grabbed his shoulders, fingers pressing into his shoulder blades with a grip that suggested he was genuinely afraid Sasuke might vanish.
He stared directly at adult Naruto -- at that face, identical to his own but settled in a composure that his own would not reach for years -- and his voice carried no attempt to hide its accusation.
"My whole point was to get Sasuke back to the village! Why are you telling him it's fine to leave?!"
Young Sasuke was being gripped by both shoulders and wasn't making any move to pull free. His body went slightly stiff, then slowly, gradually, began to relax.
Adult Naruto watched.
"...I was only stating a position," he said.
"Besides -- if Sasuke leaves the village, it's not like he'd be running off to Orochimaru again. There's no danger to his life. Even if the Uchiha massacre left him feeling that the village isn't a place he wants to be -- is he not allowed to leave?"
"Well... I mean..."
Young Naruto's voice dropped. The urgency on his face became something more complicated.
Because he knew. He knew everything Sasuke had been through as a child. Knew what Sasuke had lost, what Sasuke had endured, how many nights Sasuke had spent alone in an empty compound. He knew the Leaf had its share of responsibility in what happened. He knew Sasuke had every reason to hate it, every reason to leave, every reason to never want to go back.
He knew. He understood it all.
And still he didn't want Sasuke to go.
"Then I'll leave with Sasuke!"
"What?! Idiot! What are you saying?!"
Young Sasuke's voice shot upward. His face -- the cold, blank, deliberately averted face from a moment ago -- had gone red.
He lurched backward, trying to pull himself free from young Naruto's hands. Young Naruto's grip only tightened. He pulled twice, couldn't get loose.
"How am I supposed to be okay with you going anywhere alone?!"
Young Naruto's voice broke open in front of him, eyes fixed unblinkingly on young Sasuke, on those eyes that were writing out panic and embarrassment and a small amount of anger all at the same time. His expression was the expression of someone who had made up his mind and would not unmake it for any reason.
"Sasuke, don't even think about shaking me off!"
Young Sasuke hadn't yet decided whether he was leaving or not -- might not have thought about it seriously at all. But young Naruto announced it anyway.
"Whether you go or not is your call. But I'm going with you -- that's my call. Don't think you can lose me. Don't think you can walk away by yourself. Don't think you can leave me alone in a village that doesn't have you in it."
"Why are you following me?!"
Young Sasuke's face was still red. "Don't you want to become Hokage?!"
"If I can't even keep you safe, what right do I have to become Hokage?!"
Young Naruto had never admitted it directly. He had always used words like "rival" and "teammate" and "friend" to describe what existed between them.
But in the places he had never spoken aloud -- in the corners he may not even have been fully aware of himself -- in the specific question of possession and importance, Sasuke ranked above the Hokage position by a distance that wasn't close.
The Hokage was his dream. But Sasuke was something else. Something he had never said to anyone, something that even he knew didn't quite make sense, but that he could not control.
Young Naruto had grown up without family. Had grown up without love. All of that unreleased possessiveness, all of that fierce single-mindedness, all of it had been poured -- not deliberately, not even consciously -- onto Sasuke.
From the moment they became teammates. From the first shared meals, the first joint training sessions, the first missions they ran together. From all of that -- Sasuke had become the one thing in his life that could not be replaced. Something more important than anything else.
He couldn't say it. Didn't know how to say it. But his actions said it for him -- he would not let Sasuke walk away alone. Would not let the distance between them grow. Wherever Sasuke was going, even to the ends of the earth, he would follow.
Adult Naruto stood to the side, watching the two children argue, and began to turn away.
But Satsuki, standing beside him, had suddenly become very interested.
Adult Naruto glanced at her, then at the two still bickering, and was just about to say "let them go for a while longer" --
A thought arrived.
"Hey. Both of you. Come with me."
Adult Naruto called out to them, cutting through the argument.
"The resurrected Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto, and the Fourth Hokage and his wife, have woken up."