Chapter 550: A Model Answer
What was this guy saying?
Even though he had already half-guessed the answer, young Sasuke still couldn't stop that involuntary recoil somewhere deep in his chest -- the desperate, almost comical urge to look away, to bury his head and refuse to deal with what was sitting right in front of him.
The shame came flooding back in. The wave of it was stronger than before.
It wasn't the concept of marriage itself that got to him. He had no particular feeling about weddings -- two people standing in front of a crowd, what was there to care about?
What he couldn't stand was the raw, unshielded fact of it: that "me" and "that dead-last" could end up in that kind of relationship. That this possibility existed and was being held up in front of him without any softening or concealment whatsoever.
That was what he could not accept.
Because it touched something he had never let himself look at directly -- the part of him that cared about Naruto.
Young Sasuke was quietly unraveling inside.
Why was this happening? What had gone wrong with the world? Fine. He admitted it. That dead-last had, somewhere along the way, gotten under his skin. He had started thinking of him as a friend. He couldn't pretend otherwise. That part he could acknowledge.
But -- just changing the gender couldn't possibly make it this much, right?!
He shut his eyes. He couldn't keep looking at the smile on Satsuki's face. One more second and he was going to feel his knees start to go soft from pure mortification.
That smile was too real. Too happy. Too -- bright.
But he didn't say anything. He didn't deny it out loud. He didn't bark "shut up" the way he normally would.
Because something else surfaced in his mind.
His parents. Unless something had gone wrong, they had been brought back. There was a future now where he could live alongside his mother again -- where he would no longer be entirely alone among people who were his. Uchiha Mikoto, the person in front of whom he had always been able to drop his guard completely, the person who had seen him at his most fragile -- she was really coming back.
And all of that was because of the adult Naruto standing in front of him. The one from another world.
If someone offered him a choice right now -- become female, but in exchange, have his parents returned -- he would not hesitate for a single moment. Not even a flicker of hesitation.
Even if they added "and marry Naruto" to the end of that deal.
He would still take it. It had never been a real choice to weigh.
So young Sasuke sat with the embarrassment and did not act on it. He chose something in the middle: not fury, not composure, just a sullen, seething kind of indignation that had nowhere to go.
On the other side of the clearing, young Naruto had absorbed the verdict. His head had dropped. The brightness that had been in his face was gone.
Fell for her at first sight, and she was already someone's wife.
That was a rough way for things to land.
He found himself noticing, almost against his will, that Satsuki's personality toward him felt nothing like Sasuke's. When she spoke to him, there was a warmth in it -- something genuine, something that felt like it actually intended to reach him. Sasuke was never like that. Sasuke always had that prickly outer shell, plainly caring about something and working just as hard to pretend he didn't.
Young Naruto didn't know it, but this was a faint talent that came with his heritage and his burden -- a jinchuriki's instinct, a faint sensitivity to the emotional undercurrent of the people around him.
He turned and looked at Sasuke.
If Sasuke grew up -- would he turn out like this? Would he become that warm? Would he be that good to someone?
Young Sasuke noticed the stare. He saw the complicated, openly dejected look on young Naruto's face pointed directly at him.
He immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion.
"Dead-last." His voice went cold, and dangerously quiet. "If you keep looking at me like that, you'll regret it."
"So rude," young Naruto shot back. His expression of loss hadn't fully faded, but reflex took over anyway. "Nothing like Satsuki-nee-san at all."
Young Sasuke's hand closed into a fist.
He breathed in. He breathed out. He swallowed it down hard.
Not now. He was not going to act on this now. His parents were coming back. He could hold on.
He endured.
"Fine, if Satsuki-nee-san's already married then that's that." Young Naruto scratched his head and did his best to look like someone who was totally fine with how things had turned out. The breezy act was only about halfway convincing. There was still a faint drag in his voice, and the smile he pulled up at the corners of his mouth was doing some visible work to hold itself in place.
"Hey -- other me." He looked at adult Naruto. "Treat her right. You better."
Adult Naruto stared at this kid who had, not ten minutes ago, been falling head over heels for his wife, and who was now apparently issuing instructions to him. For a moment he had nothing to say.
Satsuki laughed. She reached out and rested her hand briefly on top of young Naruto's head.
"Thank you," she said, her voice easy and warm. "Don't worry, though -- my Naruto takes very good care of me."
Young Naruto's face went crimson all over again, all the way from his cheeks to the tips of his ears. He stood there frozen until he felt something at his back -- a cold, focused pressure that could only be one thing.
Young Sasuke was staring at him. The look in his eyes could have cut glass.
"Oh -- right!" Young Naruto snapped back to himself and spun around, loud and purposeful, clearly throwing a rope to a change of subject. "Sasuke, since you're not going to Orochimaru anymore, let's go back to Konoha! Come on, we've had everyone worried for way too long -- Kakashi-sensei and Sakura must be going out of their minds by now!"
Young Sasuke didn't answer immediately.
A moment passed. Then he turned away from young Naruto and walked toward Satsuki, one step at a time, until he was standing in front of her. He looked up at her.
"In your world," he said quietly, "did your parents get brought back later, too?"
"No." Satsuki shook her head. "That day, Naruto managed to save them before Itachi could reach them."
Young Sasuke went quiet. Something in his eyes shifted -- a tremor, small and involuntary.
"You want to ask whether I killed Itachi."
Satsuki read him before he could find the words. "I didn't," she said. "Because protecting the people I care about has always mattered more to me than revenge."
"But the reason I didn't kill Itachi was because of my mother. She's too soft-hearted -- even now, she still looks at Itachi and sees her child."
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