Archive of Our Own

There is a gardening term — rootbound — for when a plant has been in its container so long that the roots have wrapped around themselves, have filled every centimeter of available soil, have grown so dense and tangled that the plant can no longer absorb water properly, can no longer take in nutrients, can no longer distinguish between what is itself and what is the earth it occupies. The plant does not die, exactly. It simply becomes a closed system. It becomes complete.

Kakashi-sensei learns this word on the train ride up.

He is reading a pamphlet someone left on the seat — Mountain Gardening in the Hi no Kuni Highlands: A Primer for the Serious Cultivator — because it was there and he was bored and because he has not known what to do with his hands since he stopped wearing the vest, and the pamphlet is there in the pocket of the seat in front of him like a small answer to a question he has not yet figured out how to ask. He reads about soil acidity. He reads about companion planting. He reads about the importance of knowing when to repot and when to leave well enough alone, and he reads the word rootbound, and he thinks, ah.

He thinks, I already know what I am going to find.

The house is not visible from the road.

This is, Kakashi thinks, entirely intentional. The path that leads to it is not a path, not really. It is packed earth, yes, and flattened grass, and the occasional stone placed carelessly, but nothing so legible as a trail.

The road from the village below runs straight and purposeful and paved, and this path splits off from it without any sign, without any marker, and winds upward through a stand of hinoki cypress that smell like the inside of a very old shrine, and Kakashi follows it.

Then the trees open up and there is the house and there is the garden.

Later, Kakashi will try to describe it to Sakura and find that he cannot, quite, find the right words, which is a new experience for him and not entirely unpleasant. He will say: it was lush, and that will be true and also not enough. He will say: it was... organized, but not like a garden you go to visit, more like a garden that's been loved, like it grew according to some logic that wasn't ours, and Sakura will look at him with the particular expression she wears when she is deciding whether to be worried, and he will say, they were fine, Sakura, they were more than fine, and he will mean it, and she will hear the thing underneath it that he does not say, which is: fine is maybe not exactly the word.

The garden covered everything. That was the first thing. It had clearly started as a kitchen garden — you could see the beds, the deliberate rows, the bamboo trellises for the beans and the climbing cucumbers — but it had expanded outward from there as if it had jsut taken over.

Tomatoes sprawled across what might once have been a walking path. Squash vines had colonized the side of the woodshed. There were sunflowers against the eastern fence standing so tall they threw shadows on the neighbor mountain, and there were no neighbors, and the fence itself was barely visible beneath a cascade of morning glory that must have self-seeded from some previous year and been allowed — encouraged, even — to do as it liked.

In the middle of all of it, Naruto was kneeling in the dirt.

He was shirtless, which was not surprising, and tanned like he spent a whole season outdoors, which was also not surprising, and he was talking — quietly, actually, which was surprising — to a row of pepper plants as he tied their stems to their stakes with soft strips of cloth that had once, Kakashi noted, been a very orange shirt.

"You're leaning again," Naruto was saying, to the pepper plant, with the patience of someone who has had this conversation many times. "You're not going to fall over. I've got you. You keep acting like you're going to fall over and you're not going to fall over."

Kakashi said, "Naruto."

Naruto looked up.

And then — this was the thing Kakashi would not be able to explain later, the thing that sat in his chest during the whole train ride home like a stone, not heavy but kind of heavy, present and unavoidable — Naruto's face moved through something complicated before it settled into the grin, the wide uncomplicated grin that Kakashi had known since Naruto was twelve years old. But for just a moment, just a breath, there had been something else, something that looked almost like disorientation, like the specific bafflement of a person who has been somewhere very far away being asked to suddenly remember the coordinates of here.

Like being called back from a place he had not quite expected to be called back from.

"Sensei!" Naruto said, and scrambled to his feet, and the smile was real, was genuinely real, was warm in the way that Naruto had always been warm like open ground in August, holding heat long after the sun has moved. “You found us. Took you long enough. Did you walk? The road’s hell after the last switchback, the azaleas have completely taken over the southern trail—Sasuke says we should burn them back, but I like the way they choke out the bracken, gives the deer somewhere to hide—”

He was talking too fast, Kakashi realized. 

"Calm down Naruto."

Naruto gave him a sheepish smile.

"You actually came. Sasuke said you wouldn't."

"I told him I would."

"Yeah, well." Naruto's grin took on a particular quality. "Sasuke said."

Sasuke was at the back of the house.

He was doing something to a fig tree — Kakashi recognized the tree, an old one, its bark silver-gray and wrinkled like something that had been there before the house and would be there long after — with great attention, running his hands along the branches as if the task at hand was the only task in the world, as if the universe had contracted to the precise point of his attention. He was wearing a loose linen shirt, undone at the collar, his hair a little longer than Kakashi remembered, and there was dirt on his jaw and he had not noticed or did not care, and he was talking.

Quietly. Under his breath.

Not to anyone Kakashi could see.

He stepped closer and realized: Naruto had sent a clone around the other other side of the house, and he had come the long way through the garden, and was now on the other side of the fig tree, visible through the canopy, and they were talking to each other through the branches the way you talk when you don't need to look at the person, when the sound alone is enough, when the direction of the voice is enough. Back and forth, something low and particular that Kakashi could not fully hear, and the tree between them was full of small green figs like a hundred closed fists slowly opening.

Kakashi stopped walking.

He stood there in the dappled shadow of the fig tree and watched his two former students talk to each other through the branches and felt something he would not have been able to name at twenty, or even at thirty, but which at this age he recognized immediately: the feeling of witnessing something that has grown past the point of intervention. The feeling of standing at the edge of a root system that goes down further than you can see.

Sasuke's hand moved along a branch and Naruto, on the other side, said something, and Sasuke made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite argument and was somehow both, and Naruto laughed, very softly, and the figs rustled.

Then Sasuke looked up and saw Kakashi.

There was no disorientation in Sasuke's face. Sasuke had always seen things coming, even when he pretended not to. His expression settled into something composed and dry and faintly amused in the way that Sasuke's expressions were always faintly amused, the amusement buried under seventeen other things.

"You're late," Sasuke said.

"I'm a day early, actually," Kakashi said.

A beat a later there almost a smile on his former student's face. Then, "Hn."

They fed him well. This was the other thing Kakashi would struggle to explain later — not the food itself, though the food was extraordinary, was made from things that had been in the ground that morning, was seasoned with herbs he could see from the kitchen window still growing in their beds — but the taste of the meal, the way Naruto and Sasuke moved around each other in the kitchen with the fluid unconscious grace of two celestial bodies that have found their orbit. No words for can you pass the—, just the reaching and the being there. No watch out, just the small adjustments, the narrowing of space, the expansion of space, the constant low-level negotiation of two people who have mapped each other so completely that the map has become the territory.

Naruto put a bowl in front of Kakashi without asking what he wanted, and it was exactly what he wanted.

"How long has it been since you were in the village?" he asked. Carefully. He noticed they didn't ask about the village. He hadn't expected Sasuke to, of course— no, he noticed, Naruto hadn't asked about the village.

"Spring planting," Sasuke said, without looking up from his bowl.

"So — seven months."

"About that."

Kakashi said, "And you're —" and then stopped, because the sentence had several endings and he didn't know which one he meant, and perhaps Sasuke heard all of them because he looked up then, looked at Kakashi with the dark evaluating gaze that had unnerved Kakashi when Sasuke was twelve and had mellowed since then into something more like scrutiny, like the gaze of someone who is checking the light on a plant, who is checking the soil, who is assessing.

"We're good," Sasuke said.

Naruto was looking at Kakashi with the grin, and underneath the grin, something else, something that was not quite pride and not quite apology but had some of both in it, like a hybrid that doesn't have a proper name yet. Like a cultivar someone made on purpose but never registered.

"It's good here," Naruto said. "It's — you'll see. Tomorrow, when the light is better, I'll show you the whole thing."

The whole thing, it turned out, was more than a garden.

It was a conversation between two people conducted in solitude, in the slow patient language of things that grow. Kakashi walked it in the morning with Naruto leading and Sasuke coming behind, and he tried to read it the way you read a text that is written in a dialect you mostly understand, tried to trace the logic of it, and what he found was this:

Where Naruto had planted, he had planted abundantly and close and without fear of crowding — the tomatoes were staked but barely, leaning into each other the way people lean into each other at a bar, the basil ran underneath them in great fragrant masses, the strawberries sent runners everywhere and had been allowed to go, to colonize the bare spaces, to fill in the gaps with small sweet things that you found by accident and ate on the spot.

Where Sasuke had planted — and Kakashi could tell, could absolutely tell — there was a different grammar. Space. The understanding that some things need room to be what they are, need their borders respected, need the ground cleared around them so their roots can go down without competition. The herbs were separated and labeled with small wooden stakes, the characters written in Sasuke's narrow careful hand, and each plant in its own defined territory, but the territories were generous, were clearly tended with thought about the future, about what this plant would be in three years and what it would need then.

And then there were the places where their gardening overlapped, where you could see the argument and the resolution in the same bed, where the close-planting and the spacious-planting had found some middle arrangement, some compromise that looked, from above, like accident but was clearly intention.

Naruto was explaining the nitrogen cycle with great enthusiasm. Sasuke was walking behind them both with his hands behind his back, looking at the beds with the expression of someone reviewing a document they have already memorized.

"The peas fix it," Naruto said, "in the soil, and then when you pull them at the end of the season you can —" he stopped, turned around, said, "Sasuke. The word."

"Incorporate," Sasuke said.

"Incorporate them back in. And the tomatoes that come after use it. It's like —" Naruto paused, and Kakashi watched him search for the comparison the way he had always searched for things, with his whole face open and working. "It's like how one person's — I don't know. How one person feeds another. How what you put out comes back around."

He said it plainly, with no apparent awareness of what he was describing, and Kakashi glanced at Sasuke and found that Sasuke was looking at Naruto with the expression he wore when Naruto said something that Sasuke had already thought and had not expected Naruto to arrive at, had not expected Naruto to simply walk up to and name.

"The peas are currently winning," Sasuke said dryly. "He planted the entire south bed in peas without consulting me."

"You would have said it was too many."

"It is too many."

"We have a lot of peas," Naruto agreed, to Kakashi, without any apparent remorse. "We've been eating peas for two months. It's fine, though, I like peas. Sasuke's learned to like peas."

"I haven't," Sasuke said.

"He has a little bit."

Sasuke said nothing, which was, Kakashi had learned over many years, a form of assent.

In the afternoon Kakashi sat on the wooden step at the back of the house with a cup of tea and watched Naruto water the garden.

It was a long process. Not because the garden was inefficient — there were channels dug for directed irrigation, there were mulched beds that held moisture, there was clear evidence of someone, Sasuke probably, who had thought carefully about water distribution — but because Naruto stopped constantly. Crouched down to look at something. Pinched off a dead leaf. Moved a stone that was blocking a stem. Had a brief conversation with a cucumber vine that had detoured off its trellis and appeared to be heading for the fence.

Sasuke came out at some point and sat beside Kakashi on the step without announcing himself, without asking if there was room, without any of the social scaffolding that, Kakashi thought, he had simply stopped maintaining out here, had let go the way you stop maintaining fences between fields that have grown into each other.

They watched Naruto together for a while.

"He talks to them," Kakashi said.

"Yes."

"Does it work?"

Sasuke was quiet for a moment. "The garden is doing well," he said finally, which was not an answer and was also entirely an answer.

Kakashi drank his tea. A cloud moved. The light in the garden changed from gold to a softer, more considered gold, the kind of light that makes you feel that you are seeing something the way it actually is rather than the way it usually presents itself.

"I wasn't sure," Kakashi said, carefully, "what I would find."

Sasuke looked at him sideways. "What were you expecting."

"I don't know. Something — not this." He paused. "You seem well."

Sasuke's gaze returned to Naruto, who was now crouched over the strawberry bed with the total absorption of someone who has found something that requires immediate investigation. "We are," he said. And then, after another pause, in a tone that was so carefully neutral it was almost a color: "You could say that you were worried."

"I was worried."

"Hn."

"I wanted to give you time."

Sasuke made the sound that Kakashi had come to understand meant: that is both a reasonable thing to say and not entirely the truth, and we both know it, and we don't need to examine it further. It was an efficient sound. Kakashi had always admired it.

"You keep a good garden," Kakashi said.

Something passed through Sasuke's expression too quickly to read. "It keeps itself, mostly," he said. "You tend it and it tends you back. It's —" He stopped. Looked like he was going to say something and then thought better of it, and then said it anyway, the way Sasuke had always eventually said the things he thought better of, because the alternative was silence and silence had its own weight. "It's easier here. To know what something needs. You look at it and you can tell."

In the garden, Naruto said something triumphant over the strawberry bed. He had apparently resolved whatever situation had presented itself.

Sasuke watched him.

Kakashi watched Sasuke watch him.

They ate dinner on the porch as the light bled gold and then copper and then a deep, bruise-purple across the valley.

Naruto had made a vegetable stew from the garden — parsnips so sweet they tasted of caramelized honey, potatoes that held their shape like small, buttery planets, and a handful of wild garlic that Sasuke must have foraged because Naruto would have used twice as much.

They ate from mismatched bowls, and Kakashi watched them pass the same spoon back and forth, watched Sasuke take a bite and then hold the spoon out to Naruto’s lips without looking, watched Naruto close his eyes as he swallowed, as if the taste of Sasuke’s saliva on the broth was the only seasoning he required.

“So,” Kakashi said, setting down his bowl. “Gardening life is...  ah. I should pick it up.”

Naruto beamed. It was a terrible thing to witness, that beam, because it was genuine, and because it was so thoroughly no longer for Kakashi. “We’re doing companion planting. The three sisters method, but scaled. Corn for the beans to climb, beans to fix the nitrogen, squash to shade the roots and keep the moisture in. Except Sasuke keeps trying to rotate in a fourth sister—he wants to try amaranth for the early spring, but the soil pH is still too acidic from all the pine duff, so we’re—”

“We’re layering in wood ash and crushed eggshell,” Sasuke interrupted, and his voice was softer than Kakashi had ever heard it, softer even than when he’d said I’m sorry in that other dimension, softer than the way he’d wept over Itachi’s forehead. It was the softness of a man who had finally, stopped pretending to be hard. “It’ll take another season to balance. But the mycelium network under the eastern bed is already responding. We found a patch of morels last week.”

“You found them,” Naruto corrected. “I stepped on one.”

“You stepped on three. I still haven’t forgiven you.”

They laughed, and it was the same laugh, split between two throats, and Kakashi felt a sensation he could only describe as homesick. The feeling made him nauseous. He wanted to look away, and he couldn’t.

He stayed for four days.

On the second day Naruto took him through the compost system, which was elaborately organized and labeled in a way that had Sasuke's fingerprints all over it, and explained with genuine evangelism the specific ratio of brown material to green that produced the best results. "It's like chakra theory, kind of," Naruto said, turning a pile with a fork with practiced ease, "you've got to balance the inputs and outputs or the whole thing goes wrong, it heats up wrong or it doesn't heat up at all, and —" He stopped, looked at Kakashi with sudden clarity. "You're going to tell Sakura I've become a compost person."

"I'm definitely going to tell Sakura you've become a compost person."

"Don't make it sound like —" But Naruto was grinning, already. "It's helpful. It's actually really helpful. Everything that would have been waste becomes the thing that feeds the next thing. I think about that a lot."

Everything that would have been waste becomes the thing that feeds the next thing.

Kakashi turned that sentence over in his mind for the rest of the day.

On the third day he woke before dawn and went outside and found Sasuke already in the garden, moving along the beds in the dark with a lamp, checking things, because he is responsible for them, when the weight of their living is a thing you feel in your body even when you sleep. Kakashi sat on the step and watched and said nothing, and Sasuke moved through the garden and said nothing, and the sky went from black to gray to the particular shade of blue that doesn't have a name, the blue that only exists for about ten minutes and that you can only see if you were already awake to catch it.

Then Naruto appeared in the doorway behind Kakashi with sleep in his eyes and two cups of tea and sat down next to him, and said, "He does this every morning," not exactly to Kakashi, more the way you say a thing you have already said many times to yourself, as testimony.

"Does it bother you?" Kakashi asked.

Naruto thought about it honestly. "No," he said. "I wake up when he leaves the bed. I always have. Even before." He paused. "Even before..." he said again, softer, and didn't specify before what, and Kakashi understood.

Sasuke, in the garden, crouched down by the tomatoes.

"He worries," Naruto said. "He doesn't call it worrying. He calls it checking. But I know what it is."

"And you don't worry?"

Naruto smiled at his tea. "I worry different. I'm more like —" He lifted one hand, gestured vaguely at the garden. "I just put things in the ground and believe they're going to come up. And if they don't, I put more things in the ground. And I worry, sure, but not like — not like that. Not like checking. More like..." He searched for it. "More like talking to them and hoping they can hear you."

Across the garden, Sasuke had found something he didn't like — some blight or pest or problem only visible in lamplight — and was addressing it with focused quiet attention, the lamp held in his left hand, his right hand moving carefully among the leaves.

"He needs me to believe they're going to come up," Naruto said. "And I need him to check. We figured that out." He said it with the simplicity of someone reporting an agricultural fact. The soil here is loamy. The summers are warm. We figured that out.

Kakashi thought about the pamphlet on the train.

He thought about rootbound plants.

He thought there are gardeners who would say you need to cut the roots back, need to repot, need to disrupt the closed system before it starves itself. And there are gardeners who would say: but look at the plant. Look at how it is flowering. Look at how it has found a way to feed itself on what it has.

He looked at Naruto, who was looking at Sasuke, who was looking at the tomatoes, who were — he could see it now, in the growing light — lush and heavy-fruited and very obviously loved.

"You're happy," Kakashi said.

Naruto glanced at him, and the grin came, but not the full-force one, not the one for company. The smaller one. The one that was just true. "Yeah," he said. "I think we're — I think that's what this is."

It's not like everything had changed though. They argued themsevles silly at times, like little children from all those years ago.

Kakashi rubbed his hands tiredly over his eyes as he got rudely woken up by Naruto yelling. 

“You know what, teme? If you keep standing there looking all superior and not helping with these weeds, I’m gonna grab one of these fat radishes right now and use it as a buttplug. Right here in the garden. See how you like watching that while you pretend to prune the tomatoes.”

He waggled his eyebrows, bright blue eyes sparkling with pure, unfiltered mischief, the kind that used to light up his eyes when he was known as a prankster. 

"It's not even the radish season yet, dumbass." Sasuke deadpanned.

"Oh fuck you, you—!"

"Carrots, then?"

"Kakashi sensei is here!"

"Now you remember?"

On the fourth day, the morning he was leaving, Sasuke cut him a bundle of things from the garden.

He did it without announcement, without ceremony, appeared at the door while Kakashi was shouldering his pack with a bundle wrapped in paper — tomatoes, two kinds, and a bunch of basil still with the soil on the roots, and something else Kakashi couldn't identify.

"The tomatoes won't survive long travel," Sasuke said. "Eat them before you reach the city."

"What's this?" Kakashi indicated the unidentifiable thing.

"Shiso. For Sakura. She mentioned it, once." He said it in the way that Sasuke said things he did not want examined, quickly and past. "It grows easily. She can put it in a pot."

Kakashi took the bundle.

Naruto was standing a little behind Sasuke, arms crossed, doing the thing he did when he was trying not to make a scene of something — jaw set, eyes bright, all the emotion present and barely contained, like a growing thing pressing against the edge of its container. He had said goodbye three times already in the house, in the garden, twice in the kitchen, each time with the air of someone practicing.

"Come back," Naruto said.

"I will."

"And tell — tell everyone —"

"I'll tell them you're well."

"Tell them we've got a lot of peas," Naruto said, and laughed, and the laugh was a little unsteady, and he uncrossed his arms and crossed them again.

Sasuke put one hand on the back of Naruto's neck.

Just that. Not even a squeeze, or not one Kakashi could see — just the placement of the hand, the weight of it, the simple presence of it, and Naruto went still, went quiet, like a plant that has been given water, like something that has found its level.

They stood in the doorway of their house in front of their garden while Kakashi walked back down the path through the cypress trees, and when he looked back from the first bend they were still there, framed by the morning glory that had colonized the doorframe, which had been allowed to do so, which had been tended and trained to do so, and which bloomed purple and blue and white all along the wood like something that had always meant to be there.

They had built the house themselves, stone by stone, beam by beam, in a clearing where the soil was rich and dark, fed by snowmelt streams that glittered like liquid silver in the thin alpine light.

It was not a grand compound, nothing like the old Uchiha district or the bustling Uzumaki whirl of color. It was small, intimate, almost womb-like in its seclusion. A single-story structure of weathered wood and river rock, with wide windows that framed the jagged peaks and a garden that sprawled outward like a living extension of their entangled souls.

Gardening had become their ritual, their obsession, their quiet madness.

Naruto, with his sun-bright hair now grown long enough to brush his shoulders, would rise before dawn, barefoot in the dew-soaked earth. He moved like the sun itself, radiant, relentless, pouring life into every furrow.

Sasuke followed, quieter, his single Sharingan eye, tracing the lines of Naruto's back as if mapping constellations. They worked in silence mostly, but it was a silence heavy with shared breath, shared pulse. Their hands brushed constantly: Naruto passing a trowel, Sasuke steadying a sapling, fingers lingering too long, too needy.

The garden was a masterpiece.. Tomato vines climbed trellises in riotous red clusters, their leaves broad and veined like eager hands reaching for light. Sasuke had insisted on them—"They remind me of your idiocy, always pushing upward no matter how many times they're cut back." Naruto had laughed, that bright, cracked sound that still echoed in Sasuke's chest like a wound that refused to close, and planted rows of dark-leafed herbs that smelled of smoke and storm: sage for protection, basil for passion, mint that spread wild and invasive if not constantly pruned.

They were impossible to separate without tearing the soil apart.

Naruto needed Sasuke's precision, the way his pale fingers could coax a reluctant seed into bloom with nothing but focused chakra and that cold, unwavering stare. Sasuke needed Naruto's warmth, the golden flood of life-force that made even barren mountain soil yield fruit. Without the other, the garden withered. Without the other, they withered.

It showed in everything.

When Naruto's nightmares came — flashes of Kurama's roar, the cold void of losing Sasuke on that battlefield — he would wake gasping, only to find Sasuke already there, arms locked around him like vines claiming a trellis.

"Stay,"

Naruto would whisper, voice raw, burying his face in the crook of Sasuke's neck.  "Don't you dare leave the bed. Don't you dare leave me."

And Sasuke, who had once walked away so easily, would press closer, lips brushing the shell of Naruto's ear.

"Idiot. Where would I go? The world ends at the edge of this garden."

~

After a long day of weeding under the harsh mountain sun, bodies slick with sweat and earth, they would stumble inside, shedding dirt-streaked clothes like molted skins. Naruto would push Sasuke against the rough-hewn table still scattered with seed packets, hands gripping hips hard enough to bruise, mouth devouring like a starving man at harvest.

Sasuke would arch back, one hand fisted in Naruto's golden hair, the other clawing at his shoulders, drawing thin lines of blood that healed almost instantly under Naruto's frantic chakra. Sasuke's hands would wrap around him like bindweed and he'd smile.

Sasuke's Sharingan would flicker to life unbidden, capturing every micro-expression on Naruto's face—the parted lips, the sweat beading on his brow, the way his eyes glowed with that desperate, all-consuming love. They moved together like two plants intertwined, roots and stems and leaves becoming indistinguishable, feeding off the same light, the same dark earth.

Afterward, they would lie tangled in the wide bed Naruto had carved from a single fallen cedar, bodies cooling, breaths syncing. Sasuke would trace lazy patterns on Naruto's chest, following the faint scars like furrows in a field. "You're growing again," he'd murmur. "Stronger every season." Naruto would smile, sleepy and sated, pressing a kiss to Sasuke's temple. "Only because you're my soil. My Sasuke."

The wisteria they planted along the porch trellis bloomed in heavy, dangling clusters — beautiful, fragrant, but its vines could strangle a tree if left unchecked.

They grew nightshade too — delicate white flowers hiding poisonous berries. A reminder, Sasuke said, that love could kill if mishandled. Naruto watered them anyway, because Sasuke liked the risk.

On the train home, Kakashi took the shiso from the paper wrapping and held it in his hands.

The roots were still attached. Still clotted with good dark mountain soil. Still alive, still reaching, still looking for somewhere to go.

He thought about the word rootbound. He thought about how the pamphlet had used it as a problem to solve, a condition to correct, and he thought about how there is another way to read it. It didn't have to be a strangulation, it could be a... completion. Not as failure to grow but as having grown into everything that was available. As having mapped a territory so thoroughly that the map and the territory have become one, indistinguishable, each feeding the other in a closed loop that is — not healthy, exactly, by outside standards, by standards of cultivation and management and the measured prudence of the thinking gardener —

But flowering.

Very clearly, visibly, abundantly flowering.

The train moved through the mountains and then through the foothills and then through the flat rich agricultural land of the lowlands, and Kakashi held the shiso and watched the window and felt the particular ache of someone who has been somewhere that exists outside of ordinary time, and has come back, and is not sure what to do with what they saw there.

He thought about what Naruto had said: I just put things in the ground and believe they're going to come up.

He thought about Sasuke's hand on the back of Naruto's neck.

He ate one of the tomatoes over the sink of the train bathroom, because Sasuke had said to eat them before the city and he trusted Sasuke's judgment on things that grew and perished. It tasted like the mountain. It tasted like something that had spent all summer becoming exactly what it was, with total unswerving commitment, watered by someone who checked it every morning before dawn and talked to by someone who believed in it without evidence and asked nothing of it except that it continue.

It was the best tomato Kakashi had ever eaten.

He was homesick, suddenly, for a place that was not his home, and had never been, and could not be, and he stood in the small rattling bathroom of the train and felt it anyway, the way you feel the pull of a root that has found good soil: without logic, without permission, without any intention to stop.

Sakura planted the shiso in a pot on her windowsill.

It grew well, that first year. Then better, the second year. By the third year it had escaped the pot entirely — a runner down the side, through a crack in the sill, into the soil of the window box below — and she let it go. She always let things go when they were trying to become something.

Sakura came the following spring, her pink hair bright against the new green growth. She had brought seeds from the village — rare medicinal herbs she thought might help if they ever got sick. But as she approached the house, she felt it immediately: the air was thick with their presence, as if the very oxygen had been filtered through their intertwined lives.

She had found them making love in the garden.

She froze, cheeks flaming, but she couldn't look away. It wasn't just sex.

She was turning to leave when she felt his gaze on her. 

Sasuke's sharingan had flared to life, and the single eye was locked onto hers. He made no sign of recognition. 

She had visited back in the autumn of the fourth year, took the east room, woke to good morning light. Sasuke never brought up that day, and they never spoke of it, but she thought of it from time to time.

She had brought seeds again. She always brought seeds. And they planted them together, all three of them, in the south bed where the peas had been, and she noted without comment how Naruto's hands had become careful and how Sasuke's had become — not gentle, not entirely, but patient, which on Sasuke was the same thing.

She noted how they moved around each other and she noted how the garden had grown since spring.

She said nothing, and stayed a week, and ate the food they grew, and felt something she could not name, something green and a little aching, something like watching two trees that have grown so close their canopies have merged, that share now the same light, that have stopped being two separate trees and have become instead: a place you want to stand under, a place that makes the weather different, a thing that provides shelter not because it was planted for that purpose but because it has been here long enough and close enough and has grown, has simply kept growing, the way things do.

The way things do when you let them.

She felt homesick for the boys she once knew. And a little sick with the beauty of what they'd become.

~

She visited every year after that. Although, now she loudly announced herself, screaming songs and humming tunes from the little path, making her presence known before entering. She didn't think she could handle another intrusion like that spring.

She brought her daughter the sixth time, who was small and solemn and walked through the garden with the particular seriousness of children who understand without being told that they are somewhere important.

Naruto crouched down to her level and showed her a caterpillar on a fennel frond, and the girl looked at the caterpillar and then at Naruto with an expression of total unguarded wonder, and Sasuke, from somewhere behind them, said, "It will be a swallowtail," in the tone of someone answering a question the child had not yet thought to ask.

Her adopted daughter, Haruka, fell in love with the place the first time she was brought there at age seven.

“It feels like the whole world is holding you,” the little girl had whispered, barefoot in the dark soil, chasing fireflies between the sunflowers. Sakura had watched her run laughing through the rows and felt a strange ache — homesickness for something she had never quite possessed. Haruka returned every summer after that, helping harvest, learning which leaves were edible, which berries carried quiet poison.

She called Naruto “Uncle Dobe” and Sasuke “Uncle Bastard” with the same bright affection her mother once had. The two men spoiled her rotten with oversized strawberries and stories that always ended with “and it was all your mother's fault.”

She brought her son, a couple years later, when her knees had started to argue with stairs and her hair had gone the color of good winter light, pale and clean and not unbeautiful.

The boy was sixteen and unimpressed by mountains and unimpressed by gardens and unimpressed by old people in general, and then Naruto showed him the root cellar and he was impressed by the root cellar, and he spent two days helping Sasuke repair the east fence where a deer had pushed through it, not talking, working, in the particular companionable silence that Sasuke had always generated around himself like a kind of weather.

He came back to Konoha with dirt under his fingernails and a shiso cutting wrapped in a damp cloth and an expression that Sakura recognized, that she had worn herself at thirty-four on the train ride home: the expression of someone who has been somewhere outside of time and is not sure yet what to do with that.

Good, Sakura thought. Good.

"Sensei,"  she brings it up at breakfast, which is how Sakura knows she has been thinking about it for some time, has been holding it overnight, has turned it in her sleep the way you turn something over in your hands looking for the seam. "why do Naruto-oji and Sasuke-sama live up on the mountain instead of here?"

"Because they like it there," she says.

Mirai's expression communicates, very clearly, that this is not a sufficient answer. Hana verbally communicates.

She is a reader of rooms, Hana, has been since she was very small, calibrates herself to the emotional temperature of spaces with the fine-tuned precision of someone who has decided that information is important and the faces of adults are a primary source of it. She looks at Mirai. She looks at Sakura. She goes back to her rice but her ears have not gone back. Sakura can tell.

"But why the mountain," Mirai presses. "We have nice houses. Mama says Naruto-oji helped build half the village. Why did he build nice houses for everyone else and then go live somewhere else?"

Sakura sets the teapot down.

This is, she thinks, a very good question. She thinks about how she would explain it to herself at eight years old, which would have also been a hard conversation, and she thinks about what is true and what is true enough and what is too much, and she makes the calculation that you make when you love children: the version of the truth that they can carry without it being too heavy.

"You know how some plants," Sakura says, sitting down, "grow better in certain soils? And you can try to transplant them somewhere else, but sometimes — no matter how good the new soil is, no matter how carefully you do it — they just do better where they were?"

Mirai considers this. "Like the rosemary in Mama's garden. She moved it and it got sad."

"Like that. Exactly like that. Naruto-oji and Sasuke-sama — they needed different soil. Quieter soil. And they found it up there."

"But the village is fun," Mirai says, with the magnificent certainty of someone for whom the village has only ever been a place of festivals and people who give her mochi. "How can the mountain be better than the village?"

Sakura wraps her hands around her tea.

"It's complicated," she says, and hears herself, and tries again, because complicated is what adults say when they want a child to stop asking, and Mirai does not deserve that and also would not accept it. "The village — our village, the one you love, the festivals and the training grounds and everything — it wasn't always the way it is now. When Naruto-oji and Sasuke-sama were young, before you were born, before your parents were old, it was — it had some cold spots. In the soil. Places where things had a harder time growing."

Hana has put her chopsticks down. She is listening with her whole small body.

"And they felt those cold spots very much," Sakura says. "Both of them. For different reasons. And they grew up anyway, and they did everything that needed doing, and they were very great and very brave, and then — then they found each other, and they found their mountain, and they grew the way they needed to grow, and the village —" she pauses, "—the village got warmer. Because of the things they did. But by then they had already put their roots down somewhere else."

The kitchen is quiet for a moment.

"Oh," says Mirai. And then: "That's sad."

"It's a little sad," Sakura agrees. "And also not sad at all."

~

The others arrive after breakfast.

This is not an unusual occurrence — Shikamaru's children along with Inochin and Chouchou spill into Sakura's kitchen and her garden and her back step with the easy familiarity of children who have always known each other, who have known each other's parents' houses, who have absorbed without thinking the information that this house is a place you can come to and be given food.

Mirai has told them.

Mirai has a gift for narrative, for disseminating information in a way that makes it compelling, that makes people feel they would be missing something important if they were not present. Her father was the same way, though he would have died before admitting it.

They arrange themselves in the garden, on the step, on the low stone wall, with the casual totality of children taking over a space, and Sakura sits among them with her tea and thinks: well.

"Did you know" says Shikadai, Shikamaru's son, with his father's affect of asking questions as if they are slightly exhausting to articulate, "that Naruto-oji used to be Hokage?"

"Reall, sensei?"

"Yes," Sakura says.

"And he stopped?"

"Yes,"

"Why would you stop?" This from Chouchou, with genuine philosophical puzzlement. "My dad always says being Hokage is the most important thing you can be."

"Your dad also says that thinking is more tiring than fighting," Inojin observes, "so I'm not sure his assessments are reliable."

"He's right about both," Chouchou says.

Sakura's hands pause over the teacups. She has been expecting this—not this question, exactly, but some question after their visit to the mountains.

"Because," Sakura says carefully. "He... chose to leave. After the war, after everything, he chose to be somewhere else."

"But he was good at it." Mebuki's brow furrows, and for a terrible moment she is Sarada at three, asking Why don't they have any pictures of anyone else? "Everyone says he was the best Hokage. That he made everyone friends again. That he ended the old wars."

"He did," Sakura says. She pours the tea, steadying her hand against the tremor that has lived in her fingers since she was seventeen running through the battlefield. "He did all of those things. And then he left."

"Did he get sick of us?"

The question is so earnest, so naked, that Sakura has to set the kettle down before she drops it. She reaches across the table and takes Mebuki's small, warm hands in her own.

"No," she says. "No, sweetheart. He didn't get sick of anyone. He just—" She searches for the words, the right ones, the ones that will make sense to a child who has never seen two people become one organism, who has never watched a man hold another man's hand through the long, slow winter of the world. "He loved someone. And that someone needed to be away from the village. And Naruto loved him more than he loved being Hokage. More than he loved anything. So he went."

Mebuki's eyes go wide. "More than being Hokage? But that's—that's the best thing. That's the thing everyone wants."

"But that doesn't make sense. You can love someone and still be Hokage. You love your family too and you're still the head of the hospital."

The other children pause in their eating. They are the children of the new generation, the ones who have never known war, who have never heard the shriek of a tailed beast or seen the sky turn red with Sharingan fire. They know Naruto and Sasuke as names in textbooks, as statues in the Memorial Garden, as the two men in the old photograph that hangs in the Academy hallway—one grinning, one scowling, both young and impossibly alive and standing on opposite sides of a frame they would spend the rest of their lives trying to cross.

"Papa says," Shikadai says, slowly, with the air of someone relaying sourced information, "that the village wasn't very kind to Sasuke-sama. For a long time."

The garden goes a little quiet.

Sakura looks at Shikadai.

"Your papa," she says, "is right."

"What did they do?" Mirai asks.

"It's—" Sakura starts.

"It's a lot of things," says a voice from the gate.

They all turn.

Shikamaru is standing there, hands in his pockets, looking like a man who has come to collect his son and has arrived at exactly the wrong or possibly exactly the right moment, and is calculating the odds of which. He looks at Sakura with the expression that she has known for thirty years, the one that says: I can take this if you want, or you can, which would be better because explaining is such a drag.

She nods.

He comes into the garden with the unhurried ease of someone who has spent his life moving at exactly the pace he decided was appropriate, regardless of what the situation suggested, and he folds himself onto the wall.

"The village was uneducated, and unkind. Do you know what Oka-san always says?"

"To be kind to everybody, because you never know if they are sad?"

"Exactly."

"So the village hurt them?'

"Yes."

"That's terrible," Mirai says, with the righteous fury of a child for whom injustice is still a fresh concept, not yet worn down into the world-weary acceptance of people who have lived long enough to see how often it happens.

"Yes," Shikamaru agrees. "It was."

"But Naruto-oji was still Hokage," Inojin says, working it out, "even though they were like that to him."

"He loved the village anyway," Sakura says. "He always loved it anyway. That was — that was the thing about your Naruto-oji. He was always stronger than what was done to him."

She looks at her tea. "Sasuke-sama too, in different ways. It just looked different on him."

"Sasuke-sama doesn't talk to us much," little Lee says.

"My dad says Sasuke-sama doesn't talk to anyone. Like, ever. He came to the village once when I was little, and my dad tried to say hello, and Sasuke-sama just... walked past him. Didn't even look."

"My mom says he's scary," adds a girl with Yamanaka Ino's great-niece's nose. "She says he has a face like a knife."

"He has a face like a very handsome knife," Mebuki corrects, because she is a Yamanaka , and Yamanaka vanity is one of a kind. "But he never came to my birthday parties. Not once. And Naruto-sama stopped coming too, after I was like... three? I don't even remember him. I just have this blanket he sent once. It smells like dirt."

"And peas. They always send peas."

"I hate peas."

"I—"

"Okay, that is enough."

"Sasuke-sama could've stayed here instead. If he loved Naruto so much..."

"Maybe he could've."

"So Naruto-sama gave up the Hokage title because of Sasuke-sama? How was the village okay with that?"

"They weren't at first, but he did it anyway. He'll do anything for someone he loves."

"That's so cool," breathes the Akimichi boy.

"It's also very stupid," Shikamaru says, but there is no heat in it. There is something else, something softer and more painful, the way you speak about a friend who made a choice you still don't fully understand. "He made enemies that day. People who had lost family to Sasuke, people who had lost homes, people who wanted blood. They couldn't touch Sasuke — not with Naruto standing in front of him — but they could make the village uncomfortable. They could whisper. They could freeze him out in meetings, in the street, in the small a thousand ways a village has to tell someone they aren't welcome. So Sasuke-sama couldn't have stayed."

Mebuki's hands are fists on the desk. "That's mean."

"Yes," Shikamaru says. "It was. And Naruto, for all his power, couldn't fix mean. He couldn't force people to forgive. He couldn't force them to be kind. So he did the only thing he could think of — he took Sasuke and he left. He gave the village the peace it wanted. He just... didn't stay to enjoy it."

Sakura sighed. She was worried for a second, for all of Shikamaru's blunt honesty, that he might just say Naruto literally ran away, chasing after Sasuke, without so much as a goodbye. 

They will understand when they are older.

"The mountain," whispers the Yamanaka girl. "They went to the mountain."

"Yes."

The next question comes from Hana.

Of course it comes from Hana, who has been quiet for much of this and listening with the total absorption of a small person storing information for later, processing it with the patient thoroughness of someone who does not ask until they are ready to hear the answer.

She asks it simply, with no preamble, looking up from the patch of garden she has been inspecting with a stick: "Are they together? Like — together together?"

Mirai straightens with the attention of someone who had wondered this and not asked; Shikadai and Inojin exchange a glance that is doing a lot of work.

Chouchou says, "Obviously," and then looks at Sakura to confirm.

Shikamaru looks at Sakura.

Sakura feels something move through her that is warm and complicated and old, the particular feeling of a truth you have held for so long it has worn a groove in you, that sits in the groove now comfortably, that does not need to be protected anymore, that is simply — settled.

She feels herself go a little pink.

This is embarrassing, at her age.

She doesn't mind.

"Yes," she says. "They are."

"For how long?" Mirai asks, with the air of someone beginning to calculate the math.

"Since —" Sakura considers. "That depends on when you start the count. They were rivals, when they were young. Which is sometimes how it starts."

"That's nice," Hana says, and goes back to her stick and her patch of garden, apparently satisfied, the way children are sometimes satisfied by answers that would send an adult spiraling.

The shiso leans toward the window, and the tomatoes hold their color against the coming cold, and somewhere on a mountain that none of them can see from here, two men tended to the sunflowers and coneflowers and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Hana has found a caterpillar.

She holds it up to the light with the reverence of a child handling something genuinely important.

"What will it be?" she asks.

Shikamaru, unexpectedly, says: "A swallowtail, probably."

Hana looks at the caterpillar. She looks at Shikamaru. She looks at the caterpillar again.

"How do you know?" she asks.

Shikamaru glances at Sakura.

Sakura glances back at him.

"Someone told me once," Shikamaru says. "Someone who knew."

There is another gardening term — nurse log — for when a fallen tree becomes the ground from which new things grow, when the decay of one body becomes the condition of another's living, when what has ended provides the nitrogen, the shelter, the structure, the sickly softness of well-rotted wood that seeds need to take root and become themselves.

The forest makes use of everything.

Nothing is wasted in a forest.

Sakura is seventy-one years old when she makes the trip alone for the first time. Lee's legs had given out decades ago.

Kakashi had wanted to come though.

She had watched him want to come with the helpless transparent wanting of a very old man who has learned, finally, that the body does not negotiate, does not respond well to being argued with, does not care that the mind is still willing.

He had stood in the doorway of the apartment — their apartment, still a thing that surprised her some mornings, the domestic ordinariness of it, the reading glasses on the table and the six cups and the plant on the windowsill that was a descendant of the original shiso, third or fourth generation, she had lost count — and he had looked at her with the single eye that she had known for forty years and he had not said,

"Tell them I am getting too old. Tell them I said— "

B`ecause Kakashi did not say things like that, had never said things like that, and she had kissed him on the cheek and said, "I know."

And he had made the sound that meant, yes, you do, and also I am frightened, and also don't let me see that you can tell.

She could tell.

She always could.

No shinobi ever expected to live past the age of thirty.

The train ride was four hours and she slept for two of them and spent the other two looking out the window at the mountains getting larger, at the particular quality of light that belonged to high places, at the way the trees up here were different — denser, darker, more serious about being trees — and she thought about her granddaughter's dirty fingernails and she thought about her daughter's solemn face at five years old looking at a caterpillar.

The path through the cypress had changed.

It was overgrown, but you could still find it, still follow it.

What had once been a neat trail lined with glowing gourds was now swallowed by forest. Brambles clutched at her sleeves. Moss had claimed the stone fences. 

She smells mint underfoot, and fennel, and something sharp and dark that might be the ghost of the lavender, gone wild and feral and twice as potent for it.

Her digital watch — a gift from Haruka's youngest, who had solemnly informed her that Grandma, it has a heart rate monitor and also a step counter and also it tells you when to water your plants — beeps softly, reminding her to hydrate. She is seventy-one years old after all. Her knees sound like gravel being stepped on. And she is running suddenly. 

She does not remember running.

She pushed through a low-hanging cedar branch and came out into what should have been the clearing and stopped. Her old heart hammered against her ribs. 

The house was still there.

This was the first thing she confirmed, the thing her heart needed to confirm first, and she felt the specific relief of it move through her chest like water moving through cracked ground: yes, the house, yes, still standing, the roof intact, the walls still upright, the chimney at its familiar angle against the sky.

Vines — thick, woody, relentless wines, had crawled over the roof, through the windows, bursting from every crack like veins claiming a body. The wooden beams sagged under the weight of wisteria gone feral. The plants had grown, and the plants had consumed. Sunflowers towered twice a man’s height, their heavy heads bowed toward a single center point as if in some sort of mourning. Tomato vines had escaped their trellises and strangled the porch. Nightshade berries gleamed black and glossy amid the chaos, beautiful and deadly.

But the garden.

The garden had become the mountain.

Or — no. That was not quite right. Not become, no it had... joined. The garden and the mountain had joined, had merged the way two bodies of water merge, imperceptibly, until the question of where one ends and the other begins is no longer a meaningful question.

The fence along the eastern edge was invisible, entirely consumed by — she stepped closer, pushing through a curtain of something that might once have been climbing hydrangea but had grown into a wall, a living wall — yes, there were the fence posts, there, underneath, still standing, wrapped in vine and moss and the persistent embraces of a wisteria that had clearly had opinions and been allowed to act on them for many years.

Moss has eaten the roof tiles too.

The door hangs open, and through it, she can see nothing but more green, more growth, more of the terrible, beautiful, suffocating abundance of things left untended and unloved by anyone except the two men who had chosen this place over the world.

The path from the gate was there if you looked for it but you had to look, had to follow the logic of it, had to read the garden the way you read a sentence in a language you learned long ago and have not practiced and which has, in your absence, acquired new idioms.

She found the coneflowers by their height.

They were enormous. They were — she stopped walking and looked up and felt the particular vertigo of standing among things that are very large and very still, the coneflowers standing in their rows or what had once been rows and were now simply a field, a stand, a small temporary forest of them, their faces turned to a sun that had already moved past them, their heads beginning the slow patient bow like sunflowers make at the end of the day, and they were the colour of things that have always known exactly what colour they intended to be.

Between them, she saw the vines.

She had been trained, once, in the recognition of patterns, in the reading of environments, in the exact skill of entering a space and understanding it before your mind has finished forming the questions. It was an old shinobi skill. She had not stopped having it.

The vines were everywhere.

They moved from the garden to the house and from the house to the garden and between the things growing in it — threading through the sunflower stalks, looping over the remains of the cucumber trellis, running along the ground in dense low mats of green — and they all, she realized, all of them, moved toward the center. Like water finding its drain. Like roots finding water. Like everything that has a direction, finding it.

She ran ahead as best she could, legs protesting, breath coming in short, nauseating gasps.  Her knees argued. She had known they would and had decided in advance not to listen.

She pushed through the sunflowers and the vines brushed her hands and her arms and the leaves were cool and the smell was — the smell was the mountain and the growing things and underneath it something else.

Something that was soil and time and the gross mineral sweetness of composted years, of decades of things put into the ground and taken out and put back, of a garden that had been fed and fed and fed and was now, in some way feeding something back.

She found them in the center.

Naruto was sitting.

His back against the old fig tree — the old fig, still there, still silver-barked, still enormous, its canopy spread over the center of the garden like a held breath — and the vines were around him and through him, or not through him, not that, but close, as close as vines get to things they have decided to keep company with, winding around his legs and up the bark of the fig behind him and through the root-space where the fig met the ground, and his hands were in his lap, and his eyes were closed, and there were sunflowers leaning over him with their heavy heads, attending.

Sasuke's body had already begun its return to the soil — roots threading delicately through the fabric of his old black shirt, small white flowers blooming from the hollow of his throat.

One thick tendril had wrapped around his throat like a lover’s hand.

Her heart.

Oh, her old heart.

She crossed the last of the distance between them and crouched down — her knees absolutely furious with her, she noted it and set it aside — and looked at his face, and the breath she had been holding for the length of the path and the cypress and the garden and the sunflowers came out of her in a long unsteady rush, because his face was — it was fine, it was his face, it was the face she had known since she was twelve years old, since she had loved him and been unable to help it, since he had been a boy with too much in him and not enough people willing to hold it — and it was old now, was the face of a very old man, lined and sun-dark and still, but not gone. Not yet gone.

His chest moved.

Slowly.

Very slowly.

But it moved.

"Naruto," she said.

Nothing. The sunflowers attended.

"Naruto." Her hand on his. His hand was warm, warmer than she expected, warm the way the ground is warm in late summer, holding the heat of a season in its body. "Naruto, it's Sakura."

His eyes opened.

They were still blue. She did not know why she had expected otherwise, but they were still the blue that she had spent sixty years knowing, the blue that had always looked at things as though they were worth looking at, as though the world had not yet finished proving itself and was still, at every moment, capable of turning out to be exactly what had been hoped.

"Naruto," she wants to say. "Naruto, I came to tell you—Kakashi can't travel anymore, but he said to bring you a zucchini, he said you'd appreciate the horror, he's so old, Naruto, he's so old and so am I, and I have grandchildren, did you know that? Haruka has a daughter, she's seven, she's so smart, she gave me this watch—" She wants to hold up her wrist, the digital face glowing faintly in the green-filtered light. "—and I—I came to tell you that you're going to be great-uncles, my granddaughter is pregnant, can you believe it, I'm going to be a great-grandmother, and I wanted you to come down from this stupid mountain and meet them, just once, just once, Naruto, please—"

He looked at her.

He looked at her for a long time and she looked back and neither of them said anything, and the sunflowers leaned. His hand — she can see it now, one of his hands, the other hidden somewhere beneath the tangle of vines and Sasuke's stillness—lifts from the flowers, just a few inches, and makes a small, abortive gesture. Come here, it says. Come here, Sakura. I've been waiting.

She crawls. Her old legs scream. Her lungs burn. She crawls across the soft, fragrant ground and she kneels beside him, and she reaches out to touch his face, and his skin is cold, so cold, but his eyes are warm and she cannot stop the tears and she does not try.

Then his mouth moved.

She leaned closer. His voice was very quiet, was quieter than she had ever heard it, was the quiet of water at the bottom of a deep well, still moving, still real, but far down. She leaned until her ear was close to his mouth and she listened, and what she heard was numbers, low and careful, said with the concentration of someone who has been keeping them for a very long time and is now entrusting them.

The third. The month of frost. Eighteen twenty-two.

She stayed very still.

The third. The month of frost. Eighteen twenty-two.

She was a doctor. She had always been a doctor, had been a doctor in war and in peace and in the small ordinary emergencies of a life lived among people who needed things, and she understood numbers like these immediately, completely, with her whole body.

He had been counting.

He had been sitting here in his garden, in the center of his sunflower grove, with the vines around him and the fig tree behind him, and he had been counting the days since the third of the month of frost at eighteen hundred and twenty-two, and he had been keeping the number, the way you count seeds before you plant them, the way you count the days until germination, not because counting changes anything but because attention is a form of love and Naruto had never, not once, not for a single day of his life, known how to love anything without his entire self.

She took his hand in both of hers.

He was looking at her still, the blue eyes clear and present and — it took her a moment to name it, to find the word for what was in his face, and when she found it she pressed her lips together hard against what wanted to come out of her, which was not a word — the word was relief.

He was relieved. He had been waiting, she understood now, not patiently, Naruto had never been patient, but faithfully, the way a plant waits for spring, and what was in his face was the relief of a person who has been holding a door open for a very long time and has finally been told they can let it close.

"Naruto," she said, and she did not say the other thing, did not say no, wait, not yet, please, I'm not — because she had been a doctor for fifty years and she knew what came after relief like that, knew what the body did when it had been waiting faithfully and had finally received permission, and because she had promised herself everyday on the train that she would never make this about what she needed.

She had promised herself.

"Sakura," Naruto says, and his voice is the barest rasp now, a leaf skidding across stone. "I needed to tell someone. The date. The time. I didn't want to be the only one who knew."

His smile was already there when she opened her eyes.

It had come in while she wasn't looking, had settled onto his face the way the best things settle — naturally, inevitably, as if it had always been there and the face had simply needed reminding.

The wide grin.

The one she had known since they were twelve. The one that had always looked like someone saying: yes. this. exactly this. The one that was, she had always thought and never said, the most generous thing she had ever seen on any human face, because it gave everyone who saw it the irrational feeling that the world was going to be fine, specifically because Naruto Uzumaki had looked at it and decided it was worth smiling at.

It was that smile and it did not waver.

And then his eyes closed, and the smile stayed, the smile froze in place, and his chest did not move again, and the sunflowers attended, and the vines held their company, and the fig tree stood in its ancient silver patience above him, and the garden made the sounds that gardens make, which are the sounds of growing things making the best of available light.

Her watch beeps.

18:36. Time to water your plants.

The numbers sat in her vision for a moment, clean and numerical and blue-lit, the way important things are sometimes reduced to: cleanly, lit from within, without decoration. The same blue as his eyes. She thought that and then she thought: don't, Sakura. Don't make it a metaphor. Let it be what it is.

He had never seen this watch. She had not had it the last time she visited, had not had it the time before, had gotten it from her granddaughter who had bought it with her first paycheck from the hospital where she now worked under Sakura's former supervisor's former student, the unbroken line of it, the way things pass from hand to hand through time without stopping.

Naruto had never seen a digital watch.

She stood up and her knees were simply beside themselves.

She doesn't remember the train ride home.

She thinks she must have walked back through the forest, because her shins are bleeding and her shoes are full of mud and there is a sunflower seed caught in the collar of her coat, but she has no memory of the path, no memory of the station, no memory of buying a ticket or finding her seat 

The mind does this sometimes, draws a curtain over the hours it cannot process while it works, while it does the necessary structural work of rearranging everything that must now be rearranged — the past that is suddenly larger than the future, the vocabulary that must be revised, the name that must move from one category to another, the permanent present tense becoming the permanent past.

She is aware that she was on the train for four hours and that she must have done things, must have breathed and blinked and possibly eaten something from the cart and watched the mountains shrink back into hills and the hills flatten into the lit grid of the city, and she does not remember any of it.

Kakashi is waiting on his balcony when she arrives.

He seemed to have shrunk more, somehow, his shoulders curved inward like a leaf curling in drought, but his visible eye is still sharp, and the moment he sees her face—he must see it from a block away, must see it in the way she walks, the way she holds her shoulders, the way her hands are empty — his own face crumples beneath the mask, a small, private collapse that he does not try to hide.

She watches the knowledge move through him the way cold moves through a greenhouse — everything it touches adjusting, everything it touches doing the work of remaining upright, the effort of it visible in every line of him and also somehow not visible because he was always, even now, even at this age, still capable of the composure that had been trained into him before she was born and had become, over the decades, something that was almost indistinguishable from peace.

Almost.

"Tell me," he pleads.

She sets her bag down by the door and she crosses the room and she sits on the armrest of his chair because there is no room to sit beside him and there never has been and they have made do with this their whole lives and she leans against him, her shoulder against his, and they sit in the quiet of the apartment with the shiso making small adjustments toward the window and the city outside doing what cities do and the book still open in his lap to a page that neither of them will read tonight.

She tells him the numbers.

"Ah," Kakashi says, and it is the softest sound she has ever heard from him, softer even than the way he used to read Jiraiya's books aloud to Team Seven on rainy missions, softer than the way he had said I'm proud of you to three children who had needed to hear it so badly they had nearly shattered from the force of it. "So he waited, then. Naruto. He waited until he'd told someone."

"He waited to die, yeah."

Kakashi purses his lips and looks away, a pained look in his eye.

"You should've seen the sunflowers."

He looks at her again. "What about the sunflowers?"

"They were all, sensei they were all... turned face down. All of them, you should've seen, it was—"

He nodded like he understood. "Yeah well... their sun was dying."

Sakura ran her trembling fingers through her now white hair. "Our sun..."

She doesn't complete the sentence, and after a while Kakashi sensei speaks again.

"The children are coming tomorrow."

She had forgotten. Or not forgotten — she had known, had held the knowledge somewhere, but distantly, the way you hold a thing at arm's length when you do not yet have the strength to bring it closer.

"Yes," she says.

"Your granddaughter. And the young one." He means the great-grandchild, three years old, who had last visited during the plum rains and had eaten most of Sakura's windowsill shiso one leaf at a time before anyone noticed. The copy ninja's memory was a little rusty now.

"What are you going to tell them?"

Sakura thinks about Naruto's hands, warm with stored summer.

She thinks about 18:36.

She thinks about the sunflowers leaning, the slow bow of them at the end of the day, the way they track the sun while it is there and then simply wait, simply stand in the space where the light was, until it comes back.

She thinks about the number of days.

She thinks about a smile that stayed.

She thinks about her granddaughter's dirty fingernails and her daughter's face at five years old and a caterpillar on a fennel frond and a shiso plant in a paper bundle still with the mountain soil on its roots, still reaching, still looking for somewhere to go.

In the mountain, in the center of a garden that has become the mountain, in the shelter of a fig tree that was old before they came and will be old after, two things that were once two people are becoming what everything becomes — not nothing, not loss exactly, but the condition of the next thing, the soft ground in which the next thing will root, the nitrogen of them slowly, patiently, generously returning to the soil that made them.

The forest makes use of everything.

Nothing is wasted in a forest.

Some things become so rootbound they stop being plants and become the ground itself.

Some things are planted and never stop growing.

Some things flower long after any reasonable person would have expected them to stop.

She shook her head slowly, as she sits down. "That they had a lot of fucking peas."

fin.