Damaged Pieces (SasuSaku AU)

XIII. A Papa's Heart

DAMAGED PIECES:

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Galileo Galilei
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One mistake. One stupid mistake years ago. She'd paid heavily. And she was still paying for it.
She'd gotten drunk many times. She'd been a party girl through her teenage years.
It wasn't always that way though...

Her father's sudden death had hit her pretty hard. Her mother remained to be a druggie through and through. She was failing school. She was failing her father. She was losing her friends. She was.. in depression. And her mother didn't think this fact needed more attention than the powder she just had to shove up her nose.

It was a long and major struggle for Sakura to pull herself up and out of her state by herself. It was when she found out she was pregnant that she reflected on her actions. She bawled her eyes out and finally, embraced the life inside her.

But every mistake must be payed for. And she'd made many. Near the end of her third trimester, the cops had come looking for her. And the stress had sent her straight to the delivery room. A week later, when she recovered enough, she was taken to prison, leaving her unnamed daughter behind.

That was also when Mebuki Haruno finally entered rehab.
.
.
.
.

Sasuke tried to find the correct emotion in his mind but, came up blank.
What had been a hunch was now a solid, one hundred percent proved fact. And he didn't know how he wanted to feel about that.

Two days ago, when Sakura had left him standing on the stairs - after hugging him intimately which left tingles on his body and made his brain dysfunction momentarily - he had managed to - without her knowledge - acquire strands of Sakura's pink hair.

The reason being, after overhearing the conversation between the pinkette and her mother, and catching sight of Gaara, suspicion had pestered him.

Now he was here, holding a parental DNA test result which held undeniable proof that Sarada was, in fact, Sakura's daughter as well.

Sasuke went upstairs to sit by his sleeping daughter. Looking at her now, she did remind him a lot of Sakura. Her behavioural patterns, her hand gestures, her stubborn streak. Hell, he must have gone overboard with the beer, because, she even seemed to look somewhat like Sakura now.

How did he never notice it before?

For some reason, he didn't want to leave Sarada alone tonight. So, he again slept beside her. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately.

Hours passed and he still couldn't catch a penny of sleep. He looked at his daughter sleeping peacefully, unaware that her mother had left her for the second time now. Which made her leaving worse.
Ah, so he was upset about it afterall. That's one emotion sorted.

"Papa?" She rubbed her eyes as she sat up straight.

"Why are you awake, Sarada?"

"You can't sleep, papa?"

"Little girls shouldn't worry about such things. Go to bed."

She crossed her arms and huffed. There! That was so Sakura right there, he noted again with some annoyance.

Sarada's eyebrows scrunched together and she spoke as if she was his mother. "This is about Sakura, isn't it?"

Sasuke sighed once he got over her intuitiveness. "Sara, you're too young to understand."