Blind [SasuSaku Fanfiction]

Chapter 15: Nightmare

Over the next couple weeks, Sakura had worked constantly with Sasuke in adjusting to his blind state, and she was happy to tell Tsunade that he was making excellent progress. It had been a while since she had handed him the first three-dimensional puzzle while the genin cleaned the yard, and now she found that she could give him a number of different puzzles and he'd be able to solve them in minutes. Object recognition had become so easy that it was cut out of the exercises they went through, because it was just wasting time at that point. Ninjutsu practice was getting better since Sakura had found a rocky dell behind the cliff that sported the Great Stone Faces, so that Sasuke was no longer torching things. Also, he had become somewhat accustomed to walking on his own, and while he couldn't walk across the house by himself, he could at least go from the their room to the bathroom without Sakura's aid—but he still was fairly loud as he woke her up every time he would get up in the middle of the night.

She found that he had been working himself hard, and every night he would crawl into his bed exhausted. He had taken to just crawling into bed with his clothes on, having been fed up with Sakura throwing the garments at him when he left them on the floor. And even though Sakura was slightly disgusted by the thought of sleeping in one's dirty clothes, she hadn't complained—even though Inner Sakura still secretly wanted to see Sasuke shirtless again. Apart from Sasuke's personality and pride, which caused the occasional abrasion, there had been no disagreements between them.

Of all the training that they did, Sakura enjoyed the daily walks around town, finding that she could easily ignore the fact that it was rehabilitation, and could simply enjoy spending time with Sasuke. Her descriptions of locations had gotten better and she had come to like describing the world around her, as it put it in a different perspective. Though she and Sasuke didn't tend to have long drawn out conversations on their walks—unless it was over something important, and usually disheartening—she learned a few things about him through the small chitchat that they could keep going between them. For instance, apart from Sasuke having a taste for tomatoes, he also disliked dampness, the smell of the hospital and loathed Kabuto, the medic ninja who worked under Orochimaru.

"What did you do for those three years when you were with Orochimaru?" she had asked him once.

He had shrugged and gave a simple reply, "He taught me many things with all three types of jutsus, mostly in ninjutsu. Half of them are forbidden due to chakra consumption and a quarter of the forbidden ones require eyesight in order to maintain them without causing harm to the user."

She had asked him a few more things, but he had refused to give any extended responses, and the matter was dropped. He either didn't want to respond, or he simply could not remember parts of the time he had spent in the Village of Sound.

People tended to visit, Naruto being the most frequent caller, along with Hinata, whom he had taken a more curious interest in since the lectures he and Lee had given Sakura. He was still trying to work out how the young Hyuuga felt about him, while Hinata was blushing so often that it seemed that it seemed like her permanent skin tone. Sakura just shook her head at the couple, astounded by Naruto's stupidity and inability to comprehend Hinata's shyness.

Kanaye had been unable to visit because he was out on another long-term mission in some foreign country and wasn't due back until towards the end of June, while Sakura's mother had come over after the first week of them living together so that she could 'introduce herself'. Sakura knew that she just wanted to analyze Sasuke and see what kind of person he was; she had drawn the same conclusion as Kanaye: 'why do you like this guy again?' As for Sakura's father, he was still away on a mission.

Sasuke seemed to be taking it all neutrally, but Sakura supposed that was his way of taking it in a good light. No matter how he was taking it, it was better than him treating all of them coldly.