My other half! Sasukex oc. [Slow updates] (under editing)

Found🔴

Sasuke's pov

The rain had finally tapered off into a miserable, clinging mist, but the weight in my chest didn't lighten.

I moved through the trees of the training grounds with a mechanical rhythm, leaping from branch to branch, my mind trapped in a loop of that encounter at the market. "Asset" The word Kakashi had used tasted like ash in my mouth. It was a reminder of what this pathetic village truly was—a place where you were either a tool to be used until you broke, or a ghost left to rot in the shadows. Like my clan. Like me.

I skidded to a halt at the edge of the Forest of Death, the massive iron fence looming through the heavy fog. I usually came here to drown out my thoughts with raw exhaustion, pushing my body to its absolute limits until the memory of Misaki's journal—and the way she had looked at me before she jumped into the Naka River—stopped screaming in my head.

I stopped mid-step. My hand flew instinctively to my weapon pouch.

It was faint. A jagged, static-like thrum of chakra that shouldn't have been there. Most genin would have missed it completely, but my senses were honed to a razor's edge, tuned specifically to a frequency I had spent months trying to understand and two weeks trying to find.

'It can't be.'

I moved before I could talk myself out of the sheer impossibility of it. Vaulting over the high iron fence, my sandals hit the damp earth with a muffled thud. I didn't follow a path; I followed the pull. The further I plunged into the heart of the forest, the more the air began to taste like ozone and stagnant water.

The Forest of Death was supposed to be a place of endless, violent noise—the hum of giant insects, the rustle of predators hunting in the dark—but the center was eerily, suffocatingly silent.

Then, I saw her.

She was a sudden shock of pale blue and black against the rotting brown leaves of the forest floor. My breath hitched, my heart hammering a violent, erratic rhythm against my ribs. I blurred forward, Body Flicker activating instantly, my knees hitting the dirt beside her with enough force to bruise.

"Misaki?"

The word came out as a broken whisper, completely unbefitting of an Uchiha. She was lying on her side, her frame so thin it looked like a harsh gust of wind could snap her in two. Her caramel-brown skin, once vibrant, was now a map of deep, purple-black bruises and ugly abrasions. Her black hair was matted with mud and dried blood.

But it was her eyes that stopped my heart.

They were wide open. The turquoise irises were fixed and glassy, staring straight ahead into the dark underbrush. She didn't blink. She didn't move. She looked like a broken doll that had been discarded and left to rot in the rain.

"No," I breathed, my hand trembling violently as I reached out. "No, not like this."

I expected her skin to be ice, but when my fingers pressed against the side of her neck, I felt it. A pulse. It was shallow, erratic—the frantic, dying beat of a wounded bird's wing—but it was there.

She wasn't a ghost. Not yet.

A surge of something raw, terrifying, and fiercely protective roared through my veins, more powerful than the Curse Mark throbbing on my neck, more consuming than my own burning desire for revenge. I didn't care about the Council, the Hokage, or the journal. I didn't care about the two weeks she had been missing or the utter impossibility of her survival.

I carefully slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, pulling her emaciated frame up against my chest. She was frighteningly, impossibly light.