This contains spoilers for chapter 480, 481, and 482. You have been warned.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Sasuke was gone; he had vanished in a second, leaving behind only a few drops of blood to suggest that he had ever been there at all.

Sakura stared dully at the place where he had been, as a fog bank rolled in and the sky became increasingly gray and overcast, like unpolished steel.

"Sasuke-kun." Her voice trailed off, as the kunoichi trembled and tried not to cry. She had been willing to give up everything for him, her home, her safety, even her life, and still he rejected her. Once by his words, and now by his actions. He ran. He ran from her.

The wind sighed softly, catching her hair and hiding any spasm of her face.

"You're a fool, you know." A hoarse, blood-dimmed voice sounded behind her. Sakura turned, suddenly remembering the girl.

The girl laid on the ground before her, staring weakly, crumpled, a pool of blood forming beneath and around her. Sakura remembered; Sasuke had been on the verge of killing her when she had shown up.

Sakura hopped over the divide in the bridge and over loose rubble to get to her. She leaned over the girl, bowing her head.

"Did you hear me?" the girl spoke again.

"Shh," Sakura hushed her. "Don't try to talk." Using a thin blade of chakra, Sakura cut through the red-haired girl's cloak (Akatsuki…She must be one of the people working with Sasuke-kun), in order to survey the damage.

She had been stabbed very close to the heart; that much was clear from the tearing in her lavender shirt. Sakura formed another blade of chakra in order to slice through the girl's shirt, praying that she was wearing some sort of undershirt or bra while she did so. The damage was more extensive than Sakura had thought; whatever had been used to stab the girl, it had not left a clean cut, and the damage was massive. She might not survive…

No! Sakura told herself firmly. I don't make a habit of losing people like this, and I need her help. She might know where Sasuke-kun's gone.

As Sakura raised a palm of healing chakra, she noticed something. And shuddered. Sakura was sure she didn't want to know why the girl's upper torso was covered in human bite marks.

"You're a fool," the girl coughed again. She opened her eyes, covered in glass as they were, and Sakura saw the girl's eyes were vivid scarlet to match her hair; her coloring was similar to that of the Akatsuki member that she and Chiyo-baasama had killed several months ago. Her face was ghastly pale. "Don't you know…what he does to people when he hasn't got any more need for them?"

Sakura's brow furrowed. "Sasuke-kun would never—"

"Sasuke's heart is completely black!" the girl exclaimed miserably, raising her head before falling back, something like a broken sob flying from her lips. "I went with him, you know, even though he had killed Orochimaru-sama."

Sakura stopped in her healing (it was slow-going; she had to be extremely precise about what she was doing, and it wasn't easy) long enough to scan the girl's face, frowning. "You were one of Orochimaru's subordinates?" Sakura asked softly. Rain started to sound in the far-off distance. It was faint; probably several miles away.

She nodded weakly. "Yeah."

Sakura wondered if this meant she should hate the girl. Strangely, she found she couldn't.

"But I had met him a couple of years before I ran off with him and the others." Her eyes clouded. "It was my first time at the Chunin exams. We were in that freaky forest, and…there was a bear. Well, I was a sensor and sort of a medic. I wasn't a fighter. As soon as the bear showed up, my teammates decided to cut their losses and ditched me; I was always…the weakest link."

Sakura bit her lip, but did not comment.

"But then…he showed up. He saved me like it was nothing, someone who didn't even know who I was when my own teammates wouldn't lift a finger to help me." The redhead smiled a little bit. "I wish you could have seen the looks on their faces when I showed up at the campsite alive."

Sakura managed a facial expression that was somewhere between a grimace and a tearful smile. Sasuke, even when the darkness was overtaking him, was capable of such random acts of kindness; it was just part of who he was.

The girl fell back, exhausted, and stayed silent while Sakura tried to thread her skin back together. The wound didn't seem to want to heal; it kept leaking black, sticky blood that clung to Sakura's fingers even as she healed and stained her boots and cloak where she knelt.

"I went with him. I traveled with him, fought by his side; hell, I even saved his life a couple of times." She smiled, and Sakura envied her, envied her for being able to be with him, for knowing him at all. Then, the girl's face darkened. "But the moment I wasn't useful to him anymore, well…" She raised a weak hand, and with great effort drew her forefinger her throat. "Kkkk."

Sakura felt her face pale; she stopped healing out of shock. "You mean…" Sakura whispered, her voice hoarse with shock and growing horror. "Sasuke did this to you?"

Her paling, pink lips twisted in a gruesome caricature of a smile. "Who else? Danzo caught me—" Sakura's spine flinched again; Danzo was here? "—and Sasuke-kun stabbed me to get at Danzo; I think he killed the bastard too. Good riddance." She broke off into a fit of coughing, and something horribly like tears appeared on her face.

"I loved him, and he didn't care." Sakura closed her eyes, tried to close her ears, but no matter how hard she tried, the words still reached her ears. "I loved him, and this was what happened to me."

I loved him too, Sakura longed to say. She had suddenly found a sister-in-arms, in the last place she had ever expected, in a girl whose name she didn't even know, but she couldn't say a word. Her face was dimming, her eyes dulling.

If she's telling the truth…Why would Sasuke do this? Then again, Sakura had long wondered if she had ever really known Sasuke at all, if she had started seeing the real him the night he left, if the Sasuke who had been displayed after joining Orochimaru was the real Sasuke after all. If the girl knew, then she knew him better than Sakura, and it hurt to think that a little teenaged girl who had only seen the dark heart of Uchiha Sasuke knew him better than her or Naruto or Kakashi.

Her carmine eyes were growing darker; they were closing. Too late did Sakura begin to heal her again as she realized with horror how much weaker the pulse under her hands had become.

"You know, he would have done the same to you…if you had gone with him. The second you weren't useful anymore, he would have done the exact same thing to you. 'Cept he might have had the decency to make your death a little quicker.

"I'm gonna die. Stop trying to save me." Her nose fell into the nest of her perfumed scarlet hair. She smiled eerily.

Sakura trembled. "No," she whispered, "you're not. I won't let you. You're going to live, you're going to come back with me," her face formed a shaky, half-smile, "and you and I are going to have long, involved conversations about how infuriating Uchiha Sasuke is."

A low, choking laugh erupted like thunder from her broken lungs. "That…would've been nice."

Sakura stared down at the girl, not knowing why she was so horrified. She hadn't known the girl; she hadn't even known her name. She had been an enemy, one of Orochimaru's subordinates, and a member of the Akatsuki. But it was possible to form kinship with anyone, in any situation. The girl was also a symbol now, to Sakura. A symbol of how truly irredeemable Sasuke really was, if he was willing to kill someone he must have counted as comrade without a second thought.

"Sakura!"

As Kakashi ran to her, Sakura stood up, and decided that joining Sasuke wouldn't have been worth it.

It certainly hadn't been for the girl who lay dead before her.

2/18/10: Considering I've just read Chapter 483, that makes this AU. I've gotten rid of the questions because of that. Due to the issue of it being canon, I have accepted and am even relieved that Sakura was trying to kill Sasuke instead of join him, but I still think she was stupid for thinking it would work. I'm kinda glad Kakashi showed up when he did (for once the tardy ninja decided to show a good sense of timing), since I'm a bit worried that Sakura might have been willing to kill Karin in an attempt to prove her bluff.

I'm still glad Danzo is dead, though.