AN: well, well, this would be the promised sequal to my last story A Scent Like Night Rain...I had actually been without any form of Internet access for the last few months which was why I took so long to get to it, and when I did, it came out a little different than I expected...it's kind of going in an anti-sasuhina sort of direction now, which is a little funny considering that I like SasuHina XD

As always though, it's the reviews that will determine if I continue this or not...

(c) Masashi Kishimoto

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Please, let me hear it again. Just one last time, let me hear your heart beat just one more time. Oh God, I would give almost anything to hear it again, to feel it again.

Hinata lay sprawled over Itachi's body, with her head over his chest, and her hair spread over him like a wild, tangled, and blood soaked burial shroud. Her hands were clawing and grabbing with frantic desperation at the pallid skin which was now past feeling any sensations of pain or pleasure at her touch. She found that she was biting her tongue to keep from screaming out loud like some frightened child who had just watched someone die for the first time ever in their life.

She was beginning to draw blood, which was beginning to form a small red trail from her lower lip down to her chin, but she didn't care as she too felt no pain, only shock, as though one of her limbs had been swiftly and brutally torn right off from her body. How long had it been since she'd been lying over him like that? Minutes, hours, days; her mind had lost all sense of time the very second that he stopped breathing.

It was eerily warm and humid in the run-down Akatsuki hideout where she had found herself at the end of her and Itachi's renegade wandering, but his body was cold, so cold, and not even the heat of her body could restore any real warmth to it. Her shivering fingers roamed his corpse aimlessly, searching for a warm place to rest down on, but found none. She was fully aware that she was not alone; that she was being watched, but it meant nothing at all to her.

She didn't feel like a woman who had lost her first real lover, no, that wasn't how she would describe the tight ache which she felt in every part of her body. I feel more like a mother, she thought, finally finding something to compare her pain with, as if such a thing could ever possibly be compared. I feel like a mother who has just lost their only child and now has no one left to take care of, nobody left in the world to want them or need them. I don't even have a home anymore; I can't go back to Konoha now, she thought.

She squeezed her eyes shut painfully tight at the thought of her former home and of the decision which she had made with Itachi to leave it. She had been fully aware that their risky endeavor would likely end in one or both of their deaths, especially considering the menacingly quick progression of Itachi's disease, which she had played an unwilling part in. She had never expected to hurt so much though when it was all over. She had expected to feel nothing for him, and so she was surprised by the terrifying pains overtaking her. Her every breath was a cruel reminder that he would never breathe again.

I need you. I need you. I need you. I need you.

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"Get that woman off of him now, Sasuke. I've had just about enough of her and all of her sorry histrionics, and besides, Akatsuki has no need for extra baggage like her hanging around." Sasuke turned towards Madara and nodded while grabbing at the bloodied handle of his katana. He slowly headed towards the direction of the crying Hyuuga girl and the pale, lifeless cadaver of the one whom he had once fondly called brother during a time which now seemed to him to have been a pleasant dream which never truly existed in reality.

He tried to make the short way to her last as long as it possibly could, because he enjoyed watching her cry so shamelessly with her eyes reddened, her nose running, and her face swollen. After all, she was only doing what he himself longed to do more than anything, but which he would never allow himself to do ever again, not for anyone. The days of crying and screaming out loud were long over for him, and he now indulged in nothing more than the desire to see the rest of his former village shed uncontrolled tears of anguish. If he had to start with a second-rate, runaway Hyuuga; then so be it.

"Go back home," he said to her, with no sort of emotion clouding his voice. "You'll forget all of this in time, though I'll be forced to remember it as long as I live."

As she finally lifted her head up to face him, he was thrown completely off guard by the dark gleam of hatred in her eyes which gave sudden life to the features which just a few seconds before had seemed just as dead as Itachi's.

"You! I can't even bear to look at you! He came back here for you, he never forgot about you; he came back here to help you and you killed him, your own brother!" As Sasuke let the spite and accusatory tone of her tear-choked voice sink in, he found that it was starting to become harder and harder for him to breathe normally as his whole body tensed with a hot and impulsive rage. She doesn't know anything about anything, the little bitch; Sasuke thought as he roughly grabbed her by the hood of her dirt and blood encrusted jacket and began to forcibly drag her away.

Her arms and legs were violently flailing about and striking at him as they met the hard, jagged stone ground and became torn, skinned, and bloody; leaving a vivid red trail behind her as she continued to be pulled away. When her struggling became too much for even him to handle, he dropped her down and looked straight into her cold eyes.

He was taken aback by the way the crimson of his sharingan seemed to reflect so lucidly from her eerily pale eyes, which were wild and alive with hate. A single tear unexpectedly ran down the length of Sasuke's face before escaping down his chin and falling to the ground. To Sasuke's mind, it had seemed to burn and sting his skin with a near-acidic intensity. Damn you, he thought. Damn you for bringing me to this.

"You! What kind of simple-minded slut are you? Don't go giving me all of your sickening shit about loving brothers as though it were any of your business to begin with. Do you think that I enjoyed killing him? Do you actually think that?"

Sasuke half expected her to shrink back in response to his barely-controlled rage but she continued to boldly stare back at him with undisguised contempt, and her only movement came from the rising and falling of chest as she breathed. Sasuke was sorely tempted to stop that breathing motion permanently, but he held himself back and continued.

"Do you think that I wanted it to end like this? He didn't come back for me; it was never about that at all. He came back to try and stop me from giving Konoha what it's had coming for some time now. I may have forgiven him, but I can never forget what he did. I had to kill him eventually whether I wanted to or not. You, a woman, would never understand."

"I don't want to understand you."

Hinata's words werespoken in a weak, scratchy whisper as she began to crawl away from him on her wounded hands and knees, no longer able to stand the sight of his coal black hair falling over ivory skin in exactly the same way that Itachi's had. Soon, there will be nothing left of him but dust, she thought mournfully to herself.

"I don't want to understand you, but I will forgive you, because I pity you. Really I do. But as you said before of him, I will never, ever forget."

Sasuke felt the heat of his anger rising up his spine now, threatening to spill over and explode. "I don't need your god-damned pity, but I will free you from your sorry memories right now. Take good care of my brother in hell and don't you worry anymore about me. I'll join the two of you there eventually."

With those words, Sasuke raised his katana, which was still slick with his brother's blood, high above his head as the lightning-like sparks of chidori began to flash along it's length. He coolly prepared to let it sink into Hinata's body, as she sat still, as though completely unafraid of her own impending death. She then opened her eyes saucer wide as the one she had heard Itachi call Madara earlier that day stepped in to block the katana before it could complete it's macabre mission of slicing through her flesh, muscle, and bone.

"I thought that you said we didn't need trash like her," Sasuke grumbled as he very reluctantly placing the flashing katana back in it's sheath.

"Well, no, we probably don't need her; not for Akatsuki or anything of that sort but it's pretty obvious that she's the type who probably fears pain far more than she fears death, so if you let her live, you can possibly use her to bargain with Konoha a little; her life spared in exchange for that of one of their elders, or possibly even for that of the Kyuubi's host. You's be surprised at how far a village of bleeding hearts such as Konoha would go to save even the weakest of their own. Just think how long they were after a runaway like you."

Madara's hand on his shoulder felt eerily cold to Sasuke, who tried in vain to back away.

"I don't plan on bargaining with any of them, now or ever," Sasuke replied, remembering how not even the Third Hokage, perhaps the biggest "bleeding heart" of them all, had been able to stop his brother from being manipulated or his clan from being nearly annihilated.

Madara shrugged, almost playfully, and began to walk away from the whole grisly spectacle before him. "I was only making a suggestion. Do as you like with her then."

Sasuke stood motionless for a moment before turning to Hinata once again, but she was far beyond him; staring at her reflection from within Itachi's open eyes, which in color seemed to mirror her own in his death; a pure white, innocent, blameless white.

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