Sasuke slumped against the only remaining stone wall, unable to keep on his feet. His evil, cursed older brother lay only about a yard away, having just fallen himself. Itachi was still alive, but Sasuke watched victoriously through sharingan eyes as his chakra slowly began to ebb into an unstoppable end. It was better this way, watching Itachi quietly moan in pain as he slowly died, instead of granting him a quick, painless death. This moment was what he had been looking forward to for a good portion of his life, and he wanted to savor watching Itachi writhe in agonizing pain and misery.
Unfortunately, it had taken all of his chakra reserves to win the battle, and so he was incapable of standing. He would have liked to have stood tall above Itachi and gloated in his victory. Still, Sasuke was enthralled to have won, to have finally killed his treacherous older brother. His work was only half done though, he smirked to himself. There was still the matter of rebuilding his clan, and he found himself wondering if Sakura would forgive him for leaving her on that park bench all of those years ago.
Then he sensed her chakra signature, Naruto and Kakashi assumedly with her. Sasuke was finally going to see the woman he had secretly fallen for a child. Now they were both adults though, and she probably wasn't going to still be the crazed fan girl she had been as a genin. Sakura would forgive him for leaving her though, Sasuke thought arrogantly, she always loved him, and that much could never change. Sasuke became anxious to see her once more, and unknowingly to him, so was the departing Itachi.
"Sakura." Itachi whispered in awe and recognition, as soon as he sensed her familiar warming presence approaching. His voice had spoken so lowly that Sasuke had barely heard him, and when he did hear his older brother utter the name of the girl he loved, he was completely confused. He put his thoughts aside though, reaching the conclusion that Itachi was delirious. The was no possible way that he could know her. Itachi had been a S-class crimainal, a member of the infamous Akatsuki, no less; Sakura was the loyal kunoichi of Konoha.
Sakura emerged from the thick forest brush, her hair wild form her desperate rush to arrive on time. Her green eyes widened in absolute horror at seeing Sasuke smiling proudly, and her dear, beloved Itachi dying in the piles of rubble. The scream that escaped through her lips had been wholly unexpected by Sasuke, the tears flowing down her pale face even more so.
She dashed forward, stumbling clumsily on the shards of stone wall littering the area. Sasuke smirked expectantly, thinking Sakura was going to hug him frettfully and then kiss his face repetatively. Then they could exchange their long held in sentaments after all of the years of having been apart. She didn't come to him though. Sasuke felt his heart throb painfully as Sakura fell next to the slowly fading Itachi instead. Something must have been terribly wrong.
"Sakura." Itachi whispered hoarsely, clenching his teeth together to hold back another agonizing groan. He wished now that she hadn't seen him like this, and instead remembered the last time they had seen each other. It had been a happier encounter, with frivorlous love-making and soft word of contentment. However, it was too late for her to go back now, this would no doubt scar her for the rest of her life, and Itachi loathed himself for letting it happen.
"It's okay, Itachi. I'm going to save you. I won't let you die." she choked on the last word, summoning a powerful dose of healing chakra to her hands. She pressed both hands into his chest, crying, but still maintaining control of her chakra. She already knew it was hopeless, Itachi was going to die then and there. There was nothing in her arsenal of medical ninjutsu to prevent the unevetable. Not even Tsunade could have saved him.
"You're not going to die, Itachi." She sobbed, pressing the chakra more forcefully into his broken chest. Itachi knew he was long past gone, and knew she had only said it to reassure herself. Sakura was stubborn, but some things couldn't be fought, these being one of them.
"Stop, Sakura." He commanded with complete authority. He wasn't going to let her waste her chakra so needlessly. Using his remaining strength, he slowly lifted a hand to cup her cheek weakly. Sobbing harder, she did as she was told, and was forced to accept her lover's fate. Shaking even more violently, she took his hand from her cheek and kissed it dotefully, fiercely.
Sakura soon abandoned his hand and moved to his lips that were already losing their soft warmth. She kissed him with an unmatchable passion, and he was already too weak to be able to kiss back. It made her sick, the tangy, metalic flavor of his blood in her mouth, but she couldn't pull herself away from him. She was going to forge their last memories together permenantly into her mind, even the most disgusting details of it.
Itachi could no longer move with her desperate, longing kisses, his strength utterly gone. He felt a strange sense, foreign sense of peacefulness, something he had never found in his life. Of course a person who had committed such terrible crimes could never find peace in life, he thought to himself morbidly. It was almost as if he was happy, in his own miserable way. Unstartled, he realized that the last thing he would ever taste would be Sakura's salty tears mingled with her suffocatingly sweet breath and his own blood.
Still crying, Sakura pulled away to look upon the face of her beloved for what would be a last time. His face had a deathly grey palor and was covered with splatters of his own blood.
"I'm not going to live without you." She murmured, combing silky black hair out of his opaque eyes. Eyes beginning to unfocuss, he shock his head tiredly.
"Yes, you are. You have a very important reason to live." Itachi corrected her.
"It doesn't matter. It wouldn't be living without you anyway." She shock her head feverishly. She watched his slowly moving hand until it met her stomach. His fingers spread around it in a loving, protective manner.
"Right here. Your reason to live is right in here." He whispered slowly, his breath labored from only a small, mundane movement.
"Don't tell him who his father was. It must be a secret, he would only be ashamed of having a parent like me." Itachi continued sadly. The silence that followed this statement was thick and strangling, tormenting Sakura with the very weight of his words. There was no comfort to be found in his weak and dying face, when it had always been a source of joy before this.
"Sakura, I want you to do something for me."
Sobbing, she nodded her head, waiting to hear what he would have her do.
"Reach into my pocket. I have something I wish I could give you, so that you could know my true feelings for you. Please don't hate me for not being able to make it possible." He smiled sadly. Sakura did what he told her to do, and found in his pants pocket a small, black box. Wailing, she opened it to see the engagement she could never wear, because she was never gong to marry Itachi. She sunk to the ground next to him and sobbed loudly for the person who would never hold her again.
"Sakura," he started for the last time, and once having gotten her attention, se agave her his dying words that would forever haunt her, "I love you."
Horrified, Sakura watched his dimmed eyes slowly droop shut and the last air in his lungs be exhaled.
"I love you too, Itachi." She whispered back before he lost his last sense. Hearing was always the last thing to go, and she knew the man she had loved was nothing more than an empty shell. Uchiha Itachi was gone. Forever.
Some once happy part of her inner self broke, was now shattered and unfixable. Screaming for the second time, she colapsed on her dead love, holding onto him as her last life line. He didn't wrap a reassuring arm around her like he would have in his life, nor did he whisper words of comfort into her pixie-like pink hair. He was truelly gone. Without Itachi, there was nothing. The world would be, and already was becoming, grey and monotone, the only comforting thought being that of her own death. He wouldn't forgive her for a long time, but she wasn't going to be able to respect his wish for her to live. Even if it meant destroying their child inside of her, still too small to see through untrained eyes. Eternal damnation was worth sacrificing the unborn child, of she could see Itachi's face one more time.
Resolved in suicide, Sakura retrieved a kunai from the holster tied to her leg. This was the end for her, there was nothing that could keep her from her dead love. They would be together, even in death. Numbly, she prepared to slit her own throat, when he first chose to speak.
"Sakura." Sasuke called her name carefully, seeing she was not mentally sane at that point. He had seen and heard everything, and wasn't sure what to say now that Itachi was finally dead. He was angry with both of them, but Sakura most of all for having betrayed him. What he felt more than his anger was his loss. They had truelly loved each other, and Sakura was never going to forgive him. His other half of his ambition was ruined, and by none other than Itachi.
"Don't be stupid. Put the kunai away." he sighed, incapable of thinking of something more sensitive to say. Her finger twitched slightly, but she made no real move to continue, nor to put her weapon back into its holster.
"You have no idea what you did to him, what you're doing to me. You got what you wanted, now let me have what I want." She cried, the kunai clattering in her quivering hand. She would have killed Sasuke where he sat defencelessly, but it would have made her stoop down to his level. Sasuke wasn't worth killing, not for some stupid revenge. That was what had caused this whole mess, she thought.
"I've only completed half of my entire plan. I want you for the other half, Sakura." Sasuke stated sincerly. Tears still dribbling down her facem she glowered at Sasuke relentlessly. He had broken her glass heart one before, leaving Itachi to glue the pieces together. Itachi was gone, and her heart had shattered again, beyond the help of anyone. He had no right to touch her, to even speak to her after what he had done.
"I love you, Sakura. I always have, even when we were genin." Sasuke struggled with the words; saying how he felt had never been something he had been good at.
"Good. All the more reason for me to cut my throat for you to see." She whispered cooly, threateningly. Onyx eyes met green, and he saw her pain, and recognized it from how he felt the night Itachi had massacred their clan. What was more, he could see her hatred for him, the same hatred he had felt for Itachi for half of his terrible life. If he had been anyone else, he would have cried at the deathly glare she was sending him; she was supposed to love him, not curse his name. His heart wrenched at seeing how much the girl he loved had changed over the years and could find only one person to blame for it.
"What did he do to you?" He asked, throughly disgusted with his snivling older brother, and the woman who had betrayed him. Sakura's eyes widened dangerously in her fury, indicating she was on the verge of eruption.
"He loved me, or were you not paying attention?" She yelled venomously. Sasuke flinched at the very idea, knowing his older brother to have been the heartless monster who killed everyone he loved. Now Itachi had essentially killed Sakura as well, only leaving the actually killing part to her to do herself. Itachi didn't love people, he only killed them ruthelessly.
"He was lying to you." Sasuke stated calmly, seeing no other explination. Sakura shook in anger, and was unable to keep the dreadful truth from her lover's murderer.
"The only one he ever lied to was you, Sasuke." She spat.
"Elaborate." He commanded, his eyes thinning dangerously in his own fury. She smiled sardonically, her anger hardly forgotten.
"He fed you that lie through a silver spoon on the night he was forced to kill off the Uchiha clan. And you ate it up, being the gullible child you were, thinking he had wanted to kill everyone, that he had even enjoyed it. You never considered that he might have set it all up to have you kill him in the end. He had wanted you to take your stupid revenge and get your glory. Him dying by your hand had been more important to him than anything, even me. If it hadn't been for that, he wouldn't have let you kill him, and he would have lived to help me raise our child. We could have been happy together, but you had to come first, you were the only one besides me that he cared about."
"There was no lie! He killed everyone because he wanted to prove his strength! He didn't care about me, he wanted to use me, the same thing he's done with you! He wanted to poison your mind, to turn you against me so that I could never be happy!" Sasuke roared back at her, his heart breaking by how determined she was to believe Itachi.
"Did you ever bother to research your family and their activities at that time? The Uchiha clan had been planning a coup d`etat against the hokage, and Itachi had been ordered by Konoha's advisors to massacre the clan! He had killed everyone he loved, had killed himself on the inside by doing it, but the one person he couldn't kill was his innocent little brother!" She shrilled back at him, too preoccupied with proving Itachi's innocence to remember about suicide. Sasuke remained silent, unable to believe what she had just told him. There was no way it was true, it had to be another lie Itachi had used to manipulated her.
"Do you have any idea how broken he was when I found him? The one person he cared about hated him, wanted him dead. It took a long time for him to drop that cold facade, even longer for him to let me touch him. He was the most loving person I had ever known; always the perfect gentleman, always completely amiable. But now he's gone." Sakura sniffed, feeling the need to cry again. She dropped the kunai and let her eyes drift back to Itachi's ashen face once more. All of her confidence was lost, and she decided she wouldn't kill herself, kill the one thin they had made together, their child growing within her. He would never forgive her if she did kill herself in her desperation.
"Our child will know about his father, Itachi. I can't pretend that you never existed in my life. Our child will be proud of his father, despite what you might think. He will respect and carry on your name." She whispered, stroking his cold cheek. Feeling his cold and hardening skin made it so much more real to her, making her succumb to tears once more. She clutched her stomach tightly, holding the last, small connection she had to Itachi.
"Where ever you are, Itachi, please wait for me. I'll come for you some day, I'll follow you into hell if I have to." She sobbed. She wasn't going to die that day, nor the next. She would give birth to their child, but after that, she wasn't sure what she would do. Things could so very easily. She could decide that looking into her child's face was too much, or she could find happiness in being a mother. She wouldn't want the child to become too attached to her either, just in case she did decide to go.
It had taken all of the strength of both Naruto and Kakashi combined to tear her away from his corpse, but in the end, they had brought him alon, as well as Sasuke. Itachi had been given a proper funeral, though few bothered to attend. His innocence had been proven, but the village had no sympathy for his early death. He would have been a danger to everyone if he had returned to the village alive. Sasuke regretted his devostating mistake, regretted it because of how lifeless Sakura was becoming. He had actually shed tears during the eulogy, and once again when the coffin was slowly lowered into the dee[, dark grave. Sakura had wept the entire ceremony, and had stayed long after.
Her loud, broken sobs could be heard form far away, and most didn't understand her anguish. They hadn't known about how Sakura had loved him, as it had been kept utterly secret, and they wouldn't ever comprehend her feelings for him. Sasuke had stayed by her side until she had slipped into a sleep disturbed by torturous dreams, writhing miserably in the grass by Itachi's grave. Even months after the incident, she still came to visit her love, often staying late into the evening.
Seven and a half months after Itachi's death, Sakura gave birth to a healthy baby boy,who she named after his father. There had been no presents, no celebration at his birth, and nobody to hold her had through the long, painful labor. The baby looked exactly as his father had, the dark, calculating eyes, the snowy white skin, the tafts of silky black hair. His most captivating feature was his onyx eyes though, which reminded her too much of his father. The child never cried, but once getting him in her arms, Sakura sobbed loudly.
She couldn't stay to care for baby Itachi, she couldn't bear to look at her son at all. Crying on the night she gave birth to her son, Sakura decided that she wouldn't live any longer. Her promise was kept, she gave birth to her son, but there was nothing else tying her down to the world she was currently residing in. Sasuke could be trusted to care for hte child so wouldn't feel guilty for leaving. People wouldn't miss her; she was the skank who got screwed by an S-class Criminal (because that' how they all viewed him as) and managed to get herself pregnant. Not even her best friends could understand how she felt to be utterly alone. They had left her, even Ino, who was supposed to be her best friend, had told her 'when you decide to get over him, then you can call me up.' Little did she know that Sakura was incapable of 'getting over' the one man who had ever returned her feelings.
After Itachi had been taken by an overly cheerful nurse, Sakura left the hospital, without any intention in returning. Her last correspondence with a living human being was a scribbled letter on a memo pan from the hospital.
Dear whoever happens to get this first,
I have decided to leave. I know this won't bother you, I've been emotionally gone for the past seven months as it is, and it's time to leave this depressing place physically. I won't ask for your forgiveness, but I will ask you to bury me next to Itachi. That is my dying wish.
My son' s name is Itachi, after his father. I ask you, Sasuke, to please care for him. When he's old enough, tell him who his parents were, and where they've gone. I don't want him to grow up in the dark like you had to. Thank you for being so nice to me for the past few months, a small part of me was glad at least one person was understanding.
To the rest of the people I once called friends, I bid you farewell. You should be happy in knowing I will be with Itachi, but I know you won't be. Curse my name, curse his if you must, but we will be happy nonetheless. I don't plan on forgiving your treatment of me for the past few months, and if you treat my son in the same manner, I will come back to haunt you. Joking set aside, know that I am strangely looking forward to my death, and have been for some time now. I would have committed suicide sooner, if it weren't for the promise to give birth to my son. Enjoy life without me, because I will certainly be enjoying the afterlife with Itachi at my side.
Happily Leaving,
Haruno Sakura
Postscript: I won't miss any of you, not after the way you all treated me. Goodbye.
Sakura ran faster then she ever had before, stopping at her appartment only to retrieve her suicide tool- a beautiful katana that Itachi had given her almost a year and a half ago. The scabbard was a black stained wood with cherry blossoms carved into it, the hilt made with a black and pink material woven into it. The most beautiful part of the weapon was the inscription on the blade, which read 'death by a flower' in elegantly carved characters. It was the perfect thing to kill herself with, Sakura mused, leaving her appartment unlocked.
Moving even faster than she had before, Sakura dashed to the temple where her lover lay underground, waiting for her to join him. His grave was plain, it only stated his name, Uchiha Itachi, and had the symbol of the leaf above that. It was the cleanest grave in the temple grounds though, as she had taken the time to sweep it every week. She looked to the left of his gravestone, and smiled at the empty spot that would soon be hers.
"I kept my promise, Itachi. I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. He looks so much like you that it's scary." Sakura told him.
Silence.
"Itachi, I told you I was going to come to join you. So that's exactly what I'm going to do." She added.
More silence.
She wasn't sure why she had been expecting some sort of responce, he wasn't a part of the living world anymore. She unsheathed her katana and admired it for what would be the last time. She kneeled before Itachi's gravestone, and for a moment had to consider what vital organ she should pierce through. Upon making her decision, Sakura slid the blade through her heart and all the way out of her back with percission only a ninja medic could possess.
"'This is thy sheath, there rust, and let me die.'" Sakura gasped, quoting the last line Juliet had said. After the puncture into her skin, a small groan slipped through he lush lips. There was pain, and a sense of loneliness as she began to die. Coughing up vats of her salty, metalic-tasting blood, she grew dizzy. Sakura slumped onto her back, causing the katana to twist agonizingly inside of her, a sharp, stinging pang running through her heart. She felt the pain-induced tears spew from her clouded eyes, and her face lost its rosy color in exchange for a sickly white.
On her back, Sakura had never felt to much at peace with what she was doing. It was painful, but she was resolved in her death as her senses began to fade. Her eyes fluttered shut, the last thing she had seen being a starry sky above the world. Through choppy, ragged breaths, she could smell her blood and the dirt she lay in, and found comfort in it. The pain from her wound began to ebb, her life along with it. All that was left was her hearing, and vague thoughts.
The last thing she would here was Sasuke's voice, as he came too late to stop her. Apparently he had been the one to get her letter first. There was his crying that she heard, and his begging for her to not leave him alone, but that didn't last long. Sasuke had truelly loved her, and the disconnected feeling of him hugging her gave Sakura a small sensation of sadness, more for him than for herself. This wouldn't have happened if Sasuke had just stayed in Konoha and admitted his feelings for her, but she couldn't regret falling in love with Itachi, even with the prospect of living happily with Sasuke.
Then there was simply nothing but an empty, cascading abyss of pitch-black darkness. She could feel nothing, and in her subconscious, she wondered if the darkness was all there was to death. Even if Itachi couldn't be there with her, she was, for some reason, okay with being alone in the peaceful nothingness. Once the pain was gone, death was easy.
A/N: Wow, that was depressing to write... but it needed to get out. It was sort of inspired by one of my favorite songs, Join Me in Death, and so yah. Hope you enjoyed it.... or not. Poor Itachi and Sakura.... Anyways, please review!!!
~Itaweasel-hime