Timer

A/N: This will be a series of one-shots, some of which are AU. Others take place in the actual Naruto canon, but diverge from the manga after Sasuke's betrayal.

I originally wrote this in July of 2011, so if it looks familiar to my followers, that's why. I took it down awhile back to make some major revisions and forgot to ever put it back up.

Summary: AU written for the 2011 SasuSaku month prompt "Change." AU.

Song Inspiration: "Champagne Supernova" by Oasis

If he had to describe her in one word, it would've been annoying. There was so much about her that could be quickly categorized with that one word: the way he could tell how she was feeling just by looking at her, the high-pitched sound of her little girl's giggle, how she was always trying to get him to enjoy "the little things." How she made his heart beat faster. And for God's sake, her hair was pink.

If she had to describe him in one word, it would've been insufferable. He was self-centered and entirely too proper for his age, always raining on her parade and making her look bad in front of the grown-ups. Unfortunately, they were eleven, and the worst word she could really come up with was ugh.

So that was how they grew up together. With Sakura notoriously annoying, and Sasuke thoroughly ugh.

(But really, if she'd been allowed use two words, the second would have been beautiful.)

Sasuke loved sports and the great outdoors, so the choice to send him off to summer camp seemed obvious. Sakura would have rather spent her vacation gossiping and painting her toenails with her best friend, but her parents found it easier to get her out of sight where they wouldn't have to worry if their prepubescent daughter was getting in to trouble.

But they met because he beat her in a race by tripping her at the last second, and then later she screamed his ear off. What he would remember about it when he was older was that her breath smelled of lemon cough drops.

One day, before they could be considered friends, Sasuke fell asleep in the sand. Sakura buried him alive up to his throat, giggling and muffling snorts into her gritty fingers. When she was finished, his head poked out from the sandy beach like an unfinished totem pole. The blue of high tide reflecting on his face gave him a sickly pallor, and the evening light's shadows swallowed his eyes into his skull.

When Sasuke woke up half underground, he found Sakura crying over him.

"Look at this," Sakura said through a mouthful of bread, and pointed to a wilting flower in a patch of grass. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, and crumbs fell on her shirt.

Sasuke leaned in to get a closer view of the plant, as if expecting to find a carnivorous beetle or a family of tiny people living on its petals.

"It's a flower," he determined, unimpressed, "So what?"

Sakura smiled and gave him a playful slap on the shoulder. "But what does it remind you of?"

Sasuke plucked the flower from the ground, tiny aphids crawling out of the yellow feathered center. He shrugged and handed it to her. "You," he said.

Sakura twirled it in her fingers for a moment and placed it behind her ear for safekeeping. And then, after a moment's thought, she threw the remainder of her sandwich in the grass to be eaten by blackbirds.

"Why?" she asked, and touched the petals against her temple with fondness.

Sasuke sighed. "Why do you think?"

The summer they turned fifteen, Sakura learned about the sickness. The sickness that would change Sasuke from a handsome, healthy boy into a wasted wraith. That was the summer when the paleness in his skin and the shadows beneath his eyes (that had so irrevocably possessed her heart) began to mean something.

"It's okay to be scared, you know," she said, sitting on his windowsill with her feet hanging into the night. The air had a brisk winter smell that meant the holidays were coming, but she didn't really feel like celebrating. "You can talk to me."

Sasuke, who had been looking for a CD to play, let out a groan. "Jesus Christ, Sakura. Do you always have to be so annoying? Just mind your own business for once."

Sakura teetered on the sill as her body tried to choose between tears or laughter. She chose the latter, though her body trembled with anxiety. "Yeah," she said, "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

Later, when she tried to sneak out the front door, she ran into Sasuke's mother, who swayed quietly on the porch swing. The woman let Sakura cry into her lap until she couldn't breathe, and Sasuke listened through his bedroom window and tried not to be sorry.

After awhile, Sakura didn't go home anymore. She snuck up to his room at night. He let her in through the window after parties she would go to that he couldn't. Parties she came back from with smudged lipstick and eyeliner rimming eyes that were glazed and laughing without humor. Her clothing stunk of pot and she knew it, but when he asked her about it she just smiled and went to sleep on the pile of bean bags in the corner.

He wandered back to bed, and his room was so dark and silent but he couldn't hear her breathing. Was she breathing, was she alive? Even in the moonlight he couldn't see her. She faded into the couch, so small and shrunken. He could never find her. His illness destroyed everything he had, and then it took some more.

"You've changed," he said on one of those nights, staring at the ceiling through the dark. He could smell the perfume she put on to hide the stench of weed and nicotine, and it itched unpleasantly in his nose.

Sakura sat up, foam balls in the bean bags crackling noisily. "I haven't!" she insisted.

"You have." Sasuke rolled his eyes.

Sakura stayed sitting, and chewed the dry skin from her lipstick-stained mouth. Then, when Sasuke was nearly asleep, she admitted, "...There's a reason."

Sasuke rolled on to his side, and somehow their eyes met, even though they couldn't see. "I know," he said, "I know."

It wasn't until they were eighteen that the disease really took hold. In those days, he missed more days of school than not, and it quickly became clear he wouldn't graduate with the rest of them. Standing winded him, and breathing winded him almost as badly. Sakura bought him healing crystals that she hung in front of the windows that made his room sparkle. They were annoying and girly, just like her, but Sakura wasn't partying anymore so Sasuke didn't make her take them down.

"Why do you always come over so late? Some of us like to go to sleep before midnight," Sasuke complained, the light still on so Sakura could finish her Calculus homework. They sat on his bed together, and he picked threads from his comforter to pass the time.

He wasn't tired, but he'd been griping for the past twenty minutes anyway. He was scared of dying and he didn't want her to know. He wanted to grieve alone.

Sakura glanced up at him, chewing the eraser on her pencil. She pulled it from her mouth to point it at him. "Hey, if I don't learn this stuff, who's going to tutor you so you can catch up when you get better?"

Sasuke closed his eyes and breathed through his teeth. "You just don't get it, do you? I'm not going to get better, Sakura. I'm going to get sicker, and sicker, and then I'm going to die."

When he opened his eyes, it was to blink back tears he wasn't prepared for. They were in her eyes, too. She leaned in and kissed him on the mouth, and for some reason it made him smile.

They kissed a lot, every night for almost a year. When he felt okay they sat on the porch swing and his mother watched through the window with a melancholy smile. If Sakura caught her staring, the woman would bring them lemonade.

Sasuke didn't really like the sticky powdered stuff, but it reminded him of Sakura's cough-drop breath after he tripped her in the sand, so he drank it without complaint.

They were in his room, drawing the things they missed the most. Sasuke had a seizure and wasn't okay for a long time. It scared Sakura and made her scream and cry, and it was Sasuke's older brother who had to call the doctor. That was when they hired a private nurse, and when Sasuke stopped talking so much. Usually when he did talk, it was to call Sakura annoying and tell her to go home.

Sakura's pictures were of Sasuke, and Sasuke's pictures were of the beach.

Shortly after graduation, Sakura came by the house with a DVD of a movie Sasuke had wanted to see in theaters but couldn't.

The steps up to his room creaked forebodingly, and when she tried to open the door, it was locked.

"I don't want to see you," he said, curled up on the carpet. With his cheek against the wooden door, his dusty voice vibrated into the knob in her grip. "Go away."

Sakura cringed and retracted her hand to pull it to her mouth. She didn't want to cry. This wasn't about her and she couldn't make it that way.

"I love you," she confessed, a secret she'd so perfectly kept. It was a gift for him, the truth.

At first there was a pregnant pause in which the house's silence screamed in their ears. But soon enough there was the heavy scrape of him struggling to stand, if only to break the quiet.

"Sasuke?" she asked.

"I thought I told you to leave me alone," he replied with a voice like mud, and then he walked away.

Sakura didn't know what to do without him, so she tried to revisit the old clubs. She got dressed and put on her gilded sunset eye-shadow, her gauzy little dress, and decided maybe she should just go dancing.

She only got halfway there before turning back. She'd changed somehow, and she didn't really know why.

He asked for her, even though he didn't mean to. He made his mother cry, even though he didn't mean to.

"Sasuke," Sakura whispered, and climbed into bed beside him. He was smaller than she was. He was frail stick-and-bones, and when she hugged him to her, he didn't push her away. He just sucked in wispy gasps of air, and tangled his fingers in her shirt.

She crunched a cough-drop between her teeth, and the shards that pricked her tongue tasted like blood and lemonade.

"IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou."

"Shh, shh. Sasuke, it'll be okay."

When he finally slept, it was morning. He breathed the sweet breath of a child against her throat, and for a moment she let her self imagine it: the dock on the beach leading into the water and the tiny shed where they put on their lifejackets. Little Sasuke laughed in her mind, Race ya!

Light streamed through the windows, and she turned and twisted her hands to watch the refracted beams of the healing crystals glitter on her skin.

"I hope heaven is even half as pretty," she said to the boy in her arms. She didn't expect him to wake up again.

The funeral parlor was grey and had nothing of the safety she always felt in his room. The sooty lashes of his shut eyes cast shadows on his cheeks. She pressed the pad of her thumb to his pale lips, but they didn't smile beneath her touch. An hour later he was underground, pretty white flowers with yellow-feathered centers all that remained of their friendship.

She drove to the place they used to love, the one in the drawings she had sprawled across her car seat.

The blackbirds no longer felt like friends, pecking the eyeballs out of squirrels in the dirt. The wooden shed that used to hold life jackets let out a groan of anguish, fishing nets hanging like spider webs from the ceiling. She felt too big for her memories.

The sunset lit up the sky like a bruise, spilling red-purple-blue blood and pus into the ocean. There was a quiet destruction in the air. She could feel it in the way the brine filled her lungs and the sand was fire in her shoes.

She kept running, but the water never got any closer.

END.