Pockets full of rocks
Sakura knows there are certain rules, guidelines and priorities, when taking care of a wounded. And even when she can barely hears Tsunade's voice guiding her, even when her own blood rings between her ears and her steps on the ground sound like a giant's ones, she was trained for the moment when her own arms act by themselves. Despite all she wants to do is fall on her knees and break into tears and maybe even laugh hysterically or celebrate this moment – home, home, we're taking him home – she finds herself sorting the wounds on the surface by their severity, calculating where there might be internal bleedings, checking life signs. She has no idea when did she remove her gloves, but she knows that now she functions by muscle memory and instincts, not by her heart beatings or the rationality of her brain.
Naruto, on the other hand – Naruto is having a great deal of hysteria when he tries to feel the pulse on Sasuke's neck and wrist at the same time, and she pushes him away before he'll chock Sasuke and then he's really going to die.
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"He's not-"
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"He's not dead," she can see his chest rising up and down slowly, but she holds a kunai above his lips only to show Naruto the steam. "Now shut up and let me work."
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Everything is stained with blood and chakra. She saw even worse at the past, but she almost hurls at first, the first time she put her hands on his chest – because oh my god, it's Sasuke.
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"That's it," she says after what feels like days. "It's all I can do for now."
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Sasuke open his eyes. He smiles, but not at them. "That's it." He says and it's not like an echo of her own words, but a kind of a prayer. Blood covers his face and she thinks, I going to have nightmares about this moment.
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"You're such a son of a bitch." Naruto says.
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Sakura's hands move on all the superficial wounds. Sasuke makes a small sound, not exactly out of pain, and Naruto's head spins at him so fast that she almost can't see the movement. They still communicate based on some connection in which she could never have a part in, and Sakura, as always, loses importance.
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At some point she remembers there were more people around them – she thinks Naruto understands this at the same time – and when she raises her head she's surprised to find out they're gone.
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"Went to pass the news," Kakashi says, he doesn't look at them. "I believe you'd want to walk slowly than usual home, Sasuke."
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It's a hindering sentence, Sakura knows, hiding inside a heavy question. Kakashi always had a special way asking the most important questions with the simplest way. Sasuke doesn't answer immediately, and he refuses Sakura's hand when she tries to help him on his feet. He looks at the destruction the battle had brought on the forest, and Sakura sees a flash of some kind of a much drained sorrow before he turns to glare at Kakashi with his usual glaring.
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"I can walk there alone."
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"No way," Naruto intervenes, squaring his shoulders back. Naruto is well known with his insistence, that he cannot be broken; and if Sakura knows that that Sasuke knows it better than her. "We're your team, we stay with you."
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"Fine," Sasuke says after a short silence. He begins to walk to a shorter part of the destroyed mountain, but he seems less tensed, and Sakura even thinks that maybe there is still some hope. She thinks about all the things they lost and won on the last years, about their efforts and the failures, and how in the end they weren't the reason why Sasuke left and that they are not the reason why he returned. She knows that she's supposed to be happy but there is some kind of an unease inside her chest that she cannot explain.
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Instead, she starts walking and smiles at Sai and thinks how everyone should fake their own smiles every once in a while.
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Well, everyone except for Naruto, who wears a smile of a bliss every once in a few minutes, like he can't control it. He smiles at the ground and at Sakura and at Sai and at the way Sasuke recoils, like a snake, when someone tries to touch him, throwing a glare of ice and fire at whoever suggests him a physical comfort. The only person that doesn't surrender him is, of course, Naruto, who is taking care to be around him and jumps ahead whenever Sasuke's feet collapse, Sasuke's hand is casted around Naruto's shoulders until he collects his strength to keep marching by himself.
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It happens again, and again. Even Sai loses interest at some point and fastening his pace. Sakura is grateful for the slow progress of their steps – it gives her time to think, to understand what she feels and what is expected of her to feel.
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Kakashi paces next to her, and he's like a high wind and Sakura forces tranquility on her face. He doesn't say a thing for long time; when he opens his mouth, his voice is scarily neutral.
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"If you want to talk…" she turns to look at him, surprised – for a moment she's desperate to have an excuse, and on the other side she decides to be completely honest with him; it doesn't matter because before she can thank him his eye narrows in a specific way, a way that says his face a glass like. If nothing can affect Sasuke, than Kakashi is even worse when he wants. "I suggest you talk with Sai…"
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She feels betrayed, for a moment, because there were times when she felt that Kakashi and she were united by the sheer force of Naruto's pain, but she understands what he means, what he tries to teach her.
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"Because even Sai will need to talk about it, and he won't know how and to whom to talk to."
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He narrows his eye even more and then opens her with approval. "Good girl," he says with his easiest voice and put a hand on her shoulder, for a moment. "You know Naruto, on the other hand. Give him some time."
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She nods.
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She thinks about it, over and over and over, this is what we wanted.
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But "we" is such a dangerous word for Sakura. At some point they will have to disassemble that "we" and have it fit to a new dynamic, and she's not sure that she'll be able to do it herself, because she has no idea what "they" will want once you let things lie, and she doesn't know if they will reject her.
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She thinks, this is what I wanted.
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Behind her, Sasuke says something and Naurto laughs, and she does the rest of the way alone.
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The summer suddenly comes, dripping sun beams on Konoha until the heat sticks to the skin and the village hums because of the fans. Sasuke, just like the summer, is the major talk of the town until the moment everyone got used to his presence. It confuses her, because suddenly everyone acts as if he always meets with them on the gates when they go out for missions, like it only makes sense that Sakura will glance out of the window and he'll walk down the streets with bags full of ingredients, like a normal person, and sits on the bench and will ignore Naruto's enthusiastic blabbering and will eat ramen with the same uninterested hand wrist gesture. Some mornings Sakura wakes up and feels someone erased the years without Sasuke; suddenly her heart break, Naruto's desperate anger and their fragile hope look absurd like the idea of freezing out of cold, being poisoned, having your guts stabbed. The body doesn't remember the pain.
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But she's too rational to drown in these thoughts. She will pretend that their old friendship is enough for her, and she will keep the peace of their team, and she will swallow the past. She will pretend, and she will master it, but feelings are not thoughts and she can't forget.
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"Sakura."
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"Yes?"
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There's silence. It's the first time they are alone sine Sasuke returned, and probably it's the moment he realizes it.
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"I'm meeting with Kakashi later, to train – I forgot about it – tell the rest not to wait for me with the food," he says, and if it wasn't Sasuke, she could swear he sounded embarrassed. She's not completely surprised of the sharp disappointment she feels.
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"How foolish of me," she says. "For a moment I thought you're going to apologize."
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On the things that are great about Sasuke is that he doesn't pretend. He doesn't say "to apologize of what" and it fucks with Sakura because this is one of the many reasons why she can't get mad at him.
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What he does say is, "I thought you knew me better than this."
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"I'm an optimist," she says, "never mind."
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"So," he says after a while, "you and Naruto."
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She can almost hide the way her shoulders shrink, but nothing escapes Sasuke. "Yes." It could be so easy, not to keep talking, not to go into details. Let him sink with his own assumptions. But it's dirty and she wants to think that she's above these kind of tricks. "But not Naruto and I."
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"Maybe," he shrugs.
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She wants to ask him what he means; to her own horror, what come out is "don't make him choose, Sasuke. He'll choose you."
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Sasuke blinks. There is another silence and she thinks, he can pretend, now; he can lie to me and break my heart. But he doesn't, because it's Sasuke, and he can be so cruel and he can be so selfish, but he's always fair.
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"Why would he do that?"
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She stares at him, for moment. "You-you're so blind. You with your oh-so all mighty Sharingan and you're blind if you didn't undertand this until now, if you can't see that Naruto will follow you everywhere – in fact he did follow you everywhere-"
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She got silence. For a moment she fears that Sasuke actually doesn't know what she's talking about and ask her why Naruto will have to choose and she will have to explain it to him, through her fast heart beats, that even the talking about team and family and friendships and all those magical idea, in the end everyone need to come to the same resolution. But he doesn't say a thing, he just stares at her; in fact he examines her, up to down, in the way she would have dreamt about five or six years ago. She feels herself blushing. She even considers to withdraw and he comes closer to her, almost listening to her instincts that scream danger and attacking him, but he stops a foot step from her and put his hand on her head, as if to remind her that he's taller than her, and because of that better than her.
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"Look at you, Sakura," he says, and she thinks it's forever a mock in his voice when he speaks to her, "so mature and clever now."
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"Don't patronize me," she says, "I'm older that you by four months."
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Sasuke smirks the same smirk she remembers, a cruel smile that will never reach his eyes, and bends forward until the distance between them could be evaluated with centimeters. Then he stops. Sakura forces her muscles not to move – she cannot look in his eyes because he's too close and she'll be damned if she moves her glaring – and focusing at some spot on his forehead – feeling stupid.
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He smirks again. "Don't you want to kiss me, Sakura?" it doesn't sound like he cares what her answer will be. His hand drops back to his side, leaving her hair a bit messed.
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She doesn't retreat. She raises her hand to touch his lips and thinks about how much he's close, about how is skin is just a bit darker than Sai's but still so pale, and how all her childhood he could make her stomach hurt just by standing close to her.
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It's not enough for her. No more.
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"I thought you're a good person," she says, pulling her fingers from his face. "For long time. I thought you couldn't do harm. And then, you hurt me, so much, that there was a time I thought you're a terrible person."
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"And now?"
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She shrugs. "There's good in you, and there's bad in you, just like everybody else. It's just another way to say that you're human. But the point is that I don't think I'd believe in the good parts of you if not Naruto, who believes you as if you're his religion."
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He moved backwards. Finally. "Naruto?"
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And they're back at the first step: she thinks that no matter what they do, they will always reach back here, because they are like a closed circle of pulling and pushing, like a pendulum, and the center of their universe had blue eyes and too big of a smile. She can't think of what to say, so she compromises.
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"Everybody needs to choose, in the end."
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"But you don't want him to choose."
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She nods with her head.
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For the first time since she knows him, Sasuke's face change expressions so drastically that she thinks he begins to start and take her seriously. "So do you have a plan?"
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"?"
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She's a bit shocked. "I know you're the king of acting like you don't care of anything, Sasuke, but did you really just told me that you're willing to give up?" she throws at him one of her thin smiles, putting her hands on her waists. "After all, it will solve the problem."
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Sakura was proud with many achievements since Sasuke left Konoha, with her progress and her skills she got, the enemies she defeated, but something with the way Sasuke's expression break and replaced with some naïve and desperate need makes her happy.
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"No." straight and blunt, and it seems to be as if as he's regretting it. "Think about something else."
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"I don't know. Compromise." She raises her chin (it seemed to always help him) and look at him through her eyelashes. "Team work."
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That silence is even longer than the previous ones, and then Sasuke laughs, and his voice send chills down her spine.
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"Do you want to kiss me, Sakura?" he asks again.
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"I don't know," she answers completely honest, because that's her last card. "Wait a month, ask me again."
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He doesn't ask her after a month. He waits even.
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"Oh, screw you," she answers.
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"Is it yes or no?"
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"Yes."
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He's silent, tightening the knot of his ribbon. His Jounin vest moves clumsily when he raises his hands, still doesn't feel like a second skin like the rest of his clothing.
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"You lie," he finally says, and he's not even looking at her.
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Sakura presses he lips, so tightly that she bites them. She prays, and not for the first time, that the purpose of this cold war between them will be a little more aware to itself, or at least to what's going around. Everybody knows that Sasuke grew up too soon, almost too early, and she needs to thank him for taking away from her the teenager idiocy, but Naruto stayed the same, absolutely unaware of his power and what does he make other people to feel, moving the lengthening hair from a too blue eyes and a foxy smile. She has a part in which she wishes he'll never grow up. Other part of her wants to rip his clothing from his body. And every piece, every body cell of her prays that one day, life with these two kids will be easier.
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"Don't worry, Sasuke, I'm not in love with you. And I know that you never cared for me."
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Sasuke makes one of his soft sounds, part amused part cruel. "That's another lie."
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"What do you mean?" she asks. "Which one was a lie?"
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She hates the way he smiles, like it's another jutsu that makes able to cut people with. Even Sai doesn't smile so calculated and gracefully.
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"Both."
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"Give him some time," Kakashi said, but Sakura doesn't sure that she, or Sasuke, were ready for the same amount of time to give.
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"Dobe."
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"Teme."
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"That's the forth," Sai tells her and as always his timing is perfect, the way he mimics that voice of Naruto is perfect, and Sakura bites her lips in order not to break in a laughter.
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"And it's not even noon." She raises her eyes, and through the entanglement of the trees the sky are exactly the same color of Naruto's eyes when he get excited, bright shining blue. "It's going to be a long day."
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"Again," Kakashi's voice commands above them, "Sai, you're out."
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Sai nods and moved away from her. Sakura sighs and tries to shake off the stress of her muscles, envying Sai for the opportunity to rest under the shade. They work in a team consisting four for almost a year, and Kakashi loves to drag them to exhausting trainings inside the forest sometimes, taking out one or two persons of the team to see how they adapt – usually when it rains or when it's unbearable hot outside.
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The first clone arrives to her before she's ready, and she silently curses when he kicks her in her ribs, but when she gets up on her feet her hands are full of kunai and chakra.
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Something flashes at the side of her vision and it takes her a moment to realize that Sasuke is not where they agreed upon, and he moves towards her – fast as his lightnings - once he saw she fell. Damn it; when will he understand that she can take care of herself?
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He throws a shurikan towards the clone, and for a moment she thinks he'll clash with thw kunai the clone had casted on Sasuke, but the shurikan cuts through the clone's heart and the kunai brings a superficial cut on Sasuke's neck. The close dispelled with a cloud; Sasuke wips the blood from his nack, and his expression moves from a bit surprised to a knife sharped smile. He directs it to Sakura and then to Naruto, and it doesn't surprise her.
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But then Naruto makes a surprised sound, and Sakura's world freezes suddenly because even though she expected it all the time, it's so clear to her that when Naruto will choose, it'll going to be Sasuke; it's always been Sasuke.
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Sasuke, that presses his lips with an expression that Sakura can't figure out, and then moves his weight from one let to another for a second, and she doesn't understand what's going on.
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Naruto, from his side, blinks toward Sasuke, eyes wide like two blue saucers that someone threw into the air, and he stares at Sasuke. That staes at him back, and suddenly she doesn't understand how dod she miss the meaning of Sasuke's expression, because it's a challenge, and Naruto – well, everyone knows how Naruto reacts to challenging, how – he reacts to challenging that involve himself and Sasuke.
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She almost screams in a panic when Sai put his hand on her shoulder.
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"What?" he asks, "What's going on?"
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She can't answer him. She thinks, too calmly, I can't deal with this, and she count her weapons and put them back into the purse on her belt and turns, back toward Naruto's eyes and to the way all his stance had changed just because of Sasuke's expression. As if as he was lightning struck, she thinks, and it's so stupid and ironic that she almost break into tears.
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For unknown reason to her, everybody seem to think that the fact that Naruto discovered his libido is funny.
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Oh, yes, she thinks, just hilarious.
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"I don't think it's funny," Sai tells her.
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"Okay." Sakura buries her face in her knees and refuses to sigh. "Thanks."
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Sai's room doesn't look like a typical artist's room, but there is something comforting with the absence of the mess she expected to. He uses one paper each time, put back every paint brush into her place.
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She says, "It's not fair. He- he wasn't even here for years."
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"It should have been you," Sai says, there is no emotion in his voice, he doesn't judge her, and suddenly Sakura feels nauseous.
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"And what do you even know?" she yells, jumping on her feet. "You just say what you think I want to hear, and that's not what friends do, not what I need."
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"I thought," Sai says and cuts himself off. His fingers are white against the brush he holds – she was trained to notice these things – and with every other person she would have expected a counterattack, but not Sai, oh, never Sai.
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Sometime she thinks she's a terrible person.
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She came here to hear exactly what Sai told her, wanted someone to recognize the fact that maybe she's slowed to be sad, but now he returns to his paintings all of this business seems small. Small and ridiculous and meaningless. There are battles to fight for and people to mourn and Haruno Sakura is sad because her best friend chose his best friend as a love interest, and not that what Kakashi expected when he told her to talk with Sai.
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The thought of Kakashi makes her blushing out of shame.
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"I-oh my god. I'm sorry," and to her horror she starts crying, collapsing back into the floor of Sai's small organized apartment.
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He puts the paint brush down. "What's wrong?" he asks, as is the conversation they had five minutes ago never happened. The body doesn't remember the pain and sometimes she thinks even Sai's brain doesn't, not following after continuity like the rest of the people, so every sentence being said he reacts anew, like someone stopped him in the middle of the street and spitted him out.
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What's wrong?
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What's wrong is that she knows exactly what there is in Sasuke to love, and exactly what is so appealing in his looks.
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And she can't compete him.
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"It's nothing. It's-stupid. I should have known," she says, too quickly.
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"Are you in love with Naruto?"
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"No-yes."
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When she thinks about it, it's the first time she ever admitted it loudly. It was easier to say it's sexual: the simple jealousy she felt every time Naruto reacted to Sasuke's smile. He doesn't want it to be about love. Love seems… too childish and yet too mature, and so much hard.
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Sai sits next to her, taking one of her hands between his own and squeezes it. She smiles at him, surprised that that simple gesture actually making her feeling better. For a moment she wants to take a knife and cut one of them out of this destructive equation, simply just because Sai deserves better than seeing them collapsing into themselves.
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"Maybe you should just tell him," he suggest. "I think you can't expect him to choose you if he doesn't know that you're even an option."
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"Don't be stupid, Sai," she says, but wiping the tears from her face and she feels better.
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A choice. What would Naruto do?
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Well, it's easy: he'd fight back.
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"Do you have any advice?"
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"Well-" Tsunade says, and she looks confused. "I don't. I mean, never."
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Sakura lowers her eyes from her teacher's face – and then a little more.
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"Oh," Tsunade says, and Sakura wonders if she really never noticed all this time, or if she's just joking with her.
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"Use what you have, Sakura."
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Sakura tries to not to move uneasily. "And what it's going to be?"
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"Legs," Shizune interferes, raising her eyes from the paper work looking sternly at Sakura. "Legs and hair."
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"Uh?" Sakura says. "Thanks."
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"Sakura," Tsunade says as she's about to leave.
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"Yes?"
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The Hokage looks at her and Sakura forces herself not to shake. There's a reason why this woman was nominated for this title. "And the Uchiha?"
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"I'm over him." She bites the tip of her tongue so she won't repeat the sentence in a more convincing way. "You know that."
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"it's easier to get over when he;s not there for you to keep loving him, right?"
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"I-"
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"You can go, Sakura."
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On the first times she tries consciously have Naruto's attention, she feels utterly ridiculous, but it doesn't seem to matter: she's either naturally flirtatious, or Naruto's new sexuality will flow with anything more or less. The first time he crashes into a tree because her legs distracted him, Sakura feels so satisfied she hums a song her mother loves to sing while she's curing the wound that's on his forehead.
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So now Naruto's like a doll: Sasuke's pulling from one diresctoin and Sakura's from the other. And Naruto's trying to silence his own desires. Sasuke has two advantages on her: the first is that Skura herself isn't immune to his appeal. The second one is that Sakura is a nice person, and after a few time in which she has no choice but to watch the way they torture Naruto, the confusion and stress they force on him, she let go out of pity. Sasuke doesn't give up; Sasuke's beautiful in the way ice stalactites are beautiful and he has no single drop of compassion, and because she's a nice person she forgives him, every time anew. It's not his fault.
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But… what would Naruto do?
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If there's something she learned from Uzumaki Naruto is that even when there's no hope, you never give up. Never.
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So when she stands too close when they talk, when she looks for the moments when he's alone and talk with him about their last mission, when her shoulder is being pressed against his when they walk together and their hands almost touch, she tell to herself that she does it only because that's what Naurto would want her to do. It's simple. It's just a game, and it's not over until one of them decides to quit.
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"I meant to thank you."
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Sakura rolls and crouches on her knees, shaking off dust from her hair while one of Sai's birds passing near her ear. She wonder if she heard correctly.
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"Thank me for what?"
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Sai stops, raises his hand from the scroll and starts rolling her. "Are you done for today?"
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"Yes," she said, raising up and wincing in pain when her weight falls on her right ankle. "I feel like I could escape a lightning, after that training."
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"I hurt you a few times," Sai says, business like as always, "Naruto's spending more time in my companionship than the usual. I'm happy to spend my time with my friend."
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"Why would you thank me… Sai." She stops the sentence and stop trying scrub a stain of her skirt, smiling against her will. "Was it a joke? And a dirty one none the less."
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He looked so smug. "You and Sasuke spend so much time trying to catch his attention…"
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"That he just wants to run away from us," she finished his sentence, and feels horrible. "That's ironic…"
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"He doesn't know what to do about it. About you." Sai slides the scroll into a pocket on his vest.
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"No one of us knows what he is doing." She groan desperately. "Do you have any idea?"
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"I can kill one of you."
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She stares at him hardly. "Please tell me this was a joke."
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He shrugs, but the smug expression returns to his face. Maybe he learned it form Sasuke. "I have no other suggestions."
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"I'm sorry of we're making it bad for you."
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He tilts his head to the side, and that's the Sai she knows, tactless and nonetheless full of understanding. "Why would you be sorry? I think I'm the one who finds all of this business the less hard."
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"Are you sure about it?" she has to ask, for Sai.
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"In my opinion, no matter what happens, it'llmake the situation even more interesting." Sai smiles, she thinks he is, more than she ever saw him and that's a huge relieve for her. "I'll get used to it, no matter how it ends."
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"It's just… oh my god, what a mess. Wouldn't you want to have a normal team?"
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He surprises her when he laughs, a light and pleasant sound that she doesn't hear a lot. "Define normal."
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The only thing Kakashi told her about the subject is, "I hope you know what you're doing, Sakura."
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She wonder what did he tell to the other two, if he did bother to warn them.
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"Do you want to kiss me?"
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"It'd not funny anymore. Never been."
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"Then say no."
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She means to – but at the moment she opens her mouth Sasuke's expression changes and it seems – for a moment – like he cares what her answer is going to be. She curse him, inside, and bites the inside of her cheek. And she wants to punch him. But she doesn't want to lie to him.
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"Fine," she finally says. "But it's just – kissing. We're shinobi. The fact that we want something doesn't necessarily makes that idea a good one."
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"When we were younger-"
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"No." she cuts him off furiously that he doesn't say a word. "You have got not right to use the past in your own favor. You left. You fucked us. And yes, I did had feelings for you then, but this… it was just a crush of a young girl, based on assumptions of who are you and your physical looks."
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"So what is it now?"
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Oh my god. She would have hate him if she could figure out how to stop loving him. She never understood how Naruto can do both.
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"Habit," she says, and it's a lie, but a white one.
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"How are you?" Sakura's mother asks her, and Sakura had no idea how to answer.
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The truth is, no matter how hard she'll try, the situations hasn't changed. Naruto can be distracted by her body, but never when Saskue's around, and they go together to missions, they train together and eat ramen together, but the feeling that she's not a part of something private more than ever nests close, and it's frustrating her.
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Sakura trains her body and trains her chakra and can't train her heart. Sasuke laughes at her and asks if she wants to kiss him; she moves between complete ignorance and between punching him with her strongest punch in his face, ad she tries not to think about the fact the usually he lets her punch him.
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Sasuke smiles like knives at Naruto and Naruto blushing helplessly. They fight close to each other and fight from a distance, yelling cuss world; their battles always close to each other however still with some remoteness. Like fingers who are beside each other, touching but only at some points. Like a fist.
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But it doesn't matter how loud their bickering are, they are always theirs, and Sakura always finds herself being pushed out.
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The thing is, that it's opposing everything she ever imagined to happen, knowing Sasuke wants Naruto and Naruto just wants, like the wild and insisting way he does every other thing in his life, and yet no one of them does the first step. They just bicker. Sakura thinks about the situation, and thinks about it over and over until her head hurts and she loses appetite. She wonders if she lost the game and isn't aware about it, and they bicker only to hide it. She wonders if Sasuke tries harder when she's not around and Naruto refuses him, or if this is the only thing they know how to do, if the reason they can't make another step is because they are so used to be rivals until they can't change that way of thinking. That idea is supposed to comfort her, even in the most selfish way, but it only makes her more pissed off.
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"Why are you not nice to him?" she demands of Sasuke one day. "It's not like you're completely unable to it: you're not rude to the rest of the village, not like you used to, but you both act just like in the past and it's insufferable. And you can be nice to me too, I'm still you're friend."
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Sasuke stares at her as if she's talking a foreign language and doesn't care enough to translate it to him. "Do you want me to be nice to you?"
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She blinks and wonder what she is supposed to answer him.
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"No."
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Because while Sasuke always polite to most people, he's always sharp and hostile towards her and Naruto, and she wonders if the explanation is that simple. The problem is that Sasuke was portrayed in her mind as a person so distant, mentally, untouchable and so confident in himself and his cause, and now when she tries to put that weird vulnerability to his image of her she feels as if she put to many rabbits inside one hat.
.
She creases her eyebrows. "Are you that insecure? Are you testing us?"
.
"I have no idea what are you talking about."
.
"You'll keep kicking him and as he's always comes back, everything is okay?"
.
He moves his eyes from her. "You have no idea-"
.
Her voice raising up. "It's a great way treating someone you love."
.
"Shut up!" Sasuke hisses at her, and his anger is so sudden and scaring her. "He doesn't give up a thing."
.
"That's how he is, it's not me, it's his stupid need to save people, and in the end he'll figure it out."
.
She stares at him, not sure of she's surprised of him or pitting him.
.
"You're an idiot. And blind," she says. Deja vou. It's ridiculous in her opinion that Sasuke needs someone to explain it to him and it's ironic to her that she's the chosen one. "Of course it's you. You almost killed him and he still loves you – do you really think that a few fightings will be the cause him to flee?"
.
He's silent, and then open his mouth and closes it again, and for a moment he looks younger than his age. "And you?" he finally says, his voice malicious but so tired. "What's your excuse, Sakura? Do you want to heal people? It's a habit?"
.
She bends over and out her hand on his arm, feeling his chakra under her fingers, his skin. He does not flinch. With Sasuke it was never been about games: it's about negotiations.
.
"I'm naturally optimist," she says.
.
.
"Do you want to kiss me?" he asks her, and she's tempted to say yes, she wants to say yes – she wants to throw herself into his arms since she was eight years old.
.
But she's seventeen and she's tired and in the end she says, "I don't kiss traitors," and hates herself for letting him go.
.
.
"Choose," she says, and she feels wild and dangerous like a kunai thrown into the air, "go on."
.
Naruto blinks twice and then his expression changes and he looks as if someone betrayed him, his mouth stretched like a fresh wound. "Sakura…"
.
"Pick one of us Naruto. Or kill one of us. Hypothetically. Who is it going to be?"
"I'd never," Naruto starts to say and then closes his mouth. If she were Sasuke, she'd hit him. She'd want to be Sasuke, she wants it so bad her stomach burns with wanton, because if she were Sasuke, there was no Sakura and no more problems.
.
"No," she says. "No, you'd rather kill yourself, right? You fucking coward."
.
"Sakura," he says again, but she walks away from there.
.
.
She avoids him for three days, and it's possible only because Kakashi takes him to train a new jutsu, and she herself locked up inside the hospital, Tsunade pushing her to work harder, think faster. She wonders if they conspiring against her, or maybe for their own.
.
On the fourth day her mother gives her a letter someone pushed under their door mat, accompanied with a stern glare says, clearly, fix your life Sakura.
.
So when Naruto open the door to his apartment and signs her to come in, she tells to herself that she's only doing it for her mother, for herself, to have a closure, and for nobody else. Because Naruto wants to talk to her about something important and it's her fault because she told him to choose, and he chose, and she expected the result a year ago and today she doesn't expect anything else.
.
Naruto gestures with his hand toward the kitchen, and it's clearly that he's embarrassed. "Do you want, uh-"
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"No." she's crossing her fingers. Smooth parts are the best to sew later. "What did you want to talk to me about, Naruto?"
.
He twitches his face and she can almost see him gathering the courage. "Me and Sasuke talked," he says and Sakura laughs. According to Naruto's expression, it's not her usual laughter.
.
"You talked? You and Sasuke?"
.
"Yeah… well, we're not that bad," he protests, but looks embarrassed. "Yes, we had a conversation."
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"And what came up in this conversation?"
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She raises her hands as if she could gather that silence and keep it safe, but then she lets them fall and start talking, and she's not even sure what she's going to say until she says it.
.
"I don't know what do you want me to do. I can't- I just can't accept it, and I know that I should, I know that if I love you then I'm supposed to want you to be happy by all means, but it's not enough, I'm too selfish. I will not be a tragic character, I won't be okay with it, fuck it with okay." She spits the words out, and she breathes heavily. In fact she's scared. She wants to hold him and pull him towards her and tell him and beg him to not to leave her. She invested all of her feelings in him and in Sasuke. In the way she grew up with them, two fucked up children to the core, and if it's going to blow up she doesn't thing that she can build something new.
.
Everyone chose. Sooner or later, everyone chose.
.
Over the years Sakura learned that she'll never have Naruto's intense and erupts power, or Sasuke's gift. She accepted it, and grew up under their shadow but she thought about herself as the level headed one of them, the only one who won't run into the battle to prove something – and she's angry, because she wasn't able to quit the game, she could go on forever, and she doesn't understand how dare they to beat her even here.
.
In the end, she feels that more than all, she's disappointed of herself.
.
She hears footsteps from the living room and Sasuke appears, leaning on the wall in front of her, and she wonder if this is how the heart feels when it breaks – the disintergranting of the ground under her feet and the way her fists open and close. She wants to punch them – and then she wants to cry – but most of all she wants to run away from there.
.
Sasuke smiles and she hates that smile, she always did, because she wants to put her fingers against it and see if they bleed. She hated him because of the things he does to her heart. She hates that smile because that's her love for Sasuke: full of knives, and she remembers his voice whispering "Thank you, Sakura", and she remembers the torn expression on Naruto's face when she asked him to bring Sasuke by all means, and she wonder if she missed her chance when she was thirteen, and how could Naruto choose Sasuke after all the things he had done to them? How could she still love him after what he had done to her?
.
But it's always been Sasuke and Sakura knew it from the moment they helped him come bacl to Konoha, and now she wonders if she should have let him die of his wounds, at that forest department on the mountain next to his brother's burned body.
.
For a moment she's sure that he's going to ask her if she wants to kiss him, and she's broken enough to answer honestly. She would have said yes and she would have called him bastard, and he'd laugh at her because that's what Sasuke does: breaking her heart, new and crueler ways, everytime. He's not a bad person, she suddenly understands – he's just not what she wants him to be, and she could never change hi,, like she can't change Naruto's choice. Carved legs and waved hair or not.
.
"It doesn't have to change a thing," Naruto says miserably in the end.
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She nods her head. "It changes everything."
.
"Why?" Sasuke asks.
.
She's not sure how to explain him that she's in love with both of them and no one of them in interests in her. The feeling of the rejection will stick to her and float whenever she sees them. She was ready to give all of her world to one of them, and they chose each other. They always lesft her outside of their relationship – and maybe it's better this way, because Sasuke would have break her and Naruto would have suffocate her. But right now, she feels rejected and she feels humiliated, and they have no way to fix it.
.
"Are you sure?" she asks Naruto, "It's your choice."
.
"Sakura," he says, and his expression says it was never a choice; she was right all along. It was always Sasuke. She thinks she'd fight on him with Naruto if Sasuke was something you could have fight of, but Sasuke does what he wants, and even when she was ten years onld and fought with Ino on his attention he only saw Naruto.
.
One of the hardest things you learn on medicine, is knowing when to give up. Even the healer has limits; sometimes you can't save the patient. The human body is a complicated and fragile thing and not always can be assembled back. Sakura knows when she has to let go. She looks at them and they're exactly the same and yet completely different of who they used to be when they were thirteen years old: older, wiser, with more scars – and yet still desperate to each other in a way she apparently can't understand.
.
She nods at them. Sasuke is throwing knives with his eyes and mouth but Naruto always knew to catch them. Sakura, who doesn't know how to live with her love without letting the feelings to shape all of her personality, never stood a chance.