fighting, for my angel
1: And no,
Standard Disclaimer Applied.
He doesn't look the same, not really.
Time has given him his height, training his muscle, and some person Sakura will never know, his newly styled clothes. She can see the look in Naruto's eyes - that this is Sasuke, the boy they've been longing to have back for much too long now, and though he may be nearly a man, he is still their Sasuke - but she thinks he is wrong.
There is something about the way Sasuke stands, and the way his gaze lingers on them. His hair may still stand at odd angles, and his skin may still have the paleness of wax, but something more important has changed him. A knowledge she may never learn or understand has transformed him, and while once the look on his face was of a calculative indifference - and sometimes carefully controlled impatience - it is now the look of a boy grown too fast, one who's seen too much, and one who learned that no, the world is not fair. No, it never will be. No, he'll never have a home.
And no, he wont ever feel anything but rage and hate.
She will still fight him though; for him, and to prove him wrong. Sakura doesn't care what has happened, nor whom he has become. At least not in this moment, now that he is in their grasp, and soon - maybe, just maybe - they will bring him back to the place where once they had formed the memories that were, after all these years, the ones she clung to with her battered, worn, but still beating heart. If there is a chance she can set this world right, she will fight for it with all the strength she's ever had. Love, and a never dying hope, flare within her and she knows, more then he believes that these bonds are broken, that she will bring him back.
They aren't, they aren't, they aren't --
They aren't broken. Even his aged eyes can't deny it.