Sakura didn't know when she learned to love Sasuke; the emotion had not sprung up like the spontaneous affection she'd felt at the age of seven, seeing him still innocent and staring across the water. The emotion hadn't come along after he was orphaned; after the time she saw emotion fail to take hold on his own face because it was not strength to feel. Certainly, in the years of academy, competing with Ino and Ami and everyone else whose affections fell on his uncaring back, there had been no love. Infatuation, obsession - but no love.
The first time she knew she didn't love him was when she felt her heart break in the mist. When she couldn't hear his heart-beat, and everything was shrunken, clarified in the one moment of understanding. Naruto was there, alive, breathing; Sasuke was not. And Sakura cried all the harder, because she realized what she was mourning - her ideal, and the fantasy. Her undefeated warrior; her stoic prince.
She mourned because she realized for the first time Sasuke was human, just like the rest of them. He was dying, just like they all did.
Then, she began to suspect something had changed. Love was sly like that; slipping in without notice and helping you to understand, to see. A love which built as you understood what made the people around you stronger. Naruto, and the respect you felt being reluctantly cultivated in your mind. The hurt, as you came to better understand them both. As you watched Sasuke's face, and saw him smiling in the self-satisfied, catty way that said he was pleased.
Sakura realized then, staring at their backs, she loved him. And in the little ways, and in the great, big tearing ways, remembering that the same was not true of him. Realizing what she wanted more than his love was his respect, like Naruto; even from Kakashi, and which she received in the littlest ways from just Sasuke. When he asked without asking if she'd noticed, and Naruto, in his blustering fashion, had been proud in the fact she had. Sakura loved him more for that, and began to love Naruto a little too.
She noticed the difference between the both of them when she was in the forest; when she looked to Sasuke, and found that she was strong in ways he was not. When she was protecting him, because she owed him that favor. Because she wanted to save him, more than she wanted to be saved herself. When she called out to Naruto for help, because wasn't he always the one she could count on? Like a brother - she'd thought that once. Like a family.
Love was no longer a joke, and a crush was no longer obsession, and they all knew things had changed. Sakura didn't realize how much, until she'd seen him again, in the arena. She noticed the way he wasnt looking at them, anymore - and how there was a new tension in Kakashi's shoulders that didn't go away when she asked about the bruising.
She knew it even more when she was hesitantly allowed to follow after the attack on the Hokage. Her heart was in her throat. And when she saw Sasuke, unmoving, and Gaara, or what must be the frightening shinobi of the sand, Sakura took her rightful place between the two and lowered her kunai and shoulders.
Love was sly like that. You learned courage, strength, and will in ways you hadn't thought were possible before. And Sakura both loved and hated this about love. Love made you strong; love made you weak. She fought for, and with, that strength.
One day, soon, she would fight him for, and with, that strength. With Naruto, and his love, and his strength. With Sai, with his bemused lack of love, and his capacity for emotion, and his strength. And she would not lose. Because love was sly like that - and Sakura had learned how to be sly like love. And she was going to explain this to Sasuke - despite how he didn't want to listen. He'd already learned how sly love was, and he wouldn't fall for the same tricks twice.
Which is why this time, Sakura reflected, she'd settle for brash. Because some things were worth fighting for - and some friends and loves lasted long past when they should have subsided. So sly was love; so strong was she.