AN: A continuation of a tumblr prompt I received, because when I was finished I thought hmm, there's more to this:
h. "This might be my last chance to say it"/ k. "I never thought I'd see you in chains before me".
"I never thought I'd see you in chains before me."
Sakura flinched; she'd recognise that dark, compelling voice anywhere. And after their last two disastrous meetings, she wasn't sure she wanted to look up, to meet the gaze of her once and former love.
"Well?"
He was clearly waiting for a reaction, but the chakra restraints bound into the thick metal of her manacles were making her dizzy, and it was all she could do to maintain consciousness in his presence.
Two sandalled feet moved into her line of sight, and when one scuffed back Sakura thought he'd kick her. He didn't.
"Sasuke-kun," she managed eventually, fighting the blackness that was creeping in the edges of her vision.
Evidently he noticed, because in the next instant he'd dropped to his haunches, staring into her face with an expression that was at once blank and intense.
"Hn. Did they drug you?"
She nodded.
"... And did it work?"
That was a surprise. Sasuke was clearly keeping tabs on them, if he'd heard about her reputation as a poison master.
"No," she murmured. There was no point lying; he'd find out anyway.
"All that skill, and yet you're still so weak," he said absently, one hand on his chin while he stared.
If she had the energy after her beating she'd bristle. Sasuke was obviously goading her, for whatever reason, but she'd never been as hotheaded around him as Naruto. Foolish, yes, but never a fool.
"Do you know," she said, with effort, "what's going to happen to me?"
Her lips were dry from the misguided attempts to poison her and she licked them in vain, watching from the corner of her eye as Sasuke's dangerous gaze followed the movement. She felt proud of herself for not flinching when he reached behind his back, but was left off guard all the same when he produced a gourd of water and placed it within her reach.
Never one to pass up an advantage, she grasped it and drank deeply, safe in the knowledge that even if her chakra was sealed then her body would fight off any toxins in the cool, crisp liquid.
"Kabuto has…plans," Sasuke said after a while. She didn't like the detached cadence to his voice: where was his avenger's anger? "It's not often he gets his hands on a medic of your calibre."
Of your calibre. An acknowledgement, despite his earlier snub. Feeling a touch stronger after quenching her thirst, Sakura nodded at his words. She could imagine the plans the snake-like medic had for her. They wouldn't be good.
"Look," she began, but Sasuke stalled her with a raised hand.
"I don't care what you're going to say," he cut her off abruptly. "You won't be getting out of here."
She clamped her mouth shut. That hadn't been what she was going to say, and it must've shown in her expression as Sasuke tilted his head thoughtfully. When she started again, he didn't interrupt.
"This might be my last chance to say it," Sakura murmured carefully, "but I want to tell you that I really, truly do love you, Sasuke-kun. I do."
He hadn't expected that, she could tell, from the way he rocked back on his heels, as though thrown for just an instant from his destructive axis.
"Will you think of that," she continued, "when you look at parts of me from beyond the glass of Kabuto's jars?"
Sasuke sucked in a breath. She knew, quite well, that the other medic would dissect her for study: there was an unethical part of her that would do the same to him if she could.
"I won't," the Uchiha whispered, harshly, and she inwardly smiled at the first hint of emotion in his voice. "I don't think about you at all."
"Of course," she whispered back, knowing all his tells and hearing in his voice the lie that he spoke.
When he reached towards her chained wrist and snapped the thick metal holding her in place, Sakura couldn't say, truly, that she was surprised.
"Get out," Sasuke said venomously, even as he reached for her other wrist and crushed the metal with his chakra. "I'd rather you die fighting."
So he was granting her a warrior's death; Sakura knew that that was as far as his compassion would stretch, these days, but she also knew that Sasuke wouldn't extend it to anyone else.
He followed her to her feet, taking a cautious step back as she flexed her arms and freed herself fully from her shackles. She didn't thank him: he didn't deserve it after what he'd done.
Instead, she placed a hand over her heart, before gathering power in her legs to run, nodding to him as he stood at the side of her cell.
"I'll pay you back for this, one day," she said, and then smiled for real when he nodded in reply. "This is not our end."
She didn't wait to hear his final words for her, if he had any.
And three years later, when he was in front of her in chains placed around his wrists by the council of Konohagakure, pay him back she did.
"I would throw your words back to you, Sasuke-kun, but I can't say I never expected to see you in chains."
There was a dull tone to her voice that made her sound like someone else; a good actor, playing the part of Haruno Sakura, but not quite getting it right.
Sasuke didn't reply. He'd had it out with Naruto, thrown a few barbed words Kakashi's way, but there wasn't enough energy in him to confront the last member of his old team. The war and everything after it had taken the fight out of him. He thought, from the weary cast to Sakura's figure, that it might have taken it from her, too.
"Can you look up?" she continued, voice never breaching the heights he knew it could. "I need to seal your eyes."
Instinctively, he moved back when her slender hand reached towards his face, before steeling his resolve at the soft exhale she released.
"I won't hurt you, Sasuke-kun," Sakura said. "That's not my role."
From all their twisted history, he believed it.
"I know," he allowed. Then looked up into her face, and was gratified to see a flicker of something cross her blank features. And if that something was the last thing he ever saw, Sasuke privately allowed, then it wouldn't be so bad.
Sakura didn't reply; just placed her hands on his temples, closed her own eyes, and focused. It didn't take long before he couldn't see anything at all, and when it was done, Sasuke felt nothing but a worn sense of curiosity at how Naruto would react to seeing him blind. And if Sakura would admit to being the one to have done the deed.
"The council will see you in around half an hour," Sakura said finally, removing her hands from his head with the ghost of a caress across his brow.
He heard her stand, to leave, and something inside of him that was wary of the dark prompted him to speak-
"That time-" he started, listening to her footsteps pause. "In the compound."
"When I was captured?"
Sasuke nodded, and the movement felt unnatural without his eyes to calibrate the pose.
"You escaped."
A short, humourless laugh. "I did."
Sasuke licked dry lips, remembering the destruction she'd left in her wake, two cave-ins that had disrupted Kabuto's laboratory and caused the deaths of many of Orochimaru's men. He wondered if she knew.
"There was a cave-in," he continued, feeling the need to tell her, all of a sudden, to make Sakura aware that even if she'd never harmed anyone else, she'd done wrong there. "People died."
His words were greeted with a surprised hiss, the sound overpowering to his piqued senses.
"Y-yes," Sakura said, dull assurance gone in the quiver.
"Was that the first time you'd killed anyone?" Sasuke asked, and he wasn't sure why he thought that now was the time to have words with Sakura. When he couldn't see the pain that was sure to be etched onto her delicate features.
"Sasuke-kun," she murmured, and he felt the change in the air as she drew closer to him again. He held still as she sat down on the bench beside him, the slight shake of his chains the only thing betraying the nervous tension thrumming through his limbs. "Are you alright?"
What a stupid question that was, because Sasuke hadn't been alright for over ten years.
"Well?" he demanded, ignoring her question.
A pause.
"No," she said eventually. "That wasn't the first time I'd killed. And it wasn't the last."
Somewhere, the part of him that still thought of Sakura in terms of her twelve year old self flinched in surprise at the deadpan efficiency in her voice.
"A medic of your calibre," he managed, finally, repeating his words from three years prior, "killing people?"
Sasuke held himself in place when he felt his former teammate slide closer to him on the bench, moving unhurriedly until her side was pressed against his, the stump of his arm the only barrier between his torso and hers.
"What are you really asking?" she said, softly, her voice excruciatingly close to his ear. "What is it that you really want to know?"
When he kept his lips stubbornly pressed closed - partly through discomfort and partly because he truly didn't know - Sakura sat beside him for a moment longer before pushing herself to her feet with a sigh. It sounded terribly tired.
"I need to go." Her voice sounded dead again, retreating back into her own shell of dullness at his defensiveness. "But I will keep my promise to you, Sasuke-kun."
Sasuke couldn't help the inquisitive tilt of his head at her words. Sakura noticed.
"That this is not our end," she clarified, and he thought back to the sight of her dirty, bruised and beaten, picking the pieces of herself from the floor of a dingy cell. He wondered if after it all, he could do the same. "Can you give me three months?"
There it was: a thread of hope, tempting him in the dark.
Almost against his will, Sasuke nodded.
She got him out in a little over two and a half. Naruto had raged against her for weeks when she didn't visit Sasuke in his cell, but her sunshine friend didn't understand, and she didn't clear it up for him.
Sakura wanted their first meeting to be when she pulled the fog from Sasuke's eyes. Call it the hard part of her that led to appointments down in the depths of the Interrogation department, or the last thrash of a jilted girl, or even name it the thread of madness that all ninja had, but she wanted to see him again only when it was her freeing him.
When he walked out into the twilight, Kakashi's hand hard but soft on his shoulder, she knew Sasuke understood.
"Ready?" Kakashi asked her, watching with two grey eyes as she clenched and unclenched her famous fists.
No, she thought, but nodded anyway. Sasuke stood passively in his chains, head tilted back to stare unseeingly up at the darkening sky, but at Kakashi's words he pulled his chin back down and unerringly stepped towards her.
Kakashi said nothing as she took a half-step back; he simply removed his hand from the younger man's shoulder, gave her his patented creased-eye smile, and leapt away in the treeline.
Sasuke stepped forward again. This time, she didn't retreat, holding her hands out as he stumbled ever so slightly, ungainly for once after his months in confinement.
"Wait, I'll come to you," she said, speaking words that were so intrinsically them that she almost choked when they left her mouth.
Sasuke didn't reply, but he didn't pull back when she reached out and grasped his chains in her hand. And then, so like when he did it for year, all those years ago, Sakura crushed the lock to dust in her fist, dropping the heavy metal to the ground and watching the unconscious satisfaction of freedom weave through Sasuke's frame.
When she lifted her hands to place them at his eyes, as restorative as they were destructive, he dipped his head back, avoiding her touch, and she frowned where he couldn't see her.
"Wait," he said, voice husky from disuse. She did.
Sakura was used to waiting for Sasuke.
"This might be my last chance to say it," he continued, and part of her balked; was Sasuke going to make a break for it? "But-"
He stopped, and she thought it might be because she'd taken a step closer, hands now reaching to grasp his upper arms.
"Sasuke-kun?"
"But-"
His words faltered again, but Sakura couldn't bring herself to regret reaching out for his unresisting frame.
"Sakura…" it might have been the first time she'd heard her name from his lips in years; truly heard it, not the accursed hiss of hatred that he'd growled throughout his revenge. "Thanks."
She laughed, and watched as it disturbed the fine strands of his hair hanging over his cheeks; they were that close. He didn't move away.
"Why is it your last chance to say it?" she queried, accepting his thanks with a wordless squeeze of her fingers into his muscled flesh. "Are you going somewhere?"
Sakura thought that they both knew she'd stop him if he did. Because while he had been willing to grant her a warrior's death in Sound all those years ago, she would never give him the same. Sasuke would die in her arms or he wouldn't die, at all. A midnight escape from a Konoha that was beginning to welcome him back would not be Sasuke's end.
"No," he sighed, and this time he didn't resist when she skated her fingers up towards his temples.
This time, she didn't close her eyes to focus, watching as the colour restored itself to his dangerous gaze. Part of her wanted the first thing Sasuke saw as he re-entered the world to be her.
She thought it might be what he wanted, too.
"No," Sasuke repeated, blinking to clear the months of darkness from his gaze. "Sakura, I'm home."
She smiled at that, unfettered and alive, and so it happened that the first thing Sasuke laid eyes on after months in the darkness was the sight of Haruno Sakura, bright and free and so very close as she healed him again.
"Sasuke-kun," she whispered, her green gaze never leaving his.
"Welcome home."
AN: I quite like this universe, maybe I'll do more with it one day. I'm a real sucker for tadaima / okaeri stories with Sasuke and Sakura.