Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Corrosion
She's gone through it a million times in her head. She'd find an opening, aim one strike to his heart, and be done with it. She thinks she pulls out the knife because she knows if she tries to touch him with her hands—hands that have healed so many, but always, always failed him—that she won't ever want to let go.
He stands, blade untouched, assessing her resolve. "You're brave."
Those are not the words she wanted, and her grip slips just enough—enough for him to dare activate those cursed crimson eyes on her.
Fury ignites the poison in her veins. She's angry. She's angry enough to take the kunai and slash it across his eyes. She hears his silent scream as blood spurts forth into the frigid, winter air, watches as he sinks, hands swiping uselessly at his damaged retinas, to his knees.
She's taken everything from him now.
Rage takes him, boiling into near-palpable killing intent as it spills over like the blood he's lost. "Sakura!" How could you, she hears.
If she had been younger, unbroken, uncertain of herself, she would have pretended the rivulets across his cheeks were red, red tears.
"I will kill you!"
If she were uncertain, she would have believed him.
Blinded, he is enfeebled, vulnerable, desperate. She leaps into the air, to keep him from anticipating the familiar sound of her steps, and crushes him into a boulder. It shatters behind him upon impact. He aims with a strike of lightning, but she disarms by plunging a jab of disruptive chakra into his wrist. It shocks her, burns her, but it's worth it and she can see she has sent him into a brief moment of panic.
They crash, like splinters from a rotting tree, into the ground. "You won't kill me," she says, quiet so that he has to strain for the words he can no longer read on her lips. Her legs pin him below her, left hand against his throat—and for a moment, she hates herself, hates that it's become like this, that she's taking some kind of sick satisfaction from watching him asphyxiate, but it's gone instantly—and she stretches back her leather-cased fist and brings it down.
He does not cry out. He is silent, defeated, a shell of what he once was. She jerks her bleeding fist out of the broken earth, where it landed mere threads away from the bruised skin and bones that line his right lung.
He is blind, and when he says her name, she can almost convince herself that he's smiling that same gentle ghost of a smile that he gave her before he left her, their home, in pieces. "Sakura." How do you know? How can you know me? she hears.
"Because," she says, through clenched teeth, last hopes, and burning dreams, "I can heal you."
She leans forward, the fingers around his throat long curled helplessly into a mound against his chest, weak and prone against his heartbeat. She wants to pretend that the red river along his skin has faded into that delicate cherry-blossom pink from real, true and clear, tears, but as she stares wretchedly down at him, at everything that she has ever hoped for and lost and done, she realizes that they are tears. They are her own.
She wonders why, now, when he has him, she chooses to weep. (But maybe it is not a choice. Maybe it never was a choice.) She has ruined him, his eyes, his future, with her bare hands.
She trails her fingers over the scarred, corrupted tissue and wonders stonily as she watches his dark, hollow smile, if all of this was worth it.
fin.
A/N: Because I still want to see the fight I know Sakura deserves. Comments are welcome, and critique is encouraged. Thank you for reading.