Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Status: Incomplete
A/N: A new thing? I'm trying out?
She wakes up the morning after and her head is pounding.
Her tongue is dry, tastes like cardboard and feels like sandpaper. She tightens her hands into fists and her fingernails dig into the flesh of her palm. She can smell the tinge of coppery blood in the air and she swallows down a shuddering sob.
Her eyes are still closed—clenched shut, lips sealed tightly together. The glare of the sun is harsh and it takes her more than a couple of blinks to adjust to the sudden brightness, the feeling of heat on her skin after days of ash and clouds and heaving, nebulous skies.
The first thing she sees is green.
Green—the green of her flak vest, the green of her grandmother's eyes, the green of Konoha's forests for miles to see.
She blinks again, the new light making her eyesight spotted and blurry, and she flicks her tongue out to dampen her lips. The skin is crackled, broken and it aches to soothe it over, the ravished flesh already pleading for more.
Sakura sucks in a breath when she looks up at the face.
Blank eyes, glazed over, stare back at her unblinking.
Her grip on him is frightening, legs wrapped around him so tightly that she can feel the stutter of his broken spine as she loosens around him.
There is a moment of stillness. The kind of stillness before the fall, just on the precipice of the cliff, eternity staring back at you, its maw wide and gaping.
And then she's scrambling back, panic making her moves chunky and erratic and her breathing is coming in harsh pants. She can feel the burn of her throat, the beat of her heart thundering against her chest like a tattoo and she can't stop staring—
Tears crawl down her face and she moans out a sob, her arms coming around her stomach like a band, and the nausea roils in her stomach, rising up within her so fiercely she has to turn away before the rations hit her shoes.
She feels hazy, lost, and the acid burns her tongue as she chokes on a cough, her shoulders still shaking from the force of her heaves. Her hands are digging into her sides and her chest is rising too fast, too fast and all she wants is to slowdownslowdownslow—
Sakura forces herself to breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
The tears sting the tender skin under her eyes and her mouth is trembling as she gulps in breaths of air.
In. Out. In. Out.
Her mind is whirling, spinning out of control as she wheezes, desperate, and tries to breathe.
In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.
Sakura breathes. One long exhale. Her shoulders are trembling. Her skin is damp to the touch, soaked in sweat. One long inhale. Her eyes skitter across the ground, focusing on a pebble.
In, out. In, out.
She locks her gaze onto it—it's round and gray. The most unassuming pebble of all time. There's chalky white in the palette of color and she concentrates.
White, she thinks. White. Blank. My mind, she prays, is blank.
It takes three more long inhales and four exhales to get her to stop hyperventilating.
Her lips are cracked and she smells of vomit and dirt and ash, but she forces herself to look.
He's still lying there. On the cracked, broken earth, torn apart by Kaguya's plants and the fighting. Evidence of jutsu right there—in the puddle next to his head, the scorch marks that litter the earth, the jagged patterns that break up the ground systematically—water, fire, earth jutsu.
His hands are slender. Graceful. Pianist's hands, she'd called them once. There were callouses on his fingertips, she knows, and one on his index finger, but they were remarkably well-kept for shinobi's hands.
His skin is pale. She would have called it pasty-white, like some sort of skin disease she would have looked up in the medical dictionary just to make him fret a little. He'd always been…fastidious about his health. Now, it only looks like cracked porcelain, the fractures all too obvious.
His lips are still thin, chapped. He'd asked her for chapstick before when they were getting ready—when they were alive. They had pressed against hers once in a game, an experiment, and then never again.
She stares at him. His chest isn't rising. His lips aren't curling into a confused smile. His eyes aren't flashing with recognition.
Instead, he lays there, head against the cracked, broken earth, and stares at nothing.
She opens her mouth—to scream, to sob, to bellow—but all that comes out is a shrieked whimper. A choked moan is next, and then a swallowed sob, and then she collapses again, her forehead in the dirt, nose pressed against the mud.
She screams silently, mouthing his name, tears running down her cheeks, shoulders trembling.
Sai lays there, unmoving.
Okay, lay it on me.
ANd yah, i knOW i'm supposed to be uploading other shit but welp, here we are.