Evergreens
The sun is just setting, washing the courtyard with its golden, dying blaze. Flames shimmer on the evergreens, rolling off from one branch to the next as they toss to the breeze.
Despite the fiery colours painting the eaves orange and the rooftop they sat on the deep, rich red of terracotta, it was growing steadily cooler, the day's warmth withdrawing with the last dwindling hours of the day. She leans back on her hands, carefully keeping her eyes focused towards the line of fluttering washing strung out from one civilian window to another, or the clouds scrolling wispily across the darkening sky, or the mass of fir trees she fancies she can almost hear even from where she is – anywhere, that is, except directly to her right.
His sigh breaks her thoughts: contemplative, and faintly laced with irritation.
She takes this as her ticket and dares to turn her head around. Pale skin, even with the amount of time he spent ceaselessly training under the burning bite of Konoha's sun, fills her vision, pale skin and cheeks that have not quite melted away to an adult's and strands of ebony black that streak down his face like charcoal. The sunset's intensity pales to irrelevance.
He lets her stare, even when it pushes past all bounds of social awareness, even though both he and she know that he hates the breathy, fanatic attention of ogling eyes and gaping mouths. He would much rather withdraw into himself, brooding in some dark place where the sun had set a long time ago. This is a rare occasion: he's carefully giving Sakura a glimmer of the inside, delicately allowing her to see almost past the outermost layer of him. Perhaps he means to scare her away. He could certainly do with that.
Times like these, it almost works. Better than countless glares, for sure, better than the scalding contempt of 'you're annoying'. But whilst she might not have Naruto's unlimited energy reserves or Sasuke's inborn skill, Sakura can be many times quieter than the former in her persistence.
She doesn't know what to do, and sometimes she despairs either that she never will, and he will slip past her and move relentlessly onwards, or that even if somehow, she does, he won't stay anyway. He has pale skin criss-crossed with invisible scars, eyes set cold and distant above his child's cheeks, and hair that is dark like bitterness and inevitability.
Tomorrow, she'll probably forget – maybe intentionally – this moment. She'll gaze at him in hopeless adoration blind to the way he turns away with a flicker of disgust passing across features that are pure desirability and nothing else, not hate or apathy or anything else she doesn't want to face. Something like the fact that perhaps Sasuke too needed to be saved. Something like the fact that it's far beyond Sakura to be the one to save him.
When more than enough time has trickled past, and the sun is almost brushing against the rooftops, Sasuke dismounts wordlessly from the tiles, pushing his palms against the rough terracotta for additional leverage. He doesn't spare a glance for Sakura, and nor does he leave her with his goodbye to cradle home.
It's better that way. Sakura doesn't fool herself that he's doing it out of kindness for her, a cruel-to-be-kind consideration that will have her with less attachments to be brutally ripped away when he does eventually leave.
Knowledge deep inside the heart where it matters most doesn't necessarily mean acceptance, though. It won't stop her trying anyway, it won't stop her persevering even in futility to change fate. She doesn't understand it – fate, that is – and she doesn't want to, because that means there'll still be a chance, right? She wishes that bumbling and outright idiotic as Naruto could be, she had his way with words. She might be able to string them together into something strong enough to loop him into a change of heart and bind him fast.
He turns a corner, and after a whisk of black cloth he's gone. She stares after the space where he was, longing gnawing at the space where he should be. One day he'll go, and he won't be coming back. I need to kill a certain man.
The knowledge doesn't stop the tears stinging the edges of her eyes.