BRIDGES
Just Continue
Summary: "I see you on the other side". Love is pitted against the odds. SasuSaku, AU.
PROLOGUE
The last ember flickered and died as it curled into ashes, taking with it the last shred of firelight left in her tiny, gray-wallpapered room.
Two years was a long time, Sakura decided as she rose to her feet, turned on the nearest lamp and tried to brush of the sensation that she had just engaged in some Satanist ritual just a couple moments before.
-I did it. She typed up in a flurry on her phone and hit send with a triumphant flourish.
-Good for you, came the immediate reply as Karin's blurry, pixelated face popped up on her screen with a pleasant ring. Now you have to delete him from your phone. It ONLY counts when you do that. Is he still trying to send you messages?
-No, he stopped like, a year ago.
-Might as well get rid of him then. Go go go!
In the time that Sakura stood and waited for further instructions from her best friend, she found herself obligingly opening up her list of contacts and scrolling down to the S block of names.
Shikamaru Nara.
It'd been a while.
She still had that stupid picture of them set as his icon, holding hands at the beach, with their matching heart tattoos on their waists and she was laughing like he was the funniest piece of shit in the world.
The Konoha boys were a demographic of snot-ridden and obnoxious, similar to the scum Sakura picked off the bottom of her shoe, stuffing each other in lockers and climbing the rooftops during class to do God-knows-what rather than what was right and proper.
Sakura was convinced she hated every single one of them at one point.
Graduating and leaving her close friends from the Academy was already slightly traumatizing, but being thrown into a hell-hole of a school that is Konoha was just another way to rub salt on the wound.
Kiba pulled her ponytail and Shino put crickets in her lunchbox everyday, but Shikamaru didn't say much. He was intelligent, much like Sakura, and didn't cause her grief.
And that was enough.
She shouldn't hate him as much as she did at that moment.
"You have beautiful hands," was the only she could remember he did say.
And that was enough for naive, clueless, 15-year old Sakura, desperate for attention and completely smitten with the idea that a boy, oh goodness, a boy, would be interested in her.
Of course it was too good to be true. Shikamaru was too good to be true. Barely a semester into the school year, the boy was received into a nearby University honors program, and disappeared from her everyday life.
Sakura tried desperately to hold onto him.
But he met another girl. Ino something.
Two years was far too long of a time, Sakura decided as she vehemently trashed his number, messaging history, and the last tangible memory of her bitter past.
She'd cut the ties. The first bridge had been burnt.