He always left one survivor.

Perhaps it was the increasing number of missions Orochimaru was giving him to prepare for the approaching destruction of Konoha. Maybe it was just guilt. But lately, Sasuke had been thinking more and more about the fact that he always left one survivor, only one survivor. It was starting to torment him, slowly rotting away his insides like the blackened edges of a rose creeping inwards at the start of winter. He had to know why.

Murder, after all, was nothing new to him. Even as a genin back in his old village, he hadn't hesitated to kill.

Except that once. Except for that one time when—

A beautiful pink-haired girl flashed through his mind; he pushed her away. Didn't he always? Now wasn't the time to reminisce. There was never time to reminisce, not for a missing-nin. Not when he was drenched in blood, so much blood, and he still hadn't completed Orochimaru's orders to destroy this little, though politically powerful, village.

But most importantly, he hadn't yet decided whom he would spare. There were only a few still alive amidst the carnage, mostly women and children crying next to the broken bodies of family members. Hn. . . stupid people. They were too weak to run from him, too numbed by the subtle moonlight and the cold expressions of the dead. They were like he had been, the night of. . .

A bitter, vaguely tortured smirk found it's way to his lips, cracking the blood that had caked on his pale cheeks. He glided through the carcasses like death, searching for something he didn't want to find.

He saw her face as he killed them.

Not the beautiful smile she once graced him with, nor the disappointed pout she wore when he rejected her. It was always tears, always crying. Often he remembered her as she was the night he left her peacefully unconscious on the road out of Konoha, and sometimes he saw her body crumpled with anguish as she mourned his 'death' at the Great Naruto Bridge. But the image that constantly found it's way to the front of his mind (when he killed, always when he killed) was that ridiculous little girl in the Forest of Death, bruised and bloody but so determined; hellbent, really, on stopping him. And stop him she did . . . that once.

He thought about it often, and he did now as he finished the killing (blood spattering on the concrete; how he lusted to feel it on his lips and in his mouth and bathing other, more contraband places). Why did he hesitate when she held him? Tch. . . annoying. And now, he could never slaughter without leaving one pathetic figure, prostrate on the ground and covered in their own blood, but alive. Mercifully alive.

It was perfectly reasonable, he supposed. After all, he himself had survived a massacre. He had been singled out, 'spared.' It was natural to want others to bear the mark he had felt so acutely, still felt acutely. It was natural to want others out there who knew suffering, horrible suffering that never went away. Others who knew what it was to be alone.

And yet. . . it was so despicably easy to blame everything on Itachi. His refusal to communicate, his lack of relationships– all byproducts of that horrible night when his family's blood ran in rivers and his brother just stood there and laughed, like it was the funniest thing in the world.

It was time to recognize that Sasuke was the one in control. And to do that he had to look into deeper parts of his subconscious to find the roots of this. . . annoyance. So it was with dubious mental stability that he sat down amongst the bodies (mothers, fathers, brothers) to think things through.

Deep breaths, Uchiha, he told himself. Clear your filthy mind.

And, dammit, he was trying. But every time he settled down, every time he thought he was completely in control, another image of her popped into his mind. This, though– this was different. Now her face held no tears. Only those eyes, only those beautiful eyes, shining with something like love, something that called out to him and—

It hit him then, like a ton of bricks. And he knew all at once, like his heart had always known and was just waiting for his brain to catch up. Every time he killed, he left a single survivor so that if he ever destroyed Konoha. . .

He would have an excuse to keep her alive.