When the time came for them to die, Neji Hyuuga cursed and Naruto Uzmaki cried, but Uchiha Sasuke yawned in the face of the hangman.
What he wanted to do was spit, to show he was not afraid, because he knew men would talk about him later and describe the end he made. But even Uchiha Sasuke could not raise enough saliva for spitting when he had a noose around his neck. The yawn was the next best thing.
Kakashi Hatake, the Konoha deputy marshal, finished adjusting the rope and asked half-admiringly, "Are we keeping you up?"
"Hanging me up, they told me," Uchiha Sasuke answered.
On a packing box between his companions, he stood glaring out at the crowd of miners, with his lips pulled back from his teeth in the smirk that was his trademark. He had foreseen the hour of his death, but not the way of it. He had felt the jar of the bullet, heard the Cheyenne arrow whir, gone down screaming under a grizzly's claws-all these were probabilities for a man who had lived as he had lived, and a man had to die sometime.
But he had always seen himself fighting to the end. He had not dreamed of an end by hanging, helpless, with his hands tied behind him. He would not give his executioners the satisfaction of knowing he was astonished. They were going to get satisfaction enough without that.
Naruto stopped crying and stood drooping on his packing box, snuffling like a stopped yelling curses, and thinking he had figured out a way to delay the performance, shouted earnestly, "I want a preacher! You wouldn't deny a man a preacher, would you?"
The Elders had thought of that, too, and had a preacher there. They knew, by this time, about all the tricks a man could think of to make delay. Neji had nothing to say to the preacher, after all, except the frantic plea: "Tell 'em to give me a good drop."
"They will, Neji," the preacher promised. He shivered and added, "They always have. May God have mercy!"
There was still a lot of noise from the crowd of miners-the seven or eight hundred of them who had constituted the jury and had filed solemnly between two wagons to vote. Fourteen men had voted for acquittal, and after four hundred voted "guilty," the Elders had stopped the farce of tallying. The noise was far out on the edge of the crowd, where those who could not see clearly were milling around, but in the center, at the hanging place, there was hardly any sound. Here death was, and the men who would beckon to it had nothing much to say.
The three packing boxes were sturdy; each had a rope tied to it by which it would be pulled away at the signal; the nooses were soundly wound. The Elders, Sasuke recollected, had plenty of practice.
He felt a shudder coming over him, and to disguise it, he threw back his head and laughed.
He had few illusions about himself. Once he had said, grinning, "Reckon I was born bad." More accurately, he might have said, "I was born outside the law, and mostly I've stayed outside it." He had kept moving westward to places where the law was not. And what caught up with him at last was not law but anger. The angry men at the diggings could not wait for the law to catch up; they set up the Elders to enforce ruthless justice.
Kakashi frowned at that laugh. He stepped down from the box, wiping his hands on his pants, and said reflectively, "I was wondering-did you ever do one good thing in your life?"
Sasuke looked into his eyes and answered with his lips pulled back from his teeth, "Yeah. Once. I betrayed a woman."
At the hangman's signal, men pulled the ropes on the packing box.
The word love was in the language he used with women, but its meaning was not in his understanding when he met Sakura. Even when he left her, he was not sure he knew the meaning, and after that he never had much chance to find out.
She stood with her arms outspread, her hands touching the barn wall, trembling, withdrawing not so much from Sasuke as from life itself pressing toward her.
"You don't really like me," he insisted. "Bet you don't."
"Maybe I do," Sakura answered, breathless. "I got to go in now." She could have ducked under his arm, but she only glanced up at him with a scared smile. She was seventeen years old. Sasuke was twenty-nine.
"You go in now," he said, "and I'll know you don't love me." He said the word lightly; he had said it before. The shape of it was easy in his mouth.
She looked away desperately, and the color rose on her neck. "I do so l-love you," she said. "You could just as well stay here, instead of going on."
Oh, no, not at twenty-nine. He could not stay in the settlements for long at a time. The law was creeping up on him too fast. He was not sure what the law was, but he knew that he and his like had better keep ahead of it.
"Nothing here to keep me," he said. The words hurt her as he had meant them to hurt, and she drew back. "I got to go on," he said. He added boldly, suddenly seeing a dream, "Going to move on and settle down somewheres. Where I'm going, a girl like you wouldn't go. You wouldn't go with me."
She was pressed tight against the barn wall. "Maybe I would, if I wanted to."
"Your pa wouldn't let you," he scoffed.
"Pa couldn't stop me. Now let me be-let me go!" She struggled against him, but his arms were an iron cage, and his heart pounded against hers.
"Tonight at the fork of the trail," he said when he let her go, when he loosed her arms from their clinging. "Wait for me there.-But you won't come."
"I will!" she said. "Because I l-love you."
That was the last thing she ever said to him.
"I believe you mean it," he answered, and found his voice was hushed with wonder. "I guess you really do," he said, trying to laugh.
The wonder was still on him when he waited where the trail forked. But Doubt hovered there too, and roosting on his shoulder, Suspicion watched the trail with cold, yellow eyes.
If she came, he could take her somewhere and build a home,Start a family together and perhaps a new and better life together
"What makes you think she'll come?" hooted Doubt, circling over him.
"What reason would she have if she did?" croaked Suspicion, with claws sharp in his shoulder.
"There's no reward out for me around here," argued Sasuke. "Supposing she does come, her reason's her own business. It's her I want, not her reasons. I'll settle down somewheres. If she comes."
He watched the trail from up above, belly-down on a flat rock. He jerked when he saw her ride to the meeting place and look anxiously around. She had a little bundle of clothing tied to the saddle. He saw her dismount and look around again. But she didn't call out or say a word. She simply sat down to wait.
He was furious, with an unreasoning anger. "Damn little fool!" he whispered. "Running off with a man she don't hardly know! What she'll get is no more'n she's got coming."
He remembered that he himself was the man, and he lay there grinning at his own nonsense.
He would wait a while. When she gave up, he would appear and accuse her: "I knowed it was just a notion. You never meant what you said. You start but you can't finish."
Then he would let her go home weeping-or on with him, to do her crying later, when she knew what a fool she was.
But she did not give up. When darkness came, she built a little fire to keep the night away. With his heart pounding, with his lips pulled back from his teeth,Sasuke lay on the flat rock, watching her. She had come so far; she had been so faithful. How long would she wait there for him? How far could he trust her?
Suspicion whispered, "There'll come a day when she'll go crying to the law and say, 'I know where Sasuke Uchiha is if you want him.'"
He answered, "You don't know my Sakura."
He watched her head bend forward on her knees as she waited and dozed. He saw it snap up again when a night sound scared her. After a while the fire burned low, and he knew she was sleeping. She awoke and fed it, and it blazed. Then he knew he wasn't going down there. He saw not the girl but her patience. He saw not the red glow of the fire but faith abiding.
He saw love by the fire, and he could not endure looking for fear he might see it end, during that night or some year to come.
He crept back off the rock and slid silently into the darkness to where his horse was waiting.
He was justly sentenced to hang for helping to murder two miners whom he and Neji Hyuuga and Naruto Uzumaki had murderd when the miners tried to take their gold out.
Sasuke Uchiha made an ending that earned him grim respect, and he left Kakashi puzzling about how betraying a woman could be a thing a man might boast of with the last words he ever had a chance to speak.
IM BACK ! Im am so sorry for leaving you guys ive been so incredibly busy but i acctually have been writing stories the entire time YAY im almost finished with a sasusaku fanfic its about 30 chapters long so yay for you i still have to think of a ending though so yea im gonna also delete my previous stories and put up the re written one kay so you guuys no longer have to look at horrible grammer .
BTW i dont own the story its acctually called the last boast but when I read it sasusaku popped up so yea the original is bacically the same except the names and a few sentences so yep ok ill get back as soon as i can and yep thats it and just in case i dont put a story up in time HAPPY VALENTINES DAY YAY!