Oh man I am bad at this daily update thing…


Accusation


Loneliness made the wounds smart deeper than anything, she decided. Confidants offered sympathy but little closure, while the one person with the ability to do something, his brother, valued stability too much to intervene. Moreover, there hovered a feeling of disbelief. People seemed to think Uchiha Itachi incapable of cruelty.

But few had seen him on the battlefield with his cool calculation so intense and detached that he could silence—and even seem to kill— his gentle, kind nature. However, Sakura had learned that her home, too, could be a sort of battleground.

She lay bloodied on her bed, though no trace of red touched her pale skin that seemed almost sickly pallid in the moonlight. His exact words eluded her, but they didn't matter to her. The hurt they caused did. The hurt they caused lingered. The bubbling anger his audacity created, the venom provoked out of his silver tongue, and a hollowing sadness forged by his dismissiveness pounded at her temples and twisted her heart. The nature and reason of the fight had fled.

Sakura only wished they had taken along some of her pride—the one that had urged her to push him just a bit farther, to the very edges of his trauma-scarred capabilities. She knew subconscious knew then and acutely thought about now that Itachi's ability to function completely normally was limited. But her pride had deluded her—and now she wished she could sacrifice it all just to mend these wounds.

Yes, he had maintained her independence, had asserted her correctness, and had stood up for herself. Yes, she was right, and on a base level, she was self-satisfied. However, she questioned if she had preserved herself at all. Her heart, so big and compassionate and fickle, lay smarting and labored in her chest. Her accusations were stupid. They were rash. Self-professed correctness, now that the hot and thrilling anger had boiled down to nothing, hardly measured to feeling whole.

Sakura blinked her sleepless eyes open and ran her fingers over the empty side of the bed. Her stomach twisted. The clock on the nightstand read three in the morning—seven hours since he had vanished out of her door and into the darkness. She squeezed shut her eyes, feeling the burning warmth of tears, but suddenly, she jerked upright when the door creaked open.

She held her breath and sat fixed in place, her fingers white and rigid in the sheets. Footsteps echoed in the dark silence of the room until Itachi slid into her vision and stared at her steadily and silently.

Through the tired hardness, she could see the tentative calmness in his eyes. After a moment of regarding her, he climbed onto the bed and stretched out over the rumpled sheets. She said nothing, but she scooted forward until she could place her forehead on his chest. Slowly, almost awkwardly, she put her arms around him only to feel him pull her closer.

Sakura inhaled his scent and let a tear slide down her cheek and into his shirt. The ache, as expected, did linger just barely. But when he kissed the top of her head and she smiled just barely, the anger simmered itself away, the sadness slipped into relief, and she felt oddly free.