There's blackness and aching bones and stinging flesh and something slightly wet on his face when Sasuke awakens, sunlight hitting his eyes as he opens them and reminding him that there is a world he must face after every decision he makes. Blood has soaked through his clothes and situated itself on top of his skin, sweat and dirt and something that tastes like salt streaking across his cheeks.
The forest is silent.
Sasuke, for all his exceptionally honed senses, cannot hear the birds chirping. The leaves are silent and still, the animals are gone, and he does not know why he is here.
And then he remembers.
Sasuke draws himself up on shaky feet and trembling arms and finds his vision blurry, half with tears and half with strain from the Mangekyou. Because he remembers.
He had sprinted, he realizes, all killer intent and red eyes and lightning skin and Uchiha hatred at a boy with chakra that had blazed up as bright as the sun and concentrated itself into a single ball of swirling power in his hands. A boy with whisker cheeks and anguished eyes and cobalt-blue eyes that were screaming at him, screaming who are you and who are you and who—
Sasuke had replied,
I am an Uchiha.
There was no time for Naruto to ask him what happened, to ask him where the boy who scoffed and glowered and delicately handled bowls of ramen from their childhood had gone. There was no time for him to ask Sasuke if he knew that he would always be a part of Team Seven, that he would always be their teammate, that he would always be Naruto's best friend.
Sasuke thought he would feel numb, he swore himself to vengeance and killing and murder and senseless pain because he thought he would feel numb he thought he would feel numb—
Sasuke staggers, heat in his throat and a dull throbbing in his head and his heart and there is terror crawling up his spine, unfurling cold fingers and creeping towards his neck and making his lungs constrict because, kami, if Sasuke was alive and standing and the world was gouged with craters and there was destruction in the air and Sasuke was standing then, he thinks, then, he gasps, Naruto was dead.
For a moment, Sasuke is still. The forest is quiet. He thinks over the trajectories of their hits, pieces together the fragments of their paths towards each other, and realizes the exact position where he will find Naruto's body.
Sasuke turns with half-faded eyes, and looks upon the tragedy he has wrought upon Konohagakure. Through a haze of pain and blurry shapes, he feels dull surprise.
He can barely see the green of the trees in front of him, or know exactly how much earth the combination of a chidori and rasengan can tear up, but he can just make out the features a single person facing him. His ex-sensei, Hatake Kakashi, son of the White Fang and the man who had taught him how to kill his best friend, is a hunched over figure that looks up at him with dead eyes.
"Sasuke," he says, mask barely moving, and then he stands slowly and walks towards the Uchiha with weariness.
In the back of Sasuke's mind, there is a clan instinct that screams danger and killhimkillhim and youaresosoweak because he is standing still, not moving as the Konoha nin approaches him steadily. Because for all the pain on his face and in the blood that covers his hands, Kakashi does not falter in his path. He is at his student's side in a moment, his hand reaching up to become a heavy weight on Sasuke's shoulder that reminds him of the flicks of his forehead that—
NononoNONONONONONO his mind screams, and Sasuke is immediately pulled back into the reality that is facing him. He isn't ready, he realizes somewhere in the back of his head, to remember everything.
So Sasuke steps forward and lets his ex-sensei's hand fall off his shoulder, instead focusing on the direction that Kakashi wordlessly tilted his head towards. His walk is slow and cautious and edged with fear until he is close enough to see two bodies—
Sasuke stops, spine straightening and heartbeat intensifying and finally realizing that—
Something is wrong.
His head throbs harder and his visions blurs more for a split second. He can feel the twisted air in front of him, he can taste something bitter and knows, knows he knows that there is something wrong. And it is not Naruto's death.
Sasuke stares, half paused and in disbelief and half just unable to comprehend the fact that there are two bodies side by side and one of them has pink hair and a hole in its chest.
One of them is Sakura, one of them is Naruto.
"What—" he pauses, half ready to ask Kakashi to explain how how how Sakura's body is here and why is Naruto safe and alive and why is Sakura here? And also—where is her heart?
But there's silence at his back and horror at his front, and Sasuke finds himself on his knees between his two comrades. He touches the torn fabric at Naruto's front first, feeling dull wonder in his chest at the disappearance of scars and healing of skin that should have been torn apart and burned and ravaged by lightning not to mention a heart that should have been obliterated. Because Sasuke knows he made contact, he knows he felt warm blood and a beating organ and a gasp of blood that splattered across his cheeks and he knows he tasted his best friend's blood.
But the boy in front of him is whole. And the girl next to him is not.
Sasuke is almost afraid to touch Sakura, afraid of her tears and her Sasuke-kuns and her ability to guilt him like no other. He does not touch her at first, instead gazing down at the visceral remains of her upper torso and the protruding of her ribs and the gory glimpse of her lack-of-a-heart.
Sasuke looks up at a blurry black figure that he knows is looking back at him.
"I don't understand," he says a second after he places his hand at the side of Sakura's neck. There is no pulse, and he knows he knows that there can't be one without a heart but how can Sakura be missing a heart when she hadn't even been there? She had never been there, not when his parents were murdered and not when he felt tears drip down his cheeks and not when he swallowed sobs and buried melancholiness and beat his anger into training sessions and she had never been there but Naruto had, Naruto had been there with sparkling eyes and common-sense fists and a will that matched his so how could this be, how could Sakura be the one in front of him like this?
Kakashi is in front of him, then, and his ex-sensei looks at him with black red eyes and acceptance and a little bit of pity and a whole lot of I'm sorry and does not look away once.
"She had become a medic-nin, Sasuke. The protege of the Fifth Hokage."
When it clicks in his mind, he can only think, oh.
Oh. Oh.
Kami, this can't be—
Sasuke turns back to her body and presses his fingers into the hollows of her neck and feels how cold it is, he pushes them into her flesh and stares at the eyelids that should be open and filled with green and he says, he lies, he denies—
"I don't understand, I don't understand I don't understand—" he buries his hands in her hair and feels more blood on his hands and he is snarling his words, he is screaming his lies and begging his sensei and looking at Sakura.
Why? he wants to know, he wants her to wake up so he can shake her dove-thin shoulders and hold her bony wrists and round cheeks and let her hug him just this once, he wants to ask her why did you give up your heart? but Sasuke knows, he knows he knows he knows that he can cry into her skin and taste salt and coppery blood and shout at the heavens and beg for forgiveness but in the end, it is Kakashi who answers.
"She couldn't have saved you alone, Sasuke. She knew that, and she chose not to let you go."
Sasuke clutches Sakura's body and feels her blood soak through his clothes and run down his skin and mark him with forgiveness, whispering her name into her skin like he will never let her be forgotten. He will hold her name in his mouth until he dies, he will carve it into history and mark himself with it and he will say it when Naruto, inevitably, wakes up to find Sakura-chan and begins to scream in his own cacophony of anguish and he will not forget how much he would have loved her.
Sasuke says this with certainty.
Sakura will not be forgotten.
A/N hi it's me and i'm back and i'm once again in tears because i get v happy when i see reviewers telling me i made them cry, not because i'm a jerk but because i want to convey a lot of emotion and whenever i found out my efforts came through i feel amazed and exuberant/
Kelly: ! when i saw you i almost shouted omg because you're in guest mode and you still were looking out for me to publish a second work ahhhh i felt so happy when i saw your comment
everyone who will most likely drag me for this ending: I HATE TRAGEDIES IM A BIG WUSS AND I HATE IT BUT BUT BUT THIS IS AN AU in which i address the closeness of naruto and sasuke vs. the closeness of sakura and sasuke and try my best to explain how i've always felt that Sakura has felt slightly hurt about her relationship with the rest of Team 7 because she knows that she isn't as close to them as they are to each other, no matter how much she wants to be, but when it comes down to it she will quite literally give up her heart for them to be safe & secure & free to find happiness (because honestly sasuke as a character is super dependent on Naruto, at least i've always thought so, so he wouldn't be able to have a healthier relationship with others without making up with naruto first yaknow)
- angst loving author out! (also i met my own damn deadline, but at the cost of two hours of my sleep (^': haha/cries)
UPDATE 11/23/15: I FORGOT TO SET IT AS COMPLETE I'm so sorry for playing all of you by accident but this was supposed to be a two-shot and it is a two-shot now and I swear this is only my second time trying to figure out all these publish buttons and I forgot about the story status feel free to drag me but I'm so so sorry
If it makes anyone feel better, I've been thinking about an huge Itachi-centered story for over a year now (probably involving an OC? (;) and I also have a lot of ideas for an actual sasusaku fic w/o (too much/nervous laughter) angst or tragedy it's just that I'm trying to fix my tendency to become squeamish when writing scenes involving physical closeness bc my laptop is too close to the living room for safety...
