Sasori was never in love. He had never been love. He liked to say he had never known love, even though he knew, deep down, that that was a lie. There had always been his parents, but that was a different story for a different day.
Even so, when Akemi said it to him, he didn't know how to respond. The redhead stared at her, wooden eyes unblinking, at a loss for words. She didn't seem to mind, though. In fact, she barely even acted like she had said them herself, despite the weight that three small words can carry.
As it turned out, the light-haired kunoichi was rather lax with the words. She seemed to love "love". She loved the tea they got at one of the local shops. She loved the feel of the sun in Amegakure after a long period of rain. She loved her former teammates. Hell, there seemed to be few things she didn't love. Maybe that was all Akemi had meant when she had said it to him. Just another term of endearment that seemed so free-flowing from her lips.
But they both knew better than that.
Seventeen months they had known each other. Seventeen long, godawful months. A year and a half of near death experiences, infiltration, mind games, flirting (on her part, at least), and more close encounters with each other than Sasori had had in his life. Even so, the puppeteer didn't find himself minding. He wouldn't go so far as to say that he enjoyed her company- after all, there were far too few things that he actually enjoyed- but he found her... tolerable. Yes. Tolerable. Which was a far cry from his previous two partners.
He found that he was rather hoping she wouldn't die. A futile hope, of course. Death was, ironically, a part of life in this organization. And yet he found more and more excuses to go out of his way to make sure she didn't die. Leader would be angry. She was of more use on this mission than was expected. She had broken one of his puppets and he wanted to be the one to kill her himself.
They both knew the real reason. But thankfully, both had the grace to never say it aloud. They simply went about their lives, never quite acknowledging when or if their relationship had changed, but flowing simply into something new.
This won't be lovecentric, they say. It might not even get lovey at all, they say.
All in all, your lesson here is to never trust authors.
-Jack