Hello all!

So sorry that this chapter is late. (I apologize especially to my friend Alison)

But I had trouble writing this one. I scrapped an entire chapter, and then rewrote it.

And then I didn't like it, so I edited it half to death... Yeah...

It didn't flow...

But hopefully now it does. :D Yuppers!

Well, thanks for keeping up with this!

--K

Disclaimer: I don't own squat.

Dedicated to Alison because she's awesome. And it was her birthday last month. xD

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Sasuke kicked at Naruto ruthlessly.

Sweat dripped down his temple, fueled by the bright Konoha sun.

He cursed as Naruto disappeared in a puff of gray. Sasuke slipped shuriken between his fingers and sent them whirling through the trees where his instincts told him that the real dobe was.

Another puff of gray.

"Kusso."

Sasuke whirled around to face the dozen kage bunshin charging him. How had he let them sneak up on him?

Naruto after Naruto disappeared in plumes of gray as Sasuke slashed and hacked through them all.

Suddenly a fist dived in from his blind spot.

Sasuke tried to block, but he wasn't fast enough.

The fist connected with his cheek with a sickening crunch.

Sasuke flew back a few feet and collapsed on the ground, rolling a few of times from the impact.

Stunned, the rest of the kage bunshin disappeared, leaving only the real Naruto behind.

"Sasuke-teme!" Naruto ran towards his fallen friend and crouched down. "What's wrong with you? Your defense is horrible! You aren't acting like yourself at all today!"

"For once, Naruto is right, Sasuke," Kakashi said as he approached also.

Naruto whirled on him. "What do you mean 'for once'?"

Kakashi ignored Naruto and lowered his book. Sasuke simply sat up in the dirt and wiped the small trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. He frowned.

Sasuke could feel Kakashi's gaze. It seemed heavy with his former sensei's disappointment and worry.

Sasuke anticipated the words on the tip of Kakashi's tongue. Sasuke knew that his sparring hadn't been this awful since Sakura–

Kakashi sighed.

"What's wrong Sasuke?" Kakashi wisely chose to ask instead. "You didn't even activate your Sharingan. You aren't taking this seriously. Naruto was going easy on you."

Sasuke's scowl deepened.

"I know," he said. "I could feel him going easy on me."

Naruto didn't say anything. After a moment of silence, he offered Sasuke a hand.

Sasuke looked up at it. At one time, less than two years ago, he would have refused the help or would have batted the hand aside angrily.

After a moment, Sasuke grasped Naruto's hand and felt the warmth and strength in the hand as the dobe help him up.

Sasuke avoided Naruto's questioning gaze as he dusted off his pants and worked to wipe his expression blank. He tried and failed to fight the deep scowl that crept onto his face.

He didn't want anyone to ask him what was wrong.

He supposed that he could ignore the questions like he always had in the years before, but that stupid promise that he had made to Sakura still burned in his mind. He refused to disgrace her memory by breaking his promise to her.

The first, last, and only promise that he had made to her.

"Sasuke-kun. I know people are still angry at you and treat you awfully, but please, Sasuke-kun, I can't see you hurt yourself by hurting them… Please… Just try to answer some of their questions and maybe when you open up, they will accept you more. Don't make yourself regret shutting everyone out again. There are people that understand – or are trying to understand. Promise me that you'll try to open up more, ne? Sasuke-kun?"

He remembered grunting in reply. He had always been so ungrateful to her.

Even though she had been the one to whisk him away to the hospital two years ago when he had staggered through Konoha's gates, bloody and wounded and nearly unconscious. She alone had tended to his injuries, frantically stemming the flow of blood and stopping the internal bleeding. She had fought with Tsunade to drop his ANBU guard down to only four, then to two, and finally only one – Kakashi.

She had brought him good things to eat – home-cooked meals that replaced the awful, formless hospital food. She had stopped Naruto from ripping him to shreds with embraces, and then with threats and blows. She had checked up on him once a day. He's sure that she purposely shortened her visits and their frequency to make him look forward to seeing her.

She and Naruto were the only ones who had tried to treat him as if nothing had happened.

And the day that he had been released from the hospital, Sasuke found that he missed the anticipation of seeing her every day. He missed the way that she worked, busily and efficiently to save lives. He missed the way her voice commanded respect whenever he heard her down the hall in the hospital.

He missed the way her ridiculous pink hair floated around her face. The way her eyes lit up when she smiled. The way she looked at him – as if he weren't a monster or an Uchiha – just… Sasuke-kun.

And Sasuke found out, on that day, that he had fallen in love with the one girl he had vowed never to show affection to.

Or maybe he had loved her all along, and he had just been too arrogant to admit it to himself and too blinded by power to feel it.

His heart had hardened to stone, and she had been the one to melt it.

Sakura… Ever since she had disappeared, she haunted him every day and every night, but now…

Now his dreams about her were different. She was different. He could feel it somewhere deep inside of him that something had changed and–

"–asuke! Oi! Uchiha! Wake up!"

Sasuke whipped his head up.

Naruto bellowed into his friend's ear and made to smack him over the head.

Sasuke blocked. And missed.

Naruto's blow connected with the back of Sasuke's head, and he saw stars.

Sasuke shook his head to clear it. He glared at Naruto and rubbed his throbbing skull. "Dobe! What the hell was that for?"

Naruto stood, agape. "You… didn't block it?"

Sasuke scowled and glanced to the side. "Tch."

Naruto blinked back his shock. Then he frowned playfully. "C'mon, Teme! You're slower than usual today! You were no challenge at all! What's wrong with you?"

Sasuke hesitated a moment. Could he tell Naruto about his dreams? Would the idiot even believe him? Or would he blab to all of Konoha, and then everyone would know that the last Uchiha was finally going insane?

They would all think that he had finally succumbed to the grief – and to his guilt. No one but Naruto and Kakashi and the Godaime would ever believe that he was innocent.

They were the only ones who knew that he would never have done anything likethat to Sakura.

She had meant the world to him at that point in his life. She had been his only link to reality and a normal life – not a life of desperately seeking power and blind revenge.

She alone had helped him overcome his urges to continue to seek more power and kill more people. She had helped him conquer the shadows in his life, and he would never have–

"Sasuke."

He looked up. Kakashi had disappeared. Sasuke found himself beside Naruto on the road back to Konoha from the training grounds. He supposed that his feet had started moving automatically, and he had been so immersed in his thoughts that he hadn't realized that he had been moving.

Remembering Sakura did that to him. Often.

Very often.

In order to focus, he had begun to block out his memories of her more and more frequently. That block had started during missions, but now it was so automatic that he was struggling to remember certain parts of her.

He no longer remembered the exact shade of pink her hair had been.

In his dreams, her hair looked… faded. No longer entirely pink.

Sasuke looked over. "What, Naruto?"

Naruto was focused on the ground on front of him. His eyes were in shadow, and for a brief moment, a gust of wind splayed out his headband's ties behind him.

"Sasuke. If you can't trust your friends with your problems, who can you trust?" Naruto asked. His voice was no longer playful.

Once again, for the millionth time, Sasuke reminded himself that this Naruto was more mature and serious than the one he had left behind so many years ago. He looked at his friend in wonder.

"If you don't share what's troubling you, you'll start thinking that you don't need friends, and you'll end up turning into the same thing that you used to be when you left," Naruto said, gravity deepening his voice.

Suddenly, Naruto looked up. Blue flashed and met black. Sasuke noted that his eyes were dead serious in their concern.

Sasuke was silent for a moment more, and he watched as despair worked its way into his friend's eyes.

Sasuke looked away. He couldn't stand it any longer.

"Don't make yourself regret shutting everyone out again. There are people that understand – or are trying to understand. Promise me that you'll try to open up more, ne? Sasuke-kun?"

"I'm seeing Sakura."

The steady crunch of Naruto's shoes on the dirt instantly stopped. Sasuke stopped also.

He looked up.

Naruto was looking at him with wide eyes. "Sasuke…" Then his eyes sharply narrowed.

Suddenly, an orange and black blur tackled Sasuke to a tree by the road. Claws held his throat against the bark.

Naruto's eyes blazed a fiery red. The whisper marks grew sharper on his cheeks, and when he blinked again, his pupils were slitted.

"Teme!" Naruto growled and tightened his hold on Sasuke's neck. "Don't joke about Sakura-chan. Don't you damn–!"

"I'm not joking," Sasuke said evenly. His eyes narrowed. He had expected this reaction to some degree, but not this furiously.

Chakra-laden hands pressed against Sasuke's throat, and for a moment, red eyes searched black.

Then Naruto let go.

Sasuke leaned a hand against the tree to steady himself. His heartbeat was ragged and unsettled from the encounter.

He quickly tried to steady it. He would never admit it, but Naruto always unnerved him when he was like that. The Kyuubi was not a force to be trifled with.

It would kill him in an instant if Naruto wasn't there to stop it.

But what scared Sasuke the most was not the threat of death – it was that the Kyuubi was a force capable of stealing Naruto away forever.

Sasuke shook his head to clear it. He had no room in his mind now to even consider losing another friend. He was already muddled from his recent… encounters... with Sakura.

Just then, he hadn't activated his Sharingan. Kakashi and Naruto had been right.

He was really out of form today.

"Teme. What do you mean?"

The question sounded ragged, torn.

It ripped through Sasuke's thick blanket of thought.

Naruto stood off to the side. Hands clenched, eyes cast downwards. His body trembled, Sasuke supposed, from fighting the urge to rip his best friend to shreds.

"What do you mean?" Naruto demanded again.

"Naruto…" Sasuke looked away. He didn't know what exactly to tell him. He hadn't even planned on telling anyone at all.

Sasuke sighed. But what the hell did he have to lose?

"I'm seeing her in my dreams. – But it's different. Not so much like a dream. It's more… real. It's almost like it's really her."

Naruto looked up at his friend. Sasuke met his eyes.

Confused blue eyes searched black ones. "What…?"

"I don't even know." Sasuke sat down heavily and leaned his back against the tree. He frowned at the leaves on the ground. "Every other week or so, I have this dream. I'm in a field of mist, and she's there.

"The first time it happened, I attacked her. I just… wanted to get rid of her. Make her stop haunting me."

There was a soft thump. Sasuke glanced up.

Naruto was sitting beside him. "Yeah? What else?"

Sasuke felt his emotionless facade slip. His eyes widened before he could stop them. "You believe me?"

Naruto grinned. "Who else can you trust besides your friends?"

"Hn," Sasuke grunted automatically. Then he blinked and said, "Yeah. You're right."

Naruto nodded eagerly. "Ne? Ne? Then what happened?"

"The first time, when I attacked her, I figured that if I destroyed her image, I could rid myself of my constant thoughts about her. But when I tried to follow through on the attack, she… said my name… And I found that I couldn't do it. She sounded too much like… the real Sakura."

Sasuke paused. He wasn't used to talking this much. Only with Naruto would he even consider talking like this.

Naruto was silent for once, keeping the option open for Sasuke to continue.

Sasuke brought a knee up and rested his elbow against it as he thought. After a moment, he continued. "I think last night was my third time seeing her… We just… talked… It was weird. I'm sure it was a dream now, because she kept on describing these weird things calledbiorajii andingurishi. I'm not sure what they mean."

"Hey!" Naruto stood up quickly.

Sasuke looked up. "What?"

"We could go ask Tsunade-obaa-chan!" Naruto said excitedly. "It sounds like something she would know."

Naruto pranced gleefully down the path.

Sasuke followed wordlessly. It was as he had predicted.

Naruto would spread everything all over Konoha. And this would turn into just one more thing for Sasuke to have to live down in order to resurrect his clan's dignity.

But for some reason, Sasuke felt no regret for telling Naruto.

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When the boys were gone, Kakashi silently dropped to the ground. He was slightly disappointed in his former students. Neither had detected his presence. He thought he had trained them better than that.

Then again, he had been concealing his chakra, and detecting a hidden jounin was quite a feat for any chuunin.

And Sasuke hadn't had his Sharingan activated to help him detect outside threats.

But that was what worried Kakashi the most.

Even when Sasuke had been attacked, he had been distracted to the point where he couldn't even activate his Sharingan in a battle situation. Twice.

Kakashi frowned and crouched beside the tree that Sasuke had leaned against.

Sakura, huh?

Sasuke's thoughts of her constantly interfered with his concentration.

Kakashi could tell that Sasuke was thinking about her by the way his gaze became vacant – detached from reality.

Kakashi knew that it was fine to hold one's lost teammates in respect; resurrecting memories of fallen comrades was not always a bad thing.

It just depended on knowing when to keep those memories and regrets from becoming an obsession.

But then again, Kakashi wasn't entirely sure that Sasuke's dreams were only related to his refusal to let Sakura go.

There was something that Kakashi had never told his pupils. Something that he had kept between him and Tsunade-sama. Both of his remaining students would kill him if they ever found out what he had known and never told them.

Kakashi rose.

He had to get to Tsunade-sama before the boys did.

It was about time that she told the boys that Sakura had left on her own free will.