"You look dead Sakura."

He expected a short temper, a hot or hurt look, anything but what he got in return. Anything but the dead, detached voice speaking to him. He really should have learned by now.

"We're all dead Sasuke."

He eyed her, his arm was still in her hands as nimble fingers wound up the stitching in his bleeding arm.

"If we're not the walking dead... Then we'll be falling, dead soon anyways. That's how this works."

He wanted her to smile. Smile dammit! Not sit there with dead eyes that only flash to agony or sadness. Not living but not dead yet. Something sat there, within Sakura's skin that was not Sakura. He wanted Sakura back.

"You don't smile anymore."

Her lips quirked up humorlessly but couldn't quite finish the job. "In case you haven't seen... Felt it... We're in the middle of a war Sasuke-kun."

He loved that suffix even as it brought up happy memories that stung and hurt because she wasn't right and he wasn't here.

"They never said there was a war here."

She looked at him bitterly with jade eyes that has seen too too too much for any one person to see, or know. "No. No they don't." She looked at him for a moment with something he wasn't sure he could place, in her eyes. "But inside, Sasuke-kun. Inside is where they play dirty. And dirt... Dirt has always meant war." She turned her back to him, the only only only patient she could, and rinsed off her tools. "Always..."

The whisper forever haunted his mind. Forever.