"Sakura… You're different."
"How so?"
"You're… Not as cheerful or as… overbearing as you used to be."
Sakura paused. It had been over a week of her avoiding his questions.
"I'm still cheerful, just not around you," she said, elaborately calm, steady and casual as she looked down, focusing all of her energy into removing his last bandages.
"Why?"
She looked up, making eye contact.
"Do I really need to explain?"
"I can't be concerned?"
"No! No, you can't!"
As Sakura's voice got louder, she began to tear up. With all her might, she held it in, because she would not let the bastard see her cry.
Not today.
"I'm not your friend, I'm not your fangirl, I'm not your teammate, I thought you wanted me to leave you alone!"
Sakura screamed at him, letting him know the truth.
"If you want a girl to talk to you, try not abandoning her, blowing her up, abandoning her again and then returning years later and pretending that nothing's wrong! That nothing's changed!"
Sakura felt the heat in her face, tears welling up involuntarily, and she had to leave before they broke loose. She pursed her lips and spoke, voice wavering only slightly as she attempted to maintain her composure.
"Make sure you drink your healing tea, Sasuke."
Sakura tried not to slam the door as she left the house, her bag of medical supplies heavy.
She was tired.
Tired of the façades, tired of the games people were perpetually playing with her head, worse than the worst Genjutsu.
And she was tired of the nightmares. The waking ones and the ones that kept her awake at night.
And maybe she was just a little bit exhausted.
"Sakura, are you alright?"
She heard Shinku's voice in double, past and present.
"I'm fine," she replied.
Even though she wasn't. Damn, this felt familiar…
Shinku put Sakura's arm over her shoulders and began to walk her home.
Sakura looked at Shinku, face turning a bright red.
"Shinku, I-"
"Maybe you should tell Tsunade to lay off the training a little. She's fried your brain."
"I just want to help him-"
"You need my help, baka."
Sakura smiled and nodded, reliving a time she didn't remember, fixing the outcome to be the one she'd wanted all along.
38-ShinkuEarly morning, before sunrise.
Night time had always helped her think.
Sakura had gone home already, and Shinku was alone in her bedroom. She wore black shorts that brushed against the tops of her thighs and a grey tank top, wrapped up in her enormous red blanket.
She turned to look out the window, looking up at the moon. As she placed her hand on the windowsill, her fingers brushed against another hand. Her red eyes widened as her right hand wandered, ensuring that this was not yet another one of her illusions, tracing him from the arm up.
He was solid.
He was real.
Damn, that boy was good at masking his presence from her, sneaking up on her in the dead of the night like they always used to do.
She could feel the pressure of his hands on the small of her back, his body so close that she could smell the familiar scent, ash mixed with something else she could never quite place.
The fingers of her other hand fluttered to his neck, and she traced his jawline with a forefinger. Shinku felt like she had to memorize every detail, the black hair, the black eyes flecked with purple and red, the way he moved, even the sound of his breath, just in case he melted away.
She hadn't noticed her cheeks redden, but he had. And, if he wasn't real? She couldn't tell.
"Sasuke?"
The sound of her voice made something in him snap back to the present, jolting him from the daydream of what once was. He pulled away from her, his expression more sorrowful than cold, but the pain in his eyes dissipated as quickly as it came.
There was a time in both of their lives, where façades crumbled away to dust, and they exposed their vulnerabilities to each other and didn't have to fake it anymore.
At least, not when they were alone.
But that time was past.
"We need to talk."
"I know," Shinku sighed.
They hadn't spoken in months. Not since she half-dragged, half-walked him into town, broken and bloodied. They both knew she wanted to be by his side, stumbling along until her last breath. She was a loyal companion, and he once treasured that about her.
But that had, in fact, changed.
"When I left to fight Itachi, you didn't have to follow me. That was my fight, and my fight alone."
Shinku shook her head, tears already springing into her eyes as she shuddered with breaths laden with still-palpable memories of blood.
"I had to."
"I told you that I'd come back for you! That you were the one person I'd always risk my life to come back to!"
Sasuke was angrier than usual, and she couldn't bear to make eye contact anymore. She flinched at every raised word, wondering if this is how it was going to be forever.
"I couldn't just stay and be their puppet!"
"I was going to help you get out of there!"
"How? Half-dead? Once I left, I had no choice. I couldn't go back, because I had no home to go back to. Those caves had never been my home, I…"
Shinku took a deep, halting breath as the truth of what had happened finally hit her. She'd been in denial, but…
"Sasuke, I… I killed Kabuto."
She hadn't felt the blanket slip off of her shoulders, onto the floor, but she soon collapsed with it. Yes, she finally realized what she'd done. Shinku sat there, clutching the blanket, tears silently rolling down her cheeks.
"He tried to stop me from following you, and I…"
Sasuke had no idea how to react. They had grown apart after all.
And so, the same way she didn't notice him arrive, she didn't notice him leave.
39-NarutoFirst of all, it surprised him that she was up before noon on a Saturday.
Second of all, it surprised him that he would strike anyone as a morning person. He never was, even as a child.
And so, it was easy to imagine the surprise on Naruto Uzumaki's face when Sakura Haruno turned up on his doorstep, bright and early, duffel bag held with both hands, loosely in front of her. The bag was vinyl and white, the red cross on the front betraying its contents.
Naruto eyed his teammate skeptically, wondering if she was going to try and jab a needle into his rear, and trying to calculate how much force he'd have to exert to break her hold without breaking her arms. The only problem was that it was too early to think properly for him, and so he was off by far.
"Is Sasuke here?"
"No," Naruto yawned.
"Well," she sighed, "he wasn't home when I stopped by earlier." Sakura set down her bag of medical supplies, "If he thinks I'm going to just sit down and cry like the twelve-year-old fangirl I used to be, then he's wrong. But I do owe him an apology."
"For what?" Naruto opened the door wider to let her step inside, leaving her to close it after herself.
"I… yelled at him. For a lot of reasons. Mainly, for what happened when he left, and then for coming back and acting like there's nothing wrong… I mean, yeah, it was messed up for him to abandon us, but it was also wrong for me to blow up at him."
Sakura smiled up at Naruto from her severe height disadvantage.
"After all, even if we're not a team anymore, we're still friends!"
Naruto smiled back, knowing that she was right, even if she sometimes didn't even believe it herself.
"Hey, Sakura?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you think they'll reinstate Team 7 as it was?"
Sakura bit her lip in thought.
"I hope so… Actually, why not? Once Sasuke gets off of probation, he should be free to go on missions with us again."
"Yeah, just the three of us… What do you think he's doing right now?"
"I don't know, but I hope he's back at his home. I don't have more than an hour left before that solo mission, so I'll stop by again before I go."
"And I'm going back to sleep. See ya!"
"Bye!"
As she opened the door, Sakura left him wondering. She really had changed.
She'd come a long way from the girl who followed Sasuke around when they were young.
40-SasukeSasuke had taken a walk to clear his head. He was unable to think clearly, and that was happening too often. He'd left the house close to midnight last night because he'd needed to talk to her, he'd needed to do something, and he was used to her being the one he could go to, but he still couldn't bring himself to say the words.
And so he was still walking.
After he left her house, he'd gone through the woods at the outskirts of Konohagakure village. He used to know these woods so well when he was younger, but now all he knew was how not to get lost in them. He saw a familiar turn and took it, simple as that, and he soon found himself in a clearing of scarred trees, sliced with the gashes of kunais from years long past. He was on his way back to the village, and had stumbled across them, the trees that felt so familiar, drenched in the past…
That's when he remembered. Yes, he had been here before, back in the early days of Team 7, measuring his progress against Naruto's as they learned to run up the trees, defying gravity, slicing the bark at the highest point that they could get, attempting to outdo each other.
Sakura had gotten it pretty quickly, almost right away… Damn, that girl was smart, but him and Naruto struggled for days. They had such a rivalry at the time, their competitiveness fueled their effort to learn.
He missed that, the connection, the rivalry that somehow turned them into best friends. Maybe that was someone he could go to for advice, someone who knew him well, the idiot who always got under his skin.
When he finally snapped out of his memories, he remembered that Sakura was supposed to check in on him at the house.
'Crap,' he thought to himself.
They crossed paths as they arrived at the same time, coming from opposite directions.
Immediately, she noticed the leaves in his hair.
"Sasuke, where have you been? Are you alright?"
"I'm fine."
As he closed the door behind her, he turned around to face her, turning on the lamp beside the table.
"Sakura, I…"
He remembered their interaction from the day before, and trailed off.
He had meant to apologize, but had never really known how.
Apologies were meant to show that you cared enough about someone else to regret something you may have done to hurt them, and he liked keeping people distant.
Ergo, he had never done this before.
"No, Sasuke."
Sakura placed a hand on his shoulder, sitting him down in the leather armchair in the foyer, setting down her bag and leaning down to make eye contact. Her hands rested on the armrests of the chair he was sitting in, and he was closed in by the scent of her, everything about her, he couldn't see anything, couldn't think or focus on anything that wasn't Sakura Haruno.
And so he leaned back to get a chance to breathe air that didn't smell like oolong and green tea, the familiar smell he never realized he actually… missed?
"You don't have to say anything. I know I should be sorry and apologize for what I said yesterday. But I'm not sorry for what I said. I'm sorry for how I said it."
She pulled up a wooden chair to right in front of his, close enough that when she did sit down, their knees touched.
Still trapped by proximity, he continued to sit straight, and she leaned forward again in an attempt to hold his focus.
Sasuke looked across at her, his eyes slightly wider than his usual emotionless stare.
Why was she doing this?
He looked down, going cold again, trying to keep from showing too much emotion.
"Sakura… You don't have to apologize to me."
She shook her head.
"Just shut up and listen. You did leave us, and you owe it to me to listen to what I have to say, goddamn it."
He had opened his mouth to speak again, but the look in her eyes made it shut with an audible click.
"Sasuke, I know I came across as harsh, but I didn't mean for that to come across the way it did."
She sighed, running her hands through the bright shock of pink hair, the hair that, in and of itself, made her impossible to ignore.
"I meant to tell you… That you hurt me."
Sakura sighed, a little bit of tension draining out of her shoulders.
"I know you never cared about that, much less even noticed, but I have to get it off my chest, because… Sasuke, I've cared about you since we had baby teeth. I feel like, if anything, I should get out my feelings now. Even if you're just going to ignore me, and crush my feelings, whether on purpose or not, I'll never know. But I just have to say that…
Her breath caught.
"I'm tired of waiting. Waiting for you to notice me, waiting for the return of feelings that I thought would happen eventually. Waiting for impossibilities, and I know that now. You're not the man I thought you'd grow up to be, you never changed and you quite possibly never will, but I wanted to give you one last chance."
She paused for emphasis, gulping. He saw her bright green eyes search his face for any sign of understanding, and he thought about it. Why did he always reject any sign of affection from her? Was it just that he knew, somewhere inside him, that he did care?
"Yesterday, I said that we aren't friends anymore. We're not teammates anymore. I'm not an idiotic fangirl who's going to follow you around anymore, but if they reinstate Team 7… Even if they don't, I want to fix this. Fix our friendship."
Sasuke blinked once, then twice, and then he leaned forward, his forehead against hers. Her breath caught and her eyes widened.
"Don't."
His mouth twitched into that half-smile he knew had always driven her crazy, but he couldn't help it.
"The reason I commented on the change in mannerisms… is that you've become one of the few people I can tolerate."
He pulled back, tapping two fingers to her large forehead, and then standing, his hand in his pocket.
"And… thank you for the apology."