The warmth of life seeps onto his fingertips in the angriest of hues. It gnaws hungrily, a venomous, suckling bite; and there it stains happily. He watches the red spread wider and deeper, to the grooves of his callused palm. It is a fascination that he, for once, cannot conquer…
Her soft coughing brings him back. The warmth on his fingers turns lukewarm and sticky, and the combination sickens him. He wipes the blood hard, gritting, across the cold rough floor, trying to rid himself of the feel—but still it shivers slyly up his spine. He shudders.
She coughs again, stirring barely. He crawls on his bruised knees carefully over to her side, bringing himself closer so that he can make out her pale-milk face matted now with blood and sweat and crystallized salt. He listens to her quiet rasp, the faintest scratch of a mouse's paws against the wall.
"Idiot," he whispers hoarsely, injecting a feeble exasperation that does nothing but make her smile in her death-beautiful-sleep. His throat burns with shame and a sudden, irrepressible weakness (he's tried to be strong for too long and now everything is crumbling away beneath him). He has barely known this girl for half a lifetime; and already she is slowly bleeding away her light into his darkness.
The colors touch blindly; spindly fingers of growing-pained trees meeting for the first time. They stretch across the sky and scar it with their gentle brilliance.
Everything is lost in the middle of anonymity, of being nameless and faceless. Loveless for a thousand years.
"There is," he breathes heavily, on his scratched-tingling elbows, "a difference between self-sacrifice and suicide."
Her lips twitch into a last mischievous smile. After half a minute, she speaks through cracked lips. "…I know."
Her whisper is a single shard of glass drawn scraping against concrete. Her eyes are closed and he wonders what is happening behind them. (will the green forever leak away from behind the pale window-blind lashes?)
He needs to be certain of something. "Open your eyes," he says suddenly, the tiny alarm ringing in his voice.
Her brows crease together, crinkled vanilla paper, but her eyes remain still closed and shadowed. "…Why?" she breathes dryly, and he can tell it pains her to speak, to breathe, to live.
"Just do it," he says urgently, suddenly more shaken than he ever has been in his life.
Let me be sure of one thing.
Her eyes shift and move weakly beneath the folds of her eyelids. And then she begins to cough; softly at first, and then more violently, and then it frightens him how loud and hacking it is, and the sound of cough is the whole world contained and spewing from her lips. One heavy cough brings the blood to her lips (a juniper drop), and the blood splatters onto the floor before her in delicate butterfly-wing patterns. Her body convulses and she lies still for one dreadful moment.
"Open your eyes!" he croaks, and does not recognize this strangling, octopus desperation as his own. He is begging her now, pleading on his knees and elbows to the churning of his stomach, please, just this once! I will never ask for anything else! Dignity and pride are suddenly nothing more than useless crowns of glittery stone that leave bruises and scars upon his shorn head.
One thing!
She scrunches her eyes tighter shut in a fierce grimace. "Sasuke…" she whispers, half-whimpers. The cough takes over her body again, and she is nothing more than loud hollow sound and frail leaf.
And the blood falling from her lips again! One thing!
"Please, Sakura, open them!" he shouts blindly, madly, above the consuming, growing cough. The cough howls in protest and will not let her rest in peace, kicks and kicks her now failing, now almost-dead body; winds waging war. She is caught in the eye of a hurricane, and air is slowly leaking away to become the feathers of lost angels.
What will he breathe when she is gone?
She coughs the color from her cheeks and the pink from her hair, the pink of her lips away to the bitter, savage red of blood. He watches the process of her deterioration and can do nothing but watch with the eyes that see the things he doesn't want to see.
He knew the curse to be true all along.
…But what was she?
This was actually first intended to be a Nejisaku, but then I thought that Sasusaku would be more fitting for this situation. Anyways, there you go. Spam. :D
