Title: Important
Summary
: He was amazed to discover how important she had always been to him.
Pairing
: SasuSaku
Rating
: K
Notes
: This is an AU in which Sasuke has an encounter with Team 7 before his final fight with Itachi.
Disclaimer
: I don't own Naruto.


Green eyes, flashing like emeralds and sharp as keen kunai, had glared fiercely at him for a moment before disappearing from sight, as Sakura helped carry Naruto away, melting into the night's darkness, the trees swallowing her up.

That glare had burned him far worse than any of Kakashi's fire jutsus could ever hope to.

Sasuke turned over the thoughts, again and again in his mind that night, as he stared into the popping, crackling camp fire. Suigetsu mouthed off as usual; his rash, impulsive nature made him deaf and blind to the inner worries of others, and he was ignorant of Sasuke's internal conflict. Juugo noticed but said nothing, shooting a veiled look sideways at him out of hooded orange eyes.

Karin too noticed how strangely subdued the admittedly already-reserved Sasuke had become. Karin was more attuned to the emotional states of her three comrades than anyone else in the makeshift cell; Sasuke wasn't sure, but he strongly suspected that that had something to do with her being female.

"Sasuke-kun?" In the darkness of the muggy summer night, Karin shifted position and came to sit beside Sasuke, laying a hand on his arm, without the usual coquettish clinginess that Sasuke had come to expect from her. "What's the matter?"

There was genuine concern in her voice, and for a moment, Sasuke considered the wild possibility that he should confide in her. But then he pushed it down. If he told Karin his secrets, that would give her power over him and he didn't want that. Sasuke didn't want anyone to have that sort of power over him.

Sharply, he shook her hand off of his arm; Karin frowned, obviously hurt. Sasuke tried to ignore how much she looked like Sakura when she frowned like that. "Nothing," he told her curtly.

Taking the hint (at least someone in his life knew how), Karin went and sat with Juugo and Suigetsu on the opposite side of the fire, and didn't try to talk to him again.

That green-eyed glare had burned him, reached deep inside without breaking the surface of his skin and twisted his insides until Sasuke couldn't tell his intestines from his liver and his spleen from his stomach.

Maybe Sasuke had been expecting her to smile at him.

Maybe he had expected Sakura to fall all over him and plead and wheedle in the disgusting, cloying way she always had.

Maybe he'd thought that when he found Sakura, she'd still be the same as he remembered. The weak, stupid little genin who constantly fawned over him and always got in the way. Sasuke had thought that when he found Sakura, she'd still be the little girl who needed him to protect her.

Instead, she was different. More of a woman, Sakura had grown into her own as how a kunoichi should be. She was a skilled medic, monstrously strong. Her face had formed the angles of a woman and not a child; her green eyes gleamed with confidence, not childishness.

Sasuke would have to forget her, now.

Sakura couldn't help him on his quest for revenge against Itachi; she wouldn't go along with that. And though she had indeed grown stronger than Sasuke had ever expected, she would still just get in the way. That much, Sasuke was sure, hadn't changed.

But before he started the arduous, draining process of effacing Sakura from memory, Sasuke had to wonder why she bothered him so much in the first place, that he needed to forget her.