Day 3 Prompt: Nighttime
Title: this city's burning; it's not my burden
title lyric from: Extraordinary Girl/Letterbomb, Green Day
Tags: War AU; Combat Medic Sakura; Soldier Sasuke; CW: Blood and Injury

In these dim and flickering emergency lights, he says,

"Marry me."

.

.

.

Nighttime can be many things: Sunset sinking under the horizon line. A signal to gather the flock and circle them up, press the love in tight to keep out everything else. Dinner and drinks, books and cards, friends and trysts.

Sakura remembers these average evenings while she shivers, a bag of click-clacking bones, every tendon pulled tight, murmuring silent thanks to the tetchy-tuned radio and the sound of an explosive shell missing her tent.

Here, a stone's throw from the combat zone, the terrifying, strident buzz of planes wind up as the sun goes down.

Day belongs to cleaning and wailing, turning over dog tags, and fitful sleep. Night belongs to the enemy. Night belongs to war.

Men from the front line haul him in, bringing with them the barbed, pinched tang of iron and smoke. Earth clinging to worn boots; faces smeared with blood. Uzumaki (best friend of her lover and now hers too, these three young draftees intertwined as ivy, organically-grown trauma) mouths words she can't hear. Not against the new whistling of a shell sparing her frail medic tent yet again. Not against her heartbeat, currently slamming out a rhythm underneath her ribcage that threatens to burst through.

Accepts his hand on her shoulder, pats it with her own. Scored with antiseptic, rough to touch. Now they file out, dipping their heads with respect. Each set of eyes catches her for a moment then slips over, frictionless, torn from one tragedy to the next. They'll bring more casualties in time, like a promise.

When they're gone, it escapes. The low moan of a wounded animal, and it's coming from her. She quells it, dipping two fingers into the hollow of his neck to seek a pulse. Taps against her skin, weak but alive. Places her head on his chest, seeing what she can hear, and her hand moves to his forehead.

"Sasuke," she says sharply, patting his cheek. Lifts an eyelid, taps him a little harder than she should. Some stoic medic she is — each name recorded from tags hanging on the dead reminds her of her weakness. "Sasuke! Move your fingers if you can hear me."

The immediate flutter of his hand brings her more relief than she'd like to allow. She wants to embrace him right here, but there's a nagging in her gut, something not quite right.

He opens his eyes, stares into the pitch of the tent and beyond. Unfocused.

Sasuke's torn up hand, mercifully with all digits intact, comes up to touch her hair. But not the way it should: It meanders, clutches at her arm, walks along her shoulder to find it as if he —

"Sakura," he croaks, succumbs to coughs. They hurt and he writhes from the recoil. Yanks her close by the hair, straining to speak around the blood and grit in his throat. "I can't—"

Covering his hand with her own, she gropes for her penlight and finally shines it into his dark eyes,

(and beautiful, they were, for a time; she'd seen them up close on the floor of her flimsy tent, charcoal and smoldering but loving, comforting like the low-burning idle of a hearth)

"No," she hisses. Watches the way his pupils stay resolutely wide and blank. "No, no no—"

And with a cry, she sweeps her arm across the small metal table, scattering the pathetic few tools she has left to the dirt.

Taking his face in her hands, she leans over him, whispering against his cheek: "Breathing?"

"Ribs hurt," he growls.

"You can feel your legs?"

He nods in her grip, staring into nothing.

Choking back that noise again, piteous and fragile, she presses her forehead against his, tasting the salt of her own tears.

"Just tell me."

"Concussion-induced blindness. As to how long—"

"It doesn't matter," he says simply.

She withdraws and whirls around, wishing she had something to break.

"I'll mow them down."

The strangled way she says this leaves him silent. "Sakura—"

"No," she interrupts, "I will. I stitch up my friends, send their tags home in coffins, hunker in the tent waiting to be blown apart. And all I get to do is cower here, night after night, wondering if when I'm finally hit I'll be terrified — or relieved."

The radio crackles, and the stay-in-place! order moves through her as the lingering smog of decay. Her anger sparks, her words spit:

"I want a gun in my hands."

"I'll be shipped out." Sasuke's voice is steady, assuaging. "Come home with me."

Sakura snorts, turning around to see him still lying there, pensive. Calm in the face of, or perhaps shellshocked by, this new tragedy.

"And just how would I do that?"

As if the possibility occurred to him in this single moment, in these dim and flickering emergency lights, he says,

"Marry me."

A casual tone, a moment of total absurdity as mortars continue to fall.

"You're ridiculous." Voice cracking in a delicate way, as fine china. "And concussed. Literally."

He pauses, concedes the point in the haughty silence in a way only he can.

"Watch over me, then. Tonight, at least."

She sighs, but doesn't pause to consider it much at all, pulling up a chair and muttering. At least this vigil is for the living, not the dead.

Lacing her calloused fingers through his, they hang on tightly,

(and the sky and all the shells are falling and they're clutching close and she whispers I do, I do,)

— enduring such ancient fear rattling them to the bone, counting the minutes until dawn burns away this endless night.