I don't own Naruto, but it means a lot to me.
Idiots.
The crater that was once the Valley of the End is still smoldering by the time Sakura arrives. Her body aches from every muscle and tendon and bone, but sheer willpower drags her legs each step.
Forest gives way to calamity, and the azure water that had once filled the lake flows in trickles down the maze of jagged crags in the landscape. Her eyes flash as her mind struggles to process the utter destruction around her. Memories of what the valley should be. Visions of the devastation left.
Her legs start moving before her mind can encapsulate the destruction. Her eyes, green and just so, so very tired, pinpoint a singular crater - the nucleus of destruction. Puddles of superheated water bubble and hiss as she approaches, the charred surface of Earth cracking under the weight of her footprints. With a final burst, she leaps over the crater and slides into the center of the largest crater.
She gasps.
"Sakura-chan."
The blond's voice is cracked and broken like she's never heard it. There's blood pooling in his throat and lips, and his skin is marred by rapidly hissing chunks of charred flesh. Her eyes, however, don't linger on the damage or the wounds. He's a borderline corpse, and Sakura finds the idiot doing the same thing that he's done since the first day they had ever met.
He's smiling.
"I'm so happy you're..." He heaves, wet and heavy, and Sakura feels her insides twist. Her body surges forward, hand glowing green as she gently presses it into the boy's chest. Watching him talk is physically painful. She's not 100% sure his jaw isn't fractured in multiple places.
"Shhh." Sakura hisses, like he's yelled something silly at a client on a C-rank escort mission. "Naruto, shut up."
"...here." He finishes, because when has he ever listened to a word she said? He can barely open his eyes, they're so battered and swollen, but she can feel them staring at her with the love they've always held for his precious people. Her insides twist even further.
"You idiot." She all but growls, trying so, so hard to sound as angry as she wants to feel. "You absolute, colossal moron." He words are more tears than argument, the dim green glow of her hand surging as it tried desperately to seal gushing wounds. Naruto tries to laugh, but his lungs can't support the effort.
"Missed you." He rasps. She doesn't see a single inch of him sturdy enough to hit, so she claps her own hands to simulate the smack she wants to give.
"I said shut up." She repeats. "You're not going to speak or move or breath or stop breathing without my say so, you got it? Until we're back in the village, you don't do a single thing I don't say do."
It's supposed to be a threat, but Naruto only smiles more. His eyes are a mixture of water and blood, tears trickling from bruised cheeks as he tries again to rally the energy to speak.
"Sak…Sakura." He continues because defiance is etched into his very bones.
"You gotta…You gotta talk to Sasuke."
The word, his name, tastes like acid on the air. She can't stop as her chakra flares with a cold and brutal push that makes Naruto's eyes sway before she can get control of herself.
"Sasuke?" she answers, teeth grinding against frayed lips. "You're dying, again. In the literal same spot that he betrayed us, again. We save the world, and he literally turns and betrays me and Kakashi and you again."
The tears in her eyes burn as they fall. Her fingers are balled into little fists that want to squeeze her hurt away. Her nails are digging so deep into her palms that now she's bleeding, too.
"…and yet here you are…telling me that I have to talk to Sasuke?"
She's beyond livid, beyond words and anger and rage.
Naruto just keeps smiling.
"Sakura."
She can't believe he has the strength – or, for that matter, the functioning tendons - to physically move his arm. It's clearly painful from how his vision sways, but the one remaining hand the blond has stretches out to brush against her hands.
"Listen. You got to." He wheezes. "For you. For me."
It's so sincere, she wants to vomit. He's bleeding all over, missing an arm, and he wants her to talk to the person responsible? No. Hell no. Absolutely –
"Sak…ura."
It's only then that Sakura becomes painfully aware of a second voice in the same crater. A second voice sounding broken and beaten and barely conscious. Her head swivels, barely two meters away, to the bloodied and broken body of the last Uchiha. Sasuke's clothes are all but disintegrated from his body, his exposed skin a symphony of lacerations and bruised tissue. There are indentions, literal fist sized craters, across his chest and upper torso. There's a blood stain where his left arm should have been. It's a symmetrical match to Naruto's own right arm, and her blood vaporizes in her veins.
"Sakura." He repeats when she doesn't answer. His voice is so low and so broken, and it makes her whole world turn upside down in hate and feelings that she doesn't know whether to respond or to just fling herself into the abyss and punch a hole clear through his lying, backstabbing head.
She looks back at Naruto. Were it not for the blood clots forming in his vision, his eyes would have been sparkling.
"No." She answers, finally.
"I'm..." There's a pause, probably due to lack of air or functional lungs in the Uchiha's chest. It's already too much.
"You're what?" Sakura hisses, her vision becoming so red and clouded she can't even see her own hands, anymore. "I swear if you say something ridiculous like 'you're sorry' I'll kill you here and now!"
"Sakura!" Naruto barks, but it's so weak and Sakura is too tired and broken and hurting to relent.
"Naruto, no. Not once, not twice, but again and again he's chosen to lie and to betray the only people alive who care about him. It can't keep going like this, it just can't. I'm not going to listen to any more lies I can't…I can't take…"
"Sakura." Naruto whispers. "Sakura look at me."
She does, and Naruto's just smiling that stupid, stupid smile.
"Naruto, why are you even asking this!" she screams. "Everything was going to be fine. We stopped the Tsukuyomi. We stopped Kaguya. Everything was supposed to be over, and it still wasn't good enough for him."
Her chakra is flaring, and her rage flings her arm back into the rock. Smoke and slivers of stone scatter across the crater as the rock is obliterated in her hands.
"I loved you!" It pours out like a flood. A torrent of longing and betrayal and hope and suffering. "Naruto loved you. Kakashi loved you. But it wasn't enough. It was never enough, Sasuke. Why couldn't it just be ENOUGH."
Her fury echoes as the dust continues to settle into the crater. The only sound that remains is her heaved breath as the exhaustion of her heart pours out in waves. She wants to scream, wants to run and leave and never remember this terrible war or this terrible moment or anything at all and –
It's Naruto's hand, on her cheek now. Tears of blue and red mixing on his face, but his smile is trembling at the edges and its like a mirror into her own broken soul. His lips open, barley enough to breath, and he speaks.
"Tell her…" he says. "Tell her, Sasuke."
It's only now, prompted again, that she realizes the heaving coming from the final Uchiha isn't just the punctures in his lungs or the avenger's fury blazing in his heart.
Sasuke Uchiha is crying.
Ribbons of tears are cascading through the dirt and cuts along his cheeks, his body desperately trying to keep air enough for the sobs trying to break their way through.
"You are…" he whispers. The voice of the Sasuke Uchiha they knew is gone. The man in the crater is broken.
"You have always been enough."
Sakura opens her mouth, but not a damn thing comes out other than a confused and pained silence. There's a cough that shakes the Uchiha's entire being, but he continues.
"…not just sorry." He rasps. "I was…was wrong."
The words drift into the evening air like smoke, but they sink into Sakura's heart like a stone. She tries to find a way to respond but there are no words that adequately describe the absolute roller coaster of emotions and exhaustion thudding into her mind.
Naruto, never content with silence even as he lay inches from death's door, beams.
"See?" he rasps. "I told you…we'd…we'd fix this idiot."
"Fix?" She's sobbing, again, and the words taste like ash and a bad joke. She doesn't understand why her cries start to feel like laughing. She looks back to Naruto's bleeding form. "Fix? Idiot? What do you think this is?"
"This is…it's us, Sakura." Naruto answers, and he means it so much her heart wants to burst. "We fix idiots and we are idiots."
Idiots.
That's what he calls it.
"Idiots?" She balks. "What is this 'we' part?"
To the untrained eye, it almost looks like Naruto considers this comment for a moment. But only a moment.
"It's we," he explains, "because we're the idiots and you're the fixer."
This time, the noise out of her throat is more laugh than tears — there's plenty of both.
Sasuke doesn't move, and it occurs to Sakura he may not be physically capable of movement. Rather, he closes his eyes, and Sakura feels like she's dreaming as tears slip down his left cheek.
"I'm sorry." He repeats, and Sakura wonders what earth she's on. There's so much to say. So, so much hate and pain and grief and hurt and it all blends together and the words die before they ever leave her throat. Luckily for her, Naruto's never had a problem finding words to say, even as he lays knocking on the afterlife's door.
"Mah, Sakura-chan." The blond wheezes. Blood dribbles between blond lips, and Sakura realizes he's bleeding because he's trying to smile. "You'd better forgive him. If he cries much longer, he might get his…his angst on us."
Sakura laughs, but it's dry and short and a lie because no part of this is funny.
"Forgive him?" she asks, incredulous. "Naruto this isn't something that you can just move past like this."
Naruto makes the largest move since she'd arrived as he cranes his neck, his blue eyes meeting hers.
"Yes, it is." He says, as though he was being asked if the sky is blue. Easy peasy. Simple stuff, next question please.
"He's an idiot. I'm an idiot. Just fix your idiots, please."
He's an idiot. I'm an idiot. Just fix your idiots.
Please.
Sakura breaths, and she can feel the wind hum through the crater around them. The breeze brushes her hair against her skin, and it feels wet with sweat and caking blood. She'll have to wash for hours.
Fix your idiots.
"Sasuke." The words leave her mouth before she understands where they're coming from, but the lone Uchiha tilts his head, tears mixing with blood as they smear down his face.
"Sakura."
"Are you an idiot?"
The question is ridiculous. Sakura feels ridiculous for even thinking such a question, much less voicing it. Everything happening is ridiculous. But nothing is as ridiculous as the Uchiha's answer. Sasuke's answer is hollow, without hesitation or doubt. It's the most certain she's ever heard him. More than wanting to avenge his brother. More than destroying Konoha. More than becoming Hokage.
"Yes." He whispers, heavy and quiet. "I am."
Maybe it's the exhaustion. Maybe the ultimate Tsukiyomi never actually lifted, and this is all just some fever dream. Sakura can't be sure. But, suddenly, it's just so funny.
"Yeah. Yeah, you are."
She's crying, Sasuke's crying. Naruto, who had clearly been waiting for this moment only for completely forever, begins to cry himself. That's how Kakashi finds the three of them at sundown when he arrives to the crater's epicenter. Laughing, crying, with Sakura holding her glowing hands over both of his other students as she brings them back from the brink of death.
Just a couple of idiots.
Hey, anyone reading this. I wrote this project over the past two years, and it inspired me to get back into writing. I'll be posting 19 chapters, all of which are already finished, because I hated how I felt I couldn't finish things. It's a strategy I'm taking up for my other stories, as well.
I don't remember where this idea came from, but I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Comments / critiques are always welcome.
I hope you're all safe and doing well.
-Free Drinks
