hi everyone! sorry for the delay and thanks for your patience. grad school is hard.
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when your fragile world
was crashing down around you
you realized your place
and the darkness
that you've tried so hard to subdue
it causes you to change
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Inhale.
She recalled first the light — that piercing flare of chakra, that otherworldly glow that wasn't really even a color. It was expected, that light, and it'd been a welcome sign, as intimidating as it was.
Exhale.
Then she recalled the way it blackened. How it sought his body like tendrils of death rising from some hell beneath the ground, merging onto his skin with a hot slap. How the ink they'd written on the ground melted, reconstituted, crawled along his skin in words too foreign to read anymore. How her throat constricted at the sight, and her eyes clamped shut, knowing she should just be concentrating on her job.
Inhale.
She'd matched her chakra wavelengths. She'd seamlessly merged her threads into the flow, holding her own as well as she ever had, and dove right into those infinities of pathways right around his eyes — she was nervous, but ready all the same. She would conquer it this time.
Exhale.
Go, she kept telling herself. Go. Go. Push harder. Sweat began to drip from her brow. He was sweating, too, which was making her grip begin to falter. She concentrated pressure to the fingers on his temples, not letting them move even a millimeter. That sludge — she could feel it so potently that she could almost see it, thick and glossy and deep enough to suffocate in, coagulating her chakra. Keep going. Keep pushing. Don't lose your nerve.
Inhale.
Pain — pain started to seep in. And it wasn't shy. She could feel him grinding his teeth, bearing it; she tried to do the same, refusing to lose. Push, Sakura. It could have been her, or someone else who'd said it out loud; she'd never know which. But it hurt. It felt like her chakra was being pulled from her body like a second skin, just as vascular, teeming with nerves that were shrieking and begging to be put back where they belonged. Everything was wrong. The sludge was boiling now, angry at the incursion.
This wasn't a healing, she realized.
This was an exorcism.
Exhale.
She thought she'd had it then. This thin gray thread of light seeped through the furious mass, a fleeting ease on one of her thousand strings of chakra, just the barest hint of another side. Something past this horrifying barrier. She chased that microscopic slip in the rage and ignored the tidal wave of nausea that came with doing so.
Stop resisting me! she wanted to roar at him.
But then, beneath her hands, Sasuke screamed.
Inhale.
The sound chilled her blood, but she had to keep going, no matter what. This had happened last time, too, and she should have expected it. She should have done it herself by now. There was a faint metallic taste in her mouth — her teeth had ground into some softer inside without her realizing what or when.
Exhale.
Her nerves were on fire, flaying her alive. Don't scream. Don't lose. At this point, she wasn't sure how much control Sasuke had over the situation, over the rinnegan. She concentrated even harder, feeling her chakra pulse down to her core.
Inhale.
That other side eluded her like it was sentient. She could feel her legs shaking, her spine tightening. Her eyes trembled behind their lids. So close.
Exhale.
The muscles in her neck felt as if they were being pried apart, tender meat flaking from the bones. The sludgy mass was enveloping her chakra probes like a virus, spreading, bubbling, sucking at them with the intent to pull and drain. So, so close.
Inhale.
The screaming was louder now, hoarse and raw. Her chakra stores experienced a very sudden dip, and the impact of it spread into her bloodstream, bruising every muscle in her body at once, the thumbs of it digging in hard. Pain. She thought she'd get used to it — but she — but it was worsening by the second. The strength of a hundred wasn't close to enough.
The nerves it hadn't reached before were lit now, a million birthday candles of excruciating pain, melting the soft, waxy lining of her organs. A sob welled up within her and choked its way out of her mouth.
Sakura! A voice she recognized. Tsunade. But she didn't look. Her closed eyes burned with hot tears, ones that streaked down her face in hard, solid succession. She was supposed to have called it if was going south, but that was the thing — even in the midst of this awful fucking hell, she didn't think to stop, not even for a moment. The concern she knew was there would only matter once she was finished with this.
Another cry escaped her. It was okay, though. She could do this.
Sakura, another voice called, closer, deeper, steady. Two hands urgently placed themselves on her back.
For a very short moment, their pressure on her shoulder blades was grounding; chakra started to flow from the palms, merging with her own wavelength, and with a sharp snap, it was like her head broke above the surface of a flood.
Exhale.
The pain dissipated just slightly, just long enough for her to regain her focus. Her power was amplified now, doubled with this second flow.
Sweat ran down her straining neck. The bloody tang in her mouth was bitter with drive. Like she could taste that other side, that bright inner world of the rinnegan. Her chakra was no longer overwhelmed by the darkness, lost in the roiling churn of that blockage — she could physically sense it starting to push through.
Between her hands, Sasuke was suffering worse than she'd ever known him to in her life. His pulse was out of control, high and wild and pumping unnaturally hard against her fingertips. His chakra was like molten steel, the way it blared and converged on her intruding forces. She knew just how much he was suffering. She knew. Even if it was threatening to make her sick. But she was too close to the end to take it to heart. And even if she hadn't been, she probably wouldn't have spared him this.
Come on, she repeated to herself. Come on. She kept at it, even though it hurt. Kept pushing.
And then she felt the barrier give.
It was the strangest thing, she thought at that very moment, how it had just fallen away. Easily, suddenly, like it had...chosen to. Her heart, screaming its bloody pulses out, dropped at the feeling.
Gray light began to seep into the dark behind her eyelids. And the world went still.
If it was as if time itself had slowed to a near stop. As if her brain were functioning a thousand times over capacity just to see this happen in real time, to not let it pass her by in the merest instant flash. She waited. She waited for it.
What came to her first was the headrush.
It was nice at first, like a cool breeze soothing at her raw innards, the hot acid swimming through her brain.
And then it grew, slowly.
Then a little faster.
Then much much faster, whirling into a hum so powerful she could feel it in her fingertips — a rush so tangible and heavy and rapid that it lifted her senses, her thrumming heart, rocked through her in a suprise climactic starburst. The overwhelming way it hit her was toe-curling, spine-tingling, enough that her breath became rapid and shallow. She wanted — needed — more. And she chased it.
What came to her next, though, was not a relief, nor was it beautiful.
It was a horror.
The power was there, growing, consuming her threads with a thick, viscous tongue and dissolving them as easily as candy floss. The light was coming into her, obliterating each molecule in its path with a tiny explosion. Ravenous for more. Something stabbed hard into her brain and leaked, and she let out a contorted scream.
This is bad. A low, sharp voice from the other edge of the white void. Cut it off — get her to stop before —
She couldn't make sense of what was invading her mind. It was blood, and it was hunger, and it was bliss, and it was terror, and it was everything. It was everything.
She melted, drowned in the liquid death of herself. Her skull splintered and let her brain and spinal fluid ooze out in droves of black sludge. Her eyes rolled out of their sockets, bursting capillaries, shining bombs of blood and innards, infinitely reforming and exiting the inside of her face to detonate and leave their broken, gelatinous yolks at her feet.
Her skin was melting, dissolving atom by atom, each millisecond a blinding fury of pain. The hands at her back pulled away from her, taking molten strings of her body with it. Her lungs were collapsing. Filling with fire and fluid. Bursting inside the remaining seams of the inflamed marrow of her ribcage.
She wasn't ready for it. That was what this was telling her. She wasn't ready for this bloodthirsty power, this godly knowledge she was looking to unfurl. It was as if someone had poured boiling, spattering, raging oil into a thin glass cup, letting it steam and coat and ravage and shatter from the inside with relish. And relish it did. She could feel the fierce, furious anger at the attempt of intrusion. The delight in her pain. The condescension of it gauging her inadequacy.
No. Not again, she thought, the only words in the remaining matter of her brain. Not again. Not me.
And then the blackness swallowed her up in an instant, and that was it.
Inhale.
Sakura reminded herself to breathe.
To put her hands against the dense folds of her bedsheets and feel their borrowed warmth. To sense the way her lungs stretched around her breath. Still there, intact.
Healthy. Normal.
With a shaking limb, she reached for the bottle of liquor laying on the nightside table, feeling the sound of the glass dragging against the wood reverberate in the back of her head. She took a long, long pull of it, hyper-aware of the liquid scrape down the warped redness of her insides, how it went down easier with every gulp. Then she capped it, a careful hand setting it back on the table, and slunk down into her bed. The ache was everywhere. She still didn't have enough chakra back to heal herself — whatever she'd found inside that eye had extinguished her as inconsequentially as a lit candle. Even if she did have the ability now, she wouldn't know where to start.
It had been days since then, though she'd stopped counting after the third diluted sunrise. Who knew how much time had passed? She wasn't even sure if it mattered anymore. It hadn't worked.
Tsunade had warned her. Her own gut, every inch of it, had warned her. And yet she'd insisted on pushing, just like she always did. When would she learn? What would be enough to finally teach her to trust her instincts? To keep away from where she wasn't wanted?
A thin breath stuttered out from her chest. They couldn't end it here. They just couldn't. But she didn't know what to do. Sasuke's bone-chilling screams were phantom echoes in her ears, pressing through the faint darkness of her bedroom with dark, real, shadowed hands. One was threatening to close around her neck again, dragging her back down into the worst of it.
"You're alright," she said into the stillness of the room, grateful for the vibrations of voice in her chest and raw throat. It hurt to speak, but she did it again, and again: "You're alright."
If she said it loud enough, staved off the haunting long enough, she might just start to believe it.
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She couldn't go back to work unless she had chakra to do her job. The menial tasks of disinfecting and giving stitches were basically extinct now, at least in this part of the village. There were still traditional medicine practices scattered around for civilians who preferred them. Or for ninja who wanted to avoid the hospital, where every injury went on their record. Anything she could do required chakra. Without it — until she bounced back from the incident — she was effectively useless. And she hated it.
The only thing keeping her from losing her tenuous hold on her mind was the innate hum of energy at the core of herself. She'd know if that were gone. She had to believe it would resurface the way it was meant to if she just gave it time.
Chakra therapy, too, was Tsunade's suggestion. But Sakura had a feeling it was more for checking up on her and getting her out of the house than anything else.
What happened in there? Tsunade had asked her earlier, a glowing hand laid to Sakura's forehead, right at the opalescent seal they'd both earned, but was useless for now. What did you see?
Sakura braced herself on the lip of her kitchen sink, nausea running through her in a heavy, gusting beat. She hadn't known how to explain it — not even to the one person who was trying to understand. There weren't any words to describe what she'd seen. What she'd felt. It was the most sinister thing. There wasn't any way she could explain how terrified it made her — and not just of the rinnegan, but of Sasuke himself. What kind of power did he have locked away? What was he hiding?
She turned on the faucet and ran lukewarm water over her wrists. It dripped down her fingers, one by one, streams diving gently from the tips of her nails down the drain. Threads. Light. Sweat. Blood. With a frantic surge, she pumped soap into her palms, then mashed them together like a child learning to use its limbs. Her scrubbing was gruesomely slow, a scrape of nails against skin, slicing through the foam in a reddening rake. The water did nothing to soothe. It only washed away the soap, the bitter sting from the cracks of her too-dry skin, never cleaning what had found a home deep in every pore. If she'd had the chakra — if she'd had the means — she would have blown the skin clean off and grown it back herself, and no one would be the wiser.
Sakura knew she was unwell. This was plaguing her. Her hangover was a dull, aching staccato in her temples, roiling in her sour stomach, reminding her of what she was unable to forget.
She shouldn't — couldn't — keep this inside. It would eat her alive. Drag her into that black sludge. Make her drown, suffocate on her own death. It would do no good to anyone if she couldn't move along and find another way.
I won't give myself up for him, she'd told Tsunade, and more than once. The never again was tacked on the end after the last time she'd slipped — the last time she would ever let herself. She'd come so far from then. Hadn't she?
The sink still ran as she stepped away from it. The daylight spilled in through her window, and she wanted to drink it, safe and clear and dim, to fill her body with its nothingness. She threw open the panes like they'd done her wrong by staying closed.
The day was halfway warm outside, overcast. Nothing special or remarkable. It couldn't commit to fully sunny or cloudy, fully hot or cool. Limbo. She gasped in air — in through her nose, out through her mouth, coating her blistered throat with it. She tried not to dry heave. Then and now were converging on her all at once — a truth she'd never wanted to face, and a horror she couldn't run away from. She needed her own exorcism.
A sob formed itself around her panting breaths, falling on the deaf ears of the people easily roaming the street below her apartment. Reality. It was incredible, impossible to believe that any of this could exist in the same world as one where people lived, and ate, and shopped for groceries, and had jobs and families and normal days to tend to. A world where a mother could roll her baby's stroller down a quiet street and not think about an incomprehensible darkness, biding its time some place where no one could truly ever touch it but the ones it chose to do so. An evil that smiled and laughed and waved as it shut its door on you. That mother could go home, and tuck that baby into its crib, and other people, ones who'd chosen this path for any number of reasons, would try not to be crushed under the weight of pure terror, and she would never know.
Sakura was desperate to open up the earth with her fists. She craved that satisfying crack of land by her own will, the way grass would rise and shred and fly away, scared of her strength. She needed to feel powerful and alive. She needed to know that she was feared, revered, bigger than all of this. But there was no chakra, and that meant nowhere to channel that need save for the hard bump of words around the inside of her mind.
She'd have to settle for talking, even if it was the last thing she wanted to do.
She leapt from the window in a heartbeat, not caring where she landed, so long as she did.
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Her feet took her down that old familiar path, as if of their own accord, no thought or reasoning involved. Only intuition — finding what she needed at the very deepest part of herself.
This street — it was like a snapshot, a photograph worn at the corners. She felt like nothing had changed in ten years. Not the kindly elderly lady tending to the potted plants on her front steps. Not the second-story window of a neighbor's house, affixed with burgundy curtains behind the dusty, crooked pane. Not the group of cats chatting with each other on trash cans in a mildly sunlit alleyway. And certainly not the dark beige, chipped paint of the building she'd always recognize, always wonder about the life that happened in that one warm corner of the fourth floor.
Her hands shook, twisted into each other where they gripped the strap of her bag. The last time she was here...well, she just hoped what she found would be far better than that. Given recent events, though, she couldn't be too sure he was taking proper care of himself. Not that he would let that matter. He never let her check on him.
A worry or not, Kakashi was the person she needed to talk to the most. Not Tsunade, who was too driven by the motive to make things right her own way, or Naruto, who she loved with everything she was, but who could never understand what she needed him to. Kakashi was the voice of reason. The wisest person she knew. Their level-headed leader — whether he acknowledged that position or not. And he was close enough to the situation that he could tell her where to go, how to feel about it, without knowing the whole sad story. What he already knew was more than enough.
The door to his building creaked loudly. Old. And the inside was dull, unlit, save for the small spotted windows on each level. Sakura barely registered each floor as she walked inside and ascended to the next, instead focusing on the slow repetition of her feet on each upward stair. The wooden stairs groaned loudly, every single step echoing through the hallways of every floor at once. Tsunade wants me to fix this, she would say to him, sitting on the sofa she remembered seeing the shape of in the dark. At this point, I don't know if I can. I really don't know if I should. She would know he was listening, patient, even if he wasn't looking at her.
Remember when I told you I was scared? Her mind immediately erased that version, started over. Remember when I told you I was worried about all of this? Kakashi would nod, and it would reflect, hopefully, how he agreed with her sentiments. Well, I...I'm definitely...now, I think this is definitely a bad idea. Nothing about this can have a good ending. But I don't know where to stop.
I know, he'd say, or something like it. He'd said that last time. He'd had a bad feeling about it all, too. But he'd also told her to have faith, that things would work out no matter what.
Normally, she would believe him. After seeing what she'd seen, though — now — now, she wasn't so sure.
What she wanted from him, today, more than ever, was the truth.
Life bustled behind the doors of every other apartment on the fourth floor. She could hear the different tones of conversation, some of music; she could smell frying meat and the homey, sticky scent of rice. It was an incomplete picture, though. Kakashi's apartment was silent.
She softly made her way to the door, then knocked on it, scuffing her feet against the faded doormat. Perhaps there had been a pattern on it, once, but now it was plain, and dry leaves stuck deep in the tiny spaces between dulled-out straw. She remembered this, in its exact way, from the several times she'd come here before.
The longer she waited for a response, the further her stomach slipped, freefalling. Something wasn't right. There was no sound behind the door, yes, but there was also no seal on it either. There had always been a seal — even when he had been out on a mission for months — even when he was on the verge of death, fever high enough to curdle his brain, there had been a seal on his front door.
Sakura knocked again, this time with more force, frantic now. "Kakashi-sensei, it's Sakura."
She gave him a minute. Nothing.
"Kakashi-sensei."
Nothing but silence. Not even the clinking of dog tags on little blue collars. Even in her weakened chakratic state, she should have been able to sense him there.
She tested the knob. Locked. Her breath caught fast in her throat. She knelt down to pick it without even having a thought to the contrary.
The knob slipped beneath her sweating hands. The smell of unshined metal was as strong as blood, right before her face. Eyes bursting in her skull. In his skull. Don't lose your hold. She couldn't swallow around the sphere of panic that had lodged itself firmly in her throat. In other circumstances, this would have been a cinch, fiddling open this lock. Right now, it was taking her longer than usual, which only mounted her growing fear. The image of him before these last procedures — colorless, tired, not taking proper care of himself — came to mind. And then a whole wash of memories — infections, weeks in hospitals, untold pains and injuries. Kakashi's bed, the sheets stained dark, and his body in it, dirty, ill, dead.
The lock gave. She pushed her way in.
It was less dark inside than she was expecting. She still couldn't breathe. His apartment was dusty, filled with light from outside that baked at the worn floorboards. His sofa — she saw it now to be brown, a bit mottled, comfortable — was empty. The kitchen, its dated, coffee-stained countertops and tile floors, and the dog beds therein, were empty as well.
Sakura practically sprinted into the bedroom, where the door was open, as if inviting her in with a taunt. Blinding light. Death smiling at me. Her pulse was a pounding ache in her jaw.
She closed her eyes, bracing herself by the entrance. And then she opened them, letting the light back in.
His bed was empty.
She exhaled, holding herself up with hands to her knees. Not quite relief, not absolutely, but something close enough to it.
The bed itself was slightly rumpled, but the sheets were a uniform yellowed white, showing their years, the comforter a muted green. It suited him. More importantly, they were free of any bloodstains.
She didn't remember this from the last time she was here — not the sheets, nor the shelf beneath the window that lined the wall above his bed, home to a healthy potted plant whose leaves branched down near his pillow. The room was hardly decorated otherwise. Neat, but only because of its minimalism. Even the desk was free of papers, save for a scrap of one:
Pakkun - out for the day.
Food shopping for you and the boys.
Be back later
Happy saturday
"Sakura-chan?" a gruff voice called from behind her. She whipped around, heartbeat skyrocketing with a gasp.
Pakkun, in all his expressive glory, was standing in the doorway. The nostalgia she felt upon seeing him — the well of uneager joy —
"Oh, Pakkun," she whimpered, walking to him and bending down to gather him in her arms. He was stiff against her shoulder and hair, paws scrabbling and scratching in confusion, but he was warm and real, and there. Her face found the dense folds of fur and fat around where his neck met the rest of him. She breathed in that musky scent of dog — she used to be able to smell it so distinctly on Kakashi, back in the days when they still took missions together. "I'm so glad to see you."
"It, uh, sure has been a little while." He wheezed ever so slightly. "You okay, kid?"
That question alone made her want to cry. But she wouldn't. She settled for letting the emotion whirl in her gut, the ugly weight of a stone.
"Why can't I feel your chakra?" The words were a long, scraping choke. Pakkun sniffed at her hair.
"Dunno. Somethin' happened a couple of days ago where we all felt a disconnect. Like someone had cut a cord. It's still there, but…" He wriggled, uncomfortable. Sakura let him return to standing. "He never really told us what was goin' on. Only said it was fine, even though his chakra was out. Haven't seen much of him since."
It was the answer she should have expected — that he wasn't here. It was not the one she wanted, though. And not the one she needed. But she never prepared for the inevitable, did she?
No time to think of it. A memory snatched her in an instant.
Sakura. Calm and low, with steady hands on her back. Chakra pulling her out from the flood. The spiteful snap of clarity — Like someone had cut a cord — the pain bleeding from it, hemorrhaging. It's still there, but…
He had helped her. Kakashi had helped her during the operation, had helped her force her way into where she didn't belong, and now he was paying for it too.
The note from his desk was crumpled in her palm, the paper old enough for the edges to be soft, pliable. Her fingers trembled around it.
"When is this from?"
Pakkun's eyes were deep dark, rimmed in milky white, shiny, droopy, the way they'd been since she first met him. So unlike a human's, but with all the world of thought and feeling of one as they stared at her.
"Today, Sakura-chan." He sat on his hind legs. "He's okay, you know. I'd tell you if he wasn't."
One of her hands found her face, smoothing over her brow with pressure. She shouldn't be here. She shouldn't even know that he was out, or how he was doing, because that was how they operated. She worried ceaselessly while he lived his own private, separate life. He wouldn't want her here, would he?
If he'd answered the door — if he'd been in this room, sleeping, or maybe staring out the window, then yes, he would have talked to her, and she would have felt better, perhaps. He might have told her he'd seen what she'd seen, that he had felt that same living death, and it was fine. But she was lying to herself if she thought that this was the way to resolve things. She couldn't keep running to her sensei. She couldn't keep running to her shishou, or her best friend, or even to the problem itself, throwing herself back into the current until it died.
There was only one way she'd be able to fix what was ailing her, and it was alone.
"Thank you, Pakkun." She scratched the crest of fur between his ears. "Don't tell him I came here, okay? Please?"
The folds of his curmudgeonly face did not seem convinced. He held her gaze for a moment, and she nodded, holding back tears she desperately wanted to cry.
"Alright," he said finally. "Alright, then."
.
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The Uchiha compound was the stuff of nightmares. Desolate, empty, scarred by bloodshed and hate. Mania. Loss. The buildings were completely intact, but windows were shattered, walls graffitied with black and red. Killers, most of the words read. Cowards. Good riddance. Fucking murderers. It was a graveyard, still barely breathing, demons dying slowly somewhere deep beneath the ground.
It was no place to live, not for anyone. Not even its ghosts. It was loneliest place in the universe.
Sakura tried not to recall the last time she'd walked through this quiet wasteland — in absolute solitude — no lamplight to guide the way home — stop. She tried not to look over her shoulder as the wind crawled through the spaces between homes, chilling her to a shiver. It's okay. She tried not to let her hands shake, her mouth quiver, as she found the road to Sasuke's house.
It wasn't his childhood home — he'd told her that much. She'd never seen that place, would never have context for the place where his parents were killed. And that was best. He carried it with him everywhere he went regardless. This place was quiet, plain, its facade gray and spotless, eerily so among the wasteland surrounding it.
Sakura froze once it was in sight, suddenly feeling small. She should have told someone she was coming here. Someone could have — known where she was? Held her accountable? What? She could hear his screams again, feel them crawling into ever pore. And then another, deeper thing surfaced — she could feel his breath against her mouth — This is what you wanted. She felt her weakness then, her weakness now, and how much she wanted her power back. Keep going. Keep pushing. Don't lose your nerve.
There were ghosts here, though, despite it all. And one was on the roof of this stranger's house, staring at her from over its shoulder, eyes piercing into her feet and spine, locking her in place. There was no turning back from it now.
Sasuke was a spectre, tall and looming where he stood. One black eye and white skin. Black clothes and hands as pale as bones by his side. Terrifying. Beautiful.
Sakura swallowed. Adrenaline trickled beneath her tongue, sickening and cloudy. She'd seen him like this a thousand times, always standing between the forest and the sky, so far away but close enough to shoot daggers into her, make something hot and fierce bloom in her gut.
Neither of them moved.
Time stretched, amplified in that long moment, eyes locked and unwavering, ends of a magnet. Unwilling and unable to close the warped void between. She had no idea how long she had been standing there, how long she would have to before —
"What?" he said finally, loud and sharp enough to draw panicked flights from whatever few birds resided in the forest behind him. Even from her place at the front gate, she could hear every syllable of the word clearly enunciated. He hadn't needed to raise his voice, though. The furthest real noise was several miles away.
Her heartbeat was hollow, nauseating at the base of her throat.
"Get down here," she called out. The sound of her own voice almost surprised her. "I'm not going to talk to you like this."
You will not be above me. I will not be beneath you.
Sasuke only stared, eyes like the edge of a blade. And then he turned, disappeared from sight, slinking off the roof to land somewhere behind the house.
Her pulse thudded hard, each second he was out of her sight another reminder of the days before now. As he finally came around the house, walking with a straight back and lithe steps, she imagined him coming to her calmly, snapping her neck with his bare hands. One palm on her shoulder and one at her scalp, her tongue choking the last of her breath out of her mangled throat. Killing her in one fell swoop.
Sakura met him halfway.
She was grateful for her instinct not to approach the house any more than she was choosing to in this moment. The open space — the open gate behind her — she needed them for this to work.
The wind picked up again, spirit-thin, and she closed her eyes against it, against Sasuke in front of her.
Do it. I dare you.
"You smell like a hospital," she said instead, opening her eyes. Cold cotton and antiseptic. "When did they release you?"
His gaze was flinty, unnerving, stone-smooth and solid. He was so much taller now, even taller than Naruto. Broader, too. Strong.
"Does it even matter?" At least his tone was the same as she'd always known, that same flat affect. Still, it bristled her.
"Yes, it matters." Her arms tightened all the way down to her fists. "I'm the one who has to make sure this works, so I need all the details of your treatment. That's been made explicitly clear to you more than once. So unless your memory was affected during —"
"I remember," he said, and suddenly they were back in every place they'd been before. Orochimaru's lair. The front gates of Konoha. The hospitals and battlefields where she'd tried, forever, to help him. Her following behind him, chasing his back every time. Him charging toward her, the intent to kill, the intent to disillusion. His hand through her chest. His breath on her mouth. His palm against her bare stomach. His —
"I'm telling you that it doesn't matter. It's not going to work."
That snapped her back to here, now, and an ugly ripple of dread sank through her. Undermining her again, always.
"So you just want me to give up? Just because we're dealing with something that no one else has ever studied this extensively?" She curbed her anger just barely, holding it hard right behind her teeth, and yet — "I knew you were disloyal, but I never took you for a quitter."
Not hard enough. A low, cold blaze made its way into the muscles of Sasuke's face. For a moment, she thought she could see the tomoe spinning in both eyes like a purl in some mutable thing, a stirring underneath.
She should have kept her mouth shut. She shouldn't have come here.
"My loyalty isn't the issue," he muttered, slow and cutting. There was an intention in his eyes, those small waves in the black, and it was not kind. He was fundamentally incapable of kindness.
"Oh, really? Enlighten me, then."
"It's yours."
Her stomach lurched. "What?"
Sasuke's thin mouth was set, jaw tight. "Your insistence on blind patriotism is why we are stuck here. We have always been stuck here, turning and functioning solely on some idiotic persistence. You, Naruto, Tsunade, Kakashi — none of you are willing to look past your fucking selfish, cancerous, Konoha-centric idealism and just —"
"Shut up," she barked. Wrong. He was wrong, and so stupid. "You have no idea what Naruto and I went through to keep you alive after everything you did. And yes," she pressed on, "yes, you have suffered loss. I know you have. But Konoha has been nothing short of forgiving to you. So for you to —"
"Forgiving?" His lip snarled as he exhaled sharply as a slap, that one nasty noise Sakura couldn't stand for the very life of her. "You call this forgiving, then? This disgusting, pathetic definition of living? Fooling me into the lie of a temporary sentence?"
His shoulders were wide, still, his anger pure and clean. There was no color to his face, no flush of hate like she surely wore. She resisted the urge to hit him. She wanted to put a roaring punch to that callous face, put blood rushing where her hand had been, strong enough to make him flinch and wail.
It'd been a while, a long, long while since she'd last had an argument with him. And it was all adrenaline, fear and loathing and resentment, and she'd forgotten how potent it truly was. A flash of a vision crossed her mind — her sternum collapsing from the instant force of his shoulder, the impact splintering and bursting her heart. The false memory of him throwing lightning into her chest and shredding all the muscle, filling the valves and ventricles with insensate light. It all thumped wild and hot behind her ribs.
"What the hell are you talking about?" She did take a portion of a step toward him despite herself, even though she had to look up at him now. "Nobody fooled you into anything, Sasuke. It's a sentence you earned, and they're letting you off early. What else do you want? What the hell else could you want?"
Sasuke said nothing. He only looked at her. Black hair, white face, hard and mystic eyes. Beautiful and cruel.
"Are you always just going to" — words, they were starting to fail her — "to bite the hand that feeds you?"
Nothing. Again. Her pulse pumped to fill the quiet, curling in her ears. The judgment in his face was immaculately clear.
"This is what I meant. Blind loyalty." He stared down at her, looking at her like the words had to be pressed through the lenses of his mismatched eyes in order to be heard. "Did you think they were ever really going to give me my power back? Did you think they were doing more than parading you around for their own entertainment, making you believe you were accomplishing something significant?"
Wrong. Stupid. "You —"
"Did you really think they don't already know everything about the rinnegan? That all this pain they put you through isn't only for show?" He was immovable, crackling with latent fury. A chidori building in silence and absence. "Your beloved Hokage-sama and her council are playing you. Using your weakness and your all-consuming need for validation like a toy. All for their own greed."
Emotion ripped through her, a tear in the seam of the Earth, a blow through the chest. Greed. He wanted to talk about greed.
It was not wrong to believe that he knew. He knew what he'd done to her, the life he'd left her with. He knew that she always laid herself plain before him, ready for whatever may come, wanting to help the smallest parts of him that he'd allow her to. But he never allowed her anything save for the thinnest slip of hope, elusive, sliding through her fingers, wet and oily as an eel. Sasuke took, took, never gave. He came, he saw, and he always left, burning fields and forests in his wake.
"How dare you," she whispered, splintered, clutching the fabric of her shirt. Any shade of grounding, of landing back on her feet. "I know you don't believe in me, but this is…"
The right words failed her again, too lost where she couldn't reach. Her teeth gnawed at the inside of her lip.
"What I believe in are facts," he told her, stepping as if to circle her. "It is a fact that Konoha made the conscious decision to kill my clan."
Her fist clenched harder at her stomach. He looked straight ahead, away from her.
"It is a fact that I never asked for your help. Not when we were children, not when we were enemies, and not now."
Her palm laid flat now, fingers bending at their last joints to grip at her skin through her clothing. Protecting her, maybe, or trying to tear out her insides — she wasn't sure which one would feel more right, and she knew the feeling of both all too well.
"That is not even close to true." Do not fucking cry, Sakura, she thought, but the tears were already a lump wedged in her throat. "I —"
"Offered," he finished, unbothered. "You've never understood the difference."
"Oh, well, excuse me for giving a shit about you."
"Don't victimize yourself for something you weren't asked to do. Your emotions have always gotten the better of you." His eyes flitted down to the press of her hand, seeming to stare through it, like he was searching for the marks her fingernails were undoubtedly creating beneath. "I acknowledge that your powers have grown immensely since we were genin. That does not mean that you are capable of successfully reversing my condition."
"It's because you won't —"
"You need to listen to me." He was looking into her again, dark iron eyes blazing still, but different, somehow. More intense. His stature was dwarfing her. "When I told you not to follow me out of the village, you didn't listen. When I told you to stop trying to bring me back here, you didn't listen. When I told you I did not love you, you didn't listen."
The way he said love. It was without inflection or feeling. She wished she was used to it by now, wished she could purge that need to fill that gaping void in him. "Those were completely different situations, Sasuke, and you know it."
"Listen to me now." It was like her hadn't heard her at all. "It doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't matter what you try. There is nothing you can do to fix this."
Her head shook automatically. Deny, deny, deny. No. He was lying to her. He had to be, because he always lied. There was something he was hiding, protecting behind that stony facade. She felt hot, and stuck, and awful. He was wrong.
"You listen to me," she tried again, willing the shake from her voice. "If you don't want to tell me what you know, that's fine. You don't trust me, or the village, fine. Okay. But I'm the one in control of whether you get your chakra access back or not. So if you don't have even a molecule of faith in my abilities" — don't cry — "which I have worked harder than you ever have to achieve" — do not cry — "then you're not going to get very far."
"You don't get it, do you," he said, his words almost languid with the way they dragged and cut, glassy. "You're the same as you used to be. Pathetically one-track minded. Inserting yourself where you do not belong. You can't fix it, Sakura."
"Yes," she pushed, convincing herself all over again. "I —"
"You CANNOT. FIX IT."
It was like lightning had struck, hot and white. A deafening silence. Crows darted from the trees, soundless, black streaks against the pale sky, disappearing into thin air.
Sakura felt like she'd been electrocuted, suddenly alert to every single thing, living and dead. The fine hairs on her skin were standing up and still, the follicles and nerves burning within the surface. Every empty home seemed to radiate with the dissonance of Sasuke's words, the hairline fracture in his voice. She saw him for what felt like the first time.
His face was not a mask anymore. No, it was wild, and furious, and fractured. Something was seeping through, and it was sinister — and suddenly she was back in their operation room, light filling every sense, an ancient, vile condescension leaching into every last part of her.
This was more than a lack of faith. It was a multitude of bad things. Anger, leaking out from him like the evil hiding in his rinnegan. Pain — physical or mental, she couldn't tell, not from that single crack between his heavy, dark brows. More than anything, though, she saw that miniscule curl of his lip, that blue heat in his eyes, her reflection in that one remaining human eye, as he turned his gaze away. Disgust. It was, of all the things he could feel for her, for this entire process, disgust.
In that moment, Sakura felt it. She felt his repulsing hatred. She felt his inglorious pride. She felt the eyes of a thousand dead Uchihas on her, condemning her to his truth.
Defective, she remembered him saying with crystal clarity, his back to her, silhouetted by the light outside of that dreary room in his stolen home. I should have known.
Her fist collided with his face in a thunderclap. And the floodgates broke.
It felt like her mind and her body were operating outside of each other, some feral instinct unleashing itself from the darkest places she carried. She screamed, she hit and thrashed and let her fingers tear at anything they could. She had a deep, base need to feel flesh, his flesh split and drag beneath her nails, to put red in his skin and keep it flowing, enough to drink. The sides of her fists pounded against hard planes of muscle and bone. Her fingers found nothing for purchase. She swung and batted, struggling against the tall slab of his frame, and she screamed.
"Sakura," Sasuke commanded, voice muted. She collided with him even harder. Why wouldn't he move?
"Shut up!" She shrieked, unintelligible, throat blistering, aiming blindly with her fists until he caught her wrists in one hand. Her body jerked uselessly. "Let me GO!"
"Stop." He sidestepped a kick she attempted to land on his knee. "This is a waste of time for the both of us."
"Don't even fucking talk to me about wasting time, you piece of shit," Sakura all but growled. His hold was unyielding, too strong and calm for her to rip herself out of. It was truly stunning, his strength, and all it did was make her exceptionally aware of her own inadequacy, kerosene to the burning hatred eating her insides. "I've wasted my entire fucking life on you, Sasuke. You've been nothing but a thorn in everyone's side since the day we met you. An inconvenience. A coward."
His eyes still held that same expression, refusing to budge, even with a bruise blooming beneath the skin of his jaw. She couldn't stop.
"You're the worst fucking person I've ever known, you know that? I guarantee you everyone you've ever met feels the same way. Even Naruto." Her fingers twitched toward him, lusting for blood. "I wish I'd never met you, sometimes. I wish you'd never existed."
Sasuke's face didn't change, still. It was like he'd been frozen in time, in the grayness and emptiness of this cursed place. "You don't mean that."
The depth in his tone was his own version of suredness, she could tell. And she felt that fury rage even further within herself, all-consuming now that she was giving it the space to be.
"Oh," she whispered, voice raw, "I do. I absolutely do. And you know what?" She wrenched her arms, forcing her elbows toward her stomach once, twice, until he finally let her wrists out of his grasp. "It doesn't matter whether or not you think I can help you. It doesn't matter what I can or can't do. Because" — she swallowed down an inflamed sob — "because I will never do anything to give you what you want. I will never give you a single fucking thing again."
She should have waited to see if the words permeated. She should have waited to see if he gave even the barest inkling of hurt away, if he cared at all. But she didn't. Sakura had done enough waiting for him. It was time to let go. Not give up — never give up. No — it was time to let it go, once and for all. She steeled herself, letting her tongue work before she could even think to withhold anything.
"As long as I live," she said — "As long as I'm alive to see it, you will never have what you think you deserve. I'll make sure of it myself."
She took one final look at his face, that cruel and beautiful thing, vowing to never feel for it again. The wild, unrelenting hate. That deep ripple of untapped power and something visceral, an abraded emotion in him that could only be that same old familiar disgust. From now on, she would only offer him the same.
Sasuke did not reply to her. He only stared, solid as stone, jaw set and determined to stay that way. She could never expect more from him. She wouldn't.
Sakura turned to go without another word, leaving him where he stood, severing it clean.
She immediately broke into a sprint, letting the buildings and alleys of the compound blur past as she ran, too fast to reach for her with cold tendrils of tempting, malevolent wind or whispers or spirits. Too quickly for pity or time to change her mind or let her anger dissolve into heartache. Her feet thumped against the hard packed roads, thump-thump-thump until the paths were more worn, populated, recognizably so even when empty, and the brick walls surrounding the Uchiha grounds were out of sight behind her. She had barely noticed running through the entrance — but now that she knew where she was, away from it, she could breathe, gasp painfully around the open wounds within her chest and stomach.
Winded, she leaned against a tree, bracing herself against it with an arm. Stupid. Stupid. Her body crumpled against the trunk, feeling its bark scrape her pulsing skin. Her hair caught in the grooves of it, tangling and snatching as she sank toward the thick, mossy roots, unable to keep herself composed any longer. It'd been stupid to see him when she was so thoroughly weakened by the unsuccess of the procedure. It'd been stupid to go alone. It'd been stupid, childishly so, to think he would meet her in the middle, knowing he never had before. Not on anything, and especially not on what mattered the most.
Her huge, labored breaths stuttered, and she choked on her inhales. The tears came. She couldn't have stopped them if she wanted to, falling from her closed eyes as they were in salted streaks that made her cheeks burn. She cried like she'd wanted to all along. She sobbed — mournfully, exhaustedly, frustration in every fiber of her being. Sadness, most of all.
She'd done it. The words she'd kept locked inside had found a way out, seized the first slight and slip in her composure, learned and hardened through years of suffocating it into submission just to keep the pain manageable, livable. They'd exorcised themselves of their own free will, and it was fully justifiable. Sasuke might have been wrong, but she hadn't been. That didn't make it any better or easier.
The worst part, she thought, weeping miserably against that old Konoha tree, was not that she had said what she'd said. It wasn't that she'd been cruel, like him. It wasn't even that she'd exposed things she was never fully intending to let see the light of day.
No. The worst part, she knew, was that despite it all, despite how right it was to hate and fight and deny Sasuke of what he wanted most, she was sorry.
Sakura cried, let herself cry until her eyes were parched, until her nose and lips were sticky-dry, until the tepid daylight had faded fully into evening. And then she started home, walking only for that half-empty bottle at her bedside.