Title: this burden, it's made its home inside
Summary: her ghost never leaves him, and drives him to the edge of his sanity.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Prompt: sasuke being haunted - hokagee
Rating: T+
Warning(s): There's blood and some very light gore, and a shit ton of angst. LIKE A LOT.
Comments: Sequel to chapter 32. Try not to hate my so much after reading this.

It's the same nightmare every night. It starts with a corpse of a man long supposed to be dead, and the roar of winning soldiers. It starts with two enemies who had once been friends, in conflict with one another's mindsets. It starts with the familiar grief of a teenager, not quite yet adult, who is unable to withstand being torn away by the ever-so-real dream of his family alive andhappy. He is angry. He is unforgiving. He has a thirst and a need for revenge so intense that it makes him shake.

He attacks without thinking, and this is where it all burns.

In this nightmare, he can see, in the way he hadn't been able to at the time, the swift, horrific realization cross her face; he can see her jump forward in haste, throwing herself in the way of the ever-so-occupied blond. He can see the pain and the betrayal in her widened eyes—can see the agony that comes with loving someone such as him so unconditionally. He can see: he's never hurt her this much.

(it figuratively and literally kills her to die by the hands of the one she loves—the one she has always loved)

He feels a torrent of emotions, then. There is so much going on in his mind and in his heart that he simply finds himself unable to keep up, his body frozen there, eyes wide and mind running wild. He doesn't know what to do.

And then she utters his name, and he can't breathe. He can feel her heart in his hands, thudding weakly, the muscled organ torn beyond repair. He can't believe what he's done—he doesn't want to believe that this is real but it isand the proof lies right there in his hand, her warm blood flowing steadily between his fingers. He looks up to those eyes again, looks at the way the life in them fades, feels the purest, most unfathomable self-hatred sweep over him and—

This is where he usually wakes, with a cry of frustration and relentless shaking of his sweat-drenched body. Mournful of a loss he once promised he would never allow himself to feel again.

And when he gets up, a new nightmare begins.

.

.

It would have been a blessing for his torment to last only in the night, for his mind to recover in his time awake, and allow him some type of peace, however small. But Sasuke Uchiha has never been one for luck, his life forever cursed in a downward spiral of pain and suffering.

This is why, he reasons, the ghost of her murdered form follows him beyond sleep, appearing to him in broadest of daylights when he is alone and trying to forget, looking as bloody, battered and lifeless as she did at that time.

She never says anything—she just stands there, staring at him with those hollow, dead green eyes, her pale face streaked with dry, crusted blood and framed with dull pink hair that once looked so lively. The sight is enough to have him shaking, and he never lets his gaze wander past her neck because he's made that mistake once before and it took weeks before he could stop throwing up and get the image of that hole in her chest oozing red and showing her torn flesh—product of his very own hand—out of his head.

So he stares at her face and shakes, shakes, shakes, clenching his fists and digging his nails into his palms to try and break the horrible illusions of his mind, his eyes slipping shut tightly once he finally breaks skin and feels a tolerable kind of pain which shatters her phantasm and brings him the most welcomed of reliefs.

He doesn't waste a moment to begin training again, afraid she will come back once the pain is gone, stepping up his tempo and increasing his combos, pushing his muscles harder and harder, until he is sure he will tumble past his limit and leave himself unable to even think of anything at all as he drags himself home and to his bed.

Sasuke trains to forget.

But it doesn't always work.

Sometimes, on his way home, Sasuke sees her again: standing in the streets amongst the crowd, making him tense and pause in his steps, eyes wide and heartbeat picking up speed, his breath catching in his throat for just a moment, before someone finally steps through her apparition and makes her disappear. Other times, he doesn't see her until he steps through the door of his tiny self-built house, catching sight of her bloody figure from the corner of his eye and refusing to look her way and torture himself, even as she whispers his name in the most broken, betrayed of tones.

And on some rare days, when the world is feeling particularly cruel, her laughter whispers in the wind, slipping through the cracks of his walls and flittering against his skin, causing him to jerk up from his already horror-plagued sleep, her name falling from his lips as he looks around with crazed, alerted black eyes, almost as if he is expecting to find her somewhere in the room as her old lively self again. But he never does.

(and the disappointment is crushing, making it hard for him to lull back into sleep with his mind whispering the darkest thoughts of torment and laughing at him cruelly, making it hard for him to breathe sometimes because why was he never allowed to hope, why did he always have to—)

It is a cruel, never-ending cycle.

Every day, Sasuke gets up, ignoring the sting of his eyes, the ache in his limbs, the exhaustion of his mind; ignoring the nausea twisting at his stomach and the nightmares of this night filled with his blood stained hands and lifeless green eyes.

Every day, he pulls himself out of bed and shuffles to the bathroom, one hand twisting the shower knob completely, while the other works at pulling off his clothes damp with his terror induced perspiration. He steps under the showerhead, jaw tensing and hands fisting as the boiling water assaults his skin, washing away the evidence of his ill mindset and drawing his thoughts away from his nightmares, making him forget if only for a moment. He welcomes the sweltering whips and lashes of the scalding water, allowing them to punish him for his weakness and inability to fight this.

And when he drags himself out of the shower, and finishes pulling on a new set of clothes, he doesn't even bother drying his hair or trying to eat breakfast. Instead, he grabs his training gear, a few bottles of water and two ripe tomatoes, and shoves them in a bag before proceeding out the door and starting towards the desolated grounds, where he will spend the rest of the day sweating and punching and kicking and bleeding until everything in him throbs and screams for rest.

(Because he remembers what happens when he doesn't beat himself down to exhaustion. He remembers the vicious nightmares that made him scream and punch and claw at his own skin; remembers the mental breakdowns that paralyzed him in bed for days, starving him and sending him into momentary insanity; he remembers well.)

And for the past nine years, this is how Sasuke Uchiha has lived.

.

.

The worst times, he supposes, are at the start of every new spring, when the cherry blossom trees bloom softly, when the grass turns greener, surrounding him in the sweetest atmosphere of pink and green and everything that reminds him of the girl he is always trying to forget. She is most vivid in these times: screams louder, blood thicker, eyes clearer. She looks more real. Morebroken.

("you ruined me," he hears her whispers all the time, voice raspy and weak, like he'd last heard it before she died)

It is hard to get himself to the point of no return because she is there, everywhere he turns—in the trees, in the grass, in the wind, in the water—lingering around him, whispering silent words of betrayal, screaming in agony, sobbing heart-wrenchingly, reaching deep within his soul and chilling his bones, rendering his knees too weak to support him, at times.

But it doesn't end there.

All too often in the horrible hell that is spring, he wakes in the night at the sound of her voice calling his name, and startles in horror as he finds her in his bed, drenching his sheets in imaginary blood, choking on her own life-force as she hisses out, "this is what you've done to me, Sasuke-kun—this is what you've done to an innocent girl who did nothing but love you!"

It's hard to breathe in times like these, with his heart squeezing in his chest so painfully he almost curls into himself, but he forces himself to turn his back away from her, forces himself to shut his eyes and convince himself the blood is not real—

(—even if he can smell it, taste it, no it's fakefakefakepleasebelieve—)

—and that she is not here. He mutters dismissals relentlessly in hopes that she will leave him alone, clenching his teeth and digging his fingernails into his palms violently, trying to will away her hallucination, while her whispers and screams echo in his head so loudly he struggles not to lose the sliver of sanity left in him.

In the end, his bleeding palms and aching teeth anchor him to reality.

(But they are no help to the vicious, traumatic nightmares that follow him around in the spring, the ones that make the bile rise in his throat, and make the shouts of despair slip from his lips. The ones that break him a little more.)

But on the 10th year—the 10th spring since he's been here, the 10th spring since she's been gone—there is a change.

Just like every other night, Sasuke drags himself to bed, throwing his weapons on the ground and slipping off the bloodied, dirt matted clothes, something like a gasp escaping him as he drops to the bed and feels the full throb of his over-exhausted body. He thinks he might have overdone it this time, every muscle in his body screaming and burning like hellfire, his limbs so pathetic and feeble that he thinks his bones might have melted.

But this is good, he reasons, as he closes his eyes. This way, the darkness will take over soon. There won't be any torment from a ghostly, bloody ghost. Only the nightmares of tonight.

"Sasuke-kun…"

He feels his heart stop.

"No," he hisses, feeling the dread of the moments to come creeping at his throat.

(too good to be true always too good to be true because he can never for once in his fucking life get a goddamn break)

"Sasuke-kun."

His heart lurches, and he fists his hands, jerking his head down in dismissal.

"Go away," he grinds out, clenching his eyes shut tighter. He doesn't want to deal with this tonight. He's too tired—too jaded. He doesn't feel like he has the energy to pull through; doesn't feel like he can hold on to reality when his head already feels like a dark, hellish fog.

And this is where it alters from the routine that he is so sadly used to: with a whispered confession of a dead girl, in a tone he hadn't heard her use even years before he put his hand in her chest and (accidentally) murdered her.

"I love you."

His eyes snap open, then, the blood in his veins turning to ice the instant he is met with the sight of Sakura's soft, ghostly figure. She's smiling in the way she always did back in those years he was still with the team—gentle, loving, happy. The sight makes him choke in regret, but it isn't until she reaches out to touch him with her hand that he throws himself at her, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his face in her chest, trying to hide the tears threatening to spill. He rasps out her name hoarsely, puffing out shaky, barely controlled breaths that speak largely of his close, imminent breakdown.

"Sasuke-kun, it's okay," she murmurs to him, then, running her fingers through his rough, unkempt locks, before pressing her lips to the crown of his hair. "I love you. It's okay."

And—

(whether that's because of his exhaustion—of his body and holding himself together—or because of how real and alive she feels in his arms, or even because he hasn't been held like that in so many goddamn years)

—he lets himself break.

.

"Go back, Sasuke-kun," she says softly, as she strokes his hair and lets him cling to her with everything he has, sobbing desperately into her chest like he's never cried a single tear in his life. Even in death, she can feel her own heart break at his pain, the sight of him so alone and broken and beaten down by no one but himself making her wish more than anything that he wouldn't have to be by himself anymore.

"Go home. Kakashi-sensei and Naruto are waiting for you."

A/N: Just because anyone gets confused about Sasuke hallucinating two different kinds of Sakura:

The idea of it is that he hates himself so much that he imagines she does too, so every hallucination about her being jaded and dull and bloody—well it isn't her. It's his hallucinations, his cruel mind that does this.

But when real sakura appears after ten years (originally, hokagee and i talked about how she appears to him because she pushed some of her chakra into him the way Naruto's parents did to see him again, but I forgot to include that in the first prompt) and forgives him and shows him she doesn't hate him, and he knows she's the real one cause she's not a part of his imagination and she's "real" because she can touch him.

Thanks, hallous, for asking me about this because then all of you can know the little details i forgot to add in the prompt.

DeepPoeticGirl