Chapter 25: Catching Up
Finally shaken from her stupor, Sakura's head shot up to identify her visitor. Upon recognizing his familiarly saturnine features, she relaxed a little—only a little, though.
"Ah, Sasuke," she susurrated, "You scared me there. Tsunade told me that you'd be back, but I can't say that I believed her—I thought I was going to have to go out looking for you again."
He looked at her without wavering but also without responding, so she continued in a sudden and falsely vivacious voice, "Just like old days, you know? But now it's like even older days with us all back together. It's everything we've wanted for so long and everything is finally great again. I've never been so happy!" Her babble was so fast-paced and falsetto that it must have been hard to understand her.
He continued looking at her with that same stolid look and, finally, she cracked. As Sakura stood across from him, her weakly charade crumbled away like a cookie gone stale. She was glad that there were no mirrors nearby because she suspected that her reflection would tell her more about herself and her current state than she was interested in knowing.
A nurse must have noticed her worn expression because she stopped her bustling work and reached out to Sakura with her free hand.
"Are you alri—?" Sasuke's hand wrapped around her wrist and cut her off mid-question.
"Don't touch her," he commanded in a tone burning with wrath. The nurse pulled her wrist free from his grip and scurried away as if her life depended on it—and it might have.
While Sakura wanted to scold him for being unnecessarily harsh, she knew that her reaction might have been much worse than mean words if the nurse had touched her unexpectedly. The touch of strangers was never a welcome sensation for Sakura, but right now it was a punishable threat rather than a forgivable annoyance.
"…I want to leave," she whispered. Hospitals were too full of active people—too full of active hazards.
He nodded and then turned slowly toward the exit. After a moment, the remaining span of hallway between themselves and the exit inexplicably cleared. Sakura suspected that his naturally scathing glare had something to do with the partition. After all, strangers would be unaccustomed to Sasuke's resting bitch face.
Despite her ambivalence toward him, she was grateful to spend time with someone less effervescent than Naruto and relieved that he had come home. She had to wonder why he really returned, though, and why he wore such an odd look on his face now that he was here.
Her eyes blinked slowly and she dragged herself through the open rift. She knew that there were many sets of eyes on their pairing, but the gazes went right through her. After all, Sakura was just a sickly specter trying to find her way home.
When they stepped outside into the night, Sasuke asked, "Where do you want to go from here?"
"My apartment. I just need to go to bed."
Sasuke nodded and followed her listless lead.
Sakura woke up to the shining sun with a stretching yawn. Her bed was comfortable enough to leave never again. In fact, she was beginning to think that she had been wrong to leave it in the first place.
As she sat up to crack her back, her eyes narrowed—there was an unwelcome guest in her kitchen. It seemed that she would have to get out of bed, after all. Moving with no more sound than a gentle breeze, she leaned over and grabbed the hidden poniard strapped to the inside of her closest bedpost. She gripped its handle within her gloveless right palm—even though she had fallen asleep in her tattered dress, at least she had remembered to take off her gloves and shoes.
Upon arriving at the entrance to her kitchen, she whipped the poniard around the corner without looking to see the intruder's identity. She might have worried about it being a friend, but she knew that no one besides herself and the building owner had the key to enter her quarters.
"Sakura, it's me," Sasuke's voice called. Suddenly, she remembered meeting him at the hospital.
She sighed. "Sorry."
When she turned the corner, she found Sasuke sitting at her kitchen table with her poniard lodged in the wall less than an inch from his head. Tiredly, she walked into the room and sat across the table from him.
"I forgot you were here. I don't even remember the rest of our walk back last night."
He gave her the same look from yesterday. "Sakura, what happened?"
She was silent for a moment before letting out a weak chuckle. "Which part? My life's been pretty eventful lately."
"Danzo."
"I'm surprised that you wouldn't ask about Itachi first," she answered evasively, but with genuine surprise.
He shrugged. "I've already waited a long time to kill my older brother. He can wait a little longer."
She remained silent, so he pushed, "Did Danzo capture you?"
"Well, he didn't capture me. But his underlings did."
"When did that happen?"
Her throat and tongue dried like fruit in the sun. "…a month and a half ago."
His face visibly paled before taking on a foreboding umbra. Details were unnecessary to indicate that anyone who had spent over a month as a prisoner had seen better days—unless that person had been a prisoner of Itachi, of course.
"What happened there?" His words presented the question that she had dreaded anyone asking. There were many reasons why Sasuke held no reputation for his tact—this was one of them.
"I'm sure you can guess," she rasped.
However, as always, Sasuke pushed for things he wanted. "Sakura—what happened?"
She rolled her eyes at his persistence. "You want to know so badly? Fine. They took me while I was unconscious, drained my chakra, and kicked the shit out of me for six weeks straight. I don't remember most of it because I probably suffered a TBI or ten, but it's a miracle that I still have all of my teeth. Prince Ibiki Charming must've told the redheaded twins to lay off their antics so that he could interrogate a conscious person and I finally came to. Their mistake was my reward, though, because I activated my Yin Seal and knocked down walls until I remembered what fresh air tasted like. Now we're sitting here and I am just fucking dandy."
Sakura had not felt so powerless in her entire life. No matter how much she had trained, Danzo's henchmen stripped her of every scrap of worth, control, and confidence that she had toiled to cultivate. They had smashed her pristine pillars and desecrated her temple.
"…redheaded twins?" Sasuke asked.
"Yeah." She grimaced. "The people who beat the shit out of me often enough to make me forget what level consciousness felt like."
Feeling full of rancor and resentment with no outlet, she picked up her nearby saltshaker and crushed it in her left hand. She let out a sibilant laugh upon realizing her poor choice: she should have chosen the pepper. As her hand began bleeding from its panoply cuts, Sakura stood up and threw the peppershaker at the opposite wall just to spite herself.
Chunks of ceramic still laced her left hand, so she removed each large piece and crushed it in her opposite hand: she would hate for her right palm to feel left out of the bloody mess. Once she was finished carving up her opposite palm, she rubbed her dripping hands together and threw them into the air like the captain of the pep squad.
Sakura cracked her neck, ran her hands through her short hair, and turned back to face Sasuke. He looked at her with a mixed expression—a mixture of what, she did not know—and she supposed that she was acting a bit droll today.
"I may be a lot of regrettable things, but powerless is not one of them."
He arched an eyebrow. "You might be if you let yourself bleed out like that. Everyone's useless when they're dead." Sakura was surprised that he would joke rather than contradict her words in his default severe manner.
She leaned down and patted his right cheek. "Don't you worry your pretty little self. We have a medic in the room!"
He looked up at her unfazed by the hot blood she had wiped all over his face. "You look pretty good for being such a mess."
Sakura smiled viciously. "You look pretty awful for being so well put together." The blood smears really dampened his usually soigné appearance.
Sasuke looked amused. It was a little funny because Sakura knew only one other person who could maintain such calm in such a peculiar situation.
Suddenly, he was up from his seat and standing close enough for her personal space to feel invaded. It was odd, but nothing felt normal right now. Her state of alarm from their proximity heightened when he placed his hands on her shoulders. Then, when he leaned forward, her apprehension skyrocketed. As socially oblivious as she might be at times, she knew that Sasuke's heavily lidded eyes had only one explanation: he sought intimate contact. Probably just a brush of cheeks or a timid kiss, but...
With all of her past infatuations for his cold and confusing character, Sakura should have melted into this moment. Instead, she froze as if stricken by lightning. In the past, she might have framed this moment as her sweetest childhood dream, but in reality, it felt like a gauche nightmare. She could not fathom why anyone would think her moment of bleeding misery was an appropriate time for romance, even someone as perplexing as Sasuke.
When Sakura looked up at him, she knew with steadfast certainty that this was not what she wanted—Sasuke was the wrong person and, as usual, he approached her for the wrong reasons. Even though Sasuke's hands were on her shoulders and her blood painted his face, she found herself missing someone else.
It was wrong of her to want him instead of Sasuke. It really was. Sasuke would be furious if he knew. But, she prepared to push him away, anyway.
Sakura was ready to break free from his advances when they heard someone knock at her door. Startled, she looked down at herself and determined that now was not an appropriate time for visitors—especially not if those visitors were Naruto and Tsunade as she suspected.
"Ignore it," Sasuke murmured, "If anyone sees you like this, it won't end well for you."
He was right, of course. Her kitchen was a gory mess and she was much worse—if Tsunade saw her like this, she would end up with a babysitter who might never leave. If Naruto saw her, he would not leave her side for a year or longer. Even though she was not in her finest condition, freedom was something that she had just regained; she would not give it up for one moment of anger.
Although Sasuke was correct, his point held a questionable caveat. "Yeah, most people would have a conniption if they saw me like this. So, why are you so okay with me smashing kitchenware and wiping blood all over your prized mug?"
Sasuke snickered. "I'd be more worried about your hair than my complexion." Then, his face grew serious. "But, really… Seeing you act this way is probably the most I've understood another person in my entire life. I won't pretend that I'm prone to worrying about the feelings of others, but reacting with blind and destructive rage to someone who's taken what's yours is a feeling that I understand all too well."
Sakura blinked at him, feeling a little dazzled. She had never considered that Sasuke might be capable of empathy, nevertheless capable of admitting to it. His tacit message was a profound one: he felt for, understood, and cared for her in this instant. Even if his feelings ended up confined to this moment, it was remarkable that they happened at all.
As touched as she was by his empathy, its temporal misplacement saddened her. At a different time in her life, she might have been able to return his feelings. In the present, she was unsure that reciprocation was an option.
Sakura flinched when her visitors pounded impatiently on the door. "Sakura? Sakura? Are you in there?" It sounded like Tsunade's voice.
"Sasuke, I'm going to lie in bed. Answer the door and tell them that I'm sleeping. Do not let them in under any circumstances." She hoped that he was feeling empathetic enough to go along with her flimsy plan.
He nodded with a small smirk and waved her away to go hide. She did not need another signal and disappeared from the room in a flash.
Just as she settled under the covers, she heard Sasuke open the door. "Sakura's sleeping. If you need to speak to her, come back some other time."
"So, you're back? Good. We need all the help we can get right now." It sounded like Tsunade had come to check on her as Sakura had predicted.
"What are you doing in Sakura's apartment while she's sleeping, Sasuke-teme?" Naruto growled before gasping, "Don't tell me that you guys started dating during my coma!"
Sakura rolled her eyes and knew that Sasuke's smirk must have been pronounced enough to hear it if she listened. The following silence spanned a few moments, but it was appropriate considering Naruto's usual lack of tact.
"Yeah, loudmouth. So if you bother my girlfriend anymore while she's sleeping, I'll put you back in the hospital."
Sakura nearly wet the bed for the first time since infancy—not that it would have mattered with her bloody hands already staining the sheets. She could hardly contain herself; Sasuke had no right to make such outrageous claims.
"I heard her talking all sweet and soft to someone in my hospital room…so, that was you!" Suddenly, Naruto paused and Sakura feared that he might go ballistic. "Wait… I heard her accusing some guy named Jun of spiking her coffee for Danzo." He paused again before asking hesitantly, "Is Sakura in trouble?"
He had heard her murmuring to Itachi's raven. Now it took every bit of her willpower to stay in bed. Although Naruto was far from scintillating, even dunces had the power of luck—if Sasuke decided to probe his memory, she had little doubt that he would make the connection without any effort on Naruto's end.
"If Sakura's sleeping, we'll talk about this in my office, Naruto. You've missed a thing or two over the past five years and it's about time that someone's brought you up to speed," Tsunade said dryly, sounding drained. "Before we go, though: we found this basket of blueberries outside of her room. Can you make sure she gets them?"
"…who should I say they're from?" Sasuke asked. He sounded even, but Sakura knew better.
"I'm not sure—there was no tag or card. Probably Ino or Kakashi, I'd imagine. Just stick them in her fridge for now," Tsunade suggested, before taking on a low and meaningful tone, "Tell Sakura we stopped by, though. Naruto's going to stay in his old apartment for now if you'll be around to look out for her. You've messed up a lot of things, Sasuke—don't let this be one of them."
When Sakura heard her door click, her heart had suffered all of the anxious exercise that it could take for one day. She knew that those blueberries were not from Ino or Kakashi.
Sasuke Uchiha stood in her kitchen holding a basket of blueberries from his arch nemesis to his love interest. Nothing good could come from this.
Nothing except for blueberries.
Authoress's Note:
Thank you for reading, everybody~! And an Internet cookie of love to those who take the time to review.
I hope you all enjoyed the chapter. :)
A
