Chapter 33: Revenge
Sakura took a deep breath and prepared herself for the day's upcoming events. She opened her apartment door to find Sasuke leaning against the hallway wall—their gazes locked to convey their mutual preparedness. They exchanged nods of acknowledgement and were on their way.
They walked in stoic silence, but Sakura would bet that his heart was beating as erratically as hers was. She was going to confront her abuser and he was going to avenge his family—this day held a lot about which to be excitedly anxious. Although confident in their odds, she was nervous to see what skills the village elder would have in store for them; she had no imprudent hopes of him being a pushover in combat.
When they arrived at the Hokage's tower, Sakura gulped. She and Sasuke looked at each other and nodded—they were ready. As they walked up the stairs, she silently hoped that Kakashi was on time today. She hoped that his and Naruto's ruse of setting up for an evening celebration would keep civilians out of the streets and safely in their homes.
When they reached the Hokage's office, they knocked and entered. Despite the early hour, Danzo was already seated and subjecting Tsunade to false, deriding small talk about his time away. Contrary to his steadiness, the Hokage looked like she needed electrolyte water, bread, and a daylong nap—she was clearly hungover in the worst of ways.
Upon seeing her guest, Danzo turned toward them and disparaged, "This meeting isn't an open forum. The Uchiha boy can leave."
Sasuke's face remained stony enough to belong to a corpse. "Actually, I have information that'll be relevant for my teammate's case. We're a free village and she has every right to provide witness testimony on her behalf."
This was news to Sakura, but she would just have to improvise. Right up until the showdown, this whole thing would be nothing but false niceties, anyway. She had practiced so much deceit over the past several months that this meeting would seem breezy in terms of conversation.
"He's right, Danzo. Sasuke can stay," Tsunade determined. Danzo looked agitated by her decision, but did not protest. She wondered if he knew that Sasuke's presence changed his odds in the upcoming face-off. It did not require a mathematician to determine that the number two was greater than one.
The Hokage laid her palms on flat on her desk and prepared to begin. "Alright, everybody. This meeting begins now. Danzo, explain to Sakura why you've called her here."
The village elder grunted and nodded in compliance.
"Sakura Haruno, you have committed a long list of crimes against the village. You have cavorted with the enemy, withheld vital intelligence, abandoned the village on now two occasions, and killed three agents of Root. With such a long and egregious list, I unreservedly recommend execution as your punishment."
Immediately, three faces in the room turned into vicious snarls, but Tsunade was the first of them to voice her discontent.
"Danzo, your third charge is denied without further consideration. Now please explain the basis for the other three," she hissed through her teeth.
"It's a shame that you let your partiality for your student cloud the truth, Tsunade. But still, the three charges in themselves are enough to warrant execution." His gaze turned toward Sakura. "The first charge is for cavorting with the enemy. When you left the village the first time, you spent a considerable amount of time with Itachi Uchiha, the man responsible for the Uchiha genocide and a long list of heinous crimes against the village. Why Sasuke would want to testify on your behalf after a betrayal like that, I cannot imagine." He smiled. "And what is your defense?"
"I would hardly call torture-by-tsukuyomi as a hostage 'cavorting with the enemy.' But, you also seem to think that my second time away from the village was a willful excursion, so perhaps you're just confusing your words all over the place today," Sakura jabbed bitingly.
He still smiled at her despite her insult. "So, you have no defense—as I expected. The second charge is tied in with the first, which at this point has no defense. While cavorting with the enemy, you doubtlessly gained information that would be valuable to the village. However, you have chosen to withhold any such information, at great detriment to the village. If the first offense was not enough, this one undeniably brands you a traitor." His smile vanished. "And what is your defense?"
"There can be no defense sound enough for unsound charges," she replied through clenched teeth. Maintaining a calm façade during this meeting was proving itself much harder than she had imagined. She could only take solace in the fact that she would not need a defense once he was dead.
Sakura took a moment to glance at her teacher and discovered that she was having just as much difficulty remaining calm as her student was. A sideways glance at Sasuke revealed that he was somehow the calmest person in the room—an eerie circumstance, considering Danzo's tranquil composure.
"An all-around stunning lack of defense, Ms. Haruno," the village elder commended with mellifluous disdain. "I would say that we could conclude here, but out of respect for the Hokage, we will continue. Your third charge is for killing three of my finest Root agents and leaving behind only two bodies for me to find. How you uncovered their mission is beyond me, but I have no doubt that it is further proof of your criminal activity while away from the village."
Tsunade narrowed her eyes and interrupted, "Enough babble, Danzo. Who were these agents of yours?"
He sobered and gazed intently at Sakura. "I will describe them as the accused would know them. The first was Ibiki Morino. He was an important, yet obvious member of the Konoha intelligence network. The other two were Chi and Chikako Mori. They were twins with hair so red that only their fierce loyalty to this village could match its brilliance."
That was all Sakura could handle—she had reached her outer limit. Even though she had expected nothing less from Danzo, hearing her torturers described with such esteem was nefariously cruel. The only thing that held her back from attacking him was the knowledge that she needed to drag this out as long as possible in order for Kakashi and Naruto to do their jobs properly.
Tsunade stood from her desk angrily. "Quit it with the poetics, Danzo—."
Just as the Hokage appeared ready to embark on a verbal tirade, Shizune slammed open the door with a wooden box in her hands. Her eyes darted around the room like a scared animal in the presence of hungry predators; her discomfort was profoundly evident. Sakura pushed aside her knee-jerk annoyance knowing that Shizune would not have come in here without a good reason.
Shizune bowed. "I-I'm sorry for interrupting, Lady Tsunade. This box was just delivered with utmost urgency and the deliveryman told me that he was already running late…" She looked around nervously before running up to Tsunade and placing the delivery on her desk. "P-please forgive me, I'll leave right away."
Shizune followed through with her promise and closed the door quietly behind her as she left. Despite the previous tension, all eyes in the room were now on that box. Sakura doubted that Shizune knew its contents, but she wondered what the deliveryman could have said to convince her to deliver it to the Hokage during such a high-stakes meeting.
"If it's that important, then you should open it, Tsunade." The phrase sounded like a request, but Danzo's tone spoke of strict demands. Sakura had no doubt that he was searching for reasons to undermine Shizune's competence in an effort to reflect it upon Tsunade's personal character.
The Hokage muttered under her breath, "I have no idea what this could be…"
Everyone stared in silence as she slid the wooden lid off and consequently let the foulest stench Sakura had ever smelled into the room. Tsunade coughed and the rest of them gazed on with wrinkled noses—it stunk like someone had delayed a gourmet food gift to the point of its rotting. From where she stood, all Sakura could see was packing hay and melted ice packs.
Tsunade pushed some of the hay aside and froze. The look on her face aged her more in seconds than time itself had in twenty years. Sakura's stomach sunk as she realized that something awful must have lied inside of that delivery box.
"Who thinks this is funny?" Tsunade demanded angrily. "Danzo, this is the exact type of thing you would do to get your way and I'm sick of it! This crosses the line!"
Swift for an old man, Danzo lifted himself from his seat, walked over to Tsunade's desk, and peered inside of the box. His facial expression did not change, but his body stilled in a way that indicated serious news. She was unsure of how anything could be more serious than her own looming death sentence, but she was not excited to find out.
Danzo returned to his seat and suggested, "Sakura, you should see what's inside the box—I'm sure you'll be shocked. I knew that you weren't anything special, but I never expected you to send damning evidence right to your own trial."
Tentatively, Sakura walked over and peered inside of the box. Her body nearly recoiled out of reflex, but she locked her knees in place before she could show any weakness. Even from an initial assessment, it was clear that the contents were some type of human remains—the stench combined with the array of glistening red left no room for doubt. After reaching out and gently brushing more of the hay aside, Sakura fully recognized the box's contents: the decapitated head of one of the twins.
"I found the heads of my two other agents, and it seems that the third has surfaced. Tsunade, if you needed proof of your student's guilt, it is sitting on your desk," Danzo explained as Sasuke walked over to see for himself.
"You think I did this? I wish I could claim the blame for their deaths! My only regret is that I wasn't the one to put them out of their misery," Sakura griped. While she had no real defense against her first two charges, she could firmly state that she had played no role in these assassinations.
"I'm ready to present my testimony now," Sasuke announced.
The bubbling chaos in the room cooled for a moment as everybody listened to what he had to say.
"It's impossible for Sakura to be the killer."
Danzo stared at him. "And what makes you believe that?"
"When Sakura escaped your prison and returned to the village, she told me about her daily cell visitors: Ibiki Morino and the two redheads whose names she didn't even know until you took the time to introduce them today. As everybody knows, revenge is a bit of an obsession of mine, so I'm sure that you can see where this is going." He smirked intently at Danzo. "While Sakura sequestered herself away from the world, I left the village to make them suffer for what they had done to my teammate. Death would have been a merciful penance in comparison to what I had planned for them. By the time I found them, they were freshly dead—and headless. I would have thought that Sakura had done it, too, if I hadn't known that she was still back in the village. She couldn't have killed them unless she was in two places at the same time," Sasuke explained.
Sakura's eyes grew wide and she muttered under her breath, "Three aberrations. I will leave the fourth to you." Itachi's words suddenly made sense.
Her head shot up and she began to laugh maniacally. "They're dead! They're all dead!"
All of her nightmares seemed silly now—it would be hard for her tormentors to do much harm with their heads separated from their bodies. She was not sure of his driving motives, but she knew that Itachi had hunted and slaughtered them like the vermin they were. The three aberrations were dead and now only one still had his head.
"Ibiki, Chi, and Chikako are all dead, Danzo. It must sting to know that your most loyal servant has finally turned against you. But, all three of your agents are dead and it wasn't me or Sasuke—it was him. With all three of them dead, that leaves one last guilt party to face his punishment: you."
"Itachi did what he needed to do and still is. I care far less about his loyalty to me than about his loyalty to the village. I don't know why he risked his success and the village for his brother the first time and why has done it with you again now. Despite living a lifetime of perfect service to the village, you two are his only mistakes," Danzo hissed.
She could feel Sasuke bubbling with anger next to her and a quick look at Tsunade revealed that she was shocked to the point of terror. The Hokage had likely suspected the truth, but hearing it spoken aloud from the source was a class separate from mere suspicion.
Danzo was beginning to lift himself from his seat again and she knew that this exact moment was do-or-die. If she waited even a second longer, she or her teammate would be dead with the other left to finish the fight alone.
"Hey, Danzo!" Sakura lifted the separated head from the box by its stiff hair and threw it at him. "Catch!"
As she made her way to the window faster than the eye could see, she grabbed Sasuke in her right arm and punched the glass out with her left. They hit the ground below with a loud thud, but noisiness did not matter at this point.
She grabbed his hand, ran straight ahead, and commanded, "We don't separate!"
He nodded in agreement and their hands fell apart. They kept running until they reached the empty town square—Kakashi and Naruto had done their job well.
It did not take long for Danzo to arrive sans cane—it seemed that he could walk just fine, after all. His outer sleeve hung at his waist and revealed his right arm with bandages and braces winding tightly around the usually concealed appendage. He was in good form despite his well-maintained charade of an old man's aches. Beside her, Sasuke unsheathed his katana; she fell into a fighting stance with her fists up and ready.
Unable to hold back, Sasuke ran forward first with a war cry powerful enough to send every bird and bug into hiding. His body rippled with fury and his eyes burned with the sharingan. His katana crackled with lightning and his resolute expression defined his intentions: he was out for his long sought revenge.
Sasuke swung at the village elder with perfect celerity, but Danzo managed to dodge like an elite warrior half his age. In between his dodging, Danzo pulled out a kunai from within his robes and began fighting with Sasuke blade-to-blade.
Tired of waiting, Sakura charged forward and prayed that their weeks of two-on-one technique training had given Sasuke the skills he needed to slice up only Danzo with his forged metal. With the two of them barraging him from different directions, Danzo was having a harder time keeping up and received no openings to attempt blows of his own. As it continued, their dance throughout the town square must have appeared frightening to curious onlookers.
Crack! Sakura had finally landed a punch directly on Danzo's sternum and sent him flying backward for a moment before he regained his balance and tumbled back into his fighting stance. With labored breathing, his eyes narrowed at his opponents.
He quickly flicked his thumb against his blade and slammed his palm against the ground—a summons. As an enormous cloud of dust puffed at the summoning point, Sasuke swerved off to the side and Sakura launched herself into the air and at the expected creature. Based on their research into speculation surrounding Danzo's techniques, she could guess what the summon would be and intended to remove it from the equation as soon as possible.
The dust cleared to reveal a strange chimera creature. Just as it opened its mouth to inhale everything in the vicinity with a piercing whistle, Sakura landed a carefully placed, skull-shattering kick on its crown. A spectacle of physics, the creature's head slammed into the ground below and cracked the pavement upon impact. Although she hoped it would put it out of the battle for good, she suspected that this was just a temporary fix.
She bounced away from the creature and turned around in time to see Sasuke land a cut on Danzo's unbandaged arm—it seemed like they were slowly wearing him down. Just as Sakura ran over to join in Sasuke's relentless barrage, Danzo jumped backwards and sent a flurry of wind-powered shuriken in their direction. The attack was widespread enough to look like a wave of wind flying in her direction.
Sasuke hopped in reverse, but spat an array of fireballs into the wind wall hoping to power his fire with Danzo's air. His plan seemed brilliant—until it caused a massive explosion. She crouched to the ground with her head between her legs just in time for the force of the explosion to mercilessly toss her into the wall of the nearest building. Her vision fuzzed and her bones yelled as she slid to the ground.
After her vision cleared, she looked at herself and realized that all of her body hair had singed off and that her outfit was smoking. This was just one of the many instances in which it became clear that everything was secondary to Sasuke's pursuit for revenge when it was within reach. She scanned the area and realized that the town square had devolved into a hazy, dilapidated danger zone. The fur of Danzo's Baku summon was smoking enough to look like a burning building, so she hoped that Sasuke's explosion had knocked it out for good. Any fears of its revival were nullified when the summon disappeared in a cloud of dust similar to the one in which it had arrived.
Suddenly, Sakura halted her assessment of the area when she spotted Danzo gently brushing Sasuke's shoulder before darting across the square. Whatever he had done looked unnatural, so she immediately launched forward with a burst of speed in Sasuke's direction. By the time she arrived, her teammate was grunting and growling in pain.
"Don't worry about me, just take care of him!"
She whirled around, slammed her hands together with her index fingers pointed at Danzo, and sent a powerful burst of air at him. He dodged just in time to avoid any damage, but the wind did knock him off balance. She moved to hurtle toward him despite her protesting muscles, but stopped when she saw him performing a seal removal on his right arm.
As the bandages unraveled from the entire right side of his body, Sakura watched in disgusted awe. Where his pectoral muscles should have been, a blank wooden face pressed under his skin; where worn skin should have covered his arm, there were unnatural ripples with red eyes squeezed in between; where his eye should have been a natural brown, it swirled with the red sharingan. She heard Sasuke walk up to stand next to her with heavy breathing, but she could not bear to rip her gaze from Danzo's perverted form.
"Two against one is rather unfair, so I've decided to level the playing field," Danzo decided aloud, "Welcome to your family reunion, Sasuke."
For a moment, Sasuke froze in confusion.
"Fucking hell," Sakura mumbled under her breath. He was ugly without understanding his form, but definition made him the most hideous thing to walk the planet.
"You stole my family's eyes to wear them like ornaments?" Sasuke screamed, "You have no right to those eyes, you bastard!"
In an instant, his whole body crackled with electricity. Sakura had not seen this look in Sasuke's eyes—a look of potent, unadulterated hatred—since they were kids. Without even a smidgen of hesitation or fear, he surged forth like the lightning with which he buzzed. He moved so fast that after she blinked, Danzo had a katana through his heart by the time her eyes had reopened.
She could not believe it; relief tingled from one nerve to the next until she felt it all over. There was no surviving that type of wound without having mastered the Creation Rebirth technique or having a skilled and willing medic on-hand. His body was already beginning to slump down to the ground.
But something was wrong. Her vision began flickering and she knew that this taste of success had been nothing but an illusion. The cruel genjutsu must have been powerful, though, because she was still struggling to break through its imaginary walls.
Suddenly, she realized that if Danzo was not really on the ground in front of her, then he was somewhere else—and the spot where he truly stood likely posed a high risk to her mortality.
"Sasuke!" she called. Even with his sharingan, he might be trapped considering the jutsu's strength.
She turned around, punched the air where she expected Danzo to be lying in wait, and met the hardness of human flesh. The genjutsu finally shattered like glass upon impact and fell away to reveal Sasuke hissing and rubbing his shoulder.
"Jeez! Watch where you're punching, Sakura!" he berated. "I'm glad to see that you were able to break through, though. He should have died from that blow."
Based on what Sasuke was saying, the blade through Danzo's heart had been real, after all. When did reality transition into illusion? Did he cast a genjutsu as his heart gave out?
"He's dead, isn't he?" she asked.
Sasuke shook his head. "He's very alive. He tried moving in on us while we were under, but backed off when I snapped out of it and you started to break free. I'm sure he'll be back soon, though."
No sooner than the words were out of his mouth did Sasuke's prophecy become truth. They were both knocked backward by a gust of Danzo's powerful winds and would have gone tumbling if Sakura had not used chakra to dig her feet into the pavement beneath her feet to anchor them in place. When the wind died down, they would move in for their next attack—the attack that should end it all.
When the winds died and the debris settled, she and Sasuke sped forward towards the vulnerable village elder, who was still recovering from the effort of his own attack, and moved in from opposite sides. The exertion from his previous attack left him slower than usual, allowing them to move in for the deadly blow.
Sasuke put a hand on his opponent's wrist to electrocute him, but Sakura's technique moved faster. In an effort to end things, she threw her most powerful punch at his temple with revolting results—his skull collapsed under the force of her first before exploding into a shower of blood and brains. While withdrawing her fist, she gagged and shook it clean.
"I'm sorry," she coughed, "I tried, but I couldn't hold back in a fight like this. I'm so sorry." She thought that she should feel relieved by having landed a blow that nobody could come back from, but all she felt was guilty at having stolen his opportunity for revenge in a millisecond's race.
Sasuke shook his head and murmured, "You did the right thing. It's over now."
Suddenly, Sakura felt cold, sharp metal at her throat and her eyes went wide. The scene dribbled away to Danzo wrapping her in a hold with a kunai at her jugular and Sasuke staring at them with a torn grimace. With nowhere to go, Sakura noticed that there were only eight creepy eyes staring at her from his right arm instead of ten. Strangely, two of them were closed.
"I'll kill her," Danzo threatened coldly.
Sakura wanted to laugh, but held back for fear of the blade against her throat breaking the skin. If he thought that putting her life between Sasuke and his revenge was going to work, he was more unhinged than even she had realized. If he was truly relying on this situation to win his freedom, Danzo either underestimated her skills or thought very little of her mentor.
With a crazed cackle, Sasuke ran forward to humor his opponent, but she was not about to be stabbed through the chest for his sake—she wrestled her arms free from Danzo's grip and flung him over her shoulder and onto the ground between herself and her teammate. Immediately, Sasuke slammed his crackling blade through the village elder's heart. Sakura felt warm blood dripping down her chest from the pronounced gouge on her neck, but her right hand was already at work to close the wound. Sasuke removed his katana and looked at the crimson blood glistening across its edge.
As she stared at Danzo's third-time-dead body, she realized with creeping terror that she could not expect him to truly die either this time or the next. This was not well-timed genjutsu and they were not messing up; Danzo was doing something with the eyes on his arm to live no matter what they did.
"Sasuke, move!" she shouted. They both jumped backwards just as a paper bomb exploded where Danzo's dead body had once lain. Just like the last two times, the body melted away with the illusion and was replaced with the undesirable reality of Sakura and Sasuke standing back-to-back with panicked eyes scanning the premises for the seemingly immortal village elder.
Sakura panted. "We're not messing up, Sasuke. The way he keeps living has something to do with the eyes on his arm. Is this anything you would know about?"
She felt Sasuke tense at her back. "I've read about it, but I never thought it was really possible. I thought it was just a family myth, but it would explain the tree man growing out of his chest, too. This can be nothing but the Izanagi."
"So, he needs the eyes to use the technique?" she asked.
"I don't know. There's very little information on it in my family records because it became regarded with disdain over time."
"We need to find a way to get rid of that arm," Sakura determined, "Once I do that, you move in for the final blow. I have a move that should work for a very brief period of time—a powerful genjutsu. I'll take the arm when he's trapped and then the rest of the job is yours."
He nodded in agreement. Just as they began to move apart, a giant piece of wood slammed into the ground where they were previously standing. Immediately, the wood split into three limbs with a unified base, reached with its two outermost limbs, and knocked each of them onto their knees. Sakura spotted Danzo observing from across the playing field and surmised that he was trying to extend the distance between them as far as possible.
Anybody who saw her punch knew that Sakura worked best in close range, but Sasuke had more flexibility. Moving from where they stood, he ran in a half-circle around their opponent before spitting a massive, all-consuming wall of fire in Danzo's direction. This forced him to back up towards Sakura, as he could not run sideways due to its breadth, and gave her the toastiest opening she for which she could have ever hoped.
Just as she moved in, allowing a mere six inches of air between Danzo's face and her own, she pushed all of her hatred for him away and smiled the type of smile she might offer an old man taking a morning walk through the village. For just a moment, Danzo wore the face of every person she had ever loved: Ino, Naruto, Sasuke, Tsunade, and Itachi all flickered before her. As her gaze penetrated his, her smile transformed into the loveliest beam that her face knew how to wear—in this confusing and vulnerable moment, chakra shot out from her third eye and pierced his.
In the time it takes to blink, all semblance of sentience drained from Danzo's face, his shoulders relaxed, and his face took on a pleasant lull. He fit the image of serenity so well that Sakura was almost jealous of his restful bliss. Yet, he hardly deserved such a peace of mind—this moment was one for which he would have to pay a hefty price.
She knew it would last little more than a second due to his pilfered sharingan, though, so she moved forward with her plans swiftly. Her right hand buzzed with power as she turned it into a chakra scalpel—after that draining genjutsu, this took some of her last remaining stores—and sliced off the entirety of his right arm from where it met his shoulder. Her scalpel slid through sinew and bones alike, no material strong enough to sustain itself when sitting in the scalpel's path. Knowing that she was living on borrowed time, she propelled herself backwards with her last chakra to give Sasuke his final opening.
When Danzo came to clarity, he shouted in unambiguous rage. No one would be happy to see his arm lying on the ground, separated from his body, but he was especially grievous over the loss of his stolen eyes. She watched Sasuke loom from behind him with a wild and sickly smirk painted across his face. He had sheathed his katana, which initially appeared strange. However, when his hand chirped with the lightening of the chidori, she understood why.
Time elongated as Sasuke lunged forward and shoved his chidori-charged hand through Danzo's heart. His hand passed through their opponent's chest cavity and exited out the other side. Mercilessly, Sasuke yanked his arm out of Danzo's wound, stepped backwards, and flicked his arm to shake the blood and guts off of his skin. His death handshake left a sickly spatter on the ground at his right side.
Danzo coughed and sputtered, but managed to grunt out some scathing last words through angry, gritted teeth.
"You may have beaten me here, but you'll have no evidence with which to tell the truth. The people of Konoha will go on living their safe lives because of the protections that myself and my Root agents have put in place. Itachi will go on serving Konoha without regard for whether I live or die. Even though you are two glaring mistakes, I have no doubts that his loyalty to the village will remain steadfast until he steps into his grave. My agents still exist in great numbers and will remain loyal to my cause. The battle may end here for me, but you'll have to fight it for the rest of your lifetimes."
She knew that he was trying to scare them, but she was hardly afraid. With his heart nothing but forcefully dissembled pieces of tissue, she had fought and won the hardest battle of her life. As a team, she and Sasuke had won. Each of them got their revenge and, hopefully, a future offering some nights of restful sleep. They won the peace of mind for a lifetime that Danzo had only enjoyed for a moment before his demise.
As they looked on in silence, Danzo's body became engulfed by an abyssal sphere of black, empty space. It was bizarre to look at, but it left her feeling more secure in the belief that they had finally finished the battle, so she continued to observe without fear from where she stood. After the sphere had covered his entire body, including his removed arm strewn at his side, it began to shrink smaller than its contents. As it continued to shrink, it pulsated several times. Sakura wondered if she should step back from where she stood in case it intended to explode, but she was far too comfortable and content to care.
Finally, the sphere shrunk into nonexistence. There was no sign that Danzo had ever existed beyond his unforgettable legacy. The disappearance of his body was really an inconvenience to the truth, but that seemed to be Danzo's motif.
"We did it," she announced with disbelief in her voice. She knew that they could do it together, but seeing the desired result was something entirely different from imagining it. Feeling the relief in her bones, Sakura began to stretch and crack her back.
Sasuke's face stayed blank, but his body seemed to be slipping into a less rigid stance than usual.
"We did."
She looked around and realized that she had no time to bask in their victory. The town square was a mess of rubble and smoke. Once people stopped hearing the sounds of battle, they were likely to come out of their homes to investigate. Human curiosity was an insatiable creature.
"I have to go."
His head shot up and his brow furrowed; his face was no longer a bare canvas, but was now full of color. There was no doubt that fulfilling his revenge had affected him—all of the emotional turmoil that he had been hiding over the past decade was finally boiling over. With a look she could not quite identify in his eyes, he walked over to Sakura and stared at her for a long moment.
Then, Sasuke hugged her. He hugged her like he had no intentions of letting her go or leaving this moment. He hugged her like a once broken person who had now been put back together. If Sakura had not known better, she would swear that she could feel his hot, salty tears dripping on the crook of her neck and shoulder where his head was buried.
"Thank you, Sakura," he whispered.
When they parted, his eyes were rimmed with red, but showed no trace of tears or dishevelment beyond the expected wear of battle. If anything, he looked like he had just used his sharingan too long and left his onyx eyes strained as a result. But, Sakura knew better. Sasuke could now live a life that was not centered on avenging his family—he was freed from his shackles of hatred because there was no one left to hate for it.
"You're not the only person who'll sleep soundly tonight, Sasuke," she replied with a smirk. After all, he was not the only person to get revenge out of this deal.
He smirked back. "I would say 'goodbye' now, but really, it's 'I'll see you soon.'"
Knowing what he meant, Sakura shook her head, still smiling. She never thought that she would be the hunted teammate, but she had not foreseen a lot of things that had turned out to be true. Life had developed into expecting the unexpected.
Sakura spun around to take in a view of Konoha one last time. She wished that her last memory of her village could have been a little less hazy and damaged, but she would take what she could get. After one last look at her home, it was time for Sakura to leave.
Authoress's Note:
I hope you enjoyed the battle! Thank you for reading and reviewing.
Have a lovely evening,
A
