The Eternal Soundtrack

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. That copyright belongs to Masashi Kishimoto.

"Foreign Language" belongs to Anberlin.

Warning: OOC Sasuke, but for a reason. Please don't get all huffy and leave.

Track 2: Foreign Language

She was lost in a world of deep grey, with an undertone of crimson. Her eyes were fixed and she saw only the slate darkness and its underlying promise of running red on a whim.

Those eyes… They were staring right back.

Deep and fathomless, his eyes were trained on her own.

But there was something wrong: where were the perpetual scowl and the glare of utter disdain? If these eyes belonged to the person she thought they did, then those two staples of his countenance ought to be in place by now. The first sign of her presence should have demanded it from him; a conditioned response that had probably lost the requirement of effort years ago.

However, his face was blank.

Actually, that was an erroneous description. His face was not quite blank. But what resided there was so startling and one could go as far as to say upsetting, that she was not sure what to call it.

'It' was not a scowl, nor a sneer. 'It' lacked the severe brow furrow of a full-on glower, but in no way did it denote contentment. 'It' involved no upturned lips, though they most certainly were not turned down in a frown. His eyes were not narrowed, so 'It' could not be a thinly veiled glare, nor were his eyes wide, so 'It' could not be surprise.

She was stumped.

//Boys speak in rhythm and girls in code
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Tell it to me straight, give it to me now
Face forward, face forward//

"Sakura."

She was pulled from her analysis of his not-expression and attempted to look her addressor in the eyes without drifting into the hypnotic state she had been in from the moment they had met with hers.

…And had he just opened a conversation with her? It certainly sounded that way. He said her name. That was a greeting. Greetings were the openings to conversations. Ergo, he did indeed just open a conversation with her.

It was a sure sign of the Apocalypse. Where were the Four Horsemen? (Perhaps he was one of them. Death, maybe? He always was so pale…)

He was still looking at her with that non-expression on his (still flawless) face.

What is he looking at? Oh. Right…

"Sasuke-kun," she answered, her voice sounding so small to her ears. Dear goodness; what a time to be channelling Hinata! (Well, at least she didn't stutter, like she did in her mind. Yes. She stuttered in her mind. She had never been so thankful that, in addition to being uber-talented in shinobi skills, the Uchiha boy---no, man, was not also telepathic. Talk about embarrassing...)

"Where are the others?" Sasuke asked, his face not shifting, infuriating Sakura's inner like no one's business.

What is that look? What is it?

"Naruto is on a mission in Suna and---" she stopped herself, realizing that he didn't really care where they were, just whether they were nearby or not. "They're not with me."

He raised his head a millimetre; his version of a nod.

Nodding that pretty head… With that look on your pretty face. What is that?

"You do many missions without them?"

Seriously. Who was this person? Now he was asking about her? Her! Haruno Sakura. Where were the trumpets and confetti, with a banner saying, "JOKE'S ON YOU!" because she was most definitely certain that he would never ask such.

"Yes," Sakura answered, slowly. She was now watching him with careful eyes, poised to pick out any more surprises before they threw her off.

"Hn," was his response.

Sakura sagged inwardly. Yeah. What a surprise. She should have known her overactive mind was playing tricks on her. There was just no way that Sasuke would ever hold a friendly and private conversation with her. Just no way.

//Boys speak in rhythm and girls in code
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Tell it to me straight, give it to me now
Face forward, face forward//

He walked past her, not casting so much as a nod of farewell behind him.

It was clear that he fully expected her to follow him.

Can't just say, "Follow me," or, "Walk with me." No, he has to be all subliminally anal and just assume that I'm going to follow him. Well, maybe I don't want to follow him. Maybe I want to go on my way and pretend this little interlude never occurred. Maybe I'm not the type of person who is a follower anymore. Maybe I am now a follow…ee? Er, ah… A leader. Yes. Maybe I'm the type of person who leads and has other people follow them. Maybe I'm going to stay right here and make him follow me--- Oh, come on! How did this happen?!

During Sakura's little inner rebellion, her feet, with minds of their own, had moved her to just a step behind a certain tall, dark, and handsome avenger, who had yet to acknowledge her presence trailing after.

She glared down at the traitorous appendages.

You'll get yours…

Ignoring the ridiculousness and inanity of threatening one's feet, Sakura turned her eyes back up to the person before her; more specifically, his back. It was all taut cords and muscles, with shoulders that still stood strong and proud.

Sakura vaguely wondered if those shoulders had ever been slumped in shame. What about remorse? She doubted it. But she wondered all the same.

He is so full of surprises, it seems…

A part of her asked herself why she was just following him, like the submissive little girl she had been those many years ago. She was no pushover now. She was a powerhouse. Her shishou would be appalled to see Sakura slipping back into her old routine of being so acquiescent.

Yes! Why am I doing this?! I am a force to be reckoned with, not a gentle wind! I. Am. Fierce! Shannaro!

I think I will tell him that! I will tell him that I am not to be ledonI am to be the leader from here on out!

"Sakura," Sasuke spoke, as he stopped and turned to face her. His face still bore that ambiguous expression (if one could go so far as to call it such). "Some things never change."

Not a little peeved that all of her inner bolstering of her nerve to give the Uchiha an earful was now wasted, as he had just stolen the moment from her, Sakura's mind was filled with cries of frustration, and therefore did not fully process said man's words, which resulted in the articulate response of, "Huh?"

//Speaking foreign language, nothing I can translate
You're speaking foreign language, nothing I can dictate
You're speaking foreign language//

Sasuke kept staring back with that look never making way for another. Even the smirk that preceded his next words did not remove the look from his eyes. "You still argue and reason with yourself in your head."

Her face must have twisted itself into the dreaded Em-In-Su Combo---that is, the blush of embarrassment, the wide eyes of incredulity, and the gaping mouth of surprise. Not exactly flattering. No sir.

Her inner began a ceaseless screech of lamentation.

His smirk seemed to widen. "And now you're screaming at yourself."

She could have fainted. But seeing as she wasn't channelling Hinata at the moment, she instead slumped a bit and forced her face into a less moronic mask of control and calm.

…She wished. Really, all she accomplished was slamming her mouth closed, toning her blush down to a simmer, and wrenching her eyes back to a normal width, though her brows seemed to like their location, in the middle of her ample forehead. More space for them, she mused.

So he thinks he can be absent from my life for six years and then just happen to stumble back into it by some coincidence of us being in the same village, and he can just know everything about me still?! Oh I don't think so! I am not that easy to read. He doesn't still get me! I'll throw a gremlin at you! Mark my words! You are not in control, Mr. Avenger-person! I am! Shannaro!

"Are you quite finished with your inner-monologuing, Sakura? I haven't got all day." Sasuke was now seated on a bench, a tree nearby littering the wooden seat with a handful of green leaves. He raised a dark eyebrow at her, basically saying, "Are you going to stand there and stare at me until winter? Sit down."

Of course, he wouldn't actually say that. But his features were always very wordy, when he opted to use them. Sakura decided he had a very vocal face, and it was so in order to make up for the little use he made of his actual vocal cords.

//Boys speak in rhythm and girls just lie
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Tell me how you feel, come out of the dark
Then we can head back home and I'll know where to start//

Sakura sat herself down on the other end of the bench, an ample distant between them.

Because she wanted to sit, not because his eyebrow had told her to. And the distance was so he wouldn't think she was trying to get her hands on him, not because she was suddenly nervous about the idea of him wanting her to sit next to him.

She clutched at her skirt, fisting it between her strong hands. It was a habit she always implemented when she was nervous, finding its origins in her academy days. And as such, she did not realize she was doing it.

But Sasuke did. He did not comment on it, though. He did not want to make her more nervous than she already was. Sakura got dodgy when she was nervous; it would only waste more time.

"Your mission isn't pressing, that you need to focus on it rather than talk with old team-mates?" Sasuke said, watching her from the corner of his eye.

She stiffened. That was most definitely an insult. Well veiled (his often were), but an insult nonetheless. He gave the pretence that he was inquiring about her mission, and whether he was keeping her from her work, while in truth he was making a comment somewhere along the lines of, "You must be on a low-rank mission if you don't have to be attending to it. I see; you're still too weak for the more difficult ones."

With eyes stony, Sakura clipped out, "It's already finished." She would have liked to have told him that it just so happened to have been a B-rank, and that she had had a lovely time beating the living daylights (and in some instances, the will to live) out of a dangerous gang of thugs, many of whom had been shinobi themselves, thus saving the lives of goodness knew how many people and returning their village back to normal, thank you very much. But she couldn't. Discussing missions with foreign shinobi was prohibited, especially when they were missin-nins. And even though both she and Naruto still saw Sasuke as their team-mate---as a Konoha-nin---the Leaf village did not. He was a missing-nin; someone to be apprehended and incarcerated, then subsequently interrogated by the lovely division of ANBU that handled such tasks.

There was an extended silence between them. And as a gust of wind passed through the tree above them, causing the leaves to chatter, Sakura was struck with a wave of nostalgia. It was so much like the times they would wait at the bridge for Naruto and Kakashi to show up. All that was missing was the quiet trickle of the stream, but the sound of the leaves fluttering was enough to fool her into faintly hearing that too. And the lack of words between them; it was exactly the same.

Sakura glanced over at her companion. His head was tilted down, as he leaned against the back of the bench. Had the bench been the railing of a red bridge, the scene would have been perfect.

And Sakura was fairly certain Sasuke noticed as well. His face was distant and the closest to musing she had ever seen it. Even that ambiguous look had disappeared, leaving only some mild, almost nonexistent nostalgic expression in its wake.

But even though she could name this look, it did nothing to dispel her confusion at his actions. Because being nostalgic, even barely so, was still extremely un-Sasuke-like.

//Speaking foreign language, nothing I can translate
You're speaking foreign language, nothing I can dictate
You're speaking foreign language
Nothing I can translate
You're speaking foreign language.//

He was still confusing her. It was so much easier when they were genin. Then she had understood him. There were no words or gestures or expressions he implemented that she could not decipher. It had taken a while, but she had come to be fluent in the unspoken language of Sasukese.

Now, it seemed as though he had developed a creole language; an alteration of the original that was so different, only scarce traces of its predecessor remained.

Sasuke was watching her with that look again. It was almost…almost knowing. Like he knew something about her that even she did not know. And he found it…amusing? Interesting. He found it interesting. The item itself or her apparent ignorance of it, she could not tell which was it that held his interest, only that it was there.

"You're not going to try to convince me to go back with you?" he asked. Actually, it came out more like a statement, but he meant it as a question, Sakura knew. See; she could still decipher some of what he said and did. She wasn't at a total loss.

"I don't see how I could possibly say anything to make you do that," Sakura answered, watching him for a moment before studying the stretch of bench separating them. "I've already said and done everything I thought might convince you. I have yet to think of something else that would do it. It's not easy to find something that you would find worthwhile."

Sasuke did not respond, and Sakura would have said that he hadn't even been listening, were it not for the nearly imperceptible shift of his shoulders. Did they almost shift…downward? But Sasuke did not slump his shoulders. He was proud to the end. It was not in his body's vocabulary to speak such emotions as shame or regret, which were what slumped shoulders would denote.

It must have been the wind shifting his shirt. That was all.

Sasuke startled her with his next words. It did not even seem as though he had said them. More like an ambiguous onlooker who broke the fourth wall. But she knew his voice and she knew it was him when he said, lowly and almost musing, "You would still do anything for me, wouldn't you?"

She stared at him for longer than she perceived. Strangely, he did not grow impatient. He merely continued to look back at her, dark eyes studying and holding a hidden interest she had never noticed in them when they were laid upon her.

Why was he bringing this up now?

That's right. She had mentioned how she had offered him everything she could think of to make him stay in Konoha. That was why. Apparently, she needed to learn to watch her mouth around Sasuke, lest he actually pursue the topics she dredged up. It was yet another surprise from the usually aloof Uchiha.

Finding her voice, she gave the answer she could tell he already knew. "Yes."

He shifted closer, eyes not once leaving her face, intensity increasing inversely to the change in distance between them. Sakura was swiftly becoming lost. He was not acting as she expected. By all accounts, she should be in tears or focusing on hiding that painful precipitation by now. They had been alone with each other far too long for a scathing remark to not have introduced itself from Sasuke's mouth.

//Where did we go wrong?
We need medication for this miscommunication
Where did we go wrong?
Our conversation's weakened
Conversations weakened//

Yet here he was, looking her in the eye without any malice, nor annoyance, and moving nearer and nearer to her, almost as though he wished to study her being close up, making sure not to miss any detail. What was he looking for so intently? And why was he looking for it? Sakura was at a loss.

When he was close enough for her to feel his body heat, at an almost disconcerting intensity, he spoke. "Why?"

She blinked in confusion, glancing away from his hypnotic gaze for but a moment, before she was drawn back into it, like a magnet to ferrite. "Why what?"

"Why would you do that? You don't even know me."

"I know you."

He gave a wry chuckle, so unlike him. She was steadily becoming more and more disoriented by his actions by the moment. "We haven't been team-mates in over six years. A lot has changed in that time. You didn't know me that well then, you don't know me now."

"I knew you then. I knew you…as best I could," she finished quietly, looking down.

"But not enough to be offering me anything and everything you have. Isn't that right?" he continued, his eyes seemingly endeavouring to catch every detail of her being ten times over.

"No… I… I would do anything for you…because I---"

"Love me?" Sasuke interrupted. "I already established that you don't know me. So, how can you love someone you don't even know? Sakura? You do that for just anyone?"

"No!" she half-shouted, staring him in the eye for a moment before her gaze began to dance about his shirt. He was making her so nervous… "No one else… Just you. It's just for you."

"Why?"

"Because it's you." Her gaze danced between his face and his shirt. "You are Sasuke-kun and I am Sakura. And Sakura makes those kinds of pledges to Sasuke-kun."

He almost smiled here, though it was obviously overshadowed by a smirk. "Obligation without any actual rule dictating it. You do this without reason. You still haven't answered my question. Why do you do it?"

"Because I want to…" she answered slowly, floundering for words he wouldn't reject nor spin around on her. "Because it's the only way I know how to express---to offer anything that might possibly, sort of, almost, maybe be of use to you and therefore has a chance of being accepted by you."

"You crave affirmation from a stranger so badly?"

She started slightly and frowned for a moment. "I crave affirmation from Sasuke-kun so badly. He is not a stranger. He is very familiar to me."

"How do you know me?" He leaned closer still. "You can't possibly know me, Sakura."

"I know you…because…I know you here." She put her hand over her heart, peering into the man's eyes for the first time with no timidity or insecurity.

He looked down at her hand then back up at her eyes.

"You're being presumptuous, Sakura; assuming that I have a heart for yours to relate to."

She didn't miss a beat when she replied, "And you are being presumptuous, Sasuke-kun; assuming that I wouldn't be able to find yours if you had gotten rid of it."

He watched her intently, that look ever-present. "What makes you think I haven't?"

"Because you still have mine," Sakura answered, eyes intense and serious. "It's still yours. You already have it," she said quietly.

Sasuke watched her for a few more moments, dark eyes tracing her features once, twice, thrice. He had never looked at her as much as he had during their brief meeting on the bench.

He stood suddenly and looked down at her, though he was not being intimidating.

He was ending their conversation, Sakura could tell.

"You're right," he said evenly, as emotionless as ever. "There is nothing you can offer me that could make me come back." He then turned and walked away, shoulders ever straight and proud.

//Boys speak in rhythm and girls in code
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Boys speak in rhythm and girls just lie//

And faintly, she heard him say, "…since I already have it."

End of Track 2

Guttersnipe's Word: I apologize profusely for the late update. I know I told a few of you that it would come out two weeks after the first chapter, and I apologize for not holding true to that. I had inspiration with a couple other fics I had been working on, but none whatsoever in this fic's vein. And I know Sasuke is extremely out of character. I did it on purpose. Most of the fic's content (not to mention the song) wouldn't fit if he weren't. This is set six years after he left. He would have changed. Do I think he would change to become this? Absolutely not! But I just felt like making him do so, just this once. The plot (or lack thereof) required it. And may I just say, this is the sappiest thing I have ever written in my life. I'm mildly disgusted with myself. I feel all molasses-ey inside. Ugh! Once again, I apologize and I ask that you please review. Mr. Clicky needn't be punished for my tardiness.

As a side, unnecessary tidbit, the song I used for this fic was the sixth one I picked. I had written part of the story (not the beginning. Strangely, I never begin writing stories at the beginning of them, but somewhere in the middle of it. Beginnings are usually put in last or in the middle of writing. I know; I'm not in the least bit organized. But I can function no other way) when I decided to look for an appropriate song. Then, as I continued to write, the story began to shift direction, so I had to choose another song, as it no longer matched. I went through that five times, until I settled on this one. And it just popped into my head while writing about Sakura understanding Sasuke's language. So much effort put into the other five choices, and the final product comes from a random prompt. Lovely.

By the way, I'm feeling a Naruto hearts Hinata instalment next; what say you?