A/N: Wow, this chap turned out longer than i expected. I'm having so much fun writing this! Although i kinda have a love/hate thing going on with the middle of this chap...it was giving me problems.

Summary: Those who go through the doors never come back. He warned her, but she didn't care. She wanted adventure, excitement, an escape. She got it all.

In Too Deep
2. Suffocate and Breathe

His eyes looked so…different, she noticed. He really didn't want her to go. Was it sadness etched in the obsidian orbs? Despair? Anger? Well, of course there was anger, he had already made clear his disapproval of her decision.

'I'm sorry,' she thought just as the veil of darkness, or nothingness, or whatever it was, fell in front of her eyes and Sasuke, her best friend, ally, one-and-only, was forever gone. A pang of sorrow attacked her heart for the slightest of seconds, but all too soon the only emotion she could feel was fear.

She was falling.

It started out in slow motion. Slowly, she felt the invisible ground beneath her give away and she fell backwards in a span that seemed to take hours. Shocking eyes widened and her mouth opened in a silent 'Oh!' as her back arched downwards and her arms floated up above her body. And then time sped up.

And she was falling through the suffocating, thick darkness. She could feel her eyes straining as the pupils grew and tried to pick out any hint of light, but none was given. Sakura screamed; she screwed her eyes shut and let out an ear-splitting shriek, fingernails digging into her palms and stomach seemingly dropping right out of her body.

She realized right away that something was terribly wrong. She could still feel her hair whipping around her face long after she had gasped and spluttered for breath, could still feel the warm, muggy air flying past her as she struggled to control her flailing arms and legs, only to discover that she had no idea which way was actually up and which was down. She was still falling.

Her heart was in her throat, making her breaths come in irregular gasps and shudders accompanied by terrified whimpers. Swallowing past her fear, she opened her mouth and screamed again.

"Sasuke!"

"Mmph."

Sakura lifted her head slowly off of the grassy ground, groaning at the effort. She opened her bleary eyes and winced at the violent pang at her temples. Letting her head drop heavily back onto the ground she flexed her fingers, curling them around feather-soft stalks of grass and pulling.

"Sakura, what are you doing?"

She froze, heart having skipped an entire two beats, and let her hands unclench. She turned her head to the other side and opened her eyes once more. And she thought that she must have been hallucinating.

"Sasuke…" she said in a cracking voice, unable to stop the small smile that graced her lips when his own raised the slightest at the corners.

"Hey."

"Hey," she repeated back, reaching her hand out to brush loose strands of inky hair out of his face so that she could get a clear view of his eyes. Neither moved nor blinked until Sakura finally asked, "Where are we?"

"The other side of the door, I'm guessing."

Sakura gasped and pushed herself to her knees, throwing an arm out to steady herself as the world temporarily spun itself out of focus. When she regained focus, she cast Sasuke a stern look, to which he was completely unfazed by.

"Why did you come?" she asked sharply, earlier glimmer of happiness at having seen him gone. "I told you not to come."

"Well, it's too late now, anyway," Sasuke told her without much enthusiasm, copying her and lifting himself off of his stomach. Once standing, he held out a hand, which she took with a scowl and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet.

"That was the stupidest decision you've ever made."

"I could say the same for you," he replied with a strict look, arms crossed authoritatively.

"You already have."

"And I'll keep saying it."

Sakura threw her arms up in defeat. "Okay. Okay. Let's just drop it, please? There's really no point in trying to argue with you anyway. You're too stubborn to give up, after all," she ended by muttering under her breath. Sasuke raised an eyebrow but changed the subject.

"Well then, now what? I wouldn't exactly call this the most normal of places."

"Huh?"

"Look," Sasuke said simply, jerking his chin up slightly, and Sakura turned around and immediately gaped at what her eyes fell upon.

"Whoa…" she said in a hushed breath, taking a step forward. "That's crazy."

A forest seemed to have risen out of the ground and set up its tall, densely packed trees smack dab in the middle of a grassy field. That's how irregular the ruler- straight line of trees looked, their slightly sinister shadows looking very unfit at the edge of sun-drenched bright green grass. Sakura squinted as she tried to make out anything midst the trees, but the forest seemed to be very thick and not much could be seen. She suddenly felt very small standing before the towering mass of bark and leaves, and instinct had her retrace her steps backwards until she bumped into something solid.

"Oh, Sasuke, sorry!" she apologized, but he hadn't seemed to have even felt their collision, instead staying rooted to the spot with his eyes looking at something over her shoulder. Sakura waved a hand in front of his face, and dark, glazed over eyes blinked and snapped to her face.

"What?"

"What were you staring at?" Sakura asked, looking behind herself at the forest and then back at Sasuke's face, noting the still dazed look he was wearing.

"Nothing. I wasn't looking at anything," he answered hastily, though his eyes rose to look over Sakura's shoulder again.

Sakura frowned and said slowly, "Yes you were. You didn't even feel me bump into you. What was it, Sasuke?"

"I said, it was nothing," Sasuke repeated firmly, and seeing the skeptical look Sakura was wearing, he put his hands on her shoulders and said, "I'm serious."

"Fine, whatever." Sakura shrugged out of his hold, thoroughly unconvinced by his statement, but she wasn't in the mood for a futile argument. Instead, she took his arm and began pulling him away from the forest.

"Where are you going?"

Sasuke didn't budge and Sakura let out an exasperated breath. "Um, I'm going in the obvious direction, which is away from the evil forest of death."

"And exactly where will that bring us?"

Sakura hated to admit it, but she could see where his argument was coming from. Since, in fact, all she could see for what looked like endless miles and miles was nothing but grassy green and a stretch of cerulean sky overhead. At least it looked happy, though. She used this as the basis of her argument.

"It will bring us somewhere where there won't be trees and bushes and stuff all around us, so we can actually see where we're going."

"If there really is anything to see," Sasuke added, and Sakura was really getting annoyed with his negative attitude. Really, how could he see going into a gloomy, possible never-ending forest as a plus?

"Well, if you don't like it, look at the clouds. Make them into shapes or whatever."

And she started walking.

But her brisk pace didn't last long.

Because she appeared to face-plant into, well, nothing. She stumbled backwards, holding her nose and stringing together a chain of well chosen curse words which she gushed in a rather loud volume. Behind her, she heard Sasuke snigger rudely.

"What the hell was that?" he asked sardonically, and Sakura spun on her heel and sent him a glare, rubbing her nose tenderly.

"Shut up. I don't-"

"Sakura," Sasuke cut her off in a raised voice, and he raised a hand to point behind her. She narrowed her eyes at him but turned around nonetheless, and her hand dropped in surprise.

Where there was once thin air, skeletal tendrils of a shadowy color seemed to be snaking out from a single point, the place where Sakura's face had collided with the invisible wall of matter. The lines twisted and froze in jagged angles, and then the sound of breaking glass filled the stunned silence as shards of green and blue -the grassy background- fell to the ground and shattered into a shiny dust that was swiftly picked up and blown away by an indiscernible breeze. In its place was another sharp line of trees and sinister shadow.

"What…"

"A forest," Sasuke supplied not-too helpfully.

"I can see that," Sakura said, trying to force annoyance into her voice but only able to produce a tone of nervous amazement. "But…what was that?"

And this time Sasuke didn't have an answer for her.

Sakura looked to the left and then the right, down the only stretch of non-forest left, sandwiched between the parallel lines of ancient trees. "Um…"

Sasuke sighed, not even trying to hide his irritation. "Yes?" he asked moodily, and Sakura frowned at his attitude.

"God, Mr. Negative. If you're going to act like that, why don't you decide where we're going then?"

"Tch, figures."

Sakura furrowed her eyebrows. "What figures, Sasuke?"

"That you get us stuck in some situation like this, and then have to rely on me to fix it."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sakura asked slowly, hands on her hips and eyes on his. She tilted her head as if to say, 'What's the big deal? Scared to say?'

Sasuke laughed humorlessly. "You're really not intimidating, so stop trying to be."

"…Why are you being such a jerk?" Sakura asked in a hushed voice, her narrowed eyes widening and her eyebrows losing some of their severity. "This is the reason I left, so I wouldn't have to deal with people treating me like some stupid little girl, but here you are, doing exactly that. Thanks Sasuke, thanks so much."

And for some reason, the corners of her eyes stung painfully and when she blinked she felt a hot tear trickle down each cheek. "W-why am I crying?" she stammered as she wiped the tear tracks away, but they were only replaced by more. "Why am I crying? No, I don't cry, this isn't right."

It was almost frightening. One minute she had been angry and annoyed, and the next a terrible feeling of helplessness had washed over her before she had even had time register it. And the worst part was that deep inside, she didn't know why she felt so incredibly helpless, and she knew that she had nothing to cry over. It was embarrassing. It was like she suddenly had no control ever her emotions.

Sasuke stood temporarily shocked by Sakura's lamentation, the sneer having dropped off of his face, replaced by an expression of guilt. "Sakura…" But he didn't know what to say, he had never been one to console people, he was out of his element.

"No. No. It's nothing, I'm fine. I don't even know why I'm crying," Sakura told him in a rush, plastering a forced smile onto her face that quivered at the corners as more tears fell unrestrained across her porcelain skin. She wiped away the salty liquid with clumsy hands.

Sasuke looked down at the ground in shame, his voice unsure when he muttered, "I'm sorry."

"No, you're right. I'm hopeless. I said we were going that way," she pointed cheerily at the woods, her tears beginning to dry up, leaving her jade eyes watery and tinged with pink. Sasuke looked at her with dark eyes that spoke of how he saw through her, through her imitation happiness and plastic smile. Sakura pretended that she couldn't tell, but something inside of her ached when she saw the disappointment in his face as he walked past her, into the shadows and into the trees.

"Do you still think this is such a good idea?" he asked under his breath as he passed, averting his gaze from her face that immediately fell.

"You didn't have to come," she murmured back in an attempt to sound defiant, but as she fell into step beside him she bit her lip, trying to ignore the unwanted uncertainty that was beginning to plague the deepest recesses of her mind.

It was suffocating. Dark. Ominous. The only light, which was scarce, came in uneven patches through the tree tops as the leaves blew from some overhead wind. The sound was anything but calming, and when there was no sound at all it was even worse. At one point Sakura had heard a thundering snapping noise ahead of her and had shrieked and grabbed onto Sasuke's arm, holding on so tight that it was a wonder that his own arm hadn't fallen off from her grip.

He then told her that he had stepped on a twig, and that she was behaving like a five year old, and she grumbled that he was an uncaring ice cube, which he deemed too childish to respond to and instead kept walking.

She wasn't scared, she had told him in defense, only surprised. She glared daggers at his back when he had the audacity to exhale an almost silent laugh.

She was the first to see the light, and proclaimed it with a loud shout of, "Sasuke, look! That has to be the way out!" She ran up to him and grabbed his arm, this time making sure not to strangle it, and shook it back and forth in excitement.

"Calm down, I already saw it," Sasuke told her, but she didn't miss how his tone had lost some of its earlier scorn. She took his hand in hers and started running, slow at first because of his reluctance, but soon he was the one ahead of her, pulling her faster than she could run and sending a searing pain up her side as she forced her legs to keep up.

And then they were in the light and Sakura was blind, having to screw her eyes shut against the radiance that was daylight until her pupils could take the brightness. And once she could open her eyes again she took a deep breath and was shocked to feel so light and free, as if some blanket had been weighing her down and crushing her slowly the whole time she had been in the forest.

"Do you feel it, Sasuke?" she asked him, dropping his hand to smooth her wind-swept pink locks out of her face, her fingers getting snagged in the tangles.

"Yeah. Look."

She shifted her eyes in the same direction as his and raised a pastel eyebrow at the structure before them. A house, lavender in color with a wooden roof and brick chimney, stood twenty yards away, a wooden door on the wall facing them.

"That's strange, I wonder if anyone lives there."

Sasuke looked puzzled as well. "There's only this one house, in the middle of nowhere. Who would live here?"

"Dunno. It's sure better than in that forest though."

"…Come on."

"Sasuke, wait! What are you doing?"

Sasuke tilted his chin and looked over his shoulder at her, giving her a plain look. "Checking to see if anyone's home."

Sakura's eyes widened and she ran up to him, stepping in front of him and stretching out her arms as a barrier. "Sasuke, you can't just go up to a random house and knock on the door!"

Sasuke gave her one of his 'looks' and said with a smirk, "Yes I can," and before Sakura knew what had happened Sasuke had gotten around her and was pounding on the door, shouting, "Hey. Anyone there? Open the door."

By the lack of response Sakura guessed that the answer was no, nobody was home. Something peculiar caught her attention and she said to Sasuke with furrowed brows, "There are no windows…"

Sasuke grunted and pounded his fist against the door once more, and then giving up on that tactic he grasped the rust-splotched doorknob and twisted it. To his surprise, and Sakura's as well, the knob turned easily. When Sasuke met her eyes, Sakura shook her head frantically and hissed, "Sasuke, what if someone's in there?"

Sasuke shrugged and pushed the door in anyway, and despite her warning Sakura inched behind Sasuke and peered over his shoulder into the house. When her eyes fell upon the figure in the middle of the room she gasped and tightened her fingers into the back of Sasuke's shirt.

There was a wooden table and four wooden chairs of the same dark brown, once of which was occupied by a young man with one of the most ridiculous looking haircuts Sakura had ever seen. In his hands was a mug, poised halfway between the table and his face. He gave the two intruders a very befuddled stare and raised one of his impossibly thick eyebrows so that it disappeared behind his glossy, dark hair. When he opened his mouth he paused for a moment before asking tentatively,

"Can I help you?"

A/N: Guess who! It's pretty obvious. And next chap will explain some stuff from this chap, since everything that happens happens for a reason. There's a method to my madness, really.