The first time they make love, it's like the breaking of a storm. The air smells like ozone, and when Sasuke thrusts deep inside her, Sakura feels the shock jarr up her spine and settle into her molars as the air above her head atomically splits. The act lacks all the tenderness and hesitancy she imagines love-making should possess. Sasuke is brutal - he smothers her pained gasps with tongue and lips, and leaves perfect thumbprint bruises the deep blue-black of thunder clouds on the bone of her wrists. (She counts them afterwards, these vascular tokens of memory.) As always he is aloof, ignoring the heated curve of her breasts and refusing to lie flush against her, instead bracing himself on his hands and knees as if he holds actual skin to skin contact in utter contempt. For him, it's just another exercise in self-control, another fuck, a basic bodily function to mindlessly execute. For her, it's the last desperate clutch at a dream long-dead. Every thrust is painfully precise and cuts Sakura on the inside like a sharp-edged kunai until she feels her grief bleed freely, like poison from a wound.