He found her in the mud just outside that snake hole, with welds that creased halfway down her back. They were dirty and bloody, just like the clumped up hair around her scalp.

Those green eyes opened as Sasuke attempted to pull her up from the earth, without touching the cuts across her flesh.

"No- leave me here. They told me not to speak to you any longer."

The woman wasn't lowered back into the mud, but she wasn't pulled out of it either. The Uchiha held her in the middle, silent. With his stoic face full of gravity.

"Why do you let them do this to you?" Sasuke kneeled into the soiled grass beneath either of them, placing his arms around Ashita's small and shuttering body.

There was still a light rain from those furrowed up clouds. Even Sasuke, who seemed impervious to just about everything, was damp, with cold skin and vibrant eyes that pierced out beneath his wet hair. And Ashita pulled him close, weak body leaned up against him. They were embracing, and the tears came.

"No one in this village could catch you."

Ashita didn't say a word. She merely let the sorrow flow out, crying the hardest she had since her mother died. There was such an abundance, of this melancholy that swallowed either of them. Like monsters dragging the pair of them by the ankles into the darkness. And now it was falling from Ashita's face. In hot tears that mixed into the cold rain.

It was a sentiment either of them understood. This hatred. This powerlessness. Just the sheer urge to give up.

And sometimes it gripped too damn hard. To turn the pink portions of their hearts black and the black parts even blacker. The feeling was a sickness too cruel to actually kill. But this sure as hell wasn't living.

"Sasuke, why did you even come here?"

The crying thing was calming.

"You had people who loved you. They fought so hard to keep you. I know they did. You should have stayed with them, because trading all that for this hell hole was fucking stupid." Then Ashita gasped, with her sights drowning once again in tears, poised against that Uchiha's shoulder. A rag doll leaning onto a granite statue.

There was a moment between them, not too unlike all the other silences they shared, but just a little more grave.

There was no use in explanations for anything.

The two were inanimate for an entire minute, before Ashita got a searing, sweet pain at the top of her right cheek. It sliced down all the way to her lips' edge and stopped.

And she found a dagger inside Sasuke's hand, with a little of her blood across the blade.

They stared at one another, mouths zipped up tight as if their lips were sewn shut. Within those deep, sad onyx orbs was the most emotion Ashita had ever seen from him. There was misery, maybe even for her, but right next to that melancholy was an edge of determination. His eyebrows frowned. And he rose to find a way back inside.

The tiny woman watched as the Uchiha Prince walked away. It hurt. And the confusion hit her in the stomach like a plank of wood.

But her feet found places in the muddy ground, and her legs found a way forward. They were mangled, and worked about as well as broken fingers. Yet, Ashita paved a way inside and got to the shower, to wash the grime and dirt and shit out of her beautiful, milk-colored skin. And her beautiful raven black hair.

Maybe she could even get the red out of her beautiful green eyes.