He held her gaze for what felt like forever and then pushed her hand away. Gently, without force.
She let it fall, watching her fingers curl as she tried her hardest to grasp onto her hopes. She took one step back, parting space to breath, forging the distance between them that Sasuke seemed to so desperately need.
He wasn't looking at her. His eyes were trained on the dummy from the first day they'd come there. "You weren't supposed to see this," he repeated.
She spread her arms wide, welcoming the onslaught—the wrath of the boy with a will of iron and a heart of steel. "Yet here I am, Sasuke," she said.
The scar tissue on his arm was red and swollen. Taking a deep breath she placed her fingers over the skin, pressing softly to examine its condition.
For once he didn't flinch away. Just stood there still, letting her touch his arm.
"You don't give up," he said abruptly.
"If I gave up, you wouldn't have a hand right now," she said.
He clenched his jaw, as if struggling to grasp words that fled from him like a butterflies in the wind. "That's not what I meant," he said.
She tore her gaze from his arm and looked at him. Really looked at him. At the hard ridges of his face and the rings in his eye, at the scowling set to his lips that always drove her insane. There were exactly the same, and yet somehow the man inside was infinitely different in this moment. She wasn't sure how.
"Then what do you mean, Sasuke-kun?"
He shook his head and pulled his arm away. When his words arrived they were quiet but not unkind. "You don't give up on people, Sakura. That ramen-slurping idiot may have droves of chakra to spare and a foolish faith in the world that allows him to believe that anyone can be saved, but you…. You're a smart girl, Sakura. You don't have to believe in happy endings. You don't have to put your stake in a lost cause."
Despite their gentle tone, the words hit like a blow in Sakura's stomach.
"Have you been listening to anything I've been saying, Sasuke?" she demanded, feeling her anger and frustration bubble up inside her. Before she knew it she had pushed Sasuke's back into the side of the sword wall, pressing her chakra through her hand into his shoulder to keep him in place.
"I told you," she ground out. "You're not a cause for me to save. I don't care about the happy endings or fairy tales—what I care about is you and me. Not all the anger and sadness of the past, and not any of your pained notions of a bleak future. I just want you to let me love you in the here," she said, softening her hold, absently drawing a circle with her index finger over his heart, "and the now, for as long as I can."
He caught her hand, snatching it like a falling snowflake, and held on. He shook his head, and the moonlight caught his eyes in strange angles, turning them a molten black and then painting a silvery sheen on top. "That's not what I meant."
Sakura held her breath, not sure she could think straight with him so close, and her hand in his over his heart.
"I'll say it again: you don't give on people, Sakura. But depending on the person you're considering, that unfailing quality of yours can either be a blessing, or the curse that destroys your life. I have already taken years of your life—Naruto's life, my life, and so many others—and made them nothing short of ruin. So I am saying, Sakura, you don't have to let me take more. You don't have to put your stake in whatever destruction I amount to."
"Why not?" she whispered.
The corners of his eyes turned down, and she could see it there—the vulnerability, fresh as the peeled moon that night. "Because, if you choose to let me take, I'm not sure I can stop myself."
A slow smile curved over Sakura's lips. "Then don't. There's no reason to stop. Because I will always give you my love."
When she pressed her lips against his, he did not stiffen the way she expected him to. Instead, he unravelled, his body unwinding and bounding back to fit around hers as if the fight was finally leaving him, as if he had grown tired of holding his breath for so long, and finally decided to breathe.
It felt like barely a moment of his electrifying scent flaming through her senses when he pulled away, turned away, unable to face her yet still holding her hand like a lifeline out at sea. His shoulders were tense and tight with emotion.
Sakura tugged his hand, but he did not turn. She stepped to his side, placing her fingers against his jaw to make him look at her. His face was written with confliction and pain; it was the face of a man who desired a love a he did not believe he deserved.
"Don't turn away. Don't shut me out. You may be a lost cause and you may believe that all you can create is destruction. Truthfully, you don't deserve me, Sasuke," she said, feeling in her heart that the words were right for once. She smiled. "But I, deserve to have you without walls. I want doors, Sasuke, and I want you to keep them open. To me."
"You don't realize it, do you?" he asked, a hint of melancholy laughter in his voice. "I could never shut you out. You break through my walls no matter how strong I build them."
When he leaned into her, the descent was slow, measured and purposeful. His mouth parted her lips with a dangerously lethargic heat that bled through him and surged into her. He filled her with lightning and fire, and she returned it with equal passion.
She didn't know if Sasuke loved her. He did not say the words. But she did not expect them of him. She did not want them of him. Not now, at least.
He was more to her than three words strung in a cadence of affection. He was more to her than a dream. He was a boy with scars deeper than oceans, and she was a girl with a conviction stronger than stone. Hers was the will that could heal him.
Hers was the will to love him.