This is the last. Interpret what I say how you wish; you may only hear what you want to, or you may hear what you never wanted to: my intentions from the start.
Run to ruin, because that's all you can ever do. You run and run, trying to catch up with the manic, convoluted path she sets, trying to catch up and find your place in her cold empty twisted little world.
The moonlight filtered through the twisted trees, falling in rippled, broken fragments across the clearing-the border between Konoha and Iwa, seemingly alive. Dead-dying-dead phantasms biting with serrated edges; blackened, wizened tendrils pulling him in. Naruto shivered, the night air biting-the seasons were about to turn. Leaves etched with frost, writing words no one would ever know-
Answers.
What he came here for.
Answers.
Everything was building, culminating here. The tension was tangible, breakable in the air, made weak by frost and death; fractured over and over again by falling hope and lost purpose. The air smelled like ashes, ashes from all the burned bridges, from all the walls that had come tumbling down.
There was an ominous sense of invasion by just standing on the edge of this clearing. He didn't belong here, in this place where the dead congealed; he didn't belong in the dying promised land. He was here for her, to pay his respects.
And you keep seeing her in your mind, a frail, pale shadow of what was. She smiles at you and looks through you and you feel like you're the one gone, like you're the ghost in her world, her cold empty twisted little world.
If it could even be called that.
This whole thing was so twisted, so distorted. Naruto was looking at the world through a warped piece of glass, glass woven from binary strands of was-things that were. Things that could never be resuscitated, things that if you tried to resuscitate them, they would suck the life out of you and stay dead. This… This was the end of the line.
Shoving frozen hands in his pockets, Naruto stared at the ground, blinking back tears that were coming only now-now, of all times. But being here, standing here… All it served to do was drive home the reality of the fact that this was reality. Reality was here. It was the cold and the frost, the ink and the paper. It was the gods-damned ink and paper their-for yes, it was theirs now-their tale had been forged with, immortalized, for better or for worse, in annals of the mind.
Go on, try to close your mind. Try not to hear what she says to you. Try to block it away, she dares you. But you can still read her lips; hear the words she's used to convince herself. You can hear the silent dead speaking to the walls of your mind, creating her twisted little world so that after she's gone, it will live on in you.
And now he just wanted to forget.
Forget her, forget this… It had turned from a surreal dream to a nightmare to something horribly real, something as alive as Sakura was dead.
He wanted to forget how he kept imagining her alive; imagining this some kind of elaborate hoax.
Maybe it could have been, somewhere else, in some other place, some other time, some other people. Maybe the other person had been able to save his best friend, save both of them. Maybe they hadn't had to watch as they both lost themselves to their minds-dying collectively, symmetrically, drowning in their heads.
Naruto was about to wipe furiously at his eyes, but there was something-
And she tells you to let them fall, to let the tears go. In your head, your dreams, she's right there, frozen hands lisping over your arms, trying to comfort but instead stealing away the last of your hope. And really, it's just a half-hearted comfort, because noting is enough to fix the empty. Nothing is enough to stop her from destroying herself, from ripping her twisted little world apart.
"Let them fall."
Naruto sun around and there she was, pale and opaque and right there, smiling with empty pale lips and empty pale eyes in an empty pale face from her empty pale twisted world. The choppy moonlight slid over her face with the breeze through the empty pale branches, rattling like bones in a closet.
"Saku-Sakura?" This was incomprehensible, impossible. Not-no… "What is this?" he asked hoarsely.
She closed her eyes, reopening hazy orbs ever so slowly. "This is my goodbye." She reached forward and brushed icy fingers over his face, somehow right there-right there- and then gone again.
And she steps away from you; pushes two fingers against her cold empty head, rests them on her temple. It's a twisted mockery: a gun, a knife, a salute to was. You want to not hear, not see-the world is mute, but you still see her mouth move; not ansers, there were never nay to be had, but she can give you her last, cold empty words-
"I love you."
But I can't stay, she mouths. So this is my goodbye.
"Goodbye." Another wan cold empty smile, that is till not a smile.
Sakura smiles again, as she lifts her fingers; as she crumples into nothing, as she vanishes, dissipates back into her cold empty world and you are left alone, alone all over again.
And remember, I love you.