title: of love and loss
prompt: #7 - mortality
summary: sasuke thought back to the day he lost everything.

It was still in the hospital room. A swarm of medics had come and gone, gloved hands that had held white bandages and woven gauze when they had entered left empty upon leaving.

Sasuke had been absorbed by watching them as they crowded the bed, cleansing blood, bandaging wounds, and threading needles into veins, but now there was nothing left to keep his thoughts from eating him. He sat, leaning into the wall, his left hand deadweight in his lap as his right hand remained clenched around the cold metal of his chair, his knuckles as white as Sakura's face as she lay in the stretcher, all natural color washed from her face.

With the medics gone, despite how hard Sasuke tried to focus on the apathetic gray tile floor, his eyes always seemed to return to Sakura's form on the bed, her limbs arranged in such a lifeless way he had to keep reminding himself that she was breathing, just as he was.

For a moment, Sasuke tore his eyes from her, letting them wander to Kakashi, who was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest as he studied the pulse of the heart rate monitor, his gaze following each dip and rise. Though most of his face was hidden from view, the downward slope of his brows marked his face with concern.

Naruto sat just a few feet from Sasuke, but the bases of his palms were pressed hard into his eyelids as he hunched forward, his elbows piercing his legs, so he didn't notice when Sasuke glanced at him. Aside from the mechanical rhythm of the heart monitor and the faintest ticking of a clock centered over the doorway, Naruto's ragged breathing was one of the only sounds in the room.

It was like that for a while: no one spoke, looked at each other, tapped a foot on the tile. Sasuke let his eyes drift close.

"I need to start pulling my weight on this team," he heard Sakura say, her voice loud and resonating. "I'm going to be just as strong as you two one day, count on it, Sasuke-kun!"

He swallowed a lump in his throat, and a shriek replaced the sound of words, followed by a series of high-pitched screams. They were the same screams he had heard earlier that day, when enemy-nins had surrounded and attacked Sakura when she threw herself in front of the team.

Sasuke's eyes flew open. "I should've protected you," he exhaled, grimacing, "not the other way around."

He inched his chair closer to her bedside and sat an arm's length from the bed. She looked so wan and pale against the white sheets, a hand clenched into a fist at her stomach and her other arm extended limply at her side. There was no life to her features, so unlike the way she was when she was awake, and Sasuke was suddenly overcome by how simple it was to lose someone, how fragile a life could be.

He thought back to the day he lost everything, knotting his fingers with the edge of the sparse blanket spilling over the side of the bed. "I won't ever forgive you if you go," he breathed out, lowly enough so he wouldn't be heard.

His eyes were closed by the time Sakura's lips lifted ever so slightly in her dreamlike state.