This is it guys, the chapter I've been waiting for. Let's. Fucking. Gooooooo-

- Power -

"I want you to spar with me before you leave."

Sakura hadn't exactly thought the idea through before the words were already leaving her mouth. The plan was just suddenly there, fully formed in her mind. It was revealing itself to her one step at a time, like a series of dominoes tumbling down their run.

To be fair, Kakashi had effectively liquified her brain when she'd caught him staring up at her. His chakra-drunk gaze had been the honey sweetness of adoration, but it had also held a hard wanting that burned the way top shelf liquor didn't. When he'd reached up to brush his fingers through her hair, it was like drowning in a cocktail of every daydream she'd ever had about him.

She had thought herself resolved to the fact that he didn't love her. Had believed herself officially sober. Instead, she was quickly relapsing into an addiction she'd sworn she'd been ready to leave behind. They say the first step to change is admitting you have a problem. All it had taken was one burning look for Sakura to realize it might be time to deal with hers.

Because she hadn't thought it would be this hard to be around Kakashi again…but maybe it was like going to the bar the day after you decide to get clean. She'd seen rehab patients struggle to give up their drug of choice. She realizes that's how she thinks of him now- She the addict and he the addiction. That same struggle rages inside her now as she grapples with the need for yet another fix of him.

It's hard to think of what she feels for him as love now that she has something else to compare it to. What she has with Shikamaru is the closest thing to it but this... This is another monster all together, and now it has her by the throat.

Either way, she'd been stupid to think she could just come back to Konoha and will herself to stop loving this man. It would be easier to will herself to fly.

It feels only second nature to turn her face into his palm; the gesture a familiar intimacy she's shared with Yume-Kakashi ever since she'd first dreamed him into life. But now, she's a victim of her own pavlovian conditioning. She's already melting into his touch when she remembers she was suppose to be quitting him.

But it's too late. She's had her fix. She wants another and another. She drunk on dopamine and the hope that this champagne daydream will never end.

But it doesn't end. It pops like a bubble in the drink she'll need to order once this humiliating day is over.

Because Kakashi isn't reaching up to pull her into a kiss that would electrify her body and change her life. The twig he pulls from her brushed back bangs is the coldest of painful wake up calls. Colder than nearly passing out in a bathroom at the Embassy Royal. Colder being laughed at when she'd been first ready to confess her feelings. Colder than waking up on a park bench after confessing her first I love you.

When was she going to wake up from her stupid dreams and finally learn her stupid lesson?

'Today.' A voice whispers inside her. It comes from somewhere deep down. It comes from the place where Sakura knows her truth- That there wasn't a reality where this man 14 years her senior would ever see her as anything but a girl.

'Today.' She tells herself, pretending to fix her hair. She's trembling in the corner of the examination room. She hopes Kakashi won't see how hard she's trying to stitch herself back together.

Today is the day she takes back her power, one way or another.

"You want to…what?" Kakashi asks, confused by her sudden request for trial by combat.

She turns away as he pulls on his long sleeve shirt despite how badly she covets his bare skin. Because she doesn't want to live like this for a second longer, waiting for him to make a move he's never going to make. Waiting for him to say words he was never going to say, and then punishing herself for her unbearable loneliness.

The River Generals voice comes back to her now, bright as a freshly polished memory.

"If you must know, I was the one who approached him. With our differences in age, and me being his subordinate, I don't believe he ever would have confessed to me first."

There was only one way this could all go down, and she was ready to go down bloody to get there.

"Spar with me, and let me see you move. If you're really ready to be back out in the field, then a fight with me should be a cake walk."

Because while she might not be certain of how Kakashi feels about her, she knows one thing down to her core: the only way she's ever going to move on from this man is by punching him or kissing him, but preferably in that order.

And so… she makes herself a deal. A crazy, risky, stupid deal.

She was going to fight Kakashi, and prove to him that she wasn't a little kid anymore. She was going to force him to recognize her as his equal in every way that mattered between them. She's all but made up her mind now; if she can put him down in a sparing match, then she would finally tell him how she felt. There would be no second guessing this time. Whether or not Kakashi reciprocated her feelings, it didn't actually matter.

Because at the end of the day, she wasn't doing this for him. She was doing it for the girl she'd been long ago; someone willing to wait forever for the person she loved to love her back.

She would do it for the girl who had confessed broken feeling for a broken boy and been left of a park bench because of it.

She would do it for that same child who had grown up into an adult who still couldn't say I love you out loud.

She would show Kakashi how she felt to prove to herself that she wasn't fragile. She needs to prove that she can handle being rejected, no matter by who. It would be baptism by fire, but finally Sakura is ready to burn.

As a child, idolizing Sasuke had made her weak. But loving Kakashi…that had made her strong. Him and Yume-Kakashi, and Shikamaru too. One had taught her how to endure, the other had taught her how to dare. And Shikamaru… he had taught her that everything she needed was already there inside of her.

She could not be worthy of any of them if she didn't stand up now and use those gifts. She was going to do this for herself, consequences be damned.

And so, when Kakashi looks like he wants to run from the exam room without giving her another thought, she doesn't give him the option to. She doesn't ask him to spar with her, she tells him that's what they're going to do.

She knows it won't be enough for him to just hear her words. She needs him to see her first, to recognize where her strength comes from. She wants him to know that she's still his student, but she doesn't want to need him anymore.

They can become something new, or they can be nothing at all, but they aren't going to do this any longer.

He clearly doesn't expect this shift in her energy from timid and undone to suicidally empowered. In truth, she doesn't expect it from herself. But his touch has reawakened in her a lifelong yearning that never truly left her. The beast of her heart had not been slain, it had simply been asleep.

Well, this time she isn't going to run from it. She isn't Naruto's teammate for nothing. It's his look of determination on her face that says she will not be denied. It's his look that persuades Kakashi to accept his fate: That he'll have to earn his field-ready status with his fists.

That was how Sakura now stood where she did; across the training field from her second great love and hopefully the last unrequited love of her lifetime.

From each of their hips hangs a solitary silver bell. While Kakashi doesn't know it, everything at stake is riding on them. If he can take hers, she clears him for active duty and has vowed to show him a hint of her new Jutsu. But if she can take his, she gets bragging rights forever, and will be able to confess her love to him as his equal.

Sakura takes a deep breath and cracks her neck. Her fists clench tightly in her favorite gloves. What ever happens after today is unimportant. She hands it off to tomorrow's Gods. But this moment, right now… this is for her.

It's a moment of silence for the person she doesn't want to be anymore.

She takes a single, giant, courageous step towards a man she deeply loves.

Then, with a prayer…she's gone.

- Smokescreen -

Sakura is fighting with a handicap that Kakashi isn't, which makes executing her plan that much harder. She isn't just trying to take his bell, she needs to make him acknowledge her first. That means she can't use dirty tricks this time- lip reading Icha Icha isn't going to cut it. She has to push them both to their very edge, or all of this will have been for nothing.

They are several minutes into their sparing match when Sakura realizes her first big problem: Kakashi isn't using his Sharingan. He isn't even taking her seriously. She's so irritated by this realization that she barely saves her bell from his passing grasp. She retreats back to a comfortable distance, watching him carefully watching her.

The asshole isn't even winded yet…

She can tell he's simply playing with her, waiting for her to wear herself out. The last time they'd conducted this test, she'd had the challengers benefit of two on one. Her fighting skills have gotten better over the years, but her Sensei has gotten better too.

The man is coming off a near death injury, but even now he's terrifying. Even without using his Sharingan, Kakashi is twice her usual opponent. She knows she can't call herself his equal if she doesn't contend with his Dojutsu, but getting him to cooperate is proving more challenging than she expects.

Still, she's had years of chess practice with Shikamaru. He'd shown her how to transform time into opportunity, and preparation into advantage. If she was going to win this thing, it wouldn't be by brute strength alone. She'd have to outthink her Sensei in any way she could.

She'd need to use an advantage he wouldn't expect. If only she could tell what he was thinking. If only she could read his next move…

They trade a sequence of familiar strikes, a rolling combo they'd drilled for a whole week as Genin. That's when she gets her second stupid idea of the day.

'Impossible.' She thinks. 'There's no way it could work…'

And yet, the idea persists in her mind. There, another combo from his bag of tricks, one she's seen him use frequently with Gai.

She dodges a linear volley of Kunai, but she knows there's something wrong in his aim. He's directing her movements rather than trying to hit her dead on. She lands on a tree branch overhead, only to find an bomb tag already there. She's able to leap away just before it ignites, but the percussive blowback from the explosion rattles her eardrums in an ugly way.

The longer this sparring match goes on, the smaller her chances of winning become. She needs to come up with something now. She needs a hail-mary to see her through.

And so, because she's already committed to being stupid today, she decides it's time to go all out.

Kakashi's bomb tag billows ugly black smoke from where it's scorched the surviving branches. She uses that smokescreen to double back, returning to the same tree she's just escaped. If she's lucky, Kakashi will be looking for her everywhere else than where she's already been. All she needs to do is buy some time; just enough to close her eyes and count to 10.

She hears a twig snap off to her left. She reaches deep for the chakra in her core, using it to slow her breath. She call up the daydream that will make or break her hopes. 'Please-' She begs. 'I need you.'

She launches out of the smoking tree the second she feels their bond connect, barely dodging a wayward shuriken. Kakashi doesn't known exactly where she is, but projectiles didn't have to see their target to land a lucky hit.

But Sakura is ready when she lands. Chakra burns through her like adrenaline. Yume-Kakashi lands in a defensive stance beside hers, ready for a fight.

"Twice in one day? You must have really missed me."

She chokes on a sarcastic come back, throwing her body left. Her Sensei unleashes another fan of Kunai. It's like he's shooting fish in a barrel among these trees…

She races out of the confines of the forest, back towards the nearby grassy field. Her genjutsu shadow moves when she moves, reading her thoughts and predicting her needs. He stays glued to her hip like he's tethered to her, as lithe and dangerous as the real man ever was.

"Are we ready for this?" She asks him, uncertainty in her voice.

Up ahead, her Sensei too steps out of the trees. Once more, they stand still, facing one another. The silence stretches on like a high-noon gun fight, fingers on the trigger of their next big move.

Standing on opposite ends of the field, her two Kakashi's are different as night and day. One a cold and calculating tactician, the other a glowing ray of sunlight radiating support from her side. She doesn't know how she ever could have mistake one for the other…

But she doesn't let their differences discourage her. Yume-Kakashi might not be able to predict the flightpath of random projectiles, or help her walk a tightrope blindfolded. But Sakura knows the real Kakashi. She's traded fists with him since she was a child. If there was one person on the planet her Genjutsu was built to predict, it's the man who stands before her now.

"How do you know this is going to work?" Yume-Kakashi asks. He stares Kakashi down with a narrowed glare.

Surprisingly, it's Shikamaru's words that come to her now. "Because the hard work has already been done. You're the plan, and I'm the follow through."

Across the field, her Sensei cocks his head to the side. He can't hear her, but he can read her lips.

"Well, I definitely have a plan, but it's going to take some time. Do you trust me?" Yume-Kakashi asks, sizing up his corporeal counterpart.

"I trust you." She says. The words apply to herself as much as they do to him. She takes her eyes off of her Sensei just long enough to give her Kakashi a grin.

"Good. Then duck-" Yume-Kakashi says.

She does so without bothering to look for the attack. She trusts her gut and she trusts her partner. That trust is rewarded when a roundhouse kick sails through the air where her upper body use to be. The attack comes from behind, not from the front. The distant Kakashi she'd been staring down disappears with a puff of smoke.

A shadow clone distraction-

"Don't attack!" Yume-Kakashi orders, staying within earshot as the fight transforms. The brawl transitions from mid-range assaults into close quarters Taijutsu. Every time she gets the urge to counter with a punch or create space with a series of kicks, Yume-Kakashi orders her to hold back. His plan floats into her mind through their shared bond. It's a memory of something Kakashi once said, practically a lifetime ago.

If you want to mentally fuck with your opponent, then when he goes to punch, don't be there.

When he turns to find you, don't be there.

When he telegraphs a strike, don't be there.

Any rookie can block a strike with a Kunai, but only a master can disappear into thin air.

So that's what Sakura decides to do. She decides to disappear.

Sakura puts all of her mental energy into honing her speed, gaining momentum fractions of a second at a time. At first it feels like they're at a dead match- but there's an efficiency to this madness of not throwing punches. She isn't wasting energy trying to absorb his blows. Instead, she's conserving the energy he isn't.

It's almost like she's playing with magic when finally her Sensei begins to tire.

He's coming off weeks of mandatory bed rest while Sakura's been matching Utsuho's brutal cross-country pace. This minuscule difference in their conditioning gives her the tiniest hint of an edge. She uses it to claw her way up from the dark and out into the blinding sunlight.

She doesn't get it totally right at first, but at least now she's only blocking every other strike. Finally, her Sensei gets tired of slinging around the weight of his last kunai. He flings the metal at her feet, switching over to bare knuckle strikes.

He's still just a little bit faster than her, but Yume-kakashi tells her where to step and when to slip; What to dodge and what's a feint. She's a millisecond ahead of her opponent. Then a half step, then a whole.

Then suddenly she doesn't need to block at all. It's like she steps beyond the boundaries of her body. She becomes a being with phantom limbs, weightless as a spirits dance.

Kakashi doesn't land a single blow on her for the next forty-something moves. She slips and dodges, but never blocks. She is something from another world.

All the while, Yume-Kakashi is in her ear. He is the memory of every fight they have ever had together, a dictionary of Kakashi's signature moves. He is a psychic who can predict the future, and she trusts his accuracy with her life.

It is the best feeling in the world when she drops into a back handspring and her Sensei's fist passes through empty air. He staggers from overcommitting his weight, expecting to make contact when he suddenly doesn't.

She's never been this fast before. She might never be this fast again.

But even now, Kakashi doesn't lift his headband. His Sharingan remains concealed. He just keeps firing blows down the line, waiting for her unsustainable speed to give out.

Their sparring is no longer a ninjutsu fight, it's become a boxing match. But Yume-Kakshi doesn't get tired. He keeps telling her where to step and when to turn. This is her arena, no one else's.

Her eyes lock onto her Sensei's headband. If he isn't going to show her the respect of fighting her with both eyes open, she's just going to have to take it from him.

She drops into another chain of dodges, Kakashi breathing down her neck. She knows she's going to start tiring soon, and her Sensei knows it too. But she keeps her weapons to herself. She forgoes her usual attacks for this new inhuman speed.

She risks losing the battle to win the war.

Almost.

Almost there…

"Cross hook!" Yume Kakashi yells, and at his words her body obeys.

Her tempo has gotten just enough ahead. When she finally throws her punch, her Sensei's left arm is already fully extended. There is no time for him to turn and block.

Her knuckles make direct contact with his unprotected jaw, catching his blind side like a bullet train.

Kakashi hadn't expected her to throw a punch at all. She's done nothing but dodge for the last unnumbered moves.

The speed at which his head whips around sends the rest of limp body flying. His forehead protector spins away from his face, lost somewhere in the middle distance. His body hits compacted earth like a sandbag dropped from a satellite. She can tell she's knocked the wind out of him from the way he gasps painfully for breath.

She's on top of him an instant later, straddling his waist with her knees in the dirt. She refuses to give him even a moments mercy. She will make him acknowledge her, or make him bleed.

Her Sensei looks up at her in a punch-drunk daze, both eyes locked onto her movements now. His exposed Sharingan spins like a scarlet heart hurricane, but there's no point anticipating a move from point blank range.

She pulls back her fist to finish this fight.

"Sakura, he's below!" Yume-Kakashi screams.

She feels the brush of very real fingertips grasping at her forgotten bell…

She changes tactics in an instant, all it takes is the tiniest shift. Her knuckles land just to the left of his head and the blow buckles the ground like a collapsing building. The shadow clone beneath her body vanishes in a puff of smoke, shattered earth revealing her Sensei's true location.

'Stupid, Stupid!' She screams at herself, launching up from the rubble just in time to save her bell. She'd been so focused on proving she wasn't useless that she'd forgotten the point of this entire fight.

Now she was on the back foot again, her element of surprise used up and gone. She'd wasted Yume-Kakashi's plan. Now she was going to pay dearly for it.

Kakashi attacks her in earnest now, his Sharingan blazing like a reapers eye. He unleashes an unholy arsenal of blows she barely escapes with her teeth intact.

He's finally giving her the fight she wanted. Now, she's back to blocking instead of dodging. Her ribs are still there when he targets them hard. He launches a spinning back kick she can't avoid.

She blocks too high and he strikes her square in the spot where Hinata caught her yesterday.

He kicks her so hard she can taste her small intestines. She feels like she's about to throw up her guts. She doesn't know if she's pissed that he's targeted her weak spot, or proud that she's pushed him hard enough that he's had to.

Either way, she knows this is the beginning of the end. Her legs wobble and the world tilts hard to the left. She has just enough sense to grab for her bell, concealing it in her palm so it's harder for him to take. If Kakashi wants to claim his prize, he will have to break her fingers one by one before she surrenders it over to him.

"Sakura!" Yume-Kakashi yells. A ripple of something unreadable comes down through their bond, a molten wave of pain and fear.

It distracts her just enough that this time she doesn't block when the real Kakashi strikes her clean across the face. There's no chakra behind this blow, but it's still enough to make her head rock back. Her eyeballs get a good look at her own brain before she can blink away the darkness.

Maybe…this was all for the best. Maybe this was just how things had to be.

After this match, she wouldn't be confessing her feelings to him… but this fight was a love letter composed with her fists. She didn't need to speak her thoughts out loud. Hopefully, he'd understood her all the same:

That she was capable of calculated action, but capable of accepting the consequences too.

That she was not going to be afraid of her feelings anymore. Her heart was ferocious as any animal. She wasn't going to condemn that beast to a life in a cage.

That she might love him untill the day she died… but she was finally ready to love herself more. If that meant letting go of him here, then maybe losing was its own reward.

Because he would not be the last man to love her, if he ever chose to love her at all.

She staggers again, and this time her Sensei is there to catcher her before she can fall. Except his fingers tell her that something is wrong. He isn't there as a reassuring support when he grips her shoulders hard. She can see the whites of his eyes now. His anger has taken the place of his pride.

"Why?!" His cold voice is a step beyond rage. He's furious at her for taking this fight too far, for pushing the boundaries of their relationship towards something he doesn't like.

She'd gotten caught up in her feelings again, but this was just something she'd had to do. Because it wasn't this fight that really mattered. It was every fight she'd had with herself before, grappling with whether love was worth the risk. It was every time she'd measured her self worth against the scraps of his fickle attention, only to find the numbers in red.

"Give me the bell, Sakura." He says through his teeth.

"Make me." She seethes, squeezing her fingers. The thing that was once a bell in her palm compacts down into a steel ballbearing.

Because she might not be his equal yet, but at least now she knows it doesn't make her unworthy. She had accomplished something real here today. Now it was time to see it through.

"Fine." He says, gripping her tighter.

When he dips his head, she almost thinks he's going to kiss her.

But instead, his Sharingan is a searing ember burning through his orbital socket. She feels the threads of his Genjutsu clawing at the welded edges of her mind. She realizes what he plans to do only seconds before she can stop it from happening. But there's no way to stop a Sharingan…

Her brain explodes with phantom pain like he's trying to grab her consciousness and rip it out.

He's using his Sharingan to put her to sleep.

Just like Sasuke once put her to sleep.

Yume-Kakashi's voice is a war drum in her ear-

"No." He tells her. "No."

And then, she hears his voice out loud.

"Never. Never again."

Suddenly, she's being ripped from Kakashi's hands like she's nothing more than a paper doll. Someone folds her into muscled limbs. Her head whips violently into a padded flak jacket as they rotate her away from the fight. Stars explode behind her eyes; all she can smell is orange blossoms and the tang of blood.

Her vision clears just in time to see Yume-Kakashi's heel connect in a perfect spinning arc with the unprotected side of her Sensei's face. She watches her teacher's eyes blow wide as they follows the trajectory of the incoming blow…A blow he shouldn't be able to see coming at all.

The world goes dark, then light again.

Both of their bodies pitch to the ground, bouncing and rolling in opposite directions. She watches from her prone side with detached wonder as her Sensei scrambles over to her, boneless in the dirt.

She sees his mouth move beneath his mask.

He's screaming something she can't hear.

All Sakura knows is there's a high pitched ringing, the kind that lingers in your ears after a flash-bomb goes. Kakashi cradles her in the shelter of his chest and she thinks he's repeating… is he repeating her name? She tries to tell him that she's okay, but there's too much water in her mouth to speak. It feels like it's dripping from her nose, her eyes…

Kakashi's hands wipe desperately at her face, terror in his eyes like she's never seen. She still can't make out a thing he's saying, but when he pulls back his hand is covered in blood.

Blood? But she felt…fine.

Actually, she couldn't feel anything at all. Why was he bleeding? Or was it hers?

And where was Yume-Kakashi…

The man cradling her starts shaking uncontrollably. She counts the Tomoe in his left eye before everything around her finally goes black for good…

.

- Authors Note -

You guys…You GUYS… I'm really fucking proud of this chapter, what can I say. I'm glad I pushed through the earlier ones I didn't like so I could finally get to THIS BITCH. I've been planning this fight since about ch. 10, you have no idea how badly I wanted to get here!

Thank you for sticking through the inconsistent writing quality and giving this story a real chance. I've never written anything this long or cohesive before, so I'm definitely learning as we go. But at the end of the day, I'm writing something I'm super proud of and it's all because of your support and reviews that I'm motivated to continue.

If you haven't left a review in a while, please consider leaving one now. It helps others to find the story, and it always makes my day to know what you think. - XOXO, VB