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Her fingers are raw and bloody from the long climb and despite the resulting dampness that clings to her clothes, she is deliriously grateful for the cloud layer that she fought through because it masks the near-endless drop if her grip slackens. If Sakura were less tired, she would perhaps be thankful that the thick cloud obscures her petite figure from the guards wandering on the ledges not so far below, lest one of them peers upwards, spots the crazy woman and shoots her down with well-placed kunai; but not only is she too tired to dodge those hopefully hypothetical kunai, she is too tired even to worry, so lost in bone-weary exhaustion that the snowflakes crusting her lashes is only a minor reason she must fight to keep her eyes from slipping shut.
The uneven rock surface, riddled with small sharp juts, bites through her torn gloves; not even her proper woollen gloves, which she was forced to discard along with the rest of the gear intended to buffer her from the elements, would have been ample protection. Her knee scrapes painfully against the surface, rousing unexpected fury that seems disproportionate not only for the crime but also for the energy she is able to summon, and she is once again hysterically grateful: the fury distracts her from wondering who the traitor was that doomed not only the mission, but all of her team-mates to a bloodbath from which only she emerged -- not unharmed, but certainly determined not to waste their sacrifice by catching the attention of reinforcements. (Later, she will mourn them, but not yet.)
She is so tired.
She climbs. Once, shock jolts through her as her foot slips off the ice-lubricated surface of the smallest of outcroppings. Her breath comes in painful gasps, icy air exploding in her lungs; she clings on, struggling to master the cold hand of fear gripping her heart, focusing on the steady rock surface. At length, she regains her footing and moves on.
It is the cruellest trick of fate that the last two metres of the climb are so smooth they are almost vertical flat planes, and coated with ice.
No.
It can't be.
She swears.
She looks again, and it still is.
Sakura dangles, glaring furiously at where the edge blocks out the starry sky. Dreams splinter behind her eyes, and the ice does not come from the atmosphere. Why? How can it be that after all those impenetrable roadblocks that she penetrated to get to this point -- the fast, furious fighting and deadly silent escape, the long climb -- that she is blocked by something so damn small! If she had enough chakra left that doing so wouldn't make her faint, she would be able to scamper up that surface like a spider scuttling on its web. But she pushed herself that far just to get past the cloud layer, and she has nothing left.
No. No, she cannot think that way. What about Naruto and Kakashi and Sai and Ino and her parents waiting for her back in Konoha? What about her team-mates, who died on this mission with no one to remember their bravery? It is not a matter of will. She simply cannot stop at this point.
She tries.
She really does.
But her fingers slip.
And she is left staring at the red streaks on ice-coated nephrite, clinging where her bloody fingers could not cling, as she tips backwards, limbs grasping at nothing, gravity taking hold with vengeance and she begins to fall and oh god this is going to --
-- the sky seems so wide and she is falling away from it --
Fingers close painfully around her wrist.
Her shoulder screams as her fall decelerates, ceases, and begins to move in the opposite direction: up. Something firm but warm thuds against her chest: a human shoulder. Someone has slung her against a shoulder, is settling her, and now wind howls in her ears as that someone runs with shinobi-trained speed up the rock face. They clear that grip-less distance with a leap.
For a time, Sakura can only breathe, the knowledge that she is now at the cliff's edge beginning to register. As she becomes aware of her surroundings, her focus shifts to her saviour, and maybe the cold and exhaustion is making her hallucinate, because it can't be him, but the scent of fire's making her head spin. She is too tired for the hope that she thought gone reappearing. She should be beyond seeing her ghosts in the corner of her eyes. Yes. Yes, it has to be the darkness, the repressed grief for her team-mates; it has to be her bleary eyes (never mind it wasn't her eyes that told her), seeking patterns and old familiarities in the profile of his back, as he sets her down, almost gently, and takes a step or two away.
Her saviour dashes her hopes by turning around.
- : -
"The Elders won't like it."
"Screw them."
"Naruto!"
"You can't possibly still agree with them."
"They're dead, remember? Sasuke killed them. And people might think you're referring to Shikamaru's dad."
"Eh."
"Naruto..."
"Come on, I thought you'd back me up on this!"
"I -- I do! I just. We're not the only ones who know. I mean, Ino and Hinata and their teams. They saw what Sasuke did for us. Maybe they'll want to come too. Or... or... Naruto, maybe he's still alive. I healed him, and his body wasn't found."
"I released the Kyuubi. We didn't get him back into Konoha time. And there was nothing left on the battlefield."
"That doesn't --"
"I'll wait for the others. But I'm carving his name on."
- : -
He regards her, unsmiling. Even at this distance, Sakura cannot see the expression in his eyes: it is so dark that shadows are lost among the inky blackness that is the ground, and the numberless but faint stars overhead are little help. But Sakura's ears are fine, and cannot fail to recognise his voice. "Sakura. What are you doing here?"
Her fingers rise, of their own violation, to cover her mouth as amusement wars with shock. Both colour her tone as she answers. "I'm a ninja. I'm on a mission. You're classified MIA and Naruto carved your name on the Memorial Stone. I think I should be asking you that." Especially, Sakura does not say, what forces shaped his decision to come so close to the cliff that he would see her and save her.
His answer knocks the air clear out of her lungs. "I live here."
As he speaks, his fingers flash. He raises his hand before him, and Sakura narrows her eyes against the sharp glare thrown off by the small ball of chakra hovering above his palm, buzzing quietly with repressed lightning. Edges sharpen; surfaces reflect blue light. Her gaze settles slowly on the path that lines the edge of the cliff, curving around a thicket of tall trees through which she sees nothing. The edges of the ball of blue luminescence thrown by his chakra falters before the path, stretching left to right, arrives at its destination. Ah. Maybe he had been taking a walk on the path and saw her.
"What was your mission?" he asks her, continuing his questioning and drawing her attention back.
"I'll tell you," Sakura says, beginning to recover, "if you'll help me." It's not like there's any harm in doing so, and it's well worth a try, given that Sasuke's already gone to the effort of saving her.
His eyes narrow, but they are still black, a hint of blue shining in their depths. Without a word, he turns. Sakura follows.
They take the path. Sakura does not notice the trees thinning until in their depths a small house emerges. Except house is a bit misleading; it's nothing more than a one-room hut with a high opinion of itself, on the edge of a clearing peppered with stumps -- a training ground. And seeing all this, even in her exhaustion, something grips her heart and draws her close to tears.
The inside of the hut is exactly the same as the outside: impersonal. There's a futon on the floor, a table with a battered jug of water in one corner, and nothing else, and Sakura cannot fathom that he lives here.
Sasuke does not gesture, but neither does he protest when she sits heavily on the futon, drawing blankets around her. He lights a torch she did not notice before and stands by the door, watching her with his arms crossed, dressed as though still under Orochimaru's command -- but that seems his only link to the past. Radiant heat flares from the flame; she feels it even from her position.
Sakura knows she should rest or ask for help or something, anything, but the questions built up tumble out. "Is this... is this where you've been for the past year?"
Sasuke grunts noncommittally.
"How... how," Sakura tries again quietly, "did you leave the battlefield?"
"I walked," he says, looking at her strangely. "I could do that." The deep shadows in his eyes stops her from reading his expression. "Sakura. Your mission."
She takes a deep breath. "Information retrieval. Nothing to do with you."
"From the daimyo, then," Sasuke conjectures, watching her. She nods. The daimyo's safe hold is below the mountain, and if her team had not been ambushed, it would have been her goal to break in. "What?"
"The information in his hands," Sakura says flatly. She watches him, daring Sasuke to ask more; it seems to satisfy him enough that he does not.
"My turn to ask a question, then," Sakura mutters.
"You need rest."
She rubs her face. "I need a drink, because I could have sworn you just told me to rest."
"I did," he says calmly.
Another hallucination, obviously. She should have heeded Tsunade when her teacher told her that strange things happened from healing too much. Old ghosts and dreams brought back to life.
"All right," Sakura sighs. "But tell me this. Why did you save me?"
"Why not?" is his careless reply.
She opens her mouth, deeper questions on her tongue.
"Sakura," Sasuke says.
"What?" She glances at him.
"I don't have any cups."
Sakura blinks at the non-sequitur, until she realises that she has been eying the jug of water. Funny how he noticed it before she did. She takes it as tacit permission to cross the room, pick up the jug with shaking hands, and sip right from the edge, never mind how unhygienic it may be. Obviously, living alone, Sasuke has not faced the same dilemma.
Cool, blessed water. It's as though she's gone without it for three days rather than simply five hours. Careful not to waste any, Sakura drinks as much as she can. She wipes her mouth when she's done, surprised at how quickly the room has warmed up, but then, she's always associated with Sasuke with fire, so maybe it's not surprising. Sakura certainly feels his gaze as though it's a physical thing, lingering as she sets the jug back down and crosses the room back to the futon.
Blessed water. Better than anything to do with chakra. Better than anything to do with healing.
"You really live here?" she finally asks. He raises an eyebrow; she flushes. "All right. But how did you find it?" Sakura does not need to mention her long climb just to get close to the top.
"My family has a number of outposts," Sasuke explains. "Not all of them were in the Fire Nation. And there's another entrance that doesn't take nearly as long."
"We looked for you," Sakura murmurs.
He doesn't answer.
"We did," she insists. "But when I got there, you were gone. And Naruto was..." Sakura falls silent. Her eyes flick again around the room, avoiding his dark ones, and instead, taking in its bareness, once again. Sasuke's apartment in Konoha, all those years ago, was sparse, but it wasn't this; at least the apartment had some semblance of being occupied. This hut might as well lie empty.
"The idiot lost control," Sasuke finishes for her.
"Maybe," Sakura concedes, "but then he got it back." Or rather, someone else's voice brought him back to reality.
"No wonder he had the daimyo worried," Sasuke says.
Her head shoots up. "You know about that?"
He does not answer. He asks, instead, "What were you looking for?"
"It's annoying when you ask questions you already know the answer to," Sakura says. Maybe she's not completely unaffected by his sudden reappearance. "Like you said. Naruto made him wary of Konoha. He has our enemy's battle plans. We want them." Determined to change the subject, Sakura asks. "What have you been doing in the past year, here? There's nothing but more grounds to train."
"What else is there?" Sasuke answers noncommittally, flatly.
Sakura's mouth falls open in outrage. "What else --"
"You should sleep," he interrupts.
"Like hell," she says, and when she looks up, his eyes are pinwheels of red and black, his unique Mangekyo that she last saw on the battlefield when she brought him back from the edge of death. She remembers how that had shocked her: his eyes and his brother's, combined. They are deadly, and they are beautiful.
Sakura does not back down. She glares at him, daring him to do it.
After a long, long time, which might have been no more than five seconds, the eyes fade back to black. Something that feels terribly like the stirrings of hope niggles at her heart, so much like hope that it's a physical ache clawing at old wounds until they open and spill out grief.
"Thank you," Sakura murmurs. "Good night."
She sleeps.
- : -
Her eyes open just after dusk the next day, sore but gloriously alive. Sasuke is gone, but the water has been refilled, and an apple, an orange, and three tomatoes lie on the same table. Or at least, they do for the ten minutes it takes for her to ingest them.
She is given no time to contemplate her situation when Sasuke returns, smoke thick in the air, bruised and tired. He looks as though he's been training.
Sasuke crosses the room in quick strides, gulping down the water, and Sakura doesn't let her eyes narrow despite the suspicions crossing her mind.
"You don't owe me anything now," Sakura says. "Is that why you saved me?"
He shrugs. In between gulps, curiously uncontrolled in her presence, he says, "You should go back to Konoha."
"Not without you."
And it's out in the open, then.
Sasuke pauses, but even in that freeze-frame she cannot say for certain what's on his mind. "There's nothing there for me."
"Can you even hear yourself talking?" Sakura demands. "If there was nothing in Konoha, why did you turn in the last minute? Why fight against Madara?" She stands, crosses the room, and without hesitation, her hand is around his wrist. "Do you have any idea what it did to Naruto, to think that he killed you?"
"I don't care about him," Sasuke says. "And I don't care about you. I saved you last night because I owed you that."
"That's right. All you care about is your training."
He grunts. She releases his hand, but rather than walking away, steps even closer, until his warmth is a palatable presence, and each strand of raven hair dances individually by his jaw. Because it would be a display of weakness, Sasuke does not move back -- much as Sakura guessed.
"But you didn't get those wounds from training," she says.
So close that if she leans forward a little she could kiss him again, like she did on the battlefield, her hands -- stained red with the blood of hundreds -- covering his heart as she willed him to heal. That had been desperation and tears, and she'd thought she'd let go, until his chest quivered beneath her fingers, lungs expanding as he gasped for an elusive breath of air.
This kiss would be of fire, and he's not even protesting.
They stare at each other.
There is no warning when the wall of the hut implodes.
Shrapnel flies in the air, appearing suddenly out of the cloud of grey dust. Sakura ducks, cursing herself, wondering how she could have been unaware that they were no longer alone. Index finger hooking a kunai from her holster, Sakura smashes through one of the other walls with an explosion of chakra, counting on the fact that only the obvious escape routes have been trapped.
She lands in a throng of ten or so ninja, Sasuke at her back. Unlike most of last night's enemies, these are well-trained and forewarned, and attack mercilessly. She has no option but to return it in kind. For a time, she loses herself, Sasuke a constant presence she flows around.
When Sasuke tenses, Sakura reacts. It's been a year since they last fought together -- one battle against Madara -- but Sakura knows enough to duck, using the opportunity to slash at one of the enemy's leg with a chakra-scalpel.
The enemy retreats -- far enough to avoid her scalpel, not nearly far enough to avoid Sasuke's fireball, and he's the first casualty.
In the pause, Sasuke holds out a scroll. "Go back to Konoha, Sakura. Your mission is done."
How is it that, with the shock of seeing him, the shock of hearing his words fall like stones, she can still be surprised by this? "And leave you?"
He drops the scroll, apathy in every word. "Why not?"
"Because I don't want you to die!" she all but shouts, barely restrained by the need to stay silent, lest she mask the sound of their enemies. The fire, and their cover, is fading.
"I don't care." It could have been a direct statement on her opinion, but the way he says it sends shivers down her spine.
"What about your ambitions?" Sakura hisses, pulling him down to avoid the first wave of shuriken raining down on them. "Restoring your clan. Everything?"
His eyes darken. "What my clan did to my brother..."
He stops, and they deal with respective enemies. Sweat is rolling down Sakura's forehead, mingling with the blood from wounds she cannot afford to heal, when they next have a chance to speak.
"This is your life, then?" she accuses, gasping painfully. The empty hut flashes through her mind, stark in everything it lacks: furniture, space, the feeling of a home. "Never looking for death --" Her punch shatters the chest of the ninja his wire reeled in -- "but surviving on the next thrill?"
His reply makes her slam her fist into the ground, disrupting the seal one of the enemy attempts to paint. "What else is there?"
"There's us!" she yells. "Naruto! Kakashi-sensei! Me. There's a family waiting for you, and for someone with the sharingan, you're so blind you can't even see it!" Her scalpel thrusts cleanly in and out of someone's throat; that's four down, and six others doing... something. Her voice lowers. "Sasuke --"
He turns, injured in a way that makes him less than graceful, and does not answer her question. "You've got a mission to complete."
"You're injured," she whispers. "I'm not leaving you alone. You're not sacrificing yourself for one of my missions."
"Don't be annoying," Sasuke says, and it's as though the colours of the rest of the world fade into unobtrusive shadows of themselves, but he is still so bright and vivid and in the foreground of everything else. It's as though the world revolves around him -- and for Sakura, who has now so many points of focus in her life, he is still one of them and maybe her world still does.
"Don't pretend this is the next part of surviving on edge. We barely took down those four. You'll die."
His hand does not touch her cheek, but it's so close a shiver ripples through her. "There are worse things I've almost died for."
She stares at him half a moment longer. Then, without ornament, she pulls him down by his collar and kisses him.
It is hard and passionate, and wrought again with desperation. It makes her want to cling where she needs to let go, heat running from her lips in a river to her navel.
It is like fire.
- : -
Sakura runs towards the trees; they will cover her unseen. The green is the perfect background to slip into shadows, the majestic boughs concealing whoever searches for a place to hide -- a fast route to safety. Not that she needs it. Whatever his faults, Sakura knows in her bones that Sasuke would make sure none followed her.
She leaps into the branches, sounds of battle swallowed by the trees.
Stops.
Her hand flicks through a series of seals, and the blood on her arms is sacrifice enough to summon her favourite slug in puff of smoke.
"Sakura!" it exclaims. "We've been looking for you."
"And I've got something for you," Sakura answers. She passes the scroll over. "Make sure the Hokage gets it."
"What about you?" the slug asks. It is young, and worry permeates its usual cheerful demeanour.
"Me?" Sakura grins. "I've got a friend to save. And some vengeance to exact. Hm," she says thoughtfully, "That has to be Sasuke's influence taking over."
The slug disappears. She runs back into battle.
Sakura will not accept sacrifices.