For SasuSaku Month 2013, Day 19: "between you and me". Also written for bellonablack on LJ. Her prompt was: "where can love get us now: a sort of face off"

I Know (You Don't)
By icecreamlova

- : -

A secret, between you and me: Sakura did not love him until he lay motionless on a half-finished cement bridge, once smooth skin marred from hundreds of tiny bleeding cuts. He was as cold and pale as ice. Fitting.

Fog swirled around them, a cool gentle caress, dissipating slowly as three people lay dying. Her knuckles stung. Her tears stung more.

Sasuke was not supposed to fall. No one was supposed to fall, but Sasuke had faced down the Demon Brothers without a flicker of lost composure, where she'd braced herself with her eyes closed and Naruto flailed uselessly. She'd thought him untouchable. So why was she the one wobbly but unhurt, he the one flickering in and out of consciousness?

'I,' Sakura thought, 'have never been closer to him.' Her throat was scraped raw, her eyes swollen with tears. Funny how much her chest ached. She hadn't known it could hurt like this.

She was honoured by the chance to cry across his vulnerable corpse! Hysteria bubbled up her throat. It was so much cleaner in reality than the illusion Kakashi-sensei induced during his stupid bell test!

In the corner of her eye: Naruto, approaching so slowly, so reluctantly, his face crumpling. Painful awareness lanced through her heart. She couldn't stay like this. Crying over Sasuke's body was unacceptable. It had incapacitated her during Kakashi-sensei's bell test.

Sakura swallowed hard. Forced everything down.

- : -

A secret, between you and me: it didn't work. A strange, motionless weight lodged beneath her sternum. Sometimes it faded enough for her to breathe, but it did not leave, not in her warm relief when Sasuke opened his eyes and winced at her weight, not when Sasuke faltered at Orochimaru's slow smirk, not even when she watched four of her year-mates being rushed through Konoha's main gate, medical staff shouting for people to clear a path to the hospital.

(She certainly felt it, in the moments in between. When Sasuke paid a rare compliment - all right, so it had happened just once, trapped in a corridor with a crowd of chunin hopefuls, but it happened. When she and Naruto and Sasuke sat in a circle, the forest dark and treacherous around them, and planned codes that went on for five lines. When Sasuke choked and shuddered, black ink splashed across his body like an omen, and she leaped before thinking, both eyes open wide, to stop the sand monster laughing with Gaara's unstable voice.

When he said thank you, and never explained what he meant.)

The feeling closed around her throat so her conversations with Ino became exercises in pauses, no matter that Shikamaru and Chouji had recovered. Hounded her shadow when she balanced on cracked ground, back straight, eyes focused as Tsunade-sama explained the precise way to fracture a wrist so cleanly it would be easy to heal.

Sakura woke up each morning determined to train enough, the weight wouldn't feel so pressing. Sometimes it even worked.

- : -

She learnt he wanted to burn Konoha to the ground, and struggled to breathe. Wished the weight would leave.

- : -

A secret, between you and me: it would be there, when she walked away from this.

"You can still come back," Sakura said, mouth not quite forming the curve of a smile. It was not her first attempt, nor would it be her last. She clasped her hands loosely behind her back to keep her trembling fingers out of sight.

He was a lonely figure on the other side of the huge, underground room (how did the Akatsuki keep finding these places?). Sasuke looked through her. His eyes flickered between red and black, matching Naruto's focused, unblinking stare. Or maybe he was eyeing the rectangle of darkness behind them, the exit she and Naruto planted themselves firmly before.

"I know," said Naruto.

Sakura frowned, thrown. Stayed silent, not willing to ask what the hell Naruto was talking about when Sasuke's brief stillness could change at any moment.

Sasuke snorted, crossing his arms. An emotion. Sakura remembered the silent fierceness of his eyes on Naruto's back, when the three of them were training and Naruto had pulled ahead just enough to turn around and taunt them both, and thought, no. That wasn't it. It was an emotion he'd willingly shown them both, this time. Her breath caught. She dared to hope he wouldn't walk out that door.

A grin stretched across Naruto's face - he'd gone beyond hope, into expectation. "I didn't get this" - his fist thumped his chest, over his heart, the sound muffled by his jacket - "so that you could run away again. We can change the world. Promise."

Sasuke swung his sword over his shoulder. He didn't share Naruto's smile, but... there was something. Some degree of focus, of intensity, that she saw in her eyes and in Naruto's when they followed Sasuke's footsteps, that she'd hoped helplessly that they'd be able to bring out again in him. There was a pause. Sakura held her breath.

"You'll have to break this one."

Damn it.

His hands flickered through a quick sequence of seals, and she tensed. Began to redirect her chakra.

"Not on your life," said Naruto, scowling. He flashed through seals of his own, and with a high-pitched scream, wind whipped around the room, flinging clumps of dirt everywhere. A cloud of dust rose, sand-paper against her skin, and she coughed, eyes streaming.

She saw the disdain on Sasuke's face just before it was concealed behind a cloud of dust. Behind her, Naruto cursed.

"I can't see either," she hissed back at Naruto, raising her voice to be heard over the wind. She lifted an arm, trying to protect her eyes.

"Sorry," he muttered, letting the wind slow enough to clear a few feet around them. He gazed outside their circle of calm, and said, softly, "Dumbass."

For a moment, Sakura was very tempted to say... but she couldn't. She closed her mouth, turned her back on him, and headed for the doorway. Perhaps Sasuke would engage. More likely, he'd use the dust storm as cover to leave. She really did not want him walking out that door; he'd be lost to them forever.

The world flashed dull red, all the air seemed to vanish, and heat scraped against her skin. Yelping, she pounded the floor with her fist. The entire room trembled, but dirt and rock heaved up just in time to block the fireballs spitting from within the cloud of dust. The ground hissed, boiled, where they landed - forming a molten path to the doorway.

Somewhere, Naruto was shouting, and through the howling wind, Sakura heard iron ringing - kunai clashing. She stayed where she was, squinting against the dust. She hooked her finger through the ring of a kunai as she waited.

(She'd prepared for this. Was prepared. She'd thrown punches at Sasuke before, and she... she would do it again.)

A shift. A sound, barely there beneath the wind.

She pivoted just in time to block Sasuke's sword with her kunai. Metal screeched and sparks scattered as the two blades rasped against one another, and his strength was already forcing her down, so Sakura struck out with a heel that he was forced to disengage to avoid, lest she shatter his shins.

Her following punches hit thin air, as his speed and sharingan ensured they would, but she wasn't willing to leave the door unguarded as she'd need to, to follow his brief retreat. Stayed where she was, sizing him up instead.

"I guess that's a no, then?" she murmured. She had Sasuke's attention. Might as well use it.

Sasuke shrugged, very slightly. "I don't need to explain."

She remembered his eyes when focused on Naruto earlier. How intense they'd been. How pale they'd still seemed, compared to the few instances he'd spoken of his-

Oh. Awareness lanced through her body like a physical pain. The weight beneath her sternum stirred, shifted, like the world tipping on its axis. It was like the lines of every object had been sharpened into unbearable intensity, and their sharp edges cut.

Something about her body language gave away her barely suppressed smile, grim though she felt, because he frowned.

"You don't need to explain," agreed Sakura. "I know."

"You?" His brows lifted, his mouth threatened to pull into a smirk. The lines of his body stayed as taut as ever, but he wasn't about to attack.

"Yes," Sakura said, with absolute confidence, even though her stomach was sinking like it was made of lead.

Sasuke watched her with burning-bright attention. He'd never watched her like she could possibly breath his stone fences, but his eyes didn't leave her now. His sharingan spun with a strange inner glow.

Naruto had refused to explain what he meant earlier, to her, but this she did know.

Hysteria bubbled up her throat. She swallowed, hard.

"Because," she said, the words dropping from her lips like stones, "I love you." She shrugged, casual despite her racing heart. "I know you won't stop chasing your family, because Naruto and I can't stop chasing you." Even if it had somehow translated into attacking Konoha's leaders and wanted to waging war on his former village.

(The funny thing about Sasuke - he had turned his back on every single date invitation, but after the three of them limped out of the Forest of Death, he had never, not once, treated her heartfelt words with disdain.)

(And she-)

He shook his head, did not reply. Paused, as Sakura stepped out of the way.

Once, he would have passed her without a second thought. But he'd just heard her words. Sasuke's steps were slow, measured, careful, waiting no doubt for a sudden precise move he'd catch out of the corner of his blood red eyes and move to block before she neared him, for a trap to spring and collapse the doorway.

He did not know the trap was the twenty ninja waiting outside the doorway, the seal that would activate with his unfamiliar footsteps, primed to freeze his blood before even he could flee.

(Oh god. Naruto. He was going to hate her when he found out.)

Framed by the doorway, still turned to keep her in sight, Sasuke paused briefly. Met her eyes, opened his mouth. But he didn't say anything. He turned again to leave.

Sakura - Sakura though.

'This is love,' she thought, and Sasuke had always known what love meant, which was why she said, once more, as though he'd understand this time, "I love you."

Darted forward, chakra waiting to explode from her fist. She aimed for his neck.

- : -

In some universes, he understood, took it as a warning. Turned in time to block, stepped back, fire dancing on his lips, ready to devour all the oxygen in the room.

In this one, he—

- : -

Her chest ached.

- : -

End.

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