The sky burned bloody above their heads. Smoke curled thick black columns into the air; the stench of burning trees, burning earth, burning flesh. Where there was once a battlefield, there was nothing but corpses, blood and fire.

They stalked the periphery of the devastated field, lost in the copse of gray-black and scorched remnants of a forest. Leaves and dead wood crunched under their feet as they ran; she the pursuer, he the pursued.

The battlefield had been theirs, and they had destroyed it. The right of ownership.

It is ownership that drives her knee into his back when she catches up with him and pushes him face-down into the ground. Ownership that causes her to grip him by the hair on the back of his neck and force his face up out of the dirt and dead leaves.

She forced him to look up at the sky through the dark, reaching branches of the dead trees. Blackened bones of limbs screaming for the sky above.

He saw it and he laughs.

"Caught you," was her hiss into his ear, ugly and taunting. It was a game, everything. The deaths and the destruction and the years spent him chasing him. It was all a fucking game.

Blood covered the back of his neck, his face; she could see it soaking through the dark material of his shirt. She knew how badly he was injured. She ached to heal him, in spite of everything.

He turned his head to look at her. His irises were the sky; red with blood and black smoke. His gazed burned her, her skin prickled under his dark gaze.

"Will you kill me, Sakura?" he smiled, and she realized she'd rather shove his bloodied face into the dirt than have to look at such a smile ever again.

Sakura sneered in reply.

"I don't have to kill you, Sasuke, you're already bleeding to death," she snapped.

His Sharingan glinted at her in dark amusement.

"Some would say I'm already dead," Sasuke laughed bitterly. Her hand tightened in his black, blood-matted hair. She pressed him harder into the dirt until she felt him tense and heard him hiss in pain.

"You're looking pretty good for a dead man, Uchiha Sasuke," she smiled in reply, although he couldn't see it. He laughed again. It sounded more like a wet cough than anything; there was blood in his lungs.

"Are we waiting for Naruto?" He asked suddenly, for a second sounding curious rather than mocking. She smiled down at the back of his head.

"We're waiting for the Hokage, Sasuke. Who better to come retrieve the Hidden Leaf's most infamous deserter than him?" she said, lifting his head back up. She leaned to once more whisper into his ear, "What's it like to be the man behind the name the Leaf whispers to frighten its children at night?"

Sasuke's laughter echoed in the dead, barren forest. It startled the scavenger-birds from their perches above their heads.

He may have been injured, but he was still strong. In a burst of strength and speed, he managed to twist beneath her thighs. She gripped his wrists instead of his hair, finding it easier to straddle his waist rather than dig her knee into the small of his back.

"What about you, Sakura? Do you whisper my name at night, or do you just wish you could?" he taunted her brutally, his red eyes gleaming. His face was pale with blood loss, freckled and smeared with the blood he'd lost.

Sakura growled viciously, taking both of his slender wrists in one hand to press the sharp edge of a kunai to the pulsing cord of muscle in his throat, thrumming with the blood he had yet to lose.

"Fuck you, Sasuke," she cursed icily. He cocked an eyebrow, so she pushed the kunai into his skin. Just a little. Just to make sure he knew that to reply would be a rather grave error on his part. It didn't stop him from smirking maliciously.

Sometimes she hated him so much she wanted to kill him.

And other times she loved him so much she wanted to die.

Neither of which were options at the moment. She settled for drawing a thin line of blood on the column of his neck--not that he had much left to lose.

Sasuke didn't appear to notice. He gave her a long, appraising look. When he breathed, she could hear his chest rattle wetly.

She could heal him. She even wanted to, but she wouldn't. She had her orders.

"You look so different than what I remember, Sakura," he said, his voice a mockery of wistfulness. She managed a chilly smile.

"And how do you remember me, Sasuke?" she indulged him, regarding his pale, sickly appearance.

Sasuke shut his eyes and sighed loudly. Deliberately.

"I still see you at thirteen years old, begging me not to leave the Hidden Leaf. Or better yet, begging me to bring you along with me." He opened his eyes and met her gaze, still looking thoughtful. "Perhaps I should have taken you with me, after all. You don't seem as useless as I once thought."

Sakura barked out a laugh. She didn't tell him that if he hadn't left her, she never would have found the drive to become strong. She would have hated to give him yet another reason to act like the smug little bastard she remembered.

"When Naruto gets here, you'll see someone else who didn't turn out quite as useless as you used to think," she said, laughing. His expression darkened, and she got the impression she'd hit a nerve.

A smile tugged on her lips. It wasn't a particularly nice one.

"What's wrong, Sasuke? Don't want to talk about Naruto?" She mocked him, listening to the rattle in his chest. She was only permitted to heal him if it began to look as though he wouldn't survive the wait for Naruto.

He glared at her silently for a long time. His blood darkened the clothes he wore, the dead leaves beneath him.

Finally, he cracked a smile. She almost winced at the sight.

"Is it his name?" he asked her softly, silk wrapped around a jagged blade. She narrowed her eyes as she stared down at him.

"His name what?" she asked reluctantly, unwilling to walk into the trap she knew he was setting for her.

"Naruto. Is it his name you whisper at night?"

She could have snarled. She could have cut his throat and spilled the last of his blood on the dead forest floor beneath the sky that cared nothing for their existence.

Sakura smiled as the kunai glinted dangerously in her hand.

"I wouldn't call it whispering," she smirked. His smile was colder than she'd ever seen. Not that it mattered. She refused to look away, even though it was becoming increasingly difficult to look him in the eyes. The Sharingan was fading; he was growing weaker.

Sakura bit the inside of her lip and said nothing more.

After a pause, Sasuke tilted his head.

"Will he marry you?" he asked. The question came as a surprise, and it was difficult to mask. She managed--somehow. She wondered if he could tell.

"He will," she replied smoothly, not missing a beat. Naruto had already asked her--at least once a year since they turned seventeen. The real question was not would he ask her, but when she would say yes.

And she was planning on it. Once her skeletons were buried.

Sasuke was the last of them, and she wondered just how literally she'd have to take that metaphor. He was dying in front of her, and she could save him.

She just wanted him to ask to be saved.

Sasuke laughed again. It chilled her to her bones. She considered killing him just to make him stop.

"What's so fucking funny, Sasuke?" she demanded, her control slipping from her hands like Sasuke's blood from his body. She struggled to rein the former in. The latter she continued to do nothing about.

Sasuke lifted his head slightly. The kunai she had against his throat bit neatly into his skin. Blood welled under the blade and trickled down past his collarbone. She watched it fall anxiously.

How much more blood could he lose and still stay conscious?

"I wouldn't have," he whispered, his smile vindictive and cold.

Sakura gritted her teeth.

"You're a bastard, Sasuke," she informed him. He nodded, his head resting back against the dead leaves. He looked pale. White as a corpse. She knew what they looked like--she'd seen enough of them. His eyes were shut.

He was dying. The realization made it difficult for her to breathe. A strange feeling came over her; as though the red blood sky above her had descended, suffocating her and filling her veins with all of its barren lifelessness. The world slipped from her hands. It rejected her. She was alone, alone in the dark, alone in a field of corpses under a red sky of careless judgment and no forgiveness.

No, she thought wildly. He couldn't die. She wouldn't let him. Even if he overpowered her once recovered and killed her, Sakura could not let him die.

"Sasuke, wake up," she hissed urgently, tossing her kunai to the side. She gripped the collar of his dark, blood-stained shirt. She shook him. He moaned blearily. "Sasuke! Wake up, damnit!"

"What?" he rasped weakly, as though nothing were wrong. As if she were trying to wake him from a nap and not rouse him back from the quiet, dark slope of unconsciousness. He wouldn't wake if she let him sleep--he would die.

She loved him--and hated him--too much to let that happen.

She placed her hands on his chest. He was breathing, but barely. His internal injuries were severe--and she had been the cause of most of them.

Sakura stared down at her hands. They were pale and scarred and calloused, covered in blood--not all of it hers.

The hands of a healer. The hands of a warrior.

I hurt you, and I can heal you, but only if you let me, she thought.

"Sasuke," she said loudly, shouting to be heard over the lull of darkness she knew was tugging him away from her. "Sasuke, let me heal you."

Sasuke's smile was flecked with blood but it was, for once, genuine. For a moment, he looked like a boy. The boy she'd fallen helplessly, devastatingly in love with as a young girl. Not the man she and Naruto had spent the majority of their adolescence and adulthood chasing. As if he were prey; an animal to be hunted.

It felt like a lifetime ago. More than that, and less at the same time. It could have been yesterday that she was screaming that she loved him--that she would die without him. To say that she could not live without Sasuke implied some choice on her part, when there wasn't any at all.

She would not live without him. It had never been a matter of choice.

She found herself grimly realizing that the same applied to Sasuke. In this one way, she knew he would not live without her. It's more literal than she would have liked, but when it came to Sasuke, Sakura had come to expect no less.

He looked up at her groggily, dark eyes glazed over and red-rimmed with exhaustion. He was going to die.

"Sakura, by now you should know that I can't be healed," Sasuke rasped. There was blood on his lips. She cringed and once again gripped his collar. "Not by you," he continued, in a much softer voice. "Not by Naruto. Not by anyone. Just let me die."

Sasuke coughed. Sakura felt something hot splatter against the back of her hands. She didn't have to look down to know it was his blood.

"Just tell Naruto I'll make it up to him in the next life," he smirked coldly, and to her surprise, he lifted his hands and curled them around her wrists.

She tensed, but loosened her grip slightly on his shirt. Her eyes were narrowed as she watched him die. Watched his life bleed into the lifeless dirt around him. She wondered what poison his blood would prove to be for the earth under him.

Sasuke stared up at the sky above her head, lost in his thoughts. She couldn't find a thing to say.

"In another life," he whispered, eyes sliding shut. A smile ghosted his pale, blood-flecked lips. "Where he might truly be my brother, and you…" he opened his eyes again and met her gaze. "And where you might be my wife."

Her chest tightened. She hated him. She loved him. She wondered if the pain of both could kill her just as surely as he was dying. If that was what she wanted.

"Maybe there he can forgive me for this," Sasuke sighed tiredly.

"And what about me, Sasuke?" Sakura demanded, her voice cracking under the weight of emotion. "I will never forgive you if you die."

When he smiled at her, Sakura could feel the world falling apart as he died.

When she leaned forward and felt his blood against her lips, his tongue in her mouth, she almost prayed that the world would end around them, leaving just her and Sasuke, barely alive and barely dead on the ruined battlefield.

When she felt his hands grip hers, she made her decision--and when the Hokage came to the empty field and chose to grieve for them as though dead, he may not have been wrong, in the end.