if you cut me, i suppose i would bleed—

[kristallnacht]

—the colors of the evening stars.

step.

step.

s h a t t e r.

Sakura's skin is smooth under his touch, unmarred and white. He can feel the bone under it, can feel the veins and the blood pulsing through her veins.

She's so breakable, so very pretty, so alive. Sasuke wants to take her bones and crack them—he wants to watch her bleed and bleed and bleed. (but not die.)

Blue lightning skims over his skin, rushes towards her—

Sakura gasps and it stops—her face is still frozen in shock and Sasuke moves toward her, fingers outstretched. He traces her jaw, her nose, her eyes, her hair. She stands perfectly still (if i move he'll kill me) under his touch—his hands are calloused and guilty and they leave stripes of invisible filth on her face and neck when he wisps them over her flesh.

"Sakura," he acknowledges, lips stretching irregularly into a smirk as she inhales deeply, focusing on everything—the ground the sky the trees—but him.

"Sasuke," she replies definitively. Sakura is a medic and so she labels things, labels wounds and chakras and names to keep things under her control. All he can notice the lack of a suffix— and he wants even more to hurt her because this is not the Sakura Sasuke knows, this is some girl with the same name and the same eyes and the same hair but she is not Sakura.

Somewhere in his demented brain Sasuke thinks that if he kills this impostor, his Sakura will come back— and so he cuts her throat, steel slicing through her thin skin like paper and the crimson blood spreads like ink.

(that same picture stains his nightmares— her neck curving back, her head hitting the ground, her blood spilling. there's so much blood. so much death.)