title: burns like a thousand stars

author: The Scarlett Ribbon

prompt: ghost

rating: K

summary: theirs is a story that hasn't finished yet. Sasuke, Sakura and life during the war.

burns like a thousand stars

She is there through all the hours of the night, a silent guardian with blood crusted under her fingernails. The battlefield is silent now, save for the tread of shinobi retrieving the dead and dying from the depths of mud and blood somewhere out in the hushed dark. It is dark between the canvas walls, too, but Sakura cannot bring herself to close her eyes.

It has been a long, long day and she is too tired for sleep – too tired for anything now, even for questions. Or rather, she is too tired to try and seek out the answers.

Looking down at the boy in the bed – pale skin, dark hair, slender hands – all she can do is smile faintly because after all this time, Sasuke is here.

He is older, taller than the boy from her memories; more battered, more broken, but –

"Sakura," he rasps between dry lips, eyes barely open and her heart jumps, then stutters because he's awake.

"I'm here," she whispers, feeling the itch of dried blood in her hair and on her skin and nothing else matters because Sasuke saved her, Sasuke is calling her and this is more than she ever believed she would have again. But even now, she does not wish to be presumptuous. Where once she would have held his hand gently in both of hers, now she sits motionless by his beside. "I'm here, Sasuke."

She doesn't know why he changed his mind, or how the red-insanity of his eyes last time they met has disappeared. There's a vague suspicion in her mind that the change between now and the Land of Iron has to do with more than Naruto's faith and conviction and bright pull-you-out-of-the-darkness-words, which you could reach out and grab onto as though they were trailing ribbons; a lifeline to cling to and arrive somewhere other than where you are.

She doesn't know why he took the attack that was meant for her, either. It's something she will always wonder, but probably never find the courage to ask.

Sasuke watches her with dark eyes, slightly glazed with sleep and the pain of his numerous injuries. She wonders if he is even really coherent; Naruto woke up earlier babbling about ramen and Konoha and toad-sages that owed him money. The blond is back under now, and Sakura hopes that next time he wakes, he'll be her bouncing golden boy again – the brother that never was. She looks at Sasuke's pale, bloodless face and remembers how it felt to be wrist deep in his internal organs, how the pulse of his slowing heart made his ribcage reverberate against her skin.

"I won't leave you," she says, but all she can think is that this – this is the first time since that moonlit night, oh-so-many years ago, that they have crossed paths without wearing false intentions on their sleeves. In the Sound base, she was confronted with the Avenger; Sakura went to the Land of Iron, not as herself, but as a kunoichi of the Leaf.

This is something new, she thinks. This is Sakura-chan and Sasuke-kun at the end of everything.

Don't go away again, her heart tells him in the silence and the long, lingering look between them. It is traitorous, but so true and she cannot make herself regret it anymore.

Sasuke's hand moves – skitters lightly across the bed sheet until his fingers are outstretched towards her. Just a little, but it is enough. When she reaches out to him – and she's been wanting, trying to do this, to bridge the gap between them for so long – he intertwines her fingers with his, and she can feel the bones in his hand, such fragile, breakable things beneath his paper-thin skin. There is a sob building in her throat, her chest.

"…don't," he murmurs, eyelids fluttering closed, despite himself. Sakura smiles weakly, and inhales, trying hard to stop the flow of tears building behind her eyes. Crying is a weakness that only surfaces for him.

"I'm sorry..."

Sasuke's eyes do not open, but his hand tightens around her own for the smallest moment. He needs to sleep again, she knows; it's sucking him back down into its depths and he is powerless against it. She can feel the effort it takes him to raise their linked hands to her face, her lips. The kiss she presses gently against his knuckles is a homecoming long overdue. It is I missed you and don't ever leave me again, and thank you and I still love you, Sasuke-kun all wrapped up into one.

Questions and answers aren't important anymore, not right now, in this moment that she's forever imagined and always dreamed since that morning she woke on a cold, stone bench, tear tracks salt-dry on her cheeks.

"Thank you," Sasuke says in a voice that is only slightly more than a whisper, and it is a circle finally closing. He's always held her heart in his hands, but he is aware of it now, is being gentle with the bruised organ that he unintentionally carried with him through all the dark places he's been . The ghost of him has haunted her for so long.

The tears spill over and down her face, pooling in the non-existent space between their interlaced fingers and her cheekbones. She can't be sure, but Sakura thinks his mouth softens slightly in something too tentative to be a smile.

"Always," she tells him, and that is all that needs to be said, for now.