title: strands of light
couple: sasuke/sakura, but greatly team7 focus
warning: in DIRE need of editing

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Years after the Fourth Shinobi War, Sasuke and Sakura find each other as they always have: bound by the past, half-alive in the present and asleep for the future.

The first thing Sasuke notices is the dispassionate aura Sakura has around her. It is written all over her—in the grayscale glint in her eyes, the taut bones in her cheeks and the firm line of her lips.

The flatness of her expression, Sasuke supposes, masterfully disguises the fierce disappointment dug into every fibre of her being. He catches her clench and unclench her gloved fists, the movement creating the wrenching sound of leather.

He tries to swallow back the acid rising in his throat. Seeing Sakura is an injection of ice into his veins. She is reality where everything he has built since the conclusion of the war remains a tranquillizing illusion.

She has always been the kick in the back, he muses bitterly. She is a motif of his worst choices—and he scorns, he scorns so much how the broken ribbons that are her hair, tumbling behind her like some sadistic wedding veil, make him reminisce the falling cherry blossoms of Konoha.

Sasuke grits his teeth.

He hates Konoha... He burned Konoha. The bile reaches his lips.

Yet she stands, still as a statue, her calculating eyes never leaving his. She has changed. Not the change he saw in their first reunion after his defection of Konoha, nor the change he realised when her kunai was perched against his own skin.

The type of change that rots people away—killing them day by day. The type of change that degrades people.

He knows when the change occurred. He can see it in front of his very eyes—replaying like a overhead projector. He can see her running towards him, amongst littered numbers of murdered bodies, the blazes of flame above them torching the clouds with diabolic phosphoresce.

He can remember how bludgeoned she was, and in this black-and-white memory, the red is maintained. When she catches his gaze, she stops, her stare lowering to something just beneath him. The blood trickles from her eyes, and the world is ripped from under her feet. For a second, she looks like she was about to break because the only boy she's ever loved just destroyed her life in that very second—but she doesn't. She bites her lip, caging every muscle and bone in her body, restarting.

And she walks away.

She doesn't just walk away from the village she's lived in for eighteen years in incinerating havoc.

She leaves with the engraved image of Naruto's breathless body at Sasuke's feet.

Reliving the memory, Sasuke feels his lungs strangulate and he accepts why he chose the life he did after the war. His existence has been banal, to say the least. His days are nonsensical and meaningless—they have no beginning nor an end and they drag on as a dreary, drawn-out line.

He has killed her best friend. He has killed his best friend. Oddly enough, he can never come to complete terms with it.

When time begins again, Sasuke watches Sakura leave in the manner she did at the demise of the Fourth Shinobi War. She represses all the negative emotions and builds a solid wall of glass around her. He can see through her, note all her vices and all the hurt she's held all this time, but he doesn't dare reach out to touch the bladed shards that will become shall he come near.

Her unsaid words flutter into the wind, a dim notion of truth: you broke us. As she pasts him, all the emotion about her dissipates into thin air.

He has massacred all that has ever mattered, but ironically enough, he is the only signal to her being alive. Sasuke will always be her weakness, and the familiar twist of a knife in her stomach as she steps into the monochrome from the world of blue-black-white proves she can never hate him enough.

She can hate him to an extent to force several things, such as never forgiving him, but she falls short to hold enough animosity to want to let go. In a world where there are no anchors and she is drifting amongst nothingness, Sasuke is all she has left.

She stops in her tracks, caught between turning around and running away forever, and she looks over her shoulder.

He is still there, his shoulders slouched and his expression of something-thirteen-years-old. She tries not to, she really does, but when she looks in his blackened eyes she can see the glints of lemon yellow. She can hear the idiot's laugh, his promises and his incessant Hokage goals.

For the first time in many years, she revels in the sentiment of her blonde brother.

She smiles when she realises if Naruto were here, or if he could somehow reach out to the both of them, this was what he would've wanted. He lives in Sasuke and her, of some sorts, a charge which keeps them alive. He is the memoriam of Team 7, the reason to keep going, the chant of stay together, Sasuke and Sakura-chan. Don't give up.

She watches Sasuke's facial structure soften and in her heart of hearts, she lets herself be touched by the offered warmth. She can't believe she's saying what she's about to say, but she does anyway, and it comes out in a horrible croak—"I still wait for you to come home."

His eyes snap so quickly upwards to hers that she's sure he would've suffered whiplash. His sins are embedded into his eyes as a response. He is riding the guilt train into death—and she still wants to save him.

She laughs. It's disastrously choked and marred with tears, but she laughs, and it's lovely. She faces away from him again. "If Naruto were here, he'd say we were home."

He can hear her crying. There's a time for all things—and she didn't cry when it happened, and she didn't cry for years after it did, but she cries right at this very moment. She cries, vulnerable and right in front of him, and Sasuke knows now, this is a chance. This is a chance.

Her next words run through him, cataclysmic and shuddering into his spine like a firework in reverse. "Will you come home?"

Sasuke hesitates, knowing all well she would wait for the rest of her life, because neither of them have anything to live for but each other. This time around, he doesn't make her wait. He takes three long strides, and on the third, he has already closed the distance between them.

He wraps his arms around her waist and she doesn't feel she's being embraced by a destroyer. She feels she's being embraced by Sasuke-kun. She isn't reminded a second of Naruto's blood on Sasuke's pale skin, or the electricity of his chidori, or his pale fingers around her neck.

She does feel, however, every one of the Kodak moments in her life. She is blossoming with all things wonderful and the love she thought she'd forgotten rises in her chest again. Most of all, the extinguishing of hope she had once thought was committed with Naruto's death was now being reversed and instead rekindled.

Their relationship, Sakura knows, is far from the happily-ever-afters taught when innocence was of the essence. Despite its disasters and agony, it is inherent. They were built to survive—Sasuke as a killer, Sakura as a healer. But, Sasuke will never kill again, and Sakura will never heal again either.

And they think, maybe, just maybe, if they try enough, they could make something out of the barren existences they have become. They are broken and wilted, nevertheless they are accepting the past, alive for the present and awake for the future.

Their embrace continues until the sun dissipates into the curtain of night, and when they fall asleep, Naruto's radiating glow is in the both of their dreams.

They can feel him picking up the pieces right beside them and pulling them together again.

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notes: i don't really know what this was... my life on a screen?