notes: Hi, Naruto fandom! I'm not usually here, but I still love it!
notes2: Yeah, I'm not sure I got Sasuke and Sakura's characters down, but I did my best :3
notes3: It's been a looooong time since I wrote SasuSaku, but I was just so inspired by the latest chapter!
disclaimer: Funny. If Masashi Kishimoto-san was me, poor him. I'm pretty crazy. And obsessed with fictional characters.
summary: She sees him again on the battlefield, and time seems to freeze.

The green light glowing off her fingertips dims into nothingness—having finished mending and reconnecting the broken bones of the ninja she was healing—when she senses the familiar chakra signature, strong and overwhelming like how his very presence always was. Eyes widening, she snaps her head to the source—to where his chakra pulses the most powerful—and her mouth opens but no voice comes out, and she's left with nothing more than her hands hanging limply on her sides and his name hanging from the tip of her lips, dancing in her tongue like poison.

There stands, right in the middle of the raging battlefield in all his dark glory, is none other than Sasuke Uchiha.

The black of his hair seems to blend in with the shadows of the crimson-soaked ground and the near-night, starless blanket of the sky, longer and more mysterious—spikier and still gravity-defying. He is wearing the colors of white and purple and the blood of those he had fought in the war and the red reminds her of his eyes. The longing explodes inside her, and her hands itch to reach out for him, but she instantly pulls her hand back at the glint of his sword and the look of blankness on his face, scarily calm and cold.

He is exactly as she remembers from her nightmares, his hand locked around her throat, squeezing until she gasped for breath and clawed at his arm and pleaded Sasuke with a feeble voice. Instead of releasing her, he would tighten his grip and point her own kunai at her, deadly sharp and laced with poison.

Her throat constricts and her whole body tenses in fear.

She feels torn between inching back—away, away from him—and running to him and smiling and forgetting he ever left and tried to kill her, and she starts to hate herself for this part of her. Because he wanted to kill her then, and she saw it clearly in his manic eyes, too far gone to be reached by her, and yet she still feels the hope rekindling in her at the sight of him, fighting alongside them and not on any other side of the war.

She is snapped back to reality—the sounds of warfare flooding back to her senses—when his eyes connect with her viridian ones, the red piercing through her soul like it could see her innermost thoughts. She knows that he has noticed her even before she had begun to sense faint traces of his chakra, and the indifference was just there on his face because he was waiting for something but didn't want to show it—like always.

What are you going to do, Sakura?

She doesn't inch back in fear.

She doesn't run to him either.

Instead, she turns on her heel and returns to the medical tent, nonchalant and pretending the last moment of her life didn't happen at all.

There are too many bridges he has to cross before he could get to her again—before he could break the many fortified defenses she had built around her to protect herself from him.

For once, he'll be the one to look at her back as she walks away.

notes: I don't really know how this went.
notes2: Hope I didn't make Sasuke and Sakura too OOC.
notes3: Well, tell me what you think :)