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There is a blister on her Achilles' tendon and it's annoying the hell out of Sakura. They're almost to the location of Orochimaru's hideout, and she can feel Naruto's determination like a beating heart throbbing nearby to her and her arm is aching so badly with the Kyūbi's chakra remnants still burning her, sapping her life force and scalding her veins. That injury won't heal in time for the battle she's sure will come and the blister is hurting and she hates it. Sakura wants to cry, and hates herself.
She's running, and her entire body is thrumming with tension, her muscles, her organs are rippling with butterflies and she might be about to throw up because Sasuke is so close, she can sense him, and the agony of longing within her is building to new heights. With every door she throws open, every empty space that hurts her eyes with his absence, it builds. She isn't even aware of Captain Yamato at her side.
Finally her mind is distracted by Sai, that wretched snake-hearted bastard, his white skin glinting in the sunlight. She hurls herself at him, ready to pulverize him if he tells her something she doesn't want to hear - that she made a colossal mistake to trust him.
And then-
"Sakura."
***
She watches Sasuke's blade pushing into Captain Yamato. Chakra gathers inside her body, and she takes off, running right at them, and Sasuke glances up, as if Sakura's determined face and coiled might is simply a dark cloud he wishes would avoid him. His dark eyes are a challenge.
Naruto. You came too. As if he had only expected Sakura to be crazy enough to track him all the way here.
She leaps, somersaulting over his head, and then lands behind him. She whirls around to face him, small smile on her face. The battle adrenaline is humming through her bloodstream now, and despite, or maybe because, her opponent is long-lost Sasuke, she's full of the fierce joy of battle too. She knows she won't be able to hurt him seriously or stop him, that's up to Naruto.
She throws a small barrage of kunai and shuriken at Sasuke. He simply sidesteps, releasing his sword and leaving it in Yamato's gut. The barrage of weapons seem to be about to hit her team leader until they freeze. She's holding them by chakra strings.
"A parting gift from Lady Chiyo."
She moves her fingers the way she's learned how to do, and the barrage turns sideways and attacks Sasuke. Having left his sword impaled in Captain Yamato, he's forced to pull out a kunai, and artfully deflects all the weapons at inhuman speed. She's made him activate the Sharingan. That's something.
Sakura releases the weapons and withdraws the chakra strings. The kunai and shuriken clatter noisily to the ground and Sasuke watches them suspiciously to see if they'll leap up and attack him again.
Those take way too much of my already naturally limited chakra for it to be wise to use again during this fight, she decides.
Yamato writhes as a tendril of wood slowly ejects Sasuke's sword from his body. Sakura raises her right fist and gathers chakra there. As she runs at him, Sasuke prepares his stance again, but at the last second her foot comes down and she pushes off to spin the other way. She grabs her captain in her arms and jumps a safe distance away to lie him down behind a boulder.
Sasuke drops his stance and retrieves his sword from the ground, although his eyes flick towards their direction.
She kneels, her hand glowing with green healing chakra, but Yamato's fingers curled around her wrist stop her. "Save your strength, and go back and face him," her captain orders. Sakura's irritated face must tell him everything she wants to say about reminding him of his words of how she was needed specifically for healing their team, less so for battle, because he chuckles. "I'm fine, Sakura. You'll need to heal Naruto and Sai after this, you know."
She nods, stands up again, and walks back towards Sasuke. They face each other now. In the corner of her eye, she sees Naruto stirring and Sai lifting his head to see what is going on.
Sasuke is still, but suddenly he just tosses his sword at her, clearly expecting her to be impaled. The old her would have been a goner. Sakura the medic, Lady Tsunade's apprentice, dodges nimbly, charging towards Sasuke, gathering chakra in her fist again.
He simply leaps over her and retrieves his sword. He's so incredibly quick. He's always been fast, but Sasuke has clearly now surpassed both of his old teammates. Sakura has far less grace when she is striking, and she collides into the wall behind him, dodging as the entire canyon wall collapses. She whirls around to face him again. His expression reveals a tiny hint of surprise at the boulders she crumbled.
"You've changed," comes Sasuke's cool voice.
"I did what I had to do to become stronger. To become worthy," Sakura tells him.
Sasuke moves in, and the fight really begins, blows raining down, combat rapider and more intense than anything she's survived before, even Lady Tsunade's attacks, even Sasori's puppets. Uchiha Sasuke is just so fast.
He lands a kick in her stomach that throws her back into the wall behind her. The old Sakura would have stayed down. She pours healing chakra into broken ribs and staggers to her feet, grasping for handholds in the jagged rock wall at her back.
"I wanted to come with you. You remember that, Sasuke?" she throws at him. He stills, shifts his weight to the side and seems to be listening. Sakura spits blood out on the ground.
"I was a naïve little girl then. I would've done anything for you. I wanted you to be with me more than anything, Sasuke." She laughs at herself a little, hacks up a gob of spit and blood onto the ground and stands on her own two feet without the support of the wall. She's taken a lot of hits in this fight already, but like hell will she let Sasuke go without getting a chance to tell him everything he needs to know.
"I know," he says carelessly. "I was your dream." She flinches when he says that, the callous admission of the truth, that however thoughtless and childlike, her only goal she had ever worked towards was to have him, stings her tongue. "It was a stupid hope," Sasuke continues. "You'll never get any closer to that dream than you are now."
"I'm not mindlessly obsessed with you anymore," Sakura blurts out. Sasuke gives her a cool look. "You aren't the only thing that matters to me," she says, in a louder voice. "I mean, of course, I want you back, with us. It's where you belong, can't you see?" she says desperately.
"Forget about me," Sasuke says. "Is there really nothing else you can be bothered to try and achieve apart from this pointless attempt to bring me home?"
"Actually," Sakura says, clutching the wound on her arm from the Kyūbi where it's beginning to ache again, "there is. There's something I want to achieve even more than to bring you back."
"Is that so."
"Yeah. To protect Naruto," she snarls at him, at his cold, dark eyes and pale skin and emotionless face, wearing Orochimaru's robes. "To protect all my teammates," she says. "There's nothing more important than protecting your comrades. Nothing comes before defending the Leaf. Our people. Your clan knew that."
Sasuke narrows his eyes. Of course she's hit a sore spot. But Sakura knows the Uchiha, was fascinated by their abilities when she was younger and devoured books about the Sharingan, the history of the village, the katon jutsu the Uchiha specialized in. Sakura had watched the Uchiha from day one, coming and going from their compound, beautiful raven haired, dark eyed people, elegant and graceful, even their children were poised and had an ethereal quality. It was only the day she met Sasuke that she really became invested. But she had always respected the Uchiha. Even now, staring down at their renegade, she looks around her at the destruction Sasuke has wrought, on the cavern, on their lives, and admires the power of the clan that takes people's hearts and crushes them in their grip as if they were dried up autumn leaves.
"They were so strong, your clan, Konoha depended on them, and all their power, all their experience and natural ability, their whole bloodline is condensed into one shinobi. You. And what did you do? You ran away. To kill your brother, the only other Uchiha left."
Sasuke grits his teeth. He growls, "You know nothing about-"
"WAKE UP SASUKE! Some things are more important than your petty revenge!" Sakura screams at him. She can feel her features twisted in fury.
Through clenched teeth, he hisses, "You have no idea what I've been through. None."
"No. And nothing will change that. But we are shinobi. You're far from the only person who knows what it's like to have your family cut down before you. You're not the only person in the world who was ever wronged! You bastard!"
Rage drowns her and Sakura slams her fist against the nearby canyon wall and it collapses.
"You really are... different, Sakura," Sasuke says, his face smoothed over back to its previous state.
"Oh yeah? Well you haven't changed at all! You're still the same old blind, reckless, arrogant idiot who thinks of nothing but his own desires!" she spits. Her heart is broken and the jagged shards spear into her chest. It's an ache that has sat with her every day for two years, crying herself to sleep and wishing on stars, on dandelions, fallen eyelashes and with every bit of her heart, that things weren't like this. Her eyes are wet and she is angry.
"Hey Sakura, slow down. I'd almost think you were talking about me here," Naruto says weakly.
She withholds a breath of surprise. Naruto is on his feet, swaying a little in the wind.
"We're not strong enough for him yet... are we?"
Sakura shakes her head miserably. They look towards their old teammate.
"You can't tell me... It all meant nothing. Everything the three of us have been through together. I'll never believe that. Never.
Sakura turns to stand side by side with Naruto. This is where her strength is now. Maybe where it's always been.
Sasuke quirks an eyebrow.
"Sakura yelling, and Naruto pleading? Are you sure you're my old team?" he says with a hint of his old dark amusement.
Kabuto and Orochimaru appear suddenly at the top of the canyon where Sasuke was standing before and chakra floods her fists at the sight of them. Sasuke looks up towards them and his face hardens.
"Whatever I felt before, whatever I was, doesn't matter," Sasuke says to the two. "I will have my revenge. I don't care what happens to the Leaf, And, Sakura, Naruto, don't hold out hope that I care about what happens to either of you."
Naruto's blue eyes are huge and horrified, full of anguish as Sasuke slips away from them once again. "Orochimaru can take my body and soul. If I can kill my brother, it doesn't matter what happens to me before or after that point."
Sakura and Naruto glance at each other, quickly, reading each other's thoughts. They both lunge. But Sasuke is back at the top of the canyon in the blink of an eye. He raises his hand, prepares to wipe them all out. Naruto and Sakura are frozen. Naruto isn't preparing jutsu. Sakura isn't molding chakra. They're going to stand there and wait to die because they can't bring themselves to believe Sasuke, the great love of their lives, will really go this far.
Deep inside, Sakura curses her own weakness again.