#bitandbytes

thank you so much! this is inexcusably late, i know.

//

“Do you know what I find to be the most frustrating thing in the world?”

Her question comes after more than a half hour of silence, and Sasuke would startle if he hadn’t already been looking at her, the vibrant colors of her hair and clothing blurring as he’d stared.

He figures it’s rhetorical, and there’s only a brief pause before she turns to face him, “The wasted potential. We could have helped you. We would have listened. Naruto would have torn them apart for you, but...”

Sakura spreads her arms, a well here we are that’s nonchalant and easy and holds nothing of the girl that’d held his hand and his arms and then a kunai to his back. There is pity in her too-green eyes, vague and impersonal and infuriating. He would have lunged at her then, if he could.

“You would have never understood, you still don’t understand—”

Sakura shakes her head, and he prefers condescension, he would have preferred betrayal and horror and condemnation, but the quiet pity—the disappointment—reminds him of his mother, of Itachi’s imperceptible pursing of the lips when he hadn’t been able to master Katon quickly enough.

“I would have never been able to understand, Sasuke, but that wouldn’t have mattered. We loved you,” his eyes trace the movement of her throat as Sakura swallows, “What was between the three of us, we would have moved mountains.”

And there’s nothing Sasuke can say to that, because he knows it’s the truth.

Her hand reaches out, and hovers over the rubbed-raw skin of his shackled wrists; a soft green glow, and then the skin is soft and new again. The warmth of Sakura’s chakra is a shock in the pervasive chill of the subterranean room, and for a moment, Sasuke closes his eyes and lets himself imagine what it would have been like to have had that warmth with him always; to have the two steady bodies of a team that he could have (would have) trusted with his back and his life and his grief. To have had Sakura sit across from him at a dinner table and next to him for hanami and for her hand to hold his, easily and casually and frequently, every single day.  

The door to the interrogation cell scrapes open with a screech, and the dream ends.