"…."

Silence.

Thudding heart beats and silvery tears and moonlight filters down through the leaves.

And she knows she should take in every moment of this agonising encounter, every whisper of the wind between her wavering words, because it is the last.

He is leaving.

And God, she knows nothing she says will make any difference, but it is still vitally important that she say it anyway. Every bone in her body is screaming that she will never see him again- this dark, angry, damaged boy- and she knows she will regret it forever if she doesn't tell him.

She is always selfish in the end.

"I love you with all my heart."

It means very little to him, she is sure…but it is also the truth. As much as a thirteen year old is capable of loving anyone, she is in love with him.

But hearts mean very little to Sasuke.

And she is certain whatever he says or does next will be the equivalent of putting it through a blender, even if that is not what he intends.

"….You really are annoying."

Yes, she is. She is too loud and shallow and frivolous.

She is a girl.

He is a boy and if this was a fairy tale, he would promise to come back.

If this was a tragic romance, he would kiss her before knocking her out and leaving her on a cold, stone bench.

If things had been different though, they would not be here on this dark, lonely night

and Sasuke might have been a boy who valued her more than he valued power.

But maybe if things had been different, she would not love him as she does now.

It's almost enough to break her heart.

"What do you think of Shikamaru?" Ino asks one day. Sakura raises an eyebrow at her, the strong smell of nail polish filling her room and reaches for the cold glass of lemonade on her nightstand. It is cold and she enjoys the feel of condensation against the glass. Little water droplets gather in her hand.

With the utmost seriousness, she considers the boy in question.

"He's got nice eyes…you know, when they're open."

Her blonde, best-friend-turned-rival-turned-best-friend-again smiles a shy smile. It is not the dreamy smile they shared when thinking about their first huge crush. It is more real somehow, because Ino is not fantasising about an idea. She knows Shikamaru.

Sakura does not need to say that he would be the worst boyfriend ever – he would never take the initiative to organise a date, would never make surprise gestures that little girls dream about; that special, elusive thing called romance. Ino already knows all this and it almost makes it more spectacular in a way, that she maybe has feelings for him. Maybe.

And as suddenly as it came, Ino's smiles fades. "What about you Sakura?"

Sakura frowns and swallows her mouthful of lemonade. It fizzes at the back of her throat as she asks; "What d'you mean?"

"Is there anyone you like?"

And even though it is sweltering hot and the overpowering Konoha sun is beaming in through her open window, for her it is a dark, still night.

"Sakura?"

Sakura jolts back to the present, ignoring the tug of her absent heart. It is hundreds of miles away, she knows, in a dark place she cannot reach. She pushes away the memory of dark, angry eyes and smiles.

"I'm not sure yet," she answers, laughing a little. It has been almost a year since the world – her world- changed. But Sakura is resilient. The world changes – and she changes with it.

If this was a fairy tale, she thinks, life would only be a matter of waiting, of staying faithful to a prince that would return.

If this was a tragic romance, she would waste away and die of a broken heart and everyone would remark on how beautifully sad her love was. How her devotion killed her.

But Sakura doesn't believe in fairy tales anymore and she no longer fits the part of a tragic heroine. Both seem like a huge waste of a life that is already short enough as it is.

"I think Kiba is pretty cute though."

It would be a lie to say she didn't once dream about Sasuke being her first kiss. But Sakura was young then and thought that when people fell in love, they fell in love for life. It was kind of irrelevant anyway; by the time she had genuinely fallen in love with Sasuke, she cared more about the growing void between him and the rest of the team than she did about kissing him.

"Congratulations Sakura!"

She smiles wide and bright and accepts the drink that Tenten shoves at her. Somewhere on the other side of the room, Ino is flirting wildly with a cute, brown haired boy from the Hidden Sand.

Shikamaru is too busy being bullied by Temari to notice.

"You too!" she is happy, but then most of the people in the room are. Another round of the chunnin exams has come and gone and the party is exuberant. Sakura, Kiba, Tenten and Lee have passed, along with Gaara, Kankuro and Temari. The party in the bar is wild, exuberant – and Sakura is elated.

No matter that Sasuke and Naruto are both a million times more talented than she is, Sakura is the first of Team 7 to pass the chunnin exam.

"You kick ass, Haruno," Kankuro tells her, leaning against the bar. Beneath his purple war paint, he is not nearly so frightening and as Sakura blushes, there are exclamations of general agreement.

"Seriously," Kiba agrees. "I always knew you could throw a mean right hook, but damn Sakura. You almost destroyed the whole stadium!"

"It was v-very impressive," Hinata pipes up, looking embarrassed just to voice her opinion. Possibly it is because she is standing opposite Gaara, who knocked her out of the preliminaries after a fifteen minute battle.

The rest of the conversation goes like this; everyone complimenting each other on their battles and techniques, on their newly promoted status, or the good fight they put up before defeat.

The sky is dark and the stars are bright and the night air is still, no matter the loud and raucous noise of the party booming out across Konoha.

Sakura is fourteen and the night is young and whoever proposes dancing is a genius. She dances with everyone to the pounding music that makes her feel so alive; first with Tenten, last with is amazing, she thinks dizzily, that she even gets Neji to dance with her for a full ten minutes and Gaara for five.

Afterwards, when it is midnight and they have all been kicked out by the bar owner, Shikamaru has the great idea of going to the park. Together, they stumble through the streets, giddy with success and glory until they reach the grassy slopes the lazy genius loves so much, laughing and screaming at each other.

When they lie down on the grass though and look up at the sky, a sense of peace washes over them and they quieten down to look at the stars.

"It's so beautiful," Ino sighs from somewhere to Sakura's right and she agrees. It is a night that she will never forget, she is sure.

She is lying between Ino and Gaara and she find herself thinking about love and tragedy and romance and happily ever afters. She thinks her mother will be furious with her in the morning for staying out all night, but she can always lie and say she crashed at Ino's.

"Man," Kiba yawns at last, "anyone else hungry?"

The food stands will be open all night, on the last night of the chunnin exams. It seems like most of the Village is still up and celebrating.

"I'm starved," Tenten agrees.

"I could really go for some yakitori," Kankuro pipes up.

There is a short squabble over who will go and purchase the food. Kiba is forced, for bringing the matter up and Sakura is volunteered for having the best memory- she can take everyone's orders.

Together the two of them trudge off to find the nearest stand.

"So, how awesome are we?" he grins. "We're chunnin together!"

"Yeah," she smiles and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "I'll tell you a secret though? I never thought I would pass first of my team."

He sneaks her a sly look. "You're like Konoha's secret weapon," he laughs. "Wait til Naruto comes back…oh I can't wait to see you rub this in that losers face!"

Sakura is fourteen and Kiba is fun and cute and she doesn't love him. It is the easiest thing in the world to lean over and press her lips to his as they walk slowly back to the others, food weighed down in their arms.

He tastes surprisingly sweet, probably from the orange pieces he has just eaten and his lips are slightly chapped.

Later, when everyone else has gone home she walks quietly through the streets until she is standing by a stone bench, staring out across the space at Konoha's looming gates. Her lips are tingling still.

Sakura doesn't sit down, doesn't wait, and doesn't feel guilty. In fairy tales, you only kiss your one true love, but real life isn't like that. A kiss only means something if you want it to.

She pauses for a minute, eyes distant and thinks of the reluctant owner of her absent heart.

"Happy birthday Sasuke."

It is on a simple escort mission to grass that it happens. Naruto is so busy training with Kakashi-sensei and Yamato that he doesn't even realise they have gone. It's good to get away from the blatant favouritism for awhile, Sakura thinks. Tsunade knows this.

It stings that even though Sakura was the only one to stay, her wayward teacher never sees her. It is always the boys he offers to train, always the boys he says he is proud of.

She is fifteen and he still hasn't acknowledged her growth.

Their client is a weedy, weak chinned man in his late twenties, but he is kind and respectful. For that reason, she does not let Sai carry on in his usual tactless way. His stupid nicknames are something she lets him inflict on the clients she doesn't like; the ones who patronise her or try to look down her top.

"Sai," she finally asks on the way back, her fake nonchalance snapping like a rubber band. "Do you really think I'm ugly?"

It is a hot, humid day and there is going to be a storm. She'd like to be back home by the time it breaks, but she doesn't have that kind of luck.

"Despite your lack of breasts, your features are regular and evenly spaced," he replies after a moments consideration.

Sighing, Sakura looks down at her flat chest. If Naruto was there she would probably squawk indignantly and let loose her increasingly foul temper, but Sai speaks the truth and she knows it.

"For future reference, you probably shouldn't go around telling girls they have small tits. It's not very tactful to cast aspirations of size on this part of the female anatomy."

"Why?" he asks, eyes (almost) bright with a childlike curiosity. There is still so much that he doesn't understand, she thinks. But at least he is trying.

"For the same reason Naruto loses it every time you call him dickless, Sai. It means…it means you are lacking in some way. People don't like others to see their flaws, never mind pointing them out."

It's all to do with love, she supposes. In fairy tales, the princess never falls in love with an ugly prince – there are no ugly princes, in fact. There are no fat damsels in distress either, because you cannot have a happy ending if you are not perfectly beautiful. Who would slay a dragon for a princess who had a face like the back end of a donkey? She wonders if there is a way she can make him understand.

"I don't suppose you ever read stories when you were a child."

"No. Is that relevant to this discussion?"

The sky is growing darker and the heat is sticky, oppressive.

"I guess not," she admits, though she can feel a link in her mind, tenuous and paper thin. It is more of a feeling than an idea and she cannot put it into words, not for him and certainly not for herself.

"You're probably better off not reading fairy tales anyway."

"Why?" he asks, looking at her with dark, blank eyes and Sakura wonders if Sasuke will ever come home. She wanted him to be her prince once, but that was before she knew what love was really like. "I was under the impression that fairy tales are love stories."

In fairy tales, true love is based on perfection and heroics, because it's a story and the stories aren't real.

In life, she has found out, love counts for nothing.

"I suppose," she answers at last, "because the stories lie."

"I thought you were still in love with Sasuke!" Naruto yells at her. Sakura rolls her eyes and smoothes down her tousled hair and her rumpled clothes, but nothing can hide her swollen lips.

She doesn't feel embarrassed by it anyway. Why should she? Naruto is the one who has come barging into her apartment unannounced. She looks wistfully at the front door behind which the dark haired jounin has just disappeared. Haru.

"What has that got to do with anything?" she asks, getting up to pour herself a drink. She's got dinner plans later and her mind is more focused on what she'll wear than on the blonde's indignant expression.

"Because," he splutters, following her into her kitchen, eyes condemning and accusing. "You were- you were making out with that random guy! Don't you see how wrong that is?"

Calmly, she opens her fridge, absently noticing she is running low on food supplies. "Haru is not a random guy," she replies. "And even if he was, I haven't done anything wrong."

"But you're in love with Sasuke!"

Sakura sighs. "Sasuke isn't here. He's not my boyfriend- he never was. He was just a boy I happened to be in love with and that's it. Am I supposed to stay faithfulto something that never existed in the first place?"

He doesn't understand, she is sure. Not yet. Naruto is an idealist; he still believes in things like knights in shining armour and damsels in distress and hero's who save the day. He's not as untainted as he appears, she knows; she can see the loneliness of his childhood behind his oh-so-blue eyes whenever he thinks no one is looking at him.

But Naruto still believes in things like story-book love, because he's never felt it has he? He's never fallen in bottomless, helpless, miserable, effortless love with someone, let alone someone as broken as Sasuke Uchiha.

Love is irrelevant, she decides.

"It just doesn't seem right," he says, scowling. "How can you sit there and let that guy touch you when your heart belongs to someone else?"

Sakura is silent for a long time. "Love has nothing to do with sex and all that stuff. Not unless you want it to." Not unless you're lucky. She thinks for a moment. "A kiss is just what it is- two people pressing their mouths together."

Naruto's lips are set in a firm line, his expression stubborn. His arms are folded across his chest and he is still looking at her like she is betraying someone.

"That's bull," he says quietly, watching as Sakura sets the glass of water down carefully on the counter and moves towards him.

"I'll prove it," she murmurs, noticing again how much taller he is than her now. She has to stand on tip toe to reach his mouth with hers. The kiss is slow, chaste- joined lips their bodies only point of contact. When she draws away she can feel his warm breath on the nape of her neck.

Naruto stares at her in something like surprise and horror, all intermingled into one. She smiles at him and she feels nothing except the memory of his lips.

"Do you understand now?" she asks. "This isn't a love story."

She has two pictures of Sasuke- the first is their Team photo, which still sits diligently in the frame on her windowsill, the colours slowly being bleached away by the sun. The second is one that she took of him unawares- and perhaps that was cruel of her, to trap him this way, but even then she had an instinct, not a formed thought, that he was impossible to pin down and she should take whatever opportunities she was given. It was her thirteenth birthday and it passed by uneventfully. She never told her team it was her birthday – it seemed trivial somehow, in those days when everything was suddenly starting to go wrong.

After training sessions and tense conversations, a quiet dinner and her mother's uneasy silences, Sakura let herself quietly out of their house. The air was cool, she remembers and walking alone through the village, her feet carrying her aimlessly towards the training grounds, there had come a strange moment of clarity.

She can still picture the blazing sunset – the familiar figure stood in the clearing with his face turned towards the sun. It had brought out all his colours, given life to a face that was becoming increasingly distant. The camera had been hanging around her neck – he never heard the soft click as she captured that rare, unguarded moment on film.

In the days after he first abandoned the village, Sakura used to spend hours staring at that picture.

It was proof, she thought, that there was more to him than Sasuke had chosen to show them. A heart full of hatred would not stop to appreciate something as mundane as a sunset.

Sakura is sixteen when she quietly folds the photo up and buries it at the very bottom of a drawer full of scrolls and hairbands, blunt kunais and bent shuriken. Sasuke, rumour says, has joined Akatsuki- he now wears the cloak of the enemy. Red clouds on a black sky. Death. Hatred.

They are coming for Naruto. They will make the village- the world- burn.

As she sits on her bedroom windowsill watching the sun set over Konoha, the twin scars on her stomach and lower back, although long healed, seem to burn for a long moment.

She has a feeling Sasuke doesn't watch sunsets anymore.

"Sakura."

She thinks her heart should be pounding fit to burst at the sight of him, but all she can hear is the soft, rhythmic flutter of her pulse in her ears.

The sky is dark, but on this night there is no moon. Behind her, Konoha is burning.

She is not stupid enough to look him in the eyes, but she can see the blood smeared across his face. He is here and he is looking at her for the first time in years.

The air is too warm for this autumn night and it smells of ashes.

Silence reigns.

He is looking for her, she thinks. He is looking for her behind the dry eyes and uncharacteristic silence. Being a lover of masks, he thinks she is simply hiding behind one of her own.

"Hello Sasuke."

He is a victim, a villain, a monster- she knows.

But he is still a boy in desperate need of saving.

Sakura is not a knight in shining armour, though she would save him if she could.

As he watches her unhappy smile with dark, tired eyes, she wonders when he'll finally figure out that the only one who can save him is himself.

A/n: I don't know. I am sleep-deprived and rambling and I need caffeine. Make of this what you will; I'm the one who wrote it and I still can't figure out what the hell I'm trying to say.