~ Take me

Chapter 1 - Strangers

for Daughter and their lovely songs "Home" and "Landfill", which stab right through my chest every time.

~ o ~

Burned out flames should never reignite... but I thought you might.

She isn't the first to find him, or even the second.

The three of them always conspired, as a team, to become a team once more. To make themselves one again as one. Sakura pretends she doesn't notice Naruto and Kakashi going off behind her back, stamping things with "need to know" and deciding she doesn't. Pretends it makes her angry inside, when really all the slight leaves in its wake is a frigid, numb loneliness.

She scares the shit out of them with the stunt she pulls with the sleeping gas; the memory of it still wrenches an upwards twist of a smile from her thin, unhappy lips. Sakura sometimes almost wishes something had happened before her eternal protectors could track her down. It would serve them right for treating her the way they do.

She is just so fucking sick of being the sunshine. Brightening the lives of her boys and letting them, the clouds roll in to protect her. Blot her out. Because – goddamnit – she is powerful too. If they would just stop covering her, they'd notice. Kakashi and Naruto look at her and still see a twelve year old crying from the pain of her bruised little heart.

The team mom, a bit of comic relief, the weakness to protect – she hates these roles that somehow always get forced onto her. On the bench, the sidelines. Barely any lines in the script of their lives. Lady in waiting. Not even a real main fucking character.

Naruto brings him back in, of course. Kakashi was part of the team. She's not even allowed the brief bit of a part they'll ever begrudgingly relegate to her – healer. Tsunade's hands do the trick just fine.

It astounds her, after knowing each other so intimately for five years, that they can be so blind to each other.

She realizes intuitively that to Naruto, Sasuke is his. He claims the right to some final fight of glory and realization, and it will be his shoulders that will support one of Sasuke's bruised arms, his own limbs that will similarly be wrapped around his long lost friend. They'll stumble through the great green gates of Konoha that way, grinning like fiends (or at least Naruto will be). Sakura doesn't know who the hell it was who said so, but it is plain that someone somewhere has decided, decreed that brotherly love and bonds come over that stupid girl who pledged her heart once upon a time. There are clear levels to the different bonds that Naruto and Sakura claim to Sasuke, and it is plain that Naruto's ranks higher than hers.

Well who the bloody fuck says so?

They don't know all those nights she laid in bed, gasping and shuddering because the pain of her loss was like a physical wound to the chest, keeping her from breathing. Her lungs haven't felt full in a long, long time. There are knots in her stomach that are soldered together; there's no untying herself from their heaviness.

Her pain isn't irrelevant just because it doesn't have to do with her family, just because the trauma hasn't been around to fester for a decade. She almost finds it funny that Naruto doesn't get it, when she thinks about the words Sasuke spoke to him that last time when they were thirteen.

Naruto could never understand the pain of losing his family – what Sasuke had loved the most – because he had always been lonely, was used to it, had never had anything better for comparison. Then what the hell is their excuse regarding Sakura? She loved, she lost, she's entitled to be fucked up now too. Join their exclusive little manpain club.

Neji Hyuga was on the team... and Sai, and Yamato, and...

... four, five, six, seven...

She throws herself more than ever into medicine, into healing. She's desperate to, no, obsessed with becoming someone useful. In the back of her mind Sakura can't help but feel the old self-consciousness, seeping out of its carefully sealed little box like poison gas, tainting her every thought. She starts to think there must be a reason they exclude her, throw themselves in front of her feeble efforts before she can damn herself.

She must be unworthy. Unworthy of them the way she was unworthy of him five long years ago. It makes her want to strike the earth into piles of rubble until she's destroyed everything and buried herself in the anarchy.

She actually starts out in the training fields until she realizes just how much the world dwarfs her. The reaffirmed inferiority of her existence makes her want to cry hot tears of frustration. But she keeps punching.

Then there were the guards. The officials. Government people. Hospital people. The Fire Land daimyo was even rumored to have made an appearance.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve... too many to even count for sure.

It is Kakashi who comes to her one day with sharp pains in his left eye – his sharingan eye. They're not the usual debilitating pangs he gets after using it, and he's afraid.

Sakura finds, in her analysis, a nerve at the back of the retina that has been improperly connected for all these years and under dangerous stress. By now even she has been let in on the story behind Rin, Obito, and the organ's hasty transplant. As it was the little girl on his old team who facilitated the gift of his reinvigored sight, now it is his little girl pupil who saves the organ and his ninja career.

As she washes her hands after the successful retransplant, the realization finally hits her.

How in God's name can they be considered more important than her? They whose sole role is to destroy, while she heals, creates. Everyone knows destruction is easy, that the universe has a tendency toward chaos, while the real fight is to build something up, to try your damnedest to not let everything simply go to hell. They who kill and fight and sneak and break bodies and hearts. She stitches those bodies back up, tries her best with hearts, and gets between as many fights as she can, as she did one day between two stupid, stupid boys on the hospital roof.

It makes her angry again. And then, she's also angry with herself for believing in it as well.

Because she is worthy.

In fact, maybe they're the ones who aren't, the ones who should beg to be stitched up because of their own ridiculous violence by her righteous hands, and the ones who deserve to be told 'no'.

"Sakura."

She works it out in her head. She is approximately the twenty-third person to lay her olivine eyes on him.

They couldn't be bothered to tell her. The courts and the government and maybe the Daimyo himself if the stories are true of course couldn't be bothered with her, probably don't even realize that the name of Tsunade-sama's budding young prodigy happens to crop up in conjunction with the story of the infamous/glorious/finally home Sasuke Uchiha.

Naruto and Kakashi's silence hurts much more.

She is a part of their team again because they ask, for old time's sake no doubt, and unlike them her job is not to wound or destroy or manipulate but to heal, to make everything okay again.

So Sakura goes out for ramen with the lot of them. Intervenes in any of the arguments that are still quick to blossom between the two boys. Chides Kakashi for reading at the table. Takes up the role they expect of her. She knows Naruto and Kakashi are desperate for nothing to have changed between them, and who is she to get in the way of their happiness when she has the power to facilitate it? She's too much of a healer to do otherwise.

The only changes are for Sasuke. Forever her exception… She's polite, but barely spends an unnecessary word on him. Sakura thinks she wouldn't even know what to say; she's the only one of them who seems to see that in four years he has changed, has become more of a stranger who must be reclaimed in tiny degrees, the way it worked when they were all first strangers in the beginning. Only this time around, she won't be so keen to unravel the twisted threads that are Sasuke Uchiha's life.

She knows from experience that it's probably one of the few puzzles ultimately past her ability to solve.

"... Sasuke." Tsunade trails behind him, and behind her she is sure she can see Naruto's spiky, blond head.

"His eyes..." her teacher starts, but she raises her gloved hand. Turns her back and motions for them to follow her to an empty room. She remembers the blood that dripped unnaturally from those precious sharingan eyes. She has come to be an expert in ocular injuries, and her teacher is starting to get too old for delicate procedures as it is.

Sakura wonders, as she removes her gloves and looks at his eyes without really meeting them, if nothing had been wrong with him, would she have been the thirtieth person instead? Maybe the fortieth?

They're never alone. Naruto certainly makes sure of that; he hangs onto his newly-reclaimed best friend as if he's afraid one night he'll wake up to find he's disappeared again. At first she can't help but feel reflexively a little petulant, like the blond is hogging a toy she wants. She starts to be glad of this as she attempts one day to think through how a conversation between her and her old love would actually go, with a river called Five Years of Chaos rushing between them.

She never meets his black gaze for long enough to see if he even cares.

Tsunade checks her out one day; the matronly woman has noticed her looking paler, and clutching at her stomach as if she is in pain. Sakura puts up with the exam, and her beloved teacher's motherly clucking. She knows she won't find anything physically wrong with her, because she has felt these pains before.

She's out with her boys nearly every day. Even still sees Ino, Hinata and Tenten on the weekends or whenever Naruto has dragged his shy brunette girlfriend along to a Team Seven social. She is not alone.

Yet they are the pains of loneliness, the pains of despair at a loss that feels unrecoverable.

She wishes terribly that the fact that he is home safe and sound was enough for her, but it's more complicated than that. It always is with him, Sakura thinks with frustration.

Every night since her second ever operation on sharingan eyes she has been an insomniac writhing between hot, scratchy sheets, pinned beneath the memory of his dark dark gaze.

The weather is cold. Kakashi doesn't feel like going out to join them, even though they have moved their gathering from the freezing outdoor Ichiraku stall and into a nearby restaurant. It's dim and nearly empty inside. Naruto has brought Hinata, so she is forced to sit next to Sasuke in the booth-style seats. Shivers without it having to do with the icy rain splattering into the windows outside.

She nurses her tea broodingly, and one of the things that has not really changed about Sasuke is his taciturnity. In the void of lively conversation, Naruto won't stop kissing Hinata. Sakura shakes her head at him, but she's gotten used to it. Sasuke makes a face of distaste and mutters something insulting. Their blond teammate decides his efforts would be better spent with his girlfriend that arguing, so the two get up and leave. Sakura wistfully watches his warm, orange-clad arms twist around her friend's petite form, before the warm body next to her calls her attention to the fact that she is now

alone with him.

His eyes are on her, something that was uncharacteristic back in their genin days. She refuses to pay enough attention to see what is now normal for him. Pretends she doesn't care either.

He is by no means abnormally close to her – it's a wide enough booth – but the heat of him is suddenly searing her, hotter than the fresh food that has been brought to the table. She swallows and her throat is dry.

Sasuke raises a hand; she has been watching him from the corner of her eye, and she flinches. But he only takes up a pair of chopsticks, digs into his rice.

In her mind she sees his raised hand, glowing blue with chidori. Heading for her.

Sakura pushes her plate of food roughly away from her; the porcelain makes a harsh scraping sound against the wood of the table. She nearly trips out of the booth in her haste to get away.

She doesn't think she can feel safe with him anymore.

What she can't believe is that she thinks she still loves him in spite of it.

What else she cannot believe is that, after everything she has been through, she can be that fucking stupid.

The green glow of her chakra scalpel fades away. Her steady fingers tie a clean, white bandage around his eyes, taking care not to tug at his dark hair where it still sticks up in the back. He's been quiet throughout the operation and so has she.

"Your eyes should finish healing completely in the next two days. Rest them until that amount of time is up and I can come check on you." She breaks the silence first. Her voice is crisp, businesslike, succinct.

"Sakura..."

"I have a lot of other patients I need to get back to. But it's nice to see you back." She turns to leave. He can't see her going, but he can hear her. Her feet are just recrossing the threshold of the room when she hears it.

"...Thank you."

The same as that night five years ago, she is incapable of saying anything in response.

She doesn't go back to any of the other patients she claimed to be so busy with. She walks with slow, precise steps for as long as she can bear it, until the burning heat in her eyes is starting to spill out in great molten tears and then she is running. She makes it to her little broom closet of an office that is on the same hallway as Tsunade's. Tucks up her legs to her chest like maybe if she can crawl into a small enough ball, the pain inside of her will somehow become smaller too.

She weeps for Sasuke Uchiha and it is another one of those things that happens more times than she can count with certainty. It could be the twenty-third, the thirtieth, or even the fortieth. Maybe more.

But she knows it is the first time that the tears have come from happiness. He's home, and that's all that really matters right now. He's home.

She makes it to the alleyway behind the restaurant – it is dark from the rainclouds but there is an eave overhead that keeps the freezing rain from her skin – before a searing hand catches her wrist.

He towers over her, coal eyes searching, noticing how she flinches again at his touch.

"Sakura."

She doesn't answer, keeps her green green eyes carefully away from his. Tries to snatch her wrist back.

He enunciates again. "What is it?"

She fights the urge to snap back a hostile 'what do you care?'

Instead, the words just tumble out of her without prelude. Really, why beat around the bush?

"You tried to kill me, Sasuke. Do you see why that might not make me too keen to be alone with you?"

He stiffens visibly, but doesn't release her wrist. Her hand feels like it has pins and needles in it. She squirms in his hold, uneasy.

"You tried to kill me first," he finally bites back.

Sakura fights the urge to gasp. She finally raises her gaze to meet his and he sees that it is hard and angry. A state he's almost never seen her eyes in, not while directed athim.

"If you remember it so clearly, Sasuke, then you should also recall that I couldn't fucking bring myself to finish the job. I know it's a common posture of yours to have your back turned to me, so you've never exactly been able to see what's going on with me. But when I held that knife to your back... I was fooling myself to think I could ever bring myself to so much as cut you." Her voice is bitter, like she's spitting poison instead of words at him. "Yeah. That's me. The team fool."

He's unresponsive for so long, his dark eyes unreadable to her, that she scoffs and turns away from him, easily breaking the hold on her wrist that has gone slack. She's taken three steps away and back down the wet alley and towards the street before he opens his mouth again.

"Well you're still here too, Sakura. Maybe I couldn't bring myself to do it either."

She doesn't bother to stop walking as she responds.

"No, Sasuke. No. Kakashi and Naruto stopped you. I didn't mean anything to you. I don't mean anything to you."

"They came before you could see if I would really do it. You don't know if I really would have, Sakura."

She notes that he does not contradict her statements. She notes that he chooses to refute her not by reassuring her that he would never hurt her, but by telling her she doesn't know.

Yeah? Well, she's sick of them all telling her how inferior she is, how little they think she knows. She knows better than to blindly listen now.

Sakura finally turns around to look at him as she delivers her parting line. Her green eyes are blanker than he's ever seen them, and her face is cold. Her expression says that she is weary, simply weary of listening to him and his excuses.

"No. I do know, Sasuke. I know because I don't know you anymore. And strangers don't have qualms over killing strangers."

He watches her walk away from him, and this time Sasuke Uchiha doesn't follow.