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The confession doesn't work.
Maybe it's her own fault, if she wasn't convincing enough to make Naruto believe what he already wanted to believe. Or maybe it's Sai's fault, maybe he was wrong and maybe Naruto never wanted her like that at all. Maybe it never could have worked, any of it—maybe they're both hopelessly bound to Sasuke's sinking ship, each of them pulled under by this love no matter what's good for them. She can't pull Naruto free of his wreckage any more than he can free her from it.
Regardless, she tried this the kind way, and it failed.
When Sakura shows up on the bridge where the fight with Danzo just went down, Sasuke is battered, rough looking, and cold as ice. The place is demolished. His own teammate lies gasping blood on the ground, and he shows no concern. It's a girl—a pretty girl even, with a sucking wound through the chest, and Sasuke is poised on the verge of finishing her off.
"I want to follow you," Sakura says. "You wouldn't let me before, when I was weak. But I'm stronger now, and I'll be useful to you. Let me follow you now."
Sasuke scoffs. “Abandon your home? Your friends? Your comrades?”
"Yes,” Sakura says. “I'll do anything for you.”
"Alright,” Sasuke says. He doesn't believe her. “Alright. This is Karin. She was my medic until now. Kill her, and you can replace her.”
He stands up. He gestures at the body, his mouth tight in a mirthless smile.
Sakura hesitates. She's a medic, and killing in cold blood—she doesn't even know this girl, she's never fought this girl, this girl could be anyone. She comes closer. Looking down at this gasping, destroyed body, she sees a patient. The lung wound is pulling air into the diaphragm with every shallow breath, and triage methods unspool in her mind, automatically.
She drops to her knees beside this bleeding stranger. She takes out a knife. Is it worth it? Is she willing to murder a stranger just to get close enough to murder a friend?
“You can't do it, can you?” Sasuke taunts. “You've always been such a bleeding heart. You were never cut out for this life. It doesn't matter how strong your body is, your heart is weak.”
Sakura pulls aside the neck of the girl's cloak, baring her tattered chest. She is covered in bitemarks. Old and new, scars in the shape of mouths. This is someone who gave and gave and gave, and in all her wretched life her only choice has been whom to give it to. So she gave it to Sasuke. And now he wants her to give up this, too.
Karin can't speak, but Sakura implicitly recognizes what she is. There is this kinship between them, though neither of them wants it.
Her knife stabs down, towards Karin's chest, only to slice away the remaining violet wreckage of her shirt. A horrible wet shout splits the air as Sakura slaps her palm down over the wound and compresses it. Her hand begins to glow.
There's a small, spiteful tch, in the space behind her. Above her, watching, Sasuke looms like the impending weight of a hurricane. Light glints metallic and sharp at his hip.
“This is why you're useless to me,” Sasuke says. “Of course I left you behind. You're baggage, you were never anything to me but baggage.”
"Everything is baggage to you," Sakura says. "Your home. Your friends. Your comrades."
Sasuke's blood-rimmed eye widens, he pivots -
She says: “What’s the point of living, if it’s all just baggage to you?”
Her fist strikes Sasuke from behind with a force that warps the screen—her black glove hits his spine like a piledriver, tossing him across the bridge in a billow of wind so strong it blows her hair back. Sasuke hits the wall, cracking stone under his body, teeth gritted, furious.
He thinks, if I hadn't put up my guard at the last moment, she would have shattered my spine.
She stands there, head down, fist clenched in front of her. Shoulders heaving.
Sasuke hauls himself out of the stone and spits blood on the ground. “Nice trick,” he says. “Pick that up from Naruto?”
At Karin's side, the original Sakura is knuckles deep in the sucking wound through Karin's left lung. She picks out the broken fragment of a rib and closes it in her hand.
“I've learned a lot of things,” the original Sakura says, “from a lot of people. If you had stayed, you might have learned them too.”
The clone approaches Karin and sits down at her other side. The real Sakura reaches out and presses the fragment of bone into her mirrored hand. They exchange places. One pulls off her gloves as she bows forward. One pulls on her gloves as she stands.
Sasuke draws back, hits a quick series of handsigns. As Sakura advances, the air twangs.
The barrage of shuriken is too thick to dodge, too thick to deflect. It descends on Sakura from every direction. She staggers back, stars embedded in her calves and forearms and thighs. Blood drips from every dark shape. There’s a tight, low groan as she staggers. She lands left knee, right palm directly on one of the shuriken embedded in the ground. It tears up through her palm, lodges between the bones, and she screams.
She screams, Release.
The genjutsu dissolves. The ground is clear, there’s no blood on her body.
“Did you forget?” she pants. “I was a genjutsu type to begin with. I may not be able to cast at your level, but you won’t hold me. Not like this.”
Slowly, laboriously, she lifts her body. She rolls her shoulders. She cracks her neck.
Sasuke and Sakura go head-to-head, exchanging a series of heavy blows. Sasuke dodges each one, but they leave gashes in the stone with deep spiderweb cracks. They pulverize wood and level cement. She's relentless, and he's tired; he can dodge but he can never quite escape her pursuit. He lands a strike on her and she just takes it, keeps coming, shows no signs of caring.
The sharingan spins up. He watches the way she channels power into her limbs, through her muscles, hardening her bones and cushioning her joints. Blows against her reinforced body glance off like pebbles against a fortress. He reads percentages. It's a precise, delicate skill she's learned: how to push herself to the limit of human strength, without disintegrating under her own blows.
When she's punching, her chakra is concentrated in the arm delivering offense. Then the second most concentration is in her active shoulder, her rhomboid, her trapezium. And then in her feet, giving her the solid base to push from, so that she doesn't lose ground.
He smirks. The advantage to this technique of hers is that it costs her nothing in terms of chakra reserves; all her power stays circulating inside the body, flowing from limb to limb. But she’s got a limited amount. He knows that thirty percent of her overall chakra reserves are tied up in that clone, and she won't have access to that until it disperses. And she never had all that much to begin with.
There's not enough chakra in her body to protect anything unnecessary. The arm that should be her guard is unguarded, and her face, her neck—if he can land a strike any of those places, he will tear through her like paper.
He ducks, he winds back, his arm glows red hot with chakra—
The strike he lands against her wrist reverberates up his arm, his mouth opens in a silent scream wet with spit. At the same time, Sakura is thrown back ten feet, maybe fifteen, her heels dragging clouds of dust. She’s panting hard but holding her stance. We see her sweating face as she lifts it and grins.
“Your body and mine are different,” she says. “You can copy my dispersal down to the last decimal point, but your bone density is different than mine. Your tendons have a different tension. Your muscles will tear—"
She leaps forward, lands on the palm of one hand, strikes up with her heel against his chest—
“You’ll destroy yourself, trying to be someone you’re not.”
He lands gracefully, barely affected by the blow, but furious. "Fine,” he says. “We’ll play it my way.”
Chidori crackles in his palm. He winces, feeling the flow of lightning exacerbate the stress from before. All the same, he’s never let pain stop him. He charges at her with deadly speed, bearing down, and her eyes go wide. He’s on the dregs of his power, and she knows it. She has nothing to counter chidori with, and he knows it. He swipes, she dodges. It singes the hair that flies from her face, coming so close she can smell the ozone of it.
Now their earlier positions are reversed: Sakura can’t seem to get away, and Sasuke can’t seem to be shaken. She tries to strike out at him, but he guards with the chidori—she can’t hit him without frying her hand, very probably electrocuting herself.
She dances back until he’s corralled her to the cliff wall, and then she dodges at the last possible moment, so that his screaming fist lands in the rock just an inch from her cheek. The jutsu grounds out.
How many more does he have in him, she wonders.
How many more do I have in me? he wonders.
She starts to make a handsign, but the chidori flares up again, and she has to dodge. She tries again, before diving away from him. And again, she manages one sign before his fist makes contact with the ground where she lay a moment before. She rolls; he pulls his arm back out of the bridge with a painful tug.
The air is full of panting. Sasuke is bent, breathing hard, and Sakura pushes up to one knee.
“Don’t beg for mercy now,” Sasuke says.
“I won’t,” she says.
“I don’t have any mercy left,” Sasuke says. “Not even for you.”
She swallows thickly. Tears fight to fall, building dangerously at the corners of her lashes.
Across the wreckage, Sakura's clone is methodically closing the wound. Karen looks up at her through fuzzy vision, watches the mirrored tears building and threatening to spill. This is horrible, and she hates it. This is a stranger she never wanted to know, this enemy weeping over Karin's body. To be witness to this is excruciating.
“I remember how you used to protect me,” Sakura says. “No matter what a burden I was, you always protected me. I thought… I thought you must have loved me, despite everything.”
Sasuke says nothing. A third, final chidori crackles to life in his hand.
“Was I stupid?” Sakura asks. Her voice is thin, raw. “Did you ever love me? Was I only fooling myself?”
A dozen careworn little memories: the team as children, getting up to mischief, stalking Kakashi around the village. Sasuke burning with the cursemark in the Forest of Death, caught in Sakura’s arms, stilled in the moment of violence. Sasuke in the hospital, slapping an apple from her hand, refusing to meet her eye. Sasuke, at the gates of the village, poised to turn his back on them all.
Sasuke’s face in a dozen variations—smug, resentful, furious, annoyed. Indulgent.
“Did you love me?” she says, in such a small voice. “Even a little?”
“What does it matter,” Sasuke says. “You’ll die here either way.”
He coils back, ready to strike, and lunges.
It was the only thing you ever gave me, Sakura thinks. The only sign you ever cared. I thought, if I only tried a little harder… if I could only catch up to you…
The chidori washes the scene in blue and blazing white. Time slows to a crawl.
I thought…
Sasuke buries his burning fist in Sakura’s stomach. Light flares, the fabric billows, and then there is impact. Rock and rubble go flying, clouds of dust burst from the thing Sasuke has hit: a broken chunk of cement, with rebar like bones protruding from the damage.
“Replacement jutsu,” she says, standing just behind his shoulder.
A memory of her handsigns flashes before his eyes. Each one, in order, as she dodged and rolled: tiger, boar, ox, dog, snake.
Her fist snatches out, catching Sasuke by the throat. Her fingers squeeze. He gags, spits, claws at them. Sparks fizzle along his fingertips, and die away. He’s exhausted, burned out, finally empty in her grip.
“I got really good at that,” Sakura says. “A long time ago. Protecting you.”
She catches his good arm and twists it behind him tight. The Sakura who has been sitting with Karin this whole time finally lets the healing glow fade from her bare fingers, and she stands. Her weight sways, and then her feet steady on the ground. Her black heels tap quietly with each step.
“Baggage, baggage,” she spits. “We’re all just baggage to you.”
As she comes to a stop in front of Sasuke, cold now, without tears, she flexes her bloody fist.
"Your heart is your baggage," Sakura says, "so let me tear it out."
Her hand is like a claw, stiff and curled, as she draws her arm back to punch through his chest. There’s no special justsu, no weapon, no knife: only her skin and raw strength and flexing tendons.
Her teeth grit and her eyes squeeze closed, and her coiled arm surges forward—
Her hair flutters forward and falls, as she comes to a complete stop barely an inch from Sasuke’s chest. Green eyes snap wide open.
Around her wrist is a pale, gloved hand, restraining.
The camera pans out, up the sleeve, up the shoulder, the flak jacket, to the masked mouth. The tense, unhappy eye.
“No, Sakura,” Kakashi says, his voice quiet in the emptiness. “Not you.”