Redemption |complete| (SasuSaku)

The Labyrinth

⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆

" Do you feel any better?"

Sasuke acquiesced. She wondered if he was completely honest or if he still wanted to hide what he felt. After the long speech she gave him few hours ago she decided to leave him alone. It will probably take him a bit of time before he understands what she meant.

She remembered how he fell asleep while she was healing him. She had never seen him so vulnerable and cherished the thought of him showing this side to her. He probably would never do it again but that was fine by her, he did it once and showed that he trusted her.

"We should get going. I don't know how many hours already passed in here and we have work to do."

Sakura looked at him while he stood up. She followed the movement after carefully packing her things in her bag. The warmth of the place was harder to handle now that they had been here for a while and the air was rare. The fact that two were going to go deeper into the castle made her nervous.

"We should mark the way so we don't get lost, Sasuke."

Without looking at her, he took a kunai out of his pouch and marked the wall of an arrow pointing at the direction they were going to use.

"We'll just have to follow them to come back."

He started walking and she followed, leaving the light behind them, they slowly walked into the darkness.

No light was entering the castle and even after her eyes got accustomed to the obscurity, she still felt blind. Sasuke on the other hand had already activated his sharingan. His ability to use his chakra was getting better but he still couldn't use it for more than ten minutes. Due to that, they had to break as often as he needed to. The advancement of the mission was slower than they both expected and Sakura could see that her friend was getting frustrated.

"I need one of your pill." He stopped and looked at her. She had to stand right next to him to be able to follow his movement easily without getting lost so when he stopped so suddenly, she nearly bumped into him. The fact that she had no visibility didn't help either.

"Sasuke... I don't know how it will affect you. If anything happens we are in trouble. If we were in our dimension I would but it's too risky here."

"Hn."

Of course he already knew that. She grabbed his left sleeve and followed him. She was expecting him to push her away but he was probably too focused on the matter at hand to bother about her.

The castle was an immense island of stones. Its outlines were totally unfamiliar to the duo. Each wall resembled the other, each turn led them to an identical hallway and the darkness blended everything together making it hard for her to avoid walking into a wall.

The silence present in the castle was heavy on her chest. Sakura could feel the cracks on the wall every time she ran her delicate fingers on it. She wondered how old the place was. It felt ancient... there was this energy to it, something that felt like they were the first human to ever see it.

Even with the heat, the place was still very humid and Sakura was sweating already. The twist and turns of the castle made the kunoichi feel dizzy and thanks to Sasuke who managed to keep his head cold, she didn't have to think of where they were going. She just followed the movement of his empty sleeve that she was holding like her life depended on it. Every corridor seemed to stretch into another repeating the same pattern over and over again. There was no way for them to realise where they were heading. As soon as she felt her friend turning around, she tried to stop but it made her bump into him this time. She didn't move and stayed close to him.