Nothing But the Truth

Chapter 17: Distant Star

AN: This chapter was a lot of fun to write. In fact, it was the idea for this chapter that inspired the entire story. I hope you like it because it's different than anything I've done before.

Please review and let me know how I did!

Thanks!

Nothing but the Truth

Chapter 17: Distant Star

"Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

Itachi was confused and groggy when he woke up, that was something out of the ordinary already, because something was missing. Something very warm and very pink was missing from his bed. Slowly, he opened his eyes to confirm that, yes, Haruno Sakura was not in bed with him. One of his hands reached out and stroked the area where Sakura usually slept only to discover that it was cold, meaning she had left quite some time before. As he groggily sat up, he came to another realization.

He was naked.

Well that seemed to make sense as well. Itachi knew the answer he would receive from Sakura the night before when he had gone to her. He had known that she could never stay with him when she had all of those people who loved her back home. The words of a desperate man escaped him when he pleaded with her to stay, and she had cried when he asked. Then, he found himself crying as well when she told him exactly what he had expected to hear: she told him she had to go home. For the first time in almost eleven years, Uchiha Itachi shed tears. Her friends needed her, her village needed her, Sasuke needed her. How could he possibly argue with that?

What else do you do when your reason for existing is leaving your life?

Well, if you're Uchiha Itachi, you cry a little, and then you make love to her like you've never have. You put all of your emotions into that because you don't know how to verbalize your feelings yet. For your entire life, you have stunted your feelings in order to ignore the constant pain that seems to seep into every day, so you don't know how to tell the woman you care about most in this world that you love her. They say that actions speak louder than words, so he had showed her how much he cared for her in his actions.

As his vision focused, Itachi found a scroll sitting on the bedside table, his name imprinted in Sakura's loopy handwriting on the outside. He glanced around the room once and soon discovered that all of her possessions were gone – only the solitary bag he kept with him at all times was in the room now. Not really wanting to know what it said, Itachi pulled the seal on the scroll apart and unraveled it to find a letter. A letter to him.

Dear Itachi,

I guess I should start with this: I'm gone. I've asked Deidara and Kisame to take me to the Leaf shinobi rendezvous point without you.

How could he have not felt everybody waking up and leaving for the day? He would have been able to sense that. He usually always woke up when Sakura even stirred in her sleep.

Why, you may ask?

Well, first I'll say that I injected a sleeping serum into your bloodstream this morning. That's why you didn't wake up. I knew you would have wanted to come with, and you couldn't come with to this.

Well, that explained it.

Because if you came, I would have never been able to leave you – especially after last night. If you came with, I would have found another reason to stay. I can't really do that at this point, can I? I suppose not. We always knew that our time together was temporary. We never really said it, but I feel like it was always implied, right?