Antiquated Folly: The Crimson Letter

Prologue

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For the moments that we'll come to remember with excruciating detail.

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Under clouded moonlight, flurries of leaves danced to the sudden uproar of a howling wind.

Haruno Sakura's widened and wavering emerald stare was frozen ahead as Uchiha Sasuke appeared behind her—derisively close—just in the pinnacle of that dispersing gale, as if the very score of that cold disruption was caused by him.

As schools of leaves settled to a subtle scutter and shortened roseate hair reframed the porcelain skin of her face, Sasuke leaned forward.

For the brief seconds that they were ear to ear, looking at the same unnamable place in the distance, she could feel his body heat reaching her in tantalizing swathes; like a blanket of fragmentary delusion it diffused along chilled skin in constant cirruses while she deciphered the most frigid truth. She would almost deny this disparaging thing that she could so clearly see, set before them on a limerick so mercilessly absconded from the ballads of their past.

It was their reality. The diverging paths of their future.
The promises never made.

I was wrong.

"Sakura ... thank you."

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Two shinobi crashed into the center depths of an immense waterfall. The velocity of their impact obliterated the mountain edge that was the waterfall's crest-boulders fractured and catapulted, and heavy tons of pressurized water and dust shrouded in every available direction, clouding a mid-morning sky. The currents that had been forced upwards climbed as far as they could go, until they slowed and halted, and then they began their fall. The area all around darkened with the onslaught of that massive water's downpour, cascading in merciless shifts as if the sky itself had opened to relinquish its own endless precipitation in tandem.

Burrowed into the newly-created space of the mountain cliff's edge, those two shinobi-under more recognizable distinctions of male and female-met unstable ground. Corroded earthen walls impacted and shifted, and the rocky foundation underneath them collapsed. They were taken deeper behind what was left of the original cavern, to an area completely obstructed from visible sky by more concaving boulders and shifting walls.

Seconds allowed the commotion of their new location to settle. It became quieter here; in their plateauing palisade, the pounding of the rain and the hissing of the half-strength waterfall was a drowned hum against the nuances of the arranged stone walls that trapped them. Pebbles broke free from larger craters in intermittent ricochets; dripping water escaped numerous cracks and crevices; pressurized streams spurted strongly while others seeped.

Scanty tendrils of light flickered through shifting crevices and a temporarily diminished water veil to refract off available water deposits, offering subtle introductions of dampened shades of aquamarine to their dark enclosure.

Uchiha Sasuke was on his back, slightly raised up against a fractured wall. His eyes were strained, tired-their natural obsidian color-as he looked up into Haruno Sakura's emerald eyes-dulled by the same exhaustion. Mere inches separated their faces, and they bore the same abrasions and dirt stains and beaded sweat indicative of a recent physical struggle. Sakura was positioned above Sasuke in some manner: What was viewable of her upper body in the darkness was hunched over towards him, and an arm of hers was braced against the stone wall above him. Heaps of overly-long roseate hair draped her shoulders to coil onto the denim-blue tunic at his chest; that abundance of saturated hair covered well the majority of blatant holes and tears that sullied her own scarlet slipover.

Silence ensued for the enduring moments that they stared, analyzing one another. As physically close as they were, and however more dangerous their surrounding enclosure inclined, neither seemed to care. There was lethargy there. And something else.

Sakura made the first movement. A weak push with the forearm of hers against that unstable wall allowed for her to position just a hand there. The wall groaned and trembled as she pushed further, as if to support her upper body-fathoming a phantom creation of distance between her and Sasuke. Only more inches transpired.

She was helplessly in close proximity to him, mulling over a phenomenon that only seemed to mature with the expanding duration of their locked attention-and with the energy that continued to diminish rapidly from her. Lamentable and unwanted, she tried to dissuade this lingering occurrence as an attribute of temporary delirium for the both of them-an anomaly in the face of an escalating crisis. But what a tragically familiar, undeniable sentiment it was-this pitiful caricature from her past-it reared to the surface, having creeped from some unknown depths within her to prickle at wounds hardly scarred over and only silently existing till that point.

Such a desperate thing it was, chaperoned by a decade-old memory.