First off, Final Fantasy VII inclusion win.

Wow.

There's so much about this that I love. The integration of Sasuke's vengeance feelings (for Naruto, for the city he grew up in) that parallels canon. The sheer brutality. The gorgeous writing. I particularly loved:

"She shivers in the cold and her breath is a cloud of white that does not suit her...He thinks that she is like some exotic hothouse flower; stranded in a cold she didn't belong to."

Somehow, it seems very right about Sakura, or at least the way Sasuke first sees her.

"He spotted her one night between one dilapidated building and the next. It was nothing more than a brief flash of pink under a flickering street light, but he'd known. Where else could you find color so bright under the plate unless it was on her?"

It's so matter-of-fact, and yet it warms my shipper's heart.

"How does it feel to whore out your soul?"

THIS line. Love.

"He would be the death of her, she thought, late at night after reciting the Hippocratic Oath to herself ten times over. There was weight in those thoughts, and she clung to it when there was no certainty anywhere else."

And this. It's so poetically beautiful, to see Sakura's thoughts.

And that entire flashback of Sakura's memories was beautiful and powerful.

Woah! That was intense! Awesome job.

WELL HELLO!

I liked how, though the events weren't in chronological order, they made SENSE.

& the answer (assuming I read correctly what the answer was)... It was poetic & not just "freedom" or "revenge" or some material thing.

Favorite sentence had to be, "Sakura says nothing about the sensation of glass cracking splitting shattering beneath her, or the high, keening sound the supports of the building makes as she slams her body repeatedly against the daylight streaming."