#psalloacappella:SSBP
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tenerezza
Day 6 Prompt: Cuddling // “Come closer.”
@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
He keeps his comments to himself: That she has staff for a reason, that their ex-sensei-turned-Kage works her too hard and he’d made a curt mention of it when reporting back, that perhaps someone could take the task of laundering bloody work clothes off her hands. Their responsibilities even in this delicate period they call peacetime still weigh heavy, principle baked into their bones.
In the future, their children won’t know the world quite like this.
A routine peacekeeping mission turns, twists, becomes mayhem.
Surgery is an intensive thing, the delicate dance of suspending chakra and soul in the void to negotiate with Death. And though it is a grim and arduous opponent with which to skirmish, Sakura more often than not emerges victorious.
Drained, though. Frayed at the edges.
It startles her to know that she sometimes has an audience.
Bringing the back of hand across her forehead, she dabs at the shimmering sweat. An assistant hands her a small towel, bows, and retreats. Hitching a tired grin onto her face, she inclines her head. “Hokage-sama.”
Familiar, how he can show up jauntily in a chaotic atmosphere, a mess, and still manage to seem bemused. The political consequences of this recent skirmish unspoken between them. Hands in his pockets, he brings two fingers to his temples and flicks them toward her in an affectionate motion, channeling yesteryear. “Don’t bother with that, Miss Haruno.”
Sakura wrinkles her nose at his sarcastic drawl. “That does sound weird coming from you.”
“Ah, you see? So stick with ‘sensei.’”
Despite her exhaustion, she musters up the energy to stick out her tongue.
“Mature of you,” he sighs. “But of course, well done. Exceptional, in fact.”
“You didn’t watch my whole surgery just to praise me at the end?”
Kakashi smiles, the fabric forming folds that reflect expressions innate, the way she’s interpreted them for years and knows as well as the comforting wrinkles in a beloved shirt.
There’s something knowing in the set of his chin, the easy, languid way his weight settles onto one hip, almost irreverent.
“I’m here to tell you to go home,” he says gently. “It’s been hours. Days, really. Your capable staff will wrap up the rest.”
Perspiration, fluids; she wipes clammy hands on her coat. “Am I needed somewhere else?”
“No, I am simply invoking the powers of my grand office to send you home.”
Sakura narrows her eyes at him, swaying a bit on her feet. He’s not wrong about the rest, but she does resent his smugness in a situation where she’s unable to see the reason.
“Tell me why.” Raising her chin, she folds her arms, a stubborn root settling in for long, protracted and perhaps heated discourse.
Chuckling, his eyes twinkle in a manner just borderline risque enough to make her frown.
“He’s home.”
“Oh, for the love of—” Simmering rouge moving swift and fast through her cheeks, flooding out the pink from her exertion and becoming full-blown embarrassment. “Just say that first. Actually, no! No, don’t — how do you—?”
“He’s already checked in, report done. Doesn’t waste time chatting with me much anymore, I’m just his old, grey sensei.” Kakashi’s sigh is wistful, aiming at charming.
But his eyes are sharp, always watchful of everything and in particular, his loved ones. Can he see her shakes, or does he just see
tears gathering on her lashes, the nightmares ripping her from sleep the night before, and the night before that, and —
She’s sure she catches his self-satisfied wink as she hurries out on unsteady legs.
Weak knees, breathless, for all sorts of complicated reasons.
.
.
Plants watered. House slippers and shoes chivvied back into line, a neat row.
The scent of him: Of earth and salt, traces of forests and faraway lands and a bite — oh, that crisp bite of smoke and fire, heady and hot, from his essence rather than his clothes.
She finds it difficult to hold herself up, clinging to the threshold frame. Laid out across her couch he’s something of an enigma, an infamous man whose existence sparks ignorant prattle, the truth and falsehoods hoarded and passed as collective talismans. Half-informed tales of the team she adores and the man she loves.
Handsome, of course. That aspect has never changed, never will. Vulnerable, arm resting behind his head, the placid rise and sink of his chest. Managing to come back without summons but always, forever, at the precise and needed time.
Socked feet padding against the cold wood floor, (there was a rug, she needs a new one — knucklehead Hokage-in-the-wings spilled red wine all over it), she kneels next to the couch. Eyes following the cut edge of his jawline, the sovereign slope of his nose. And most of all, the unexpected serenity his face reflects, no furrows or creases in his expressions even in sleep.
There’s an object out of place, and its energy distracts her, draws her gaze. A basket of laundry that she assumes was gathered but unfinished, a medley of clothes he undoubtedly stripped off upon arriving tossed in with the several layers she’s been through in the last week, the sanguine fabric narrative of her journey to the void and back.
And yet.
On hands and knees she drags it across the floor until it's in front of her, snatches a shirt right off the top.
Bringing it to her face, she inhales the scent of devotion so potent that the tears come swift and sudden.
“Sakura?”
Sleepy, a little hoarse, but even on awakening the concern threads his voice through. Her, crying into a shirt he’s just washed for her; she sulks inwardly, feeling stupid.
When she tries to respond, struggling to force out some chirpy greeting and loving quip, it slips into impossibility. He reaches out to her, hand starting at the top of head to run through her clammy pink locks, then down to take her face in his fingers, a thumb gently swiping hot tears away.
“Sakura.”
A hitch in her breath; she struggles to swallow down the sobs clawing and turbid at the back of the throat. Pressing her face into his chest, she mumbles, “Welcome home, Sasuke-kun.”
Still with his hand on her head, fingers exploring her scalp in idle and soothing trails as tracing familiar ancient etchings, as memorizing braille.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, shifting onto his side. Taps his fingers against her head, gentle, a quiet ask.
Sakura’s face emerges pink, tearstained, with a wobbly smile that feels like a throwaway lie for a fool.
“I’m sorry! I don’t know what came over me. I’m so glad you’re—”
“Apologizing,” he interrupts. Like a quiet rumble, the purr of a prowling cat. “Ah, what did I say about that?”
“To stop it?”
Sasuke makes some noise of assent, from the throat rather than his lips.
And he looks at her and knows. He’s learned, but has always intuited this habit of hers since Genin days, the way she plasters on a smile and flashes those bright teeth to disarm fools. How deeply mortifying crying feels to her in certain moments, the way it becomes an acute weakness and liability, especially regarding work. Families don’t want to see your tears, only your triumph — the way you’ve bowed to Death and danced, and depart at the end of the number with their loved one’s soul as crown and winnings.
The problem being there’s rarely an expectation of anything less.
Now he’s sitting up, still cradling her face in his hand. Mismatched eyes searing, searching, flickering rapidly across her face.
“You’d better be off-duty now,” he says. “You look exhausted.”
“Oh, you sure know how to charm a girl,” Sakura sniffs. Leans into his hand and touch, raising no protests at the way his thumb continues to sweep away an endless estuary borne of things she can’t articulate. A gravity in her demeanor, at once present but faded into an unreachable inner sanctum and self.
Instinctual, the way his fingers remain in constant contact with her skin, cheek to hair to shoulder, trailing warm down her arm and finally to her cold, shaky hand.
Tugs her gently, indicating the space he’s made for her to sit.
“I have to—”
“There is nothing; I’ve done it all.”
There’s nothing for her to protest, no way for her to pretend she’s fine.
“Come closer.”
This act for her seems onerous, pulling her tired body into his lap appearing utterly spent, bereft. He keeps his comments to himself: That she has staff for a reason, that their ex-sensei-turned-Kage works her too hard and he’d made a curt mention of it when reporting back, that perhaps someone could take the task of laundering bloody work clothes off her hands. Their responsibilities even in this delicate period they call peacetime still weigh heavy, principle baked into their bones.
In the future, their children won’t know the world quite like this.
She melts into him with her heavy head against his heart, his fingers continuing their simple repetitions in the tangle of her hair.
Sasuke thinks of her shirt still soaking in the sink, one he labored on for a while before her return, desperately trying to lift the rubicund crimson from the white fabric.
Wondering if that one pulled through, for her sake.
Her grip catches his attention, as if her head is spinning and she needs rooting to the earth — fingers in his shirt, head tucked under his chin.
Sickle-cresents of leftover copper in the beds of her nails, the trials and triumph of a woman fighting back.
She says something he doesn’t catch, a flutter, possibly I love you.
What she does holds such importance, but he cannot imagine the cost. Pressing his mouth to her forehead, he speaks in a quiet chant in tender cadence with his fingers moving through her hair:
I’ve got you.
I’ve got you.
I’ve got you.
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poco a poco
Day 5 Prompt: Lover’s Quarrel // “You never listen to me.”
@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
Underneath the dense foliage of a magnificent, custodial beech tree, they sit quiet for a bit, apologizing without moving their lips — in the buzz of insects, the nostalgic trilling of toads, the whispering of tree leaves.
Sasuke watches her in profile; then, with an unexpected tenderness, tucks her hair behind her ear, dark eyes on the split skin of her cheekbone.
The sound Sakura makes isn’t quite a scream, but it startles Sasuke enough for him to pause in his foraging task. Reaching for a benign fallen fruit nestled in the grass, her reaction seems theatrical on its face and now he’s distracted by the glistening, bright nettles getting in the way of securing the bag.
“Don’t—!”
It makes sense in an instant: The alarming shade of orange they possess, an alien glimmer and dance about them. He scoffs and has a thought that immediately reminds him he’s occasionally stupid, Ah, plants don’t move like this —
And though Sakura’s never possessed his level of speed, she’s already yanking him out of the brush as the alcove swiftly aims to trap them in.
They tumble backward, Sakura bodily pulling him along without tapping the wellspring of her true strength; they’ve played that game, and he’s intimately familiar with the shiver a grown man feels dancing down his spine when a fissure snakes beneath the earth under his feet.
Tangled up in one another and already catching angry mutters, he’s sure he’s missed something he doesn’t understand and she’s about to tell him exactly what it is.
Well, he’d never have it any other way.
Kneeling on her haunches, she roughly clears her vision of stray hair and levels a gaze, green-glass and sharp, that could slice and feather him as a mandolin.
“Are—you—blind?”
“Not quite yet.”
Sasuke never knew her eyes could get quite so wide, and he considers the merits of keeping his witty comebacks to himself.
Something draws his gaze, though, and the amusement sinks as fast as it came. The thin line, a surface split in the skin dashed across her cheekbone, doesn’t seem to impede her anger roiling along as a volcano, folding in on itself and furthering its validity as a runaway chemical reaction.
“If you touched it, we need to extract the poison right away,” she says impatiently, speaking through gritted teeth. Luckily that’s only a side-effect of her fury, rather than the cut.
“Sakura—”
“Come here—”
“Your face!” A spark of his own surfacing out of guilt and irritation; there’s no way she’s unaware of the poison now coursing through her systems in a chaotic melee, seeking whichever biological home feeds it best.
Her response is to yank him by the hand, turning his arm at the elbow and spreading his fingers.
“I’m fine!” he barks.
“All it takes is a tiny way in, Sasuke—”
“And what about you? What do we do?”
“I’m asking the questions, here.”
“I’m not your patient out here, you know,” he snaps, indicating the forest clearing.
“Then maybe stop trying to act like one!” The rouge of her anger lights up the cut in her face with an odd white rim, and Sasuke catches the sinister gleam from the split in her skin from a passing moment in the shifting canopy.
Orange.
“A color that bright — gods, I can’t believe you—”
Ripping her belt from the waist and unfurling it with a snap!, a motion saturated with ire, her hand hovers for a second or two, fingers bouncing in rapid thought, before plucking a vial and fluttery gauze from the pack.
“Tell me what to do,” Sasuke growls.
The response is savage muttering, and he’s so sure he catches something like that’s some Naruto shit and handsome-stupid. No stranger to her temper flaring bright and subsiding with haste, but his helplessness makes it difficult to keep his dumb mouth shut.
“Sakura!”
“Concentrating.”
Emerald, soft and with an incandescent, almost mystical texture and glow. There’s something about her skill that roils his gut into abstruse knots of anxiety threaded through with intimidation, spun through with tight, woven pride. In contrast to the coarse and hackneyed way in which he’s healed or handled injury in the past, cowering in caves and sweating out lonely fevers and even the way he’s used another body, sinking his teeth in to rob an unknown and murky power from another vessel.
But her behavior jerks him back to the present as she squeezes venom from her fucking face into her stupid glass vial and he absolutely cannot believe he’s watching this from the woman he loves, as she gently coaxes it to the surface and manages not to spill a drop despite the shakes settling into her limbs.
“What do I do, Sakura? Tell me.”
She corks the vial with aplomb and offers nothing but a heavy sigh. “Please gently put this back in my waistbelt.”
Now it’s his turn to stare, and though she blinks in the moment his eye flickers and flares to crimson life, it doesn’t frighten her like he thought it might.
“You’re annoying.”
She frowns, and the gentle glow around her fingers brightens a bit. “How could you touch something so bright? Is something like that ever not poisonous?”
“Then what about you? Acting like it’s not a big deal!”
The shrug she gives him makes him clench his jaw, closing his eyes for a moment. Not quite a praying man, but most of the things that are destined to pass his lips will only escalate their bickering.
“There’s nothing to be gained from panic,” she says quietly. “I’ve learned this many times, now.”
And though she’s not and has never been stone cold, he can see the bobbing in her neck after her heavy swallow, the deep breath, the search for calm as the glittering orange comes away in her glowing hand, suspended in-air as the formless shapes of ink blot tests, losing it’s luster as she flicks her fingers and it dissipates into the wind. Harmless.
“And anyway, I’ve played with poison before.”
Grey pallor receding from her face, she smiles at him in a small and faint way that prompts him to ask, again,
“What do I do?”
She exhales, shoulders slumping, body relenting to the aftermath of adrenaline rush by losing its strict form. “Can you help me?” She nods at a nearby tree. “Need to sit for a moment.”
Miles from home, it seems their paltry disagreements last for the better part of years, but when they’ve burnt out, twinkling out as tiny stars, they know they’re never angry for long.
Underneath the dense foliage of a magnificent, custodial beech tree, they sit quiet for a bit, apologizing without moving their lips — in the buzz of insects, the nostalgic trilling of toads, the whispering of tree leaves.
Sasuke watches her in profile; then, with an unexpected tenderness, tucks her hair behind her ear, dark eyes on the split skin of her cheekbone.
“You haven’t healed this.”
Emerging from what seems like a deep reverie, she nuzzles against his fingers, absorbing his touch.
“I shouldn’t do that with you,” she says, eyes glossy. The threat of tears. “It’s what I do in an emergency — you learn it’s simply not about you, that you’re the one in charge. They’re scared, so you put away your fear and feelings.” Her eyes swivel to him, offering an apology and asking forgiveness. “They need you to lead, and so you do.”
Why she hangs on the notion that he might not forgive her, that she needs to ask even silently, he’ll never be able to parse, given the grace he’s been extended from his loved ones and above all of them, her, so many times over.
“You should know how to do this.” Voice firm, a statement rather than a suggestion. Head still resting against the venerable tree trunk, she continues. “Even basic skill could go a long way.”
“You’re not suggesting—”
“I absolutely am!” she interjects. “What if you need to heal someone and I’m not there? What if I’m incapacitated, and it’s me?” Taking him by the shirt, she pulls him a little closer to drive home the solemnity, the gravity of what she’s implying. “In the future, in a life with new loved ones . . . what wouldn’t you do for them?”
Sasuke’s eyes flicker from her intense eyes to the cut on her cheek, the discomfiting orange glimmer long gone, but the injury still resolutely present.
“Great men,” she whispers, “have died from many benign, simple things.”
Here is what he’d never confess: She adores him and believes in him more than he deserves. The idea that he’s a good man, a talented one, possessing an unshakeable compass when his narrative has proven, in his view, the absolute opposite.
That nearly every day, his instinct is to sink into shadows that tug at him, but right on cue she emboldens him to step into the light.
“You should do it,” he says quietly, aiming for a dissuading tone. “This is your face, I don’t want to hurt you.” Again. As always.
“I trust you.”
“I can’t do it now, like this.”
“You never listen to me, Sasuke-kun.”
She takes him by the hand — he can feel the warmth of the green glow he’s observed many times, relieving bodies of their healing burdens and broken bones; has seen it used on his good friend, an old sensei, a child’s skinned knee here, an elderly’s poor joint there. A body brought back to life, snatched from the void’s edge of an unknown thing they’ve yet to explore.
And for an otherworldly instant that unwavering devotion is reflected in the eyes he’s woken up to for days and weeks now: Unshakable belief reflected back to him, a second in which he sees himself as she always does.
“And I’m telling you, you can.”
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tempo rubato
Day 7 Prompt: free prompt // “From now on . . .”
@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
It is a divine and breathtaking thing, to be untethered from their earthly expectations.
The rhythm of the world is a universal hum, an unbroken orbit consisting only of two.
(we write a story)
Hewn halves of the same whole, shadow and light.
They tell themselves to keep it simple, take it slow. This, whatever this is.
The dynamic shift between them is not sudden nor gradual, but something permanent, piquant, and passionate.
Arcs of exploration, personal and entwined: They roam the edges of the world they know and the enclaves they don’t, hoping that their bonding will reveal the hidden map — time reigning at the helm, the pilgrim cartographer.
But they’ve never been blithe or unfocused, not in their goals or in the shaping of their destinies. Certainly, nothing between them has ever been anything other than a dramatic affair, enduring, and a love that every other eye can see.
“How many days has it been?” she asks him across an inn table, watching him in the dim light.
Sasuke knows damn well she’s aware of the hours and seconds that have elapsed together; she’s far too precise for sly questions of time. Does it matter?
He pauses before answering, already so taken with the way she levels her gaze at him, unadorned, and knows bringing her along will be the ultimate undoing of his penance journey, the taking apart of his hard heart. Sunrise cleaving through his endless dusk.
“Months, now.” Gathering up the last shreds of meat from his bowl, he places it in hers and meets her eyes in the manner of setting dry kindling alight.
And so it works, this restrained and sentimental pace, for a while.
.
(we speed up)
Whispers in firelight will be their foundation, the tales that will shape their future. They speak of mundanities (flowers), practicalities (weather) and dreams, some past, lost, and others transforming into hesitant, potential plans. They speak of scars, this one that one, from the one they called Sasori she breathes, his fingertips tracing a swift cleaving crescent, from him, he mutters, and he knows she’ll know which man simply by the smolder in his sloe and violet eyes.
Some damage gossamer, passing marks on the skin, and others rugged as mountain ranges, raised in affront. Shapes distorting and flickering in the flames. A reminder of the world they hold up, the home they must decide to recommit to, if they can.
They travel and retrace their own history, craving and dreading the point at which they meet the end if only to know the epilogue.
But this love is unbridled, moves at breakneck speeds — years piled up with unsaid things, so it’s easy to melt, crumble, learn and map every single vulnerable inch of one another. Hearts, minds, skin. Whispering one another’s names in constant refrain.
It is a divine and breathtaking thing, to be untethered from their earthly expectations.
The rhythm of the world is a universal hum, an unbroken orbit consisting only of two.
.
(we slow down)
Swimming in a lazy river, circling as fish in palty ponds consisting only of their dual halves, they speak of coulds: Could we settle somewhere new? Is the place that birthed us a sort of destiny? Is that home, or is this, you and I, enough of an identity?
Could our future thrive in the same place of our trauma?
Could this system, somehow, become better?
Balancing a brush between idle fingers, Sakura drips dry in the parched heat and nibbles the end of it in thought.
“Anything to add?” she asks.
Sasuke swats at an insect, squinting in the high noon.
“For Kakashi?” Thinks a moment, then glances sidelong at her; at the way she holds things aloft so delicate in hands that break the earth. Heal men, and kill them on occasion. At the way she imbues such seriousness into her letters to their ex-sensei, frown rivets dashing across her forehead. At the fading water evaporating from her skin. “Ah, just to share it with the idiot.”
Lips drawn in moue, Sakura struggles not to laugh. “I can write separate letters; Kaka-sensei is busy now. Hokage things, you know?”
She watches him throw his arm against his eyes to shield them from a dazzling sun, and his quiet snicker contains multitudes, echos in a song. The expression just in that reminds her how little friction remains between them, that they’ve caught fire.
“He can dictate to Naruto — you’ll burn out here if I let you write two,” he chides, noting the red dusting on her cheeks, suffused with glow. “I’m not quite sure how well he reads on his own anyway.”
Erupting into giggles, she shades her own eyes to stare at him with bewitching and stripped abandon. “Be nice. You know he’s next in line to lead, and no matter what he says, he’ll need you.”
Duty. It sits between them occasionally, considered and sometimes unwanted.
“You as well.”
Before she’s laughed it off, brushed it away to avoid its grip, but he’s correct. They are fever-bound in fire to the village that will shape the future. A daunting prospect.
“And I’ll need you too.”
Sakura’s so sure she’s misheard, but he’s closer now than a moment ago, sweeping into her orbit with his infuriating and silent speed, thumb resting gently on her blazing bottom lip.
Bringing the question into being, a fruitless thing he’d never deliberate but she never has qualms about speaking into being.
“Do we have to go back?”
In answer he kisses her on a simmering, sunny riverbank in a way that would make their mothers blush, an apology, a wish, and this day becomes an axis even if they won’t know it for many cycles of the moon.
A pin is pressed into a shared soul map, becomes a burgeoning accompaniment, another rising phrase in their endless song.
From now on, they are in harmony, particularly with something much larger than themselves.
.
.
Somehow it seems the village feels them coming, whispers paving the way.
Beginning with the far-flung ranging scouts and flying fast to the spry perimeter lookouts, on to the first inner circle defensive squads and, once the shinobi are identified, the hostile caution drops from their voices in a game of telephone to be replaced with a slightly manic curiosity.
“Two,” one of them says, yanking a sweaty flak collar from his neck.
“No,” the other says in a strident tone, waving his answer away. “There’s another with them. Three.”
Details drip in Ino’s ears, and she leaves her post in a whirlwind, a tornado of emotion whose witnessed story springboards from house to training ground to alcove to inn.
It’s fitting that the first encounter, or reunion, occurs in the middle of a main road beginning as ringing, if loving insults but dwindling to potshots from gritted teeth and smoothing into cooing whispers as the two women, these best friends, encircle one another with shaking arms and a bundle pressed between them; the accompanying men linger at awkward edges, Sasuke betraying so little with his usual impassive expression and Shikamaru, who was tripped up in Ino’s anger along the way, keeping his hands in his pockets.
“Oh, how could you?” Ino sniffles, wiping away tears with the heel of her hand. “Can’t do anything by half-measures, no subtlety, you never could! No letter, no warning.” Here she glares at Sasuke for a moment, enough for him to cast his eyes away in at least a modest show of humility.
The moments pile upon, become stranger and more surprising, as Ino presses her lips to the bundle in Sakura’s arms and Shikamaru sighs in not-unhappy resignation, ah, so it is, and extends his hand to an unusually startled Sasuke and for a fleeting sliver-second, the corners of his mouth aren’t quite so dour.
“Who’s next?” Ino asks, tenderly flicking away a lock of Sakura’s hair. “Though by now, the whole damn town knows.”
The men shake clumsily, wary, bereft of custom.
“I’m sure you had nothing to do with that. The honorary uncle, it's only fair.”
“We have to report regardless,” Sasuke supplies quietly. Bending over the bundle and his new wife (which, Ino will rant in retrospect, seems obvious now — his unusual tenderness, his glow, men don’t glow like that for just anyone, any reason!), he whispers, begins to lead her away. They walk with high heads and radiant faces.
Her jade eyes behold their new bundle, but his eyes stay, mostly, on her.
.
By now the gossip’s reached his stuffy office, and though he’s never been one to put on airs or prepare for visitors, he does try to clear a free spot to be able to see over the mess of his desk, before an aide takes pity on him and handles the rest.
He will have to get a full, unadorned look at this.
She leads, of course she does — this is the love at twelve she forcibly took into her own hands, even when it pricked and bruised. Wrestled it until she won. The newlywed glow is obvious. As a shadow Sasuke sweeps in behind, but the tiny uplift of his lips is still evident.
True, then. Differences all around.
“The kids do things differently these days,” Kakashi jokes. “Have you at least considered getting married?”
“Have you?” Sasuke snarks.
Sakura shushes him gently, thumbing away some errant speck from their bundle’s chubby face. Eyes bright, they seem to dim the rest of the room as she raises them to Kakashi and asks, breathless, “Do you want to—?”
And despite his aide’s effort to clear his desk he gets up and comes around it, to them, closing the loop around a future he hopes is halcyon and new, shepherds of peacetime.
He wonders if they’ve had their real homecoming yet, the true test — but no, he’d be able to tell. Not that the joy in Sakura’s face could possibly be more evident, and by the careful way Sasuke presses his mouth to her temple, nudges her with his nose (and there’s the glow, the one that paints great men often only because of exceptional women they love). Naruto, busy and climbing for his Hokage position but with his own recent arrival, his own legacy coming in the form of something tiny, blond, and confusing.
The third point of their legendary triumvirate, no doubt unaware of what’s coming to his doorstep and in tow, the new member of his full life he’ll meet anew.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Sakura whispers, eyes shining.
A gloved hand on each head, as if they’re genin again: He’s gentle with Sakura, ruffles Sasuke’s hair with a roguish twinkle if only to provoke his trademark scowl.
Subdued, but their sensei’s happiness sings through in the crinkles in the corners of his eyes.
.
Perhaps they don’t expect Naruto to be the one they see as the door swings open; after all the last letter he sent in his untidy scrawl is still in Sasuke’s cloak pocket, unread in the wake of their universe shifting to this perennial birth that’s brought them across the world and then to their best friend’s doorstep, clutching this thing that did not exist and now does, borne of them and their love; he stands there, blond hair in chaos and a strange smattering of dirt on his cheek and a rag over his shoulder covered in fluids that his friends now know will be constant, streaming, the aftermath of infants; Hinata behind him, carrying her own bundle, with the same look of frenzied-excited exhaustion but now her mouth falls into a small, round ‘o’ as she sizes up the scene faster than her darling, ditzy husband, who’s bereft of speech and straightens up from his sagging position against the door frame, stunned.
“S-Sakura-chan!” Bright ocean eyes ping from her face — beaming, because she’s already understood this wonderful coincidence and can deduce now what his message contained, she begins to weep a little, overwhelmed — to Sasuke’s, hesitant but with its own subtle change, a fleeting expression of love and pride.
Hinata makes a comforting noise behind them, a reassuring response to Sakura’s tears, the language of women a bit quieter, something less decipherable.
“‘Ay, Sasuke you total bastard, showing up like this! Didn’t respond to my letter—”
“You ass,” Sasuke hisses, tugging fabric over one tiny ear belonging to his daughter. “She can hear that.”
“She’s in trouble anyway, with my mouth,” Sakura sighs, brushing away a tear.
Naruto’s eyes grow so wide they push the earthly bounds of his sockets. His head whips ‘round to look at his wife, their son, and snaps back just as fast to stare at his best friends.
“She?” The word comes out croaky, and Naruto’s already sniffling.
Sasuke and Sakura exchange a glance, the ghost of a knowing smile: His sentiment has always been equal parts maddening and endearing, his adoration broadcast to the entire world.
Sasuke assents with a nod, but his own voiced response emerges with surprising vibrato emotion. Perhaps to hide it, he drops his chin onto Sakura’s head, resting it there. “Yeah. A little girl.”
They should expect it, but it’s still a scuffle like old times, Naruto tackling them both, gathering them close in his way, welcoming them home from the outside world and back into his magnetism, his heart.
“Can’t believe you — didn’t even — you just come home like this—”
Their greetings and scoldings and expressions of love mesh together, can’t believe Sasuke managed it, Don’t squish her, Naruto! You idiot, It's you who’s managed it, how old, how long, where did you travel, what have you seen, how old is your son?
“How did you know?” Naruto asks, finally allowing them to breathe. He stares at Sakura, quizzical. “Betcha missed my letter. So how’d you know it’s a boy?”
“I’m a medic, remember?” Readjusting her daughter, she extends her other hand to Hinata, gesturing so she comes closer, anticipating a deeper appreciation of a friendship they’ve already begun, a new language they’ll learn together. “Had a feeling. I just know.”
But Naruto’s tugging on them again, drawing them close and tight, rooting them to the earth and the place they sprung from, flourished and fought in, and now, where they’ve returned.
Time slackening and quickening though never lost or stolen, occasionally rhythm-robbed but always arriving expectantly, weaving their life legends into knots.
The codetta they’ve always managed to sing together in the end.
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à deux
Day 1 Prompt: Rain
@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
“Cold,” he croaks, like unhinging an old metal joint. Instead of the weight of unused years, it’s the weight of unshed tears. The strain in his voice zigzags, lost, falls into its baritone groove. “You always are, when it rains.”
Upon awakening in the bleak dawn, the day’s significance settles on them — at once a burdening melancholy and poignant relic.
At first blush it could be any morning, but as shinobi experienced with the passage of years and the disorientation of traveling dimensions, both are loath to disregard the importance of date and time.
He’s standing at the window. You would assume he’s still lost in a daze of sleep.
Sakura gently presses her cold (they’re always cold, on days like this, days in which it pours and rain floods the countryside and small villages and cleans the dust from these everyday, hard lives) fingertips to his back, alerting him to her presence. Still they are in the phase of learning the lore of one another despite all the things already known, and it is the truest labor of love.
“We should stay one more day,” she says quietly. He hasn’t acknowledged, but hasn’t resisted.
Some days, that’s good enough.
But she overdoes it; that’s who she is. Love may be gentle but her manner of it isn’t always: Indeed, she is fierce with people that rub her the wrong way, especially those invoking his name out of turn; she eats too fast, as indulgence; she hugs children too tightly when she knows she’ll never see them again, knowing that they are ships flickering through towns, some benevolent symbol of an oppressor they’re too young to put a face to.
Today is the anniversary of death. Over time they’ve both come to know this as an old friend, but this is Sasuke’s most notable scar.
Sakura cannot reach him on days like this, and that’s okay.
“The rain, after all. Traveling in this would be a pain — we’ve tried that before.”
She slides her arm around his waist, pressing her cheek to his warm back.
Don’t cry. It’s not your day. Don’t be so emotional.
Tears escape, they always do. To his credit, he never resents it.
Even with him now, his equal, there are bouts of disbelief and self-loathing in which all she manages to do is convince herself nothing about her is helpful, that she’s still yearning for him to turn around.
Now the other arm, hanging on to him as if he’s unwieldy, as if he’ll sink into the chilled wood floor and out of her sight for good.
Sasuke’s hand and grip are warm, flash and fire. She knows this is in more ways than one — unspeakable ones, really.
Some grunt of assent, no fully-formed word at all, but she hears him swallow hard, once. It’s easy to, in a small corner of the world which hasn’t yet begun its day.
Hot fingers, frigid arms.
“Cold,” he croaks, like unhinging an old metal joint. Instead of the weight of unused years, it’s the weight of unshed tears. The strain in his voice zigzags, lost, falls into its baritone groove. “You always are, when it rains.”
Sakura resists the urge to click her tongue at his misdirection, the veneer to gloss over his emotional state.
“I’m all right, Sasuke-kun.”
“Hm.”
“I am! It just settles into my hands, that’s all. It’s close to an equinox, you know. The seasons are turning.”
(He’d never admit he likes that about her — nervy, a little more quick to correct, less scared, and that it’s brought him some delight, some sparkle to her that continues to surprise him.)
She feels him scoff under his breath, probably at her ability to pinpoint their location in time, in space, in the universe no matter where they are. When you save lives on seconds of analysis, on minuscule doses, these things become instinctive.
So of course, she knows what today is.
Pressing her nose into his shoulderblade, she says, muffled, “Should I call for tea, then?”
It’s a long beat before he nods, knowing that she’ll have to let him go to complete this task, leaving him alone at the drafty window — the chill having a chance to seep into the cracks in his soul.
They’re always less protected on these days.
.
.
The sleeves of his shirt always drown her wrists and hands, and though she has to flick and adjust them as she moves about the inn room, it’s one of her favorite ways to trap heat against her body. It’s not as cold as the caves they’ve sometimes inhabited, but close. Though the teapot scalds, it’s welcoming.
“It’s steady,” she muses, eyes on the persistent rain. “The whole village will be quiet today, in weather like this.”
Sasuke nods in response with unfocused eyes, collecting himself to meet hers. Green, watching him in a searching way. The way he does to her on all other days, seeking signs of regret or distress or any emotion within his ability to repair or ease. At once, old lovers and new.
A memory sears, a sharp grazing against the mind: A low table, scattered small dishes like this with food remnants vivid, colorful; a sullen father, the corners of his mouth sagging; his mother beaming, hiding laughter behind her hand.
A brother, by then already burdened and saturated with the weight of his destiny, still finding the almost offensive wherewithal to poke him in the face.
“You haven’t touched anything,” she chides gently.
Tuning in again to them, this, arriving momentarily from his sojourn of the past, his eyes flicker to her own messy plate. Lately she’s only pushed food around in the mimicry of an indulged meal. Worries about her being sick. She just blusters, waving away concerns. (I’m a medic, for god’s sake, I’d know!)
“And you,” he responds, indicating her own dregs with his rude, handsome chin.
She shrugs, burying deeper into his shirt. “Perhaps it’s just the day.”
“You’re coddling, aren’t you? I don’t need that.”
It comes sharper than expected, and he regrets it the second it leaves his lips. He imagines what Itachi would say, knowing he possesses a great love which he’s taken for granted time over, time again. He’d reprimand him, as he should.
Often he settles for his ex-sensei’s silent admonitions instead.
Finishing a sip of tea, she sets the mug down and sighs. Getting to her feet, she collects a few scrolls she’s been poring over the last few nights and looks at him, a bit less readable this time.
“You’re allowed to feel this, you know, Sasuke-kun. You’re allowed to love, and you’re allowed to hurt.”
She half-turns, but stops and adds,
“And you can even feel it all at the same time.”
Sakura retreats to the corner where one of the few furnishings sits. A chair, large enough for her to fold herself into and unravel her resources. A plant discovered in this new region they had crossed into last week, similar and yet different enough to pique her interest and spur her to research. She’s been lost in common roots, and he’s been mired in the loss of his old ones.
The ability of the mind to experience multiple things at once is truly remarkable. To an observer he watches her study with intent as she furrows her brow, yawns often throughout. Sasuke can see her as well as his past all at once.
Anniversaries of his dead loved ones shouldn’t mean so much. After all, he’s been alive without them longer than with.
Sasuke wishes he could explain that her presence is enough. That her loving him has been enough.
“We could still go through the traditions, if you’d like. Collect what we need. I know,” and her breath hitches, and she glances away under his dark eyes, probably feeling she’s pressing, said too much, “there’s no grave to do it with, but—”
“It’s fine.” He tries, he does, to say it with less bite. Gods, he’s transparent, his pain and denial. He’s not ready yet. Will he ever be?
“This is your day to grieve,” she says softly. “You should do that however you choose. No one can tell you how to feel — not even me.
Even me. He knows she knows his weakness. Watches her yawn again and awkwardly adjust her body, as if her own skin is uncomfortable, blink and he’d miss.
“There’s nothing I want to do,” he confesses, sounding hoarse against his will. “Nothing at all.”
A pause, a long one, in which the rain sings against the roof.
“Then you don’t have to,” she says. “You just grieve.”
And so he does.
Pretends to read.
Stares out the window.
Lingers in the discomfort of his own skin.
Paces.
Touches no food, lapses into a mausoleum silence so complete the lines of them blur against their own dimension.
He can feel his brother’s touch, and she can feel his agony.
She rises periodically, offering him tea, sliding her arms around him from behind again. He alternates between silence and quiet shakes that he’d never admit were sobs.
By dusk he’s in her lap, hair mussed and wild, feeling spent from everything and nothing at all, from wandering in the better memories of a brother he can’t bring back.
It slips from his lips in a moment of weakness, it hurts.
“I know,” she whispers, pulling her fingers gently through his untamed locks. “It always might. But don’t forget, every day has the same number of hours.”
It’s not until they lie down again, the day a simultaneous blur of grief and guilt, that she says in a soothing whisper, “And look, darling — you’ve made it through another. You always do.”
And while he can’t articulate that each year it’s a little more muted, the pain easing off him as they pass, if only marginally, he manages to thank her only in twilight when he’s spared from knowing if she can hear him at all.
.
.
On the second day of rain he awakens before her, an arm curled around her stomach in a way that aligns with some adagio ballad pouring from where, he doesn’t know, the universe, some sign, and as intelligent as he is the facts are slipping from him whether due to the haze of sleep or the turmoil of his ghosts, the way the dead and the living and the coming to life knot themselves with one another, soaking him with an instinct and some sense of surety so intoxicating that he buries his face in her long, wild hair where nothing can see his face, but she will know his heart.
If everything’s a cycle, then the old and new must cross paths in their rotations.
The darkness bleeds away and he realizes she’s waited to spill the joyous news, not wanting to acknowledge that alignment of the stars to spare his feelings, and for that he is endlessly grateful and guilty.
But he likes to think his brother, despite his faults, would have liked to know he continued forward, that he accepted the love he didn’t feel he deserved and tried, desperately, to welcome life anew.
Sasuke presses his lips to the back of her neck, and his warm hand against her stomach.
“It’s still raining,” she murmurs, still in the place between wakefulness and dreams.
He thinks he feels the flutter of his future against his palm. He only whispers,
“Let’s stay here for now.”
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reprise
Day 4 Prompt: Teamwork // “I’ll protect you.”
@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
So then, so now. In the simmering tangerine heat, she stands waiting in knee-high boots and the skirt he’s seen her in so often, and he commits her shape to memory through each stage of the return of his sharp sight.
He’s released into a humid dawn with nothing to his name but guilt and the clothes on his back. Things borrowed — the bruises under his eyes, blue.
Emerging from the other side of something indescribable, carrying much more but somehow much less than he arrived with.
Feeling light without the chains of metal and melancholy, the weight of all he’s done. A cyclical cadence of small cold rooms lit by garish bare bulbs and sneers barely concealed by skeptical guards, the entreaties of the interrogation unit, unsure if the gradually softening questions are piteous or a tactic. The same stories to different ears, and the people who adore him creeping at the corners and doors to ensure his treatment is humane.
As the “assigned medic,” as one of the few determined to be able to have even a chance of preventing an escape he has no desire to execute, she’s been his doctor since the first day and his advocate throughout, bringing a semblance of level headedness to the proceedings that Naruto, bless him, isn’t talented in articulating. He’d prefer to raise his voice, brandish fists if he has to, the declaration that he’ll come to blows for his best friend.
So then, so now. In the simmering tangerine heat, she stands waiting in knee-high boots and the skirt he’s seen her in so often, and he commits her shape to memory through each stage of the return of his sharp sight.
They speak around him, Sakura and the last shinobi guard. He lets them.
“He’s been released into my care,” she says stubbornly, folding her arms. Tapping her foot.
The guard has clear reservations, regards her with skepticism.
A fluttering flare of her nostrils, a habit he noticed on day twenty-six; but really, it had only been a forgotten tic of yesteryear, a habit Naruto or even their sensei never failed to induce in her.
“I’m his . . . doctor. I’ll take this from here, thank you.” The acknowledgement is perfunctory, with an edge of dismissal.
She doesn’t unfold her arms or let them fall to her sides until the guard’s long gone, reporting to his next post or perhaps the Hokage’s office, the smoke from his departure whirling and blending with the ripple of a rising summer heat.
Sakura turns, careful to avoid his eyes.
“I suppose that’s that. It’s nice to see you, Sasuke-kun.”
Resists the urge to say he saw her yesterday, and the idiot too, that they’d been around spending far too much time with a criminal, even if newly pardoned. His upcoming stint of house arrest still indicates otherwise.
He knows all the words that would be kind, human, and reasonable to say. Embodying any of those personal qualities would be nice. Instead:
“Why are you here?”
“Actually, I moved around my schedule to make sure I’d be here.”
“I didn’t ask for that.”
“I know.”
She’s not miffed or bothered by him, and that’s what hurts the most. That she expects him to be this: Curt, angry. Broken, fragile. Physically he’s coming together; mentally he’s held up with thin, fraying strings.
She inhales before beginning again, already sounding wary of his potential response.
“For now they’ve assigned you to your previous living space. In the old district.” For all her poise and command when beholding the human body, ever the professional, the fusion of skin and sinew and soul in need of tender loving repair, she’s fiddling with the edge of her skirt and all he wants to do is make her stop.
“I said it wasn’t a good idea,” she adds, intent on staring just past his ear. “No one has been there for years. It’s not your burden.”
“It’s fine.” The strain of unuse, and a little swift. A little mean. Without any further gesture, he turns and heads down the street, the gravitational pull of family ghosts too strong to defy. Then he stops, realizing he’s awkward, unsteady, and forever difficult to read.
Looks at her over his shoulder.
“I’m your escort.” She sounds apologetic, quiet.
He wills her to look him in the eyes, but won’t meet hers. Oh, what does that make him? A coward at best.
He waits until she catches up, their difference in height more than he remembers.
The sensation of her lingering at his shoulder, though, sears through his bones as the catalyst heat of sparks on flint, a familiar biological imprint that feels like coming home.
.
.
Three days in a row, she comes to his doorstep.
Three days in a row, she pleads her case.
“Do you think this is good for you? Emotionally, I mean. Sleeping with the ghosts of your past?”
The first attempt to shake her loose goes poorly, and Uchiha Sasuke experiences for the first time and certainly not the last how charmingly infuriating it is to have her stubborn nature focused on him, a spotlight.
Ignoring her questions, unwilling to place a fine point on his obvious dysfunction. “Why are you here, Sakura?”
“What part of ‘released into my care,’ escapes you? You wouldn’t have liked the alternative.”
Each morning visit reveals a wilder man: A little more gaunt, covered in an additional thin layer of dust. She’s terrified the house, this cursed and unforgiving compound moaning his name, will take him back, as moss commandeers the forest floor, as nature reclaims its kin.
“You at least need to eat. Turn on some lights, open windows.”
Sasuke stares at nothing, everything, and in some terrifying moments, only her.
Pressing her knuckles to her lips as she wanders the old rooms, a tomb of memories laden with the skeletons of furniture, saturated with the kinesthesia of many extinguished lives; swiping fingers across surfaces choked with dust; surreptitiously checking that his pillows are comfortable and that curtains get opened and he eats (which, she notes, he isn’t.)
He refuses to engage and watches her silently — simply living, breathing, feels draining — but not once does he order her to go.
.
.
She permits his behavior only until Day 4 — so, not very long at all.
Different, with her hair pulled back behind a cloth band of a cheerful color, carrying a box of haphazardly-packed supplies. They stand on the doorstep mirroring one another’s unease, suspended in a place that’s not quite friendship and now, far from war enemies, but a shade of something encompassing nuances beyond.
“If you insist on living among ghosts,” she says, soft but firm, “let’s at least make this all more hospitable.”
Perhaps she notices the way his eyes soften, though he still has trouble facing her head-on. Too bright, earnest, willing to forgive.
I didn't ask you to love me.
Voicing none of this, he instead raises an eyebrow at the box.
“Seems to be more than soap in there.”
A sliver of a moment in which she meets his charcoal eyes — it’s enough to dim the summer sun, melt his bones. Burn down the world.
It cannot be, and here, now, the premonition intuited but not understood in boyhood: Anyone entangled with him will perish.
Together they could catch fire.
Briskly, to distract from her blush, she readjusts the box in her arms.
“There’s food in here, too. And gloves for all four of us, though I’m sure Naruto’ll forgo them.”
“Us?”
“He’s wanted to see you, and we can’t do this on our own.” A pause before she forges ahead, words skipping and speeding up, gathering courage, avoiding his interjections. “I can order them to the yards and common areas, if you’d rather they don’t touch your things. I understand.”
“You don’t need to do any of this,” he says quietly.
The way her eyes sharpen, albeit glimmering with tears, makes Sasuke feel as though he’s losing his control on the little shred of it he might have had.
“We are always a team. And you and I — we can be one too! I know I can’t save you, fix you. But,” she sniffles, voice in vibrato, “we can at least be something.”
He eases the box from her hands, turning his back on her expression of surprise, of wariness. It’s the first time he’s implied she can come in, rather than her opening the door to his makeshift tomb.
Down a hallway, dim and chilled, she follows close behind. The wisps of socks on cold floors, the only sound in silence.
She reaches out.
He tenses, but like so many times under her touch he relents. Lets her fingers weave into the material of his shirt and hold him in place.
If he didn’t feel her, the misty quality of her voice could be calling from another planet.
“I know you believe you deserve this. To be among these ghosts, these dead spirits, as penance. And if that’s what you want, I suppose I can’t stop you. I never could.”
A tether. If she releases him, he has no doubt he’ll absolutely drown.
“But if they come for you, Sasuke-kun, make it hard for you to breathe . . . I’m here, okay?”
He stifles a noise, a growl and a sob and a sigh. Tries to stop her from sinking into him further, becoming sewn to the tapestry of his cursed history. “Sakura—”
But she is his, as she’s always been,
and she is fierce.
(And they end, begin again, forever something old and something new.)
“I’ll protect you.”
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scherzo
Day 2 Prompt: Cooking // “I didn’t know you had that habit.”
@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
“You miss him — don’t deny it! You’re a softhearted man.”
“I plead the fifth.”
Quiet laughing, shared only in a small clearing at the edge of the world, filthier than they like but close to the salt and earth and sea, nothing in between them but love and a basket of peeled fruit.
The first time she does it, Sasuke is quite sure he’s succumbing to blindness, or at least some degradation of sight. Must have been a trick of the light.
The second time she does it prompts a double-take.
On the third time he looms up behind her as she crouches near the fruit basket, and can’t help the incredulous sigh that escapes him, which startles her; in hindsight, his approach was a poor choice of abrupt entrance into her space, considering she’s been putting a sharp object so close to her lips.
Discarded rinds flutter to the forest floor as well — as butterflies, as kaleidoscopic confetti littering the ground beneath them from her produce peeling.
“Sasuke-kun!” The knife falls to the dirt with a keen metal pitch. “Don’t scare me like that!”
“What are you doing, Sakura?”
“You said your vision was fine,” she says with a pout. “Making dinner, obviously.”
“And . . . have you always done that?”
“Done what?”
A rustle and sigh, not wanting to give form and shape to the action. Plucking up the knife now spattered with dry soil, she gently cleans it against the material of her thigh and settles into her haunches properly, seeming puzzled. Flame of the small makeshift pit of fire popping merrily, a boiling stone pot waiting to be fed previously-peeled vegetables. Between her thumb and forefinger she dangles the knife absentmindedly.
Maybe it’s a silly worry — maybe he’s just hungry. Brow furrowing, he decides to tell the truth in his sometimes brusque way.
“Just be careful with that. And anyway, where’d you pick that up? Seems like something our teammate might do.”
When her eyes flash for a moment, bright in the fading daylight, he considers that so far out from the main road, no one could hear him scream. Ah, stupid response.
She rolls those elegant green eyes in a long, mocking arc, and blows a strand of long pink hair out of her face. Both of them are a bit scruffy, a long way from an inn or even a village, off the grid for a while after encounters with persistent bandits. Possessing renowned abilities and not exactly strangers to the world after being honored post-war, they concluded they may have overdone it in their retaliation.
And, propping up the bodies afterward near a visible post near the road (gently, of course, and with all limbs intact!), they decided to travel light and low the following weeks.
They’ve watched each other transform into slightly more feral versions of one another. It’s not unwelcome, the smudges on her face and the ragged edges of her hair beginning to reach her waist. He wonders what he must look like to her; brutish, perhaps, although by the way they’re so close at night, perhaps not.
She’s not exactly the same girl he left behind.
“Is poisoning the way you wanted to go, darling?”
Sasuke blanches. “Sakura?”
Flipping the knife and catching it again, she aims the point at him. “Do not compare me to Naruto, or there will be a tragic accident here indeed.”
He’s done this before, stumbled into a flippant comment that he doesn’t expect to get her going. Well, he’s learning.
“In fact, don’t compare any woman to Naruto,” she adds, wrinkling her nose. “Not if you prefer living.”
Sasuke tamps down a snort that could be laughter. He doesn’t usually stop her rants — they’re sort of endearing.
“Listen, I know you were wandering around the world with your own . . . aims,” she says, waving the knife around again, “but I did an absurd lineup of missions while you were gone: reconnaissance, medical dispatch, undercover — yes, I did, I see that smirk of yours, and don’t you know women tend to have much, much higher completion rates than the men on those?”
Yes, Sasuke knows all these things, but getting her heated, sometimes, is a joy and entertainment in itself that he’s at least been smart enough not to admit. Assumes she’ll discover it eventually, the way he quiets down in the face of her temper, the shameless way he’s realized he watches her eyes and lips and an angry rouge simmer up through the skin of cheeks and chest.
“Not to mention I’m usually the only kunoichi on those missions, or at the very least outnumbered; do you know what it’s like to bunk with a whole damn bunch of you? Gods!”
Jabbing the knifepoint in the basket next to her laden with a colorful bouquet of chopped produce, it comes up with a piece of apple, which she points at him in a vaguely threatening manner.
The sight of this particular fruit sends a strange pang throughout, plucking at a string in his heart in the vein of a vibrating and resonating harp.
“And if you’re worried about me hurting myself,” she says with a sharp tongue cluck, “I’ll have you know — but you should already know! — that I’ve performed countless surgeries, sewed up hundreds of bodies, been horribly poisoned, pinned like a cushion, and sure maybe I have picked up a gross habit or two from Naruto, but you know what being around him is like, he rubs off on everyone, and the point is,” and now she takes an angry bite of the apple chunk that’s still speared through with the knife, chewing angrily, and waves the uneaten half at him some more, “I am perfectly capable of using knives, and at total and complete liberty to lick the knife when I’m done! It isn’t the worst thing you can put in your mouth anyway. You’re one to talk: You put all sorts of inanimate things in your mouth, even when I offer to help you, you were bandaging wounds with your teeth for gods’ sake!”
Just about spent, she seems to burn even brighter in the dusk. Sasuke thinks of fruit on hospital floors, the earth splitting beneath his feet: She is at once something gentle, something fierce.
When she tosses the knife back into the fruit basket and the spearing of a cleaved, unlucky fruit chunk sounds between them, Sasuke’s too slow to hide his smirk and knows he’s been found out.
“You think this is funny! Oh-ho, you think it’s hilarious when I’m mad, don’t you? When I defend myself?”
Sasuke shakes his head, lackadaisical. Settled in and sated like a large jungle cat. “I didn’t want you cutting yourself. That’s all.”
“Could’ve saved me the rant, then,” she mutters. Her stomach growls louder than she anticipates, and she presses her hands to her face and groans. “So embarrassing! I’m hungry, dirty, fucking vagabond vogue and you just sit there and you look so, ugh, self-satisfied.”
Sighing, she tumbles back into a sitting position and cards a hand through her long hair.
“I shouldn’t have compared you to Naruto,” he offers, still fighting a smirk. “It wasn’t what I meant in the slightest.” He pauses. “I . . like you this way.”
“Oh, what way?”
“ . . . scrappy?”
“You mean filthy?”
“Strong?”
“Should’ve known that by now.”
“Indeed.”
“Bandits? A lil’ thing called the Fourth Shinobi War? Naruto’s ribs?”
“Ah, now who’s bringing up the idiot?”
“You miss him — don’t deny it! You’re a softhearted man.”
“I plead the fifth.”
Quiet laughing, shared only in a small clearing at the edge of the world, filthier than they like but close to the salt and earth and sea, nothing in between them but love and a basket of peeled fruit.
“Perhaps . . . I did speak out of turn.”
Sakura leans back on hands, tosses her head to the sky to beam at the budding evening stars.
“I do appreciate it, though. You caring, I mean,” she adds. “But I promise I know my way around sharp objects.”
Something slips from his lips in undertone, a quiet remark that draws her mischievous green gaze.
“That too,” she says. She tosses her long, wild hair over her shoulder and meets his eyes head-on.
Staring back and channeling the same crackling heat as the fire a few feet away.
“So,” she says triumphantly, eyes aglitter, “shall we discuss, over dinner, the bad habits involving your mouth, Sasuke-kun?”
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sotto voce
Day 3 Prompt: Confession // “I’ll choose you every day.”
@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
Could he tell her that when she lays her hands on him, touches his scalp that tender way in which she unravels his hair soaked with salt and sweat and travels, he finds himself catching his breath? One of the few times his limbs find the level and tranquilize, luxuriate in the chillbumps that sweep from the base of his neck down the spine?
That he’s considered lifetimes in scattered astronomy-dimensions in which all they do is this?
Life on the road, at the very least, is never bereft of amusement nor lacking in a certain charm.
And though Sasuke’s not sure what tune has so enamored his companion, he welcomes the shift in mood as he continues to work diligently through the knots in her hair, easing through the sticky snags and tangles with a single talented hand.
Sighing to himself, as of course it would be easier with two, and he’s sure he’s tweaked her here, yanked her there on accident despite his attentiveness. Since losing a part of him in this way he’s refused to resolve it in strict penance; he aims for recompense by redoubling his gallantry, a thing that so long ago would have seemed to teeter on the edge of absurdity.
Sasuke considers it forgiveness; Sakura calls it love.
“Ooh!” When she winces, he pulls back. Few aspects of life make him cautious, but causing undue pain might be the foremost. It’s not something he wants to do anymore.
He sighs, carding his hand through his own mussed hair as she resumes a low hum, in melodic flow with buzzing insects and the babbling river and other woodland universe sounds.
“It’s okay,” she says, shaking out her hair and combing her own fingers through it. “After all, you didn’t upend the entire cask on me.” Taking a lock of plum-stained hair between her thumb and forefinger, she giggles. “At least thieves get what they deserve.”
Fermenting scents of grapes and other fleeting terroir aspects — she had been making a game out of guessing its origins as they tramped through the forest seeking a way to wash out the wine.
Some thieves they stumbled on when passing through. Of all the things they agree upon, mundane or serious, harassment of civilians is a pressure point for them, a sensitive and present wound. Trying to liberate traders of their wares, and in the scuffle, Sakura took the liquid brunt of an exploding cask of wine. Turns out her hair, wild and long, can hold multitudes.
“The smell, at least, is not unpleasant,” Sasuke says, continuing to work through knots. She’ll need a rinse soon. Though it’d be easier if she simply went into the river, neither of them have the clothes to spare for that, so the only alternative is . . .
Well.
So, kneeling behind her as she splashes her feet in the water, humming, swaying a bit to the beat of her unknown maestro: washing is their task this scorching afternoon.
“Rinse,” is all he says, nudging her arm. Covering her eyes, she leans back a little so he can pour water from a bucket, running it through her pink locks until the excess runs a little less plum.
“Thank you, by the way.” Still covering her eyes, but the lilt of a smile decorates her tone. “You really don’t need to labor at this so long. We can find a place to stop eventually.”
Sasuke simply makes a noncommittal noise. “Fruit scents attract insects, and other animals.”
“Sure,” she responds, tone teasing. “That’s the only reason.”
“Hmm.”
“I think you’re trying to prove your usefulness. Your kindness and care.”
Sasuke frowns.
Could he tell her that when she lays her hands on him, touches his scalp that tender way in which she unravels his hair soaked with salt and sweat and travels, he finds himself catching his breath? One of the few times his limbs find the level and tranquilize, luxuriate in the chillbumps that sweep from the base of his neck down the spine?
That he’s considered lifetimes in scattered astronomy-dimensions in which all they do is this?
Methodical yet loving, an intimate thing too esoteric and evading worldly explanation. A comfort undeniable, and always reminding him of the mere morsels of tenderness he offers in return.
Though she can protect herself, perfectly capable of handling bandits herself, why is his instinct to protect furious, swift, almost a madness?
It comes simply, so obvious:
Because I need you.
“What?”
“ . . . What?”
Sasuke curses — he almost certainly said that out loud.
This happens too often now, his words slipping out easily around her, in all those moments when his feet don’t feel so firmly planted on the earth, when sleep finally arrives and softens his guard.
She’s tense beneath his hand, watching him in profile over her shoulder.
“Nothing.”
“Uchiha Sasuke — scares the life out of road bandits, styles his sweetheart's hair in his free time. Confesses secrets in forests.”
There’s heat in his face, simmering to the surface of his skin. As if it isn’t blazing out here already. Damn. And her, teasing him? “Sakura, please. Hygiene is practical.”
“I know you care. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. Or rather, I wouldn’t be here with you.”
Despite her bravado, the skin showing between her shirt and scalp is pinker than her hair.
She opens her mouth and inhales as if to speak, but seems to deflate, unsure of how to proceed.
The pause feels delicate, fragile.
“I know I sort of . . . insisted to come with you.” Voice halting, stepping around unseen land mines. “Maybe I — I’m not sure if this is what you wanted. How you yearned to spend your days.” Sheepishly tucks stray, damp hair behind her ear.
He watches her back, sees her squirm in discomfort as she waits for his response.
The wait is so long, too long, and she’s crumbling underneath the weight of his silence.
When he finally speaks, it’s a little strangled, a scant vibrato and stirred.
“If this is what this life, after everything I’ve done, has granted me . . . then I choose this,” and he reaches forward, feels her soft, damp locks underneath his fingers, “every day.”
She pulls her feet out of the river water, hugging her legs. Hiding her face. Saying his name in undertone, exasperated and touched. It's usually him turning his back to love; the vulnerable secrets in his mind slipping again from his discipline and bleeding into reality,
Turn around.
But she continues to sit rigid on the riverbank, raising her head in the manner of a shipwrecked castaway with eyes and soul fixed on the savior ship, the sea.
“But if I move — this moment could disappear.”
“Sakura,” he says, closing the gap between them, securing her with an arm around the waist and pressing his mouth to her hair. Poetics elude him, as always, but it's nothing but the simple truth to say,
“I’ll choose you every day.”
(And could she tell him, don’t worry, these sobs are only heady joy, fervent and free?)
(Tang — that her tears taste of something like delight?)
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