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orpheus
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Loss is an angry pit.
Sakura spends her mornings like this:
Wake before the sunrise, run through her kata, make tea. Eat a small breakfast of leftover onigiri at the little wooden table in her kitchen, the window thrown wide open to let in the morning mist. On weekends, she lets herself sleep until the sun is streaming full across her bed, the light still buttery and new the way it is before noon.
Loss is an angry pit: it begs to be fed.
Her afternoons are more varied. She might see to some troublemaking bandits outside the village or she might visit the market; Mondays through Wednesdays she works at the hospital. This isn't a Hidden Village, so the local doctors usually don't need her; it seems when people aren't forced to kill for a living, the rate of grotesque injuries are astoundingly low. Instead, they summon her for surgeries and she treats what they can't.
They marvel at what she can do; they wonder at her ability.
She marvels at their open hands, at their smiles; she wonders at the way these ordinary people can lay down roots, how they are not half-starved in the heart.
Sakura drifts, from village to village, the hunger of loss dogging her footsteps as she retraces his.
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The places change, but her routine does not. The motions are a ritual—she half-thinks it may bring him back.
Loss is an angry pit, it throws the miles she has traversed back in her face like so many inadequate offerings (he was supposed to have been a god, once).
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Sakura spends her mornings like this:
Wake before the sunrise (her body carefully arranged in the space where she thinks he must have once laid, trying to find an imprint of his warmth), run through her kata (she imagines him doing the same, the light following his fluid movements, touching his skin as it touches hers), make tea (scalding, the way she likes it best, a small ache in her chest because she doesn't remember how he'd made his).
Her map of him isn't perfect.
There are things that she'd never had a chance to learn, things that she's forgotten— not every place she goes is somewhere that he has stepped. She wanders: away from him, and then back again, perpetually in orbit.
Loss is an angry pit, a relentless god. Sakura knows it won't relinquish its hold on her until she gives it a body or a name, so she searches, and she chases his ghost.
If he is gone, she thinks she would have known. If he is gone, something in the air would have been immeasurably changed. She clings to the thought, or rather, the thought clings to her, and the only way she can escape the itch of it is to give in to its demand.
Loss is an angry pit, and the only thing hungrier is her hope.
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Sakura traces his old letters and the rumors and her faith until she arrives in a tiny seaside hamlet.
A foreign man had indeed passed here, many years ago, a woman tells her. He was as beautiful as he was sad.
Passed? Sakura asks. Do you mean passed through?
The woman looks at her, a sympathetic tilt to the head, No, child. He'd been grievously poisoned, and he died all by himself in a cove a few miles out.
He'd insisted, the woman explained as Sakura's world quietly shifted, because he was afraid the toxin was contagious.
Was he buried?
The poison, the villager says helplessly.
Sakura nods, reassuring the woman that they'd done right.
She asks for the directions, and sets out.
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The violent waves had reshaped the shoreline in the intervening years. The small system of caves nestled in the cove had only one entrance; a wall of rock and rubble greets Sakura when she arrives.
She thinks of his bones, on the other side. She thinks of him, all alone. She starts to dig.
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Ino had warned her to not lose herself in her grief for him. Naruto had begged her to turn back, to stop the self-flagellation, that Sasuke wouldn't have wanted her this way. They didn't know that it'd never been about him—not entirely.
Leaving had been the most selfish thing she'd ever done.
(Love is a selfish thing; one can never not involve the self—)
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The moon is high when she finally finishes. She summons her chakra; the light flares into life around her.
Her keening wail is almost lost to the sound of the waves.
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The sobs wrench themselves out of her, and it's her gods taking their last tithe. Sakura doesn't know when she'd collapsed to her knees, when she'd plunged herself into darkness, but she doesn't need the light to remember the barren cave around her.
Loss hadn't even left her a body to bring home.
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She exhausts herself and eventually slips into a fitful sleep. She dreams of him; of the moments right before, and then then years after. Had the tides stolen him away? Or had he brought one last flicker of flame to life with his final breath? She dreams of following a trail of bones: a metacarpal, a femur, the tibia; of collecting and rebuilding him and laying bushels of apples at his feet. I really thought I would find you, she told him, I really thought I would have known.
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It's still dark when Sakura jolts awake. She rises to her feet, heart racing, every part of her electrified and alive.
It's high tide, and she thinks she must have imagined it in the noise of surf, when: "Sakura."
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She remembers the stories—of lovers turning to dust, of bodies turning to salt. Don't look back, don't turn.
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She only realizes she'd been holding her breath when it leaves her in a rush.
She feels him against her back, she feels her name in an exhale against her hair, she feels the careful hand he lays on her arm.
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She imagines the worst: she imagines stealing a glimpse of him, and then watching as he fades away. Or his body, perfect and alive, then crumbling to ashes. Don't look back, don't turn.
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Sakura turns. She turns, and there he is.
pt 2: eurydice