If anyone already read Kasai Ya Aisu, this is the same story, I just took out all the grammar mistakes and changed the title/summary, then reposted it. :P
Summary: He walked through the blazing remains of what had once been a front door. She followed.
Disclaimer: If I owned Naruto, this would be actually happening in the manga. Heehee...
Frozen Inferno
By: Paisley May
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost (Fire and Ice)
It was autumn. It was cold. It was the feeling of another sweltering summer dulling down into another soggy and miserable winter. Uchiha Sasuke had no favorite season.
Early November was when Team Seven had brought him back, unwillingly but back nonetheless. Much like after his clan was murdered, he could easily feel the eyes of the ignorant, and of the sympathetic. They were trained onto his back like a target. But he was seventeen now, and only the malicious sought him out on purpose. They glared as if they could see right through him. Sometimes he wished that they could. He wanted no more than for their hardened stares to pierce his souless heart. No one would miss him but Naruto. Maybe even Kakashi.
If Sakura was capable of missing him anymore, perhaps she would care. But she was a ghost to him, skipping along the edges as if she was avoiding him. Had it not been for Naruto's incessant praising of her medical abilities, he would have assumed she had moved to another country after his return.
Always busy, Naruto insisted. She was always busy.
During the three weeks he had been back, he had seen her casually in the village for the first time just two days ago. She was smelling the flower displays outside of the Yamanaka Flower Shop, talking animatedly and not looking busy at all. He did not speak to her. He had more pride than that. Ino gave him a look, andfor a second he thought she would point him out to Sakura. She scowled and led her friend inside the building. And suddenly, Sasuke realized why she just so happened to be 'busy.'
When they dragged him back to Konoha unwillingly, she was too busy to heal him. Tsunade wasn't.
When they ordered that a trusted and experienced ninja must live at the Compound with him, Sakura declined the mission and suggested a 'good friend' in the ANBU because she was too busy with paperwork to deal with him. Her ANBU buddy wasn't.
When he wanted to leave the village again and live out his lonely existence as a rogue, she was too busy to tell him no. Naruto wasn't, and he had enough free time to attempt to beat the resistance out of him.
Sometimes when he saw her in the streets, he would contemplate telling her to stop letting other people persuade her into overworking herself. It was obscene that she never had a single minute of free time. But the words would get caught in his throat when she glanced over, no more than ten feet and four passerby between them.
She waved, and kept walking forward.
Winter came, and the river below the bridge froze over. It wasn't just any bridge. It was the meeting bridge, the Team Seven bridge, theirs and theirs alone while others came and went.
There was some mindless festival going on somewhere on the other side of the village. It was obnoxiously loud; not to mention that he could see the lights from where he was, leaning against the chilly wooden railing and staring up into the dark sky by himself. There was no point in him going somewhere like that, so there he stayed. He glanced down at the sheets of ice and thought.
What would it be like, he wondered, to be a piece of ice? Just a cold slab of frozen water facing up to the stars. It seemed like a leisurely kind of life. No pains, no worthless emotions...
He might as well find out for himself.
He jumped from the small bridge, landing almost gracefully onto the frozen surface of the river. It cracked slightly under his weight, but held him above the surface. He laid on his back, feeling the piece of ice move slowly beneath him. It would not move downstream. It was stuck between other solid sheets of ice that lay floating on the river. It floundered around in a little circle; moving yet staying in one place. It was trapped.
A presence from the corner of the forest caught his eye. Sakura.
Everyone was dancing, she explained, and had no partner. So boredom had brought her here. Perhaps even a hint of loneliness.
He would not dance with her. She knew that without even asking, and so she sat with him instead, lightly joking that he owed her a dance. Laying on their backs, looking at the stars; it was the most at ease he had been in a long time. But the shifting piece of ice wouldn't hold two people. It cracked down the middle of them both, creating two separate glaciers.
They floated around in little circles, getting nowhere in particular. Never touching, never meeting again. Always staying isolated, yet close.
Disconnected, yet still together. And somehow, it felt like home.
When Spring came, the ice melted.
The dissolved snow on the roof of his house seeped through the wood and leaked in through the ceiling. Mold started to grow in the places where he could not stop the constant flow of water. His only house was wasting away.
One day, Sakura came busting through his front door. Her hands were full with wooden planks and paint and tools. She grinned wide at Sasuke, who was staring incredulously at her from the living room sofa and wondering why he hadn't locked the front door.
She giggled, calling him a 'couch potato' for not doing his stupid Spring Cleaning yet.
He grumbled. He disliked potatoes, much less being called one. But he did secretly appreciate the help in cleaning out the manor.
With her monstrous strength, she ripped the old ceiling boards out from the second-story rooms and replaced them. She brought sanitizers from the hospital to get rid of the smelly mold. Through all of her hard work, all she let Sasuke do was hold the materials like a pack mule.
She washed the dishes and made his bed (he would not allow her in any other bedroom) and washed his clothes and scrubbed the floors. He found her passed out at ten o' clock, and laid her on the couch for the night.
The next morning, he woke to the noxious smell of paint. She was covering up all of the walls that had water stains or marks from the mold with fresh coats of color. This time she allowed him to help with the actual work. By that night, they had painted the living room a deep red, the kitchen white, his bedroom a dark navy blue and his face as well, because Sakura had swiped a paint roller down his face when he let his guard down. To his dismay, it was starting to dry.
Sulking to the bathroom to wash his face, he accidentally kicked the can of red paint into a tray containing white. When he returned with a newly clean face, Sakura was mixing pink with a wooden spoon from his kitchen. She picked up the tray and led him back to his bedroom, where the navy blue was almost done. She stood up on a chair opposite his bed and dipped both of her hands into the paint. She then proceeded to stamp two baby pink handprints on the wall, bordering the ceiling. She used her index finger to draw her initials.
Afterwards, she went home to prepare for hospital work the next day. She'd spent her only two days off that week to fix his house.
That night, he looked across his room at the tiny pink handprints. A soft smile manifested itself on his face before he fell asleep.
Summer came, andthe last of the cherry blossoms died. The foliage around the village seemed to be glowing with a healthy green color. However, it clashed horribly with the dead plants and clumped-up weeds surrounding the Uchiha District, or at least the charred remains of what was left of it. Besides the main house everything else was destroyed; all that remained were the wooden outlines and foundations of once-proud buildings. Sasuke knew Madara had had something to do with that. Carrying out some convoluted scheme to piss him off was certainly not below the masked man.
He really was sick and tired of looking at it day after day. He was sick of the ANBU who took up space in his guestroom. And so finally, he decided to do something about it. He just didn't know how.
The answer knocked on his door three days later. She stood on the threshold, shivering though the summer rain was pleasantly warm.
After a brief explanation of why walking home from the hospital in the rain was not smart, Sakura stumbled over to a pile of recently washed towels in his laundry andwrapped one around her shoulders. She woke up the next morning still on his couch. She panicked and rushed off to work, leaving her things in his living room. He sighed. As smart as she was, Sakura could be quite forgetful.
After she finished her work, she stopped by his home to retrieve her medical books and such. She practically fainted onto his couch five minutes later, just when the clock struck midnight. And so the cycle began again.
Through the rest of June and all of July, it seemed as if his house had become her storage area, or even her own house. After a steady accumulation of her work supplies and books became too much to keep in the living room, Sasuke moved them into the guestroom- accidentally giving the ANBU the impression that he could leave his job to Sakura.
Without realizing it until too late, she came to live there. Sasuke secretly didn't mind. Sakura didn't bother asking questions. Naruto jokingly asked if they were dating. While nursing the Sakura-inflicted wound on his head, he regretted it.
By August, the burnt remains of his past were too unbearable to see.
She woke one night to the darkness of the night and the overwhelming smell of smoke.
Deadwood was burning.
Sasukejust stood there, simply watching the houses burn (after all, he'd set them on fire). It was almost captivating, really. Fire looked so different when he wasn't using it offensively in combat. When he watched it closely, it was almost kind of beautiful- though he would never say such things out loud. It was red and orange and yellow swirling together peacefully, flickering in the humid summer air.
He heard Sakura frantically running outside, thinking it was some kind of horrible accident. She saw him, standing calmly and mesmerized by the sight and somehow understood.
He walked through the burning remains of what had once been a front door.
She followed.
Sakura pulled at his sleeve, telling him about how the fire would cause the unstable wooden frames to fall inwardly onto them. He did not care. He did not wish to.
The thunder roared and the downpour came.
Her arms relaxed around his neck and she reminded him- he owed her a dance.
It wasn't really dancing, he thought to himself. Just swaying back and forth to the thrumming beat of the rain and the sound of raging fires being smothered by water. Tiny chips of wood fell softly to the grass and smoke from the extinguished fire swirled gracefully around the two like magic. And he realized.
A home is not a place boxed in by walls or ceilings.
It is not something you can buy, or pay off over a period of time.
It is not a location, it is not a material.
Home is a feeling.
It is a value, and a treasure to be held sacred.
It is a bond that even Uchiha Sasuke could not sever.
It is a fearless truth, when all else is considered a shameless lie.
And when the skeletons of the empty house collapsed- outwardly, as luck would have it- with the August rain pouring and the puffy clouds of smoke swirling and tiny arms wrapped around his neck, he knew.
When everything else came crashing down, there was nothing left but home.
"A warm summer night that smelled of smoke and tasted like humidity when the stars broke through the clouds in a shining epiphany of light."
[The End]
Super Special Note From Moi- I've been working extra hard on this since December. 'Cause i'm an uber perfectionist and went over it like twenty times so I could change stuff. I think it was worth it, though. The only thing that still bothers me is that I sort of skimmed over Sasuke's return. I hate it when fics just sort of start like 'HE'S BACKKK' and then don't really say anything else about it. It just sort of irks me. Dx Well, now that publishing this story is no longer berating my subconscious with a stick of DOOOOOM, I think I'll work on the new multichapter story I've, coincidentally, also been working on since December. I work so furking slow... ;_; Haha, I hope the people who already put this on their favorite story list don't mind that I went through and changed it a bit (Not the storyline, just the title and the grammar mistakes.)
Anyway, my goal for reviews is five. I'm not forcing anyone, but just saying... *coughcoughcough* xD
(Spoiler Alert, peoples. Just warning yah.) Kishi, you disappoint me. I don't think that after reading the 483 spoilers, my desire to read the manga will be back any time soon. Dammit, he tried to kill her! :(
R.A.W.R: Read And Write Reviews! Pretty Please?
I'M IN A GLASS CASE OF EMOTION!! (Hahaha, Anchorman is TEH SMEX),
Paisley~