Title: Unpacking
Day/Theme: February 14/ bedroom politics
Series: Naruto
Character/Pairing: Sakura, Sasuke
A/N: Because it was valentines day and I can't write fluff happily. Also, I'm in a good mood because I've finished about 5 gift!fics. =D
Summary: This is the hardest part, harder than the casual meetings and empty locations.
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This, she thinks, must be the hardest part. Harder than the cold brush-offs in the streets, where two hands have become one. It's gotten chilly the past few months and her once too-short scarf is now overly long. She's started to use gloves again, finding them hidden in corners where they've remain forgotten for months.
He doesn't say anything when she passes him, doesn't glance up or flinch away. If she's in a particularly bad mood, she'll angrily chow down on ice-cream and call Ino and tell her all about the heartless bastard. How he's arrogant and stand-offish and never tells her how he feels, never gives her what she wants and needs to hear.
If she's calmer, she knows it was probably hard on him too-his figure seems slighter now, his face more gaunt. It was messy and complicated and goodbyes are never easy. They have never been simple either, and that didn't help at all.
Still, she can survive those panic-filled moments, where it seems like this is all she knows and her too-tight chest and watery eyes last forever.
A little harder are visiting places-the restaurant where they celebrated their first anniversary, saving and scrimping for months to afford two meals. The petting-zoo where he took picture after picture of her among the goats and ponies. The street they went window-shopping every now and then on Sunday afternoons, the sun warm on their back and the streets overly crowded.
Sometimes she swears she can see their echoes still, a warm hand print, a distorted shadow, a single mingled breath. And sometimes she can't see anything and she doesn't know which is worse.
And yet, that still can't compare to this pain, fresh and new and adding wounds to her healing heart. There's a box she's kept shut since the break-up, a box that taunts her when she happens to glance at it.
There are the roses he gave her Valentine's day, carefully pressed into a diary and surrounded by hearts. A pair of tickets to the theatre, to a comedy she loved and he hated. A white dove he made for her birthday, a collection of CDs she borrowed and never returned. Small gifts that mean more than the world to her, that represent everything that made up their relationship.
Already she can feel their meaning slipping away. It still hurts, but she can stand go to the box, open it and look at the items. There was a time when she didn't want those feelings to disappear and even that desire is changing.
Her fingers tremble as she brushes against a mini-album. It's still too early to go through them, to remember and laugh fondly. For now she stares and waits and thinks it was still worth it, in the end.