Disclaimer: As everyone knows, Masashi Kishimoto and I go way back, but that rat-bastard stole Naruto from me. I pursued him across the seven seas, but damn, that's one slippery bloke.
The prequel to this, the lack of oxygen, is now up!
They rendezvous at various nondescript and shadowy corners on the ship. Deserted passageways, the maintenance sectors, the storage rooms have all been privy to their passionate trysts. He takes her roughly (gently? no. no, she thinks, Sasuke is anything but that) against the walls, shelves, or the floor when he is desperate or angry. She tries not to feel used and dirty after their brief encounters.
You stupid, stupid girl. It is a mantra she repeats to herself often. She has yet to remember it when he snatches her into a dark room, despite the way he pounds it into her, breathless and consumed with desire.
They have never fucked (she cringes at the synonyms, knowing the absence of love and the coldness of sex, and she feels like a whore) on a bed before. He has never allowed their relationship (is this what it is? she never wanted it to be like this) to progress to that level, steering her into empty hallways whenever they meet near their quarters. He is not a generous lover, selfish and overwhelmed with his needs, leaving her bewildered and confused in the aftermath of their combined passions.
He has never kissed her. She tried to kiss him once; he bit her shoulder and flipped her around to take her from behind. She wonders if he knows she cries after every session, drowning her sobs in the communal baths. She attempts to scrub the traces of him (but no, she broken-sadly laughs, nothing important) from her. She has taken more baths in the five months she has served on the USS Sharingan than she had on her two-year rotation aboard the USS Kyuubi. She doesn't feel any cleaner.
He does not acknowledge her presence. As the ship's medical officer, she makes weekly reports to Captain Uchiha. As usual, First Officer Suigetsu stops her outside the captain's quarters, retrieving her report and simultaneously dismissing her before disappearing inside. When she meets him along the ship's narrow corridors, he is surrounded by the top brass, and he looks through her, or not at all. She wanders back to the medical bay, and sits among the wounded and dying. She tries to lose her pain among theirs.
She remembers that she used to be happy. She can't remember how that feels. There is no sun in space, no warmth and no sound. (space is diseased with darkness and danger and silence, and they are the fools who flirt with this madness) Space, she thinks, is like Sasuke. A void. She immediately banishes the thought; Sasuke is not a void, he is too complex and pained and angered to comprehend, and he defies the laws of physics and science and everything else like he always has. But Naruto, she is sure, is like the Sun. Bright and loud and warm and energy-filled. She misses him, and misses Sasuke, and is hurt by the realization that the two men in her life that she loves are not missing her. Naruto, perpetual optimist that he is, is convinced that missing someone is only for when you aren't going to see that person again, and he is going to see Sakura-chan soon and they will eat ramen with Kakashi-sensei and Sasuke-teme and we'll have so much fun!, so why should he miss her? And Sasuke, Sakura knows, cares nothing for her.
There are nights when she sneaks away to the ghostly hallways of the mausoleum of a maintenance sector, seeking refuge and sleep between the monolithic water tanks, or against the serpentine heating pipes when she needs the comfort of warmth that her lover cannot (will not) give. None of her bunkmates ask her where she goes, but they all know that she comes back a little sadder each time, her heart a little more broken, and her eyes a little further away from here. They offer her comfort, but none that she can find solace in. It is now a rare night that finds her in her bed, narrow but still two sizes too large.
The days drag past in her quiet sadness, and the tenth month of her rotation arrives. Nothing has changed, and she is still the warm body that Sasuke repeatedly buries himself into in clandestine corners of the night amidst stifled moans and gasps. (and oh, the irony, she thinks, would he bury her still-warm body if he had to?) He is particularly rough whenever she appears after he fails to find her, and he steals the warmth and solitude that she takes from the ship. She bruises easily, and he knows that, but it does not stop him from liking to mark her, sometimes on her lily-white neck, or on the underside of her fragile wrist. I fell, she tells whoever asks, and it is not entirely a lie.
She is tired of this, tired of the way they come together and leave, like breath that shifts like thoughts into the spaces between words, always there but not-there, almost shapes and pictures, fragments and shards, nothing. She is tired of being nothing to him, of having nothing of her left. She is spent, she knows, and he is the only one who can make her whole, but he is too broken and hard to help her fix herself. She cannot escape, not for another year, but she can end this, and she loves (yes, loves, she is a stupid, stupid girl) him enough to end it the way that will be the easiest for him – wordless, emotionless, faceless.
It is a quarter past midnight when he comes inside her as she climaxes in waves around him, and she clings to him a little tighter than usual as she savours the only kind of warmth that he can provide her. She is flush against the wall, and both their uniforms are askew and rumpled, hanging off their bodies in awkward angles in their haste. He lets go of her and steps back, and she is left shivering in the cold as she regains her bearings. He is quick to readjust his uniform, tucking himself back into his pants and ironing out the wrinkles on his shirt, and when she next glances at him he is back to being the impenetrable, perfect, unbreakable Captain Uchiha. He makes to leave the storage room first, and steps away from her, but she –
"Sasuke."
He turns. She feared that he would ignore her and leave anyway, but now that she has his attention she fumbles and stutters. She swallows as he cocks an expectant eyebrow, and she walks up to him, tentative steps echoing loudly, too loudly. She extends a hand to his face, tracing his chiseled jaw, and he stonily grabs her offending arm.
"Don't."
He walks away, and she is left staring after his retreating back. (why, why is she always the one left behind?)
She buries herself in her work from the next day onwards. She never leaves the medical bay, always in sight of her fifty-six patients. Their ship carries three thousand, and with the ongoing war with Oto, she is in the operating theatre for nineteen hours a day. She sets aside an hour for meals, spends two on paperwork, and collapses on a cot against the far wall for the remaining two. She is a doctor, and she knows this isn't healthy, but it helps her to forget, and that is all that matters. (the shadows under her eyes darken, and her patients know they are not the only wounded here.) He came to find her once, two days after what she now calls The Last Encounter in her over-dramatisation that he hated so much. He stepped through the double sliding doors of the medical bay at precisely nine-eighteen in the morning (and oh, don't think she doesn't know how she's killing herself slowly), noted the presence of more than eighty other people in the bay, and left. His eyes had only met hers for a fraction of a second, before it skimmed over to the others. He had never returned (some part of her that was hoping he had fallen in love with her died, and there is not much of her left).
It had been forty-seven days since she had stepped foot outside the confines of the medical bay, and news had spread ship-wide of her peculiarity. Insanity, some derided; dedication, others whispered in reverent whispers, and combat trainer Lieutenant Rock Lee had declared it "A shining paragon of the burning flower of youth!" She no longer delivered her weekly reports in person, instead sending digital copies to the First Officer to pass along or tasking some Cadet to deliver it to the Captain. She no longer ran into him in the corridors, keeping to within the safe boundaries of the medical bay. She was safe. She was dying.
Bone-deep fatigue became her new best friend, and she revels in the feeling of tiredness that consumes her every waking hour and is insufficiently satiated by her scant two hours of sleep. There are no ghosts here, amid the ill and infirm, she thinks. (there are pains worse than this, she assures herself, and can't help but feel envious of the elderly Mr. Saito who passes in his sleep) The other medical personnel are worried about her, she knows, and she studiously avoids the penetrating, too-knowing gaze of Chief Medical Officer Tsunade.
The next day brings a fresh wave of attacks by the Oto fleet, and a badly wounded captive is brought in. She is told that his ship crash-landed into the Sharingan's landing bay in a suicide attempt, but failed to wreck heavy damage. We need to interrogate him, says Sergeant Inuzuka Kiba, but he is too injured. She needs to heal him a little before they can proceed, just sufficient to keep him alive long enough to talk. From what they know, he elaborates, their captive is the highly dangerous Colonel Yakushi Kabuto, and his information will prove key in turning the tide of the war.
She nods and dons her surgical gloves as the operating theatre staff usher Sergeant Inuzuka into the viewing room. She blinks several times, and notes that the gritty feeling behind her eyes has intensified, but she pushes it to the back of her mind, and turns to the bloody Colonel lying on the table. Mostly flesh wounds, she assesses, and wonders how minor (but no doubt, extremely bloody) flesh wounds would be able to cause a fully-grown adult male to lose consciousness when he sits up, and she –
She hears the click of a gun being armed, and she feels the death-cold barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of her head as she is violently shoved to her knees. She can hear her breathing, short and loud, and there is a pounding in her ears, and there is motion all around as Kiba charges out of the viewing room, the theatre staff shriek and there is chaos everywhere and –
"I need to speak to Sasuke-kun. Now."
His voice is slimy, soft and insidious, and the hairs on the back of her neck stand. He says Sasuke's name like a chilling caress, and hearing her childhood endearment from his lips wraps an icy fist around her heart. She is calm, a strange calm, a different calm. She is detached, and so cold, so very cold, and why are the voices around her so loud? The fatigue in her bones is heavy, and her head feels like the weight of the world. Her eyes feel funny, and focus, focus, everything is blur now, why? Some part of her wishes that Kabuto would put a bullet in her cranium already; she is tired, so so so fucking tired.
"Don't – don't bother. He won't come. I'm sorry, but I think you picked the wrong hostage."
Her voice cracks, and is it her or is it softer than usual? She doesn't know, and she is tired of trying to find answers to questions she has spent years asking. There are cracks in the tiles on the floor, she realizes, and there are cracks in her too, she thinks, just that she's going to break a lot sooner than the tiles, she knows. And oh, oh, when did Sasuke-kun get here? She knows her heart beats a little faster in his presence, although, she laughs-sighs, it may have something to do with the gun pointed to my head, or my heavy, heavy head – high blood pressure, you know. The pounding in her eyes is loud, so loud, voices are drowned out and her eyelids are so, so heavy and it would be wonderful to close them for just a second – wait, is that Sasuke-kun's voice? Why is it so loud? – and oh my god it hurts, it hurts, someone make it stop, please, stop stop stop stopstopstop
It takes her sixteen days to wake up. Fatigue, Tsunade tells the Captain. Her body knows she needs rest, and is making up for all the lost time. She wakes swathed in warm sheets, and a body next to her. Her eyes are slow to refocus, and she takes in her surroundings gradually, painfully. She is in his bed, under his sheets, next to him. He sits next to her on the bed, in his pristine Captain's uniform, with a book on military strategy in hand. Her breath is halting, and she finds herself at a loss for words.
This is his apology, she knows, and emotions clog up her throat, and she avoids his piercing gaze and she notes the Unit 7 hologram he keeps on his immaculately neat desk, notes the cherry-blossom fabric of the silk robe she is ensconced in, and he places his hand under her chin and tilts her face to him. He traces feather-light kisses over her face, over the yellow-purple bruises on her left cheek, before he –
He kisses her mouth. It is all-consuming, all-telling, everything she has ever wanted and more. I'm sorry, it says. I love you, it shouts. Don't go away.
It is not a fairytale, she knows, and their story is not a happily-ever-after, but she will try, and so will he, and they will break a little and mend, and she will hurt and cry and this will not be perfect, but it is enough, and she is content.
BROWNIES FOR WHOEVER CAN SPOT THE STAR TREK REFERENCE! :D
Anyhow, you know the drill. Reviews make me a happy clam.