In the Falling Snow
He finds her amidst the descending white, the wind against them, and then he frowns and he looks at her and wonders if she has changed.
They have become two people set against the backdrop of the stark hills and the landscape covered in steel-white (the woman who has her back turned towards him starts wondering if there was anything beneath these layers of snow- just like her, or him, or the man she is trying desperately to bring back herself)- two colors that contrasted against each other like clashing swords, yin and yang- and this is something they already knew by heart. It's too late for that now. Regrets. The rift starts to endlessly divided them from each other.
They were just so scarred, and pained, and burned, and so many things more-
"I've been looking for you," he finally says, hesitation laced in those broken words put together, and he takes a step closer towards her, yet he feels that she is still far away from him and out of his reach.
He's not sure if she is afraid to look at him, or if she doesn't want to see the promise so evident in his eyes. So instead she says what he needed to hear (from her). "I've been searching… waiting for him-" her breathing hitches, as if it pained her to say the next words. "for… so long…"
She wants to say a lot of things to him. Thank you- You were always there for me when he wasn't- I hate you and your stupid promise, can't we go back and start all over again?- You deserve somebody better to love, someone better than me- but she still can't find the courage to say them yet.
Before she can speak, he says to her (just like he always does), "You don't have to do this to yourself. I was the one who promised to bring him back, remember?" he smiles his same painful smile (it breaks her, that smile of his) and wonders if his words can somehow reach her just this once.
"But this promise-" she whispers, bowing her head as the cloak that protects her from the cold billows and surrounds her- "This promise isn't a promise anymore, is it?"
He looks at her in surprise.
"I need to hear it from you."
I'll bring him back for you, okay? It's a promise of a lifetime!
Even with her back towards him, she looks behind her, and he can see the weary lines that have etched her face he has never seen before. She has a small smile in her lips, but her smile is different now from the rest of her smiles before: sad but honest, revealing instead of masking the hurt. Deception. But he can still see pain in those features. He doesn't know what hurts to see more.
He looks up at the sky and watches the falling snow. "No." he can feel her piercing gaze. "Not anymore." And maybe it never was.
And he sees a kind of invisible weight that once bruised and burdened her frail shoulders disappear and he sees that her eyes now carries a knowing that things have certainly changed between them. Especially after this. Like something had been snapped clearly into two, only to be fixed again. It was as if she finally knew all his secrets...
She smiles more openly for the first time since he had seen her set foot on this forsaken land. "I'm glad, then."
"What?"
"I'm glad," she says again, a distant smile still veiled on her lips, but she looks away from his face this time and turns towards the snow-covered plains and steep, jagged mountains as if they mean something to her, as if she was searching for an answer. "I don't have to live in the past anymore."
(Unlike you.)
(Why can't you just learn to let go of old ghosts?)
She turns and walks away.
"Wait."
She stops. She waits. The snow beneath her ruptures and splits in her wake. She stands there, hoping, hoping he would finally see-
"Come back with me."
It's her turn to be taken aback. "What?"
He's ready for this moment, but he watches her hands turn to fists and suddenly he feels the mustered strength inside of him waning and fading. "We don't have to face him yet. He's still out there, finding his time…"
"I thought you want him back."
Her voice fills him with regret. He stays silent. Suddenly the words from long ago goes on a cycle in his head, a revolving circle he can't escape: bring him back, bring him back, bring him back…
"You kept promising that you would bring him back."
It cuts him over and over again-
"Isn't he the reason why you're here in this place, after all?" The words she lets out are burnt out and dried.
He can't look in her eyes now.
"If you want him back, then bring him back! Not because of a promise you made years ago!"
It's hesitation, he thinks blindly- he wants to bring him back but he's afraid that the past would finally catch up to him and he doesn't know what he would do if that happens-
So he says, "I will, I will," and he looks at nothing in particular. "He has to come back. For you, right? I promised you. He has to-"
Then out of the cold blue she is upon him, punching and breaking him with such seriousness and strength he has never seen in her before, and he stumbles back, bloody and bruised. He doesn't fight back.
She is panting now. "Stop trying to piece us back together like it's your own damn fault!" she suddenly grabs him, grips him tighter than steel, never holding back. "I'm at fault, too! And it's his fault as well! But he isn't the same anymore! So stop acting like things will be the same again once you bring him back, because it's not going to be and it never will!"
She continues to shake him, hard, hands fisted tightly and wildly, grasping the collar of his wet cloak and jumpsuit. Stop feeling sorry, dammit! You can't stay in the past forever! Don't you owe this to yourself? Just learn to let go! The snow continues to fall, but beneath them it's starting to melt. He has never seen such determination in her before; such surprisingly clear intensity that he saw beyond her green eyes, instead of something glassy and uncertain when it came to moments like this. You've really changed, haven't you, Sakura? But…
"I can't."
Finally she stops the shaking and the breaking and her grip on him goes slack but she doesn't let go. She searches the secrets he had always kept from her in his eyes, but he refuses to look up and face her glinted gaze.
"I can't back down now." his senses are dull from her punches and the cold, and yet he can still feel the movement his hands made as they held hers- gripping them with the same strength as she grips him tightly and he can almost feel her coldness and her scarred, calloused skin beneath the worn gloves, but the girl he had always known was still there somewhere. "If I do, I won't have anything else left. If I give up on him, he'll give up on me, too."
She starts to wonder if it was things like this that keeps him up at night, and she finds it hard to understand- hiding these dark, growing, slithering secrets from her or everyone else- but she knows him long enough to know that he would refuse to give up his demons just like the snow and the fog that surrounds them now.
Just like her.
(We are so much alike after all, aren't we...)
"But it's like a curse, this promise."
His words startles and scathes her raw and it reminds her too much of the shadows that should be left in the past. You're making him suffer too. The corner of her eyes starts to sting. But then she remembers why she is here in this barren land covered in snow, and she only wishes how she could somehow put them in to words.
She studies him for the briefest of moments, and finally (regretfully) she lets go.
She doesn't say anything, but she comes closer, closer.
Right there something inside of her changes again, and he feels it. The once burning, fiery eyes now hold something much softer, breakable, in them. Her hand finds its way to his clammy, whiskered cheek.
The gloves she wears (that hides her scars from everyone else) were already damp and cold from the snow and the icy wind, but he can finally feel the warmth of her hands beneath them.
"I've already made my choice." She says softly, cupping his cheek, and in the midst of the fog and the thin breaths they made that blurred the outlines between them, she hopes that he makes his own, too. (He has to.) "It took me two thousand miles to come here just to find myself." The hardened look in her eyes has returned, and he suddenly feels they were miles apart. "And I'm not stopping and going back."
She drops her hand and backs away.
Trying to chase lasting ghosts and persistent pasts.
The warmth was suddenly gone.
He just looks at her as she starts to leave, cloak rising around her- and he (desperately) wants to stop her and tell her that that they would bring him back together just like they promised in a silent hospital ward so many years ago- wrapped in bandages and wounds and so much hope- instead of doing it alone, but then he realizes that the promise isn't a promise anymore and now he can't stop her and say that this isn't right.
She looks back at him once more, and maybe for the last time.
"I'm sorry, Naruto."
And then she is gone.
And he is the only one left amidst the falling snow that surrounds him, with the wind against him and then he stares at the shadows and the footprints she has left behind upon the melting snow on the ground and he wonders how she has changed.
He clenches his fists tighter, until his fingernails have left deep marks upon his pale, white palms and soon he knew that they would disappear but he wished that they would stay and leave a pattern or a scar in his skin.
First him, now her… He felt like everyone was running away from him.
He looks straight ahead, towards the direction she had gone to, towards the snow-covered trees and mountains in the distance, and suddenly he knows what to do, and what he should've done whenever she walked away from him. He won't force her to come back, to bring her back to the past and to where they truly belonged just like he forced the man who have left them years ago. He knows that now, and he doesn't want to repeat those same mistakes all over again. He was tired of shadows and things that reminded him too much of yesterday.
(The promise isn't a promise anymore- she made sure of that- so why did he feel like he still has to fulfil something meaningful for her?)
So he sets off to find her- to find himself- and if he does and he sees her amidst this land covered in snow, he would be there by her side and he would follow her and just be there for her. Once he would catch a glimpse of her hair or her figure again, maybe he will finally have the strength to follow her to the ends of the earth.
The snow finally stops falling.