Flowers
previously "Like Flowers They Died"
The walls are bare and white, but he remembers them being pink.
She sits on her white bedspread, but he remembers it being pink as well.
She cries and looks out the white windowpanes, and he can't remember if they were ever anything but white.
In front of the window sits a white vase, and resting inside it, the only color in the entire room. There are four flowers, one wilted completely and the other three beginning to following suit.
There is a white rose and a blue iris, a sunflower and a cherry blossom.
Sakura pointedly stares above the vase, at things outside. She stares across the street at the neighbor's house (though it is run-down and quite an eyesore), she stares at a stray cat that wanders along searching for food, she stares at anything but the flowers. —But Sasuke stares right at them.
The white rose seems lively enough, but some of its layers are crooked, falling down. He is reminded of Kakashi's underneath the underneath, the disguises he wears.
The blue iris is the deepest and healthiest, though a few of its petals look sickly. Sasuke thinks of his own battered ego, and he smirks as if something funny had been said. —It's a bittersweet smirk.
The sunflower does not resemble any others. Its color is borderline orange, mutated with false happiness somehow, black in the center to kill the joy. He suspects there is a really bad gardener out there somewhere, but then Naruto fills his head. Naruto is different like this sunflower, and just like Naruto, it's killing itself from the inside out.
The cherry blossom is in the worst condition of them all. In the center of its fruit, where there should be a tint of the most feminine pink, there is not. Instead it is a pure, pristine white and Sasuke hates it. He hates it for being so dull; he hates it because all of its petals are rotted at the edges and it could be so much better. He hates it because it's supposed to be pink and it's not.
Sasuke stops looking at the flowers and looks back at Sakura, who sits with puffy eyes and nothing but white all around her.
He shakes his head at her slowly, and then, just as slowly, his fingertips guide the white vase to the edge of the table. It shatters and Sakura looks up, vaguely frightened. When she goes to clean the mess, the broken ceramic stains her fingers a dark, dark red.
And then there is color, real color.
Fin.
Author's Notes: This one also from Incognito Temptation. Moving is fun.
