Cat: Requested by and written especially for Homeslice (ilu, seriously). If none of this makes sense, then that's alright; it didn't make sense to me, either.
When the streets are aflood like a fever
It's a holiday of the new
We're coming closer now to the truth
(Set your hopes on fire)
- Hope on Fire, Vienna Teng
The village is alight with fire. Sakura can feel it, pressed beneath her fingertips and resting on the tip of her tongue where it ignites when she speaks, and her feet are simmering as she makes her way down the lighted streets. The people too are on fire, and she can see the flames licking the surface of their bodies. Easy to see is the raging fire in the moonlight, and the stars reflect the ashes.
Sakura smiles as Ino approaches her, and the fire breaks and is clear for a moment. Her own grin is smoldering so brightly that Sakura thinks it better to cast her eyes away, but the other girl is speaking then and her words are on fire and her actions are on fire. "The fireflies are pretty," she says. Sakura nods, despite having heard the same comment several times before, and from the same lips, the same eyes. The eyes glow with a hot ember that she cannot register.
The village is burning up before her eyes, but there is not a thing to do. So she ambles down the streets with Ino at her side, and the two are so close that Sakura feels as though the skin on her arm is melting away. She pretends that her conversation with Ino, regardless of how aimless it appears, is the most significant thing in either of their lives. Her hands are clasped behind her back, the fingers holding one another loosely just as she has done to all of the ashes in her life, and her eyes fall on the ground because Ino's are on her and the ground never looked so welcoming before.
Lovely are the fireflies, but lovelier is Ino, and Sakura tells herself these things as the two stroll through the night. Ino is speaking and Sakura listening; she has never been a good listener, and Ino is questioning her and she can't find her mind to answer. The thoughts were elsewhere (and they were directly at her side), but her mind is broken into and she falls away into reality again. "Sorry, what did you say?" she replies dumbly, laughing nervously and wanting to kick herself in spite of her stupidity.
Ino always has been the brighter of the two, and Sakura knows this and Ino knows that she will never admit such a thing.
"I asked-- oh, never mind." Ino rolls her eyes, a sigh rolling off her tongue; she makes it look and seem so easy, brushing away the world and these fiery questions like a piece of dirt on her clothing. And it does not seem to affect her at all, the unanswered inquisition, something that she had wanted to know but will never find out.
Dumb. Sakura feels incredibly moronic as she makes her way, hands at her side now and awkwardly messing with the fabric of her clothing. There are things she wants to say, things she wants Ino to hear, and these flames are eating her alive and these flames cannot be extinguished. She drowns in them.
"The fireflies are pretty," Ino repeats into the silence, and Sakura nods with lighted cheeks. The village is alight with fire, as are the people, and Ino and Sakura simmer almost silently, invisibly, as they both burn slowly and gently in the summer flame.