Pairing: Kakashi/Sakura, implied Sakura/Naruto/Sasuke
Genre: Romance/Angst
Summary: Character study. "Do not forget" had become the unwritten, unspoken rule between them.
Word count: 1,150
A/N: Again, I am being an angst whore. I cannot stay away from this genre for too long.
And please, feedback.
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Another heart is cracked
In two
I'm on your back
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He noted (much to his dismay) that she still played the lovesick idiot. A little too well that at times he wondered how her talents had managed to slip past him unnoticed the way they did.
Truth be told (and he would never tell), it scared him how well she fit into the role of disillusioned girl.
Woman.
Female.
Whatever she was at the moment.
Like her one missing teammate and the other who chased him, she was stuck somewhere between extremes, unable to pick one for the sake of picking. She was left to wait for that missing something that would compel her to choose.
Something told him that experience in the field of unrequited love had something to do with it. Perfect silhouettes of her once teammates had been reduced to cartoonish holes in her memories. Only her heart could measure, down to the last eyelash and toe nail, the Naruto and Sasuke shaped exits they'd left as a reminder of their presence, now absence. He didn't the sharingan to let him see that.
Still, it irritated him to know that he paid entirely too much attention to that particular aspect of her life. An unbecoming characteristic of a shinobi. Especially for the much feared Copy Ninja himself.
She didn't mean to rely on him to straighten herself up, or find comfort merely in his presence. He knew it, but said nothing, as was his usual method of teaching. Only now he had no lesson to impart, no wisdom to pass on. She had Tsunade for that. The Hokage had taught her to heal the physical wounds, but it seemed she (like him) had neglected to show her how to mend those broken pieces of herself.
But he couldn't explain the long looks, the hurt in her eyes, no matter how small or how well she tried to hide it when he turned away. He wallowed in nostalgia, not necessarily for the memories of all three as obnoxious kids, but for the feeling of simpler times when Naruto and Sasuke competed as all boys do, while Sakura yelled at them both for being entirely too careless in their rivalry. He missed that she worried over the wounds they would no doubt receive in the process.
Six years.
He kept count, knowing that one she'd have to let go. Or rather, until the current version of his one time student would dissipate and he would no longer have to hold onto that image of someone who needed him the way he hadn't been needed in such a long time. An icy feeling crept through his veins, something akin to dread sinking his heart. It settled at his feet, ready to be stomped on by a random pedestrian in sight.
Six years since he's last seen a real smile on her face and he found himself missing the simple lift of her lips in an expression of genuine and infectious happiness.
Instead, she smiled in a way that him hurt and ache in ways he didn't want, helpless before a chuunin. He wondered if that was it meant to heartbroken – to feel things when you absolutely did not want to. Whatever walls he had built up (as all experience teaches us to put up) had slowly begun to break, the smallest opening that alarmed him. Though he was guarded (once upon a time) more securely than Ibiki's torture chambers, he wasn't even sure what managed to disarm him – age or her.
I must be getting old, became his excuse.
Regardless of the cause, it made a total waste of his training. The sharingan sometimes lingered on her longer than necessary – a disgraceful use of the technique, of a good friend's sacrifice. He imagined the ridicule if anyone found out: the Copy Ninja rendered defenseless by a mere girl.
Woman.
Female.
Former student.
So much for defenses after all, he mused ruefully. They just seemed to crumble, a little at a time, under her steady green gaze, her lack of expression save for worry and regrets (the most haunting of feelings after love and loss), and her increasing competence as a med-nin (the most telling of signs, however polite, that he could shove it with any other lessons).
He missed the way her hands used to tremble while attending the inevitable emergency out in the field; eager to save, to help, to fix whatever was broken and bleeding (the way she would have liked to have done with two others). But somewhere in the course of it all, he noted her once dreamy eyed quality, or whatever it was that allowed her to hope, dissipated from seeing her hands drenched in blood over time as a usual routine. His stomach turned at the sight despite the usual dark red fluid still warm on his stained hands from successfully targeting a mission. The longer he stared at her hands, the more he wished he could have prevented that particular casualty.
He supposed it was to be expected from a girl who'd had her heart broken too many times. She'd been subjected to disappointment in regards of the opposite sex time and again. Those expectations were too high for anyone to meet. Sky high. A gaping hole within her ribs, waiting to be filled. That something she longed for but couldn't keep because it couldn't (or wouldn't) keep her.
And sometimes, if he thought about too much, he was left with equal parts of false relief and irrational disappointment. Like the time he was sent on a retrieval mission after Sasuke that ended in failure. He often wondered what she saw in him (or for that matter, Naruto) at all, even if the boy had been a promising student at one point.
But he imagined that even if he tried, he would most likely be no better in that area. He too, was made up of lost friends and an unsteady stream of lovers. Infrequent. Rare. Whatever the word was for seldom. He could hardly recall the last time he was able to open up to another person. Except for the conversation he'd had with her about some obscure childhood prank he'd pulled off once.
But that was beside the point. (Even though he'd somehow coaxed a smile out of her.)
At least for both former teacher and student alike, the general image of romance was lost, tarnished in the aftermath of betrayal, indifference and abandonment. No more delusions about useless elaborate tokens of affection and a special someone waiting on the other side of the apartment door.
It was empty as usual. The norm. It was safe.
Yet he – a thirty-five year old man – pined over her like a desperate lovesick teenager. Just like the kind she persisted for the benefit of memory. "Do not forget" had become the unwritten, unspoken rule. Neither wrote it. Neither said it. It was merely understood.