Author's Note: There's some slightly mature content here, but nothing explicit - it is rated accordingly.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Sticky Fingers
Summary: Sakura has just turned twenty(eighteen(sixteen)) and can't quite bring herself to look away.
When Sakura turns sixteen, she starts noticing his hands.
He's reading Icha-Icha again, par usual. She has just finished patching up some genin who were viciously attacked by a fluffy cat that didn't want to be rescued mid-nap.
They're calloused, capable, crisscrossed with faded scars that leak faint silvery pink edges all over the off-white of his palms, as she had expected.
What comes as a surprise is that his fingers are almost-too long and not quite blunt tipped, and move with a fluid, lethal grace.
She thinks, fleetingly, that maybe she could imagine those hands on her some day. She squashes this thought with fervor, hoping that it will disappear forever in the dark corners of her mind, never to reach her consciousness again.
It's two years before she can bring herself to acknowledge Kakashi again.
When Sakura turns eighteen, she's already begun to be weary of her daily life. Some time ago (she can't quite remember when now) Naruto left her and went off to find Sasuke, and he hasn't yet returned. She can't allow herself to think about why that is.
Sakura stayed because she had to (because she didn't want anything to do with Sasuke anymore, what with the depth of his betrayal finally seeping into her moral matrix). Sakura stayed because a year ago, some Sound nin crept into Fire Country too stealthily to be caught, leaving only a trail of eviscerated border guards in their wake. She tried healing a man who already had his entrails slithering out in a heap of slippery, quivering flesh, and all she received for her trouble was some bloody clothing and a trail of hot, angry tears sliding down her face to mingle with the caking, coagulating red. She decided it was better that Naruto had left her - the fight has been drained out of her anyway, and this way she won't see any more familiar bodies.
When Sakura leaves the hospital, she sees Kakashi reading Icha-Icha again. She doesn't want to think about the cold sterility of the hospital and the acrid smell of death anymore, so she approaches him for the first time in two years.
He looks up from Icha-Icha, but not before putting the book gently down with those hands, and she suddenly remembers why she has so pointedly been being avoiding him.
Kakashi sees her expression, mistaking it for stress (he has been hearing about Tsunade's relegation of her best student to deal with the dying that rarely live, no matter how much chakra you waste on them), and asks her if she's all right.
She cracks a lopsided, not-quite smile, and then he asks her if she'd like to come to Ichiraku for some ramen and tea.
It's not quite the same as it was with Sasuke and Naruto, but Sakura decides that she doesn't really mind.
They exchange sparse words, interwoven by a companionable silence, and Kakashi realizes that although she's newly disillusioned, she'll be fine (he hopes).
Then his fingers start tracing faint, almost imperceptible patterns on the steaming cup of fragrant jasmine tea, and the silvery pink edges on his hands are now even more visible than they were before. Sakura takes one more look at them and bolts out of the restaurant.
She leaves a bewildered Kakashi to ponder her unexpected flight over the remnants of their shared meal.
Her abandoned tea is still warm. The tendrils of heated smoke lazily ascend towards the roof of Ichiraku, but dissipate before they ever have a chance of reaching the ceiling.
When Sakura turns twenty, Naruto's still gone and she can't quite bring herself to care. She's working double shifts at the hospital now, and training every day. She's too pragmatic and far too clinical, but her newly cold, detached self barely notices. After all, it's not like she's suffered too much of a loss (not one that she will admit quite yet, anyway).
One day, Kakashi comes to visit.
She first bumps into his slightly slouching silhouette as she wanders around aimlessly, looking for the first caffeinated drink she can find to keep awake. She hasn't been sleeping much lately. She can't afford to now, because she's been dreaming of almost too-long fingered hands working frantically, feverishly over her skin, and she wakes up feeling overly heated, like she's being incinerated in a red-hot furnace and she cannot stand it anymore.
After disentangling herself from the unfortunate soul she crashed into in her sleep-deprived haze, she notices his hands. For an instant, she thinks that she's hallucinating, but then she sees Kakashi looking at her looking at his hands with a troubled, intent sort of gaze. It's a little too close (not nearly close enough) to the way he was looking at her last night, and she starts to quickly back away.
"Sakura, what's going on?"
She opens her mouth, tries to answer, but the synapses aren't firing correctly and the words she's been meaning to say aren't coming out at all.
She tells him that it's good to see him, which isn't entirely a lie. She says she really wishes she had time to sit down and chat, but after a moment of struggling for a suitable excuse, she settles for admitting that she has to go treat a few troublesome patients (Rock Lee, among others), before they annoy her so much that she singlehandedly ensures that they will never leave the hospital wing.
Her voice rises from its fairly recently lowered register in the end to an entirely false laugh, and she cringes. The brief convulsion as well as her nervous, tightly sprung air is not lost on Kakashi. He allows her time to collect what's left of her composure before he speaks.
"Sakura, it's been entirely too long. I know you're busy, but why don't we go get some tea?"
He leads her out of the hospital. It would be unspeakably rude to refuse such an innocuous request from a former teacher, so she follows him out, wordlessly. It has nothing to do with the fact that she is twenty(eighteen(sixteen)) and can't quite bring herself to look away.
It takes her a beat before she realizes that he's leading her to his apartment in some more scarcely populated part of Konoha, and that this time, it's going to be harder to run.
She collapses in a chair in his kitchen and wearily (warily) watches him make tea. She notices, almost absentmindedly, that he's making jasmine tea, the same one as last time, if her memory serves her correctly.
Warning bells go off in her head that it hasn't been nearly long enough since the last time (whenever it was).
He settles the cup of tea in her slightly trembling hands. When she dares to look up, she sees his hands connecting with hers for only an instant. She notices the faint silvery pink that has been festering in her subconscious mind since the day she really saw them (him) for the first time.
She's looking, but she's not lookseeing, not until her hands almost drop the fragile cup and he reinforces her grip with his. She thinks he's finally figured it out by now, her almost fixation with his hands (with him), and she can't bring herself to care anymore (not about this).
He asks her to look at him, and she can't, she won't, not until he gently, gingerly, takes the cup from her, and sets it down on the floor. Then he cups her face with his goddamned too-sinuous fingers so that she can finally just see him as he is.
They stay like that, and this time, Sakura realizes that the intentness, the intensity in his gaze that surfaced the last time they drank tea wasn't a figment of her imagination, because she's lookseeing it again.
He holds her as though she is fragile and maybe cared for, and this hurts most of all because she never once considered that this wasn't unrequited, whatever this was.
She doesn't cry (she's stronger than that, now), and she just shudders (but only slightly). He traces the trails of invisible tears on her face, remembering her for almost forever with his hands. She leans in, gives in to herself, and allows him to place a single, lingering kiss on the corner of her mouth.
She allows herself later to remember the details of the rest of that day, how those fingers carefully, questioningly brushed over the rest of her, with added fervor later because she begged. She thinks that maybe this means the consuming intensity isn't unrequited any more than the affection is, and that it should be reciprocated in kind.
It takes a while before she allows herself to accept that maybe the events of that day should be habitual after all.
When Sakura is twenty years old, she wakes up to fingers caressing her face, crisscrossed with faded scars that leak faint silver-pink edges all over his off-white palms. They are slightly sticky from last night. She wakes up smiling for the first time in years.