Dedication: to one day, you three, and the hope that we're enough.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Enjoy!
Feet dangling off the roof with twenty feet until the ground, four faces raised to the moon with its bright and cold light.
A gust nipped at Sakura and Ino's exposed elbows. They jerked the heavy afghan tighter around them, bumping their shoulders into the people next to them until Temari and Karin moved closer together. So close together that they tucked their shoulders inward and the back of their forearms slid together, the girls made a can of sardines look spacious.
The cramped body heat, however, was better than the mid-spring cold.
Times like these were rare. A childhood and adolescence spent together had drawn towards a wide gap as adulthood had beckoned. There had been miles and towns between them, texts sent via satellite and invisible wires, infrequent video chats and visits, and new friends and places that were hard to see from the other end. School was eight months out of the year, busy as hell and obsessed with maintaining its hellish stature, leaving the four to congregate on as many weekends as they could during the summer.
Friends, however, were still forever.
At the next breeze, they huddled nearer, drawing the same breath and pulling the blanket together.
It was a patchwork of a blanket; each of them had crochetted a quarter of it over winter break with a fire going, the pleasant blast of music from a pair of crappy transportable speakers, and laughing as snow might have fallen outside. The product of different hands, each corner looked like it hardly belonged to the ones next to it.
Temari had come up with the project, even if she didn't need anything warm back in Suna. She was, after all, the one with crafts and hobbies, making gardens that flourished in the dry heat of her desert town, a plethora of desserts that never failed to surprise her friends, and making her own clothes either from scratch or altering some things she bought downtown. Many shades of brown, green, gold, and soft purple had bloomed under her fingers, patterns of growing and life leading to setting stars and a sunrise peeking out from behind a fluffy white cloud.
Ino's corner was made up of the sparkly gradient yarn they'd found at the hobby shop down the street from the apartment she shared with Sakura. Upon her insistence, they'd bought three skeins of yarn so she could make scarves, hats, mittens, and ponchos out of its rainbow. Konoha was warm during the summer, but the spring and winter…
It froze, sometimes, and snowed out of nowhere.
Someone had posted a pattern for kittens online, and Ino had determinedly worked at the yarn until it made itself into a group of colorful cats drifting through a maze of green.
Karin's corner dipped, tickling Sakura's neck as she yawned and rested her head on the red-head's shoulder. It was a very nondescript triangle of red, but, behind Sakura's back, it exploded into a giant butterfly with a shimmery outline of silver and filled in with streaks of orange, plum, and a pink so dark it was nearly purple.
Out of the four of them, she'd gone the farthest, up to Ame where it rained more than the sun shone and poured even when it was colder than the grave. There was so much to do up there, with the civil war torn area and the orphaned children fighting for spots under various awnings before shop owners kicked them out.
Needless to say, it was a good area to study social work in action.
While searching through the aisles upon aisles of yarn for the perfect colors, she'd spent enough time there that Ino and Karin had wandered the shop and had found patterns for eight Christmas stockings, three different kinds of hobo bags, and four pairs of socks as well as seventeen instructional videos on how to make their own yarn from the coat of a rare species of alpaca living in Grass.
For the last corner, Sakura had made diamonds, one each of orange, purple, royal blue, and turquoise, each touching two others to make a diamond of the palest green. Outside the diamonds was a stretch of black that shared a border with Ino and Karin's and a corner with Temari's.
It was just a little after midnight, and they were quiet.
There was no music.
There were no giggles.
There were no words.
All that existed was this constant thereness that they all felt over the distance, even more so when one another was right there, sleeves brushing bare arms.
Heads, on shoulders.
Arms, entangled.
Written a few nights ago and with a few [small!] changes before posting it here.