title: these words
author: pandastacia
prompts: crystallized pineapple, dancing in the rain, red notebook, pink lipstick
dedication: to sara. love you much, darling. chin up & here is some angst for you. :)

The concourse is perfectly thrumming with energy. Glimpsing several people passing her slow and steady steps, Sakura observes nervous anticipation, excitement, and bored resignation in rapid succession.

She wonders what people see when they look at her. Do they see a young woman setting off on a long journey? Or do they instead see a small girl who was running away from something she couldn't control? Do they see her, beyond pink strands of hair that catch light at all of the wrong times yet can't catch the attention of the person she wanted most? Do other people only see hair that came close to sweeping her shoulders and the way she feebly tries to hide behind it?

Eyes fixed on the gate number on the ticket in her right hand, she withdraws into her snug black peacoat, stuffing her other hand into her pocket. Sakura's nail-bitten fingers scramble for the crystallized pineapple package around a key ring, pink lipstick, bandaids, and gloves among other things. It is something that is she always willing to buy from the airport's gift shop, regardless of how much she had to splurge to acquire it.

Some people invest in Dramamine. Sakura Haruno sates her nerves with crystallized pineapples.

Popping one into her mouth, she focuses her attention on that small piece of gummy sweetness instead of the large glass windows to her left that showcase the giant airfield with many giant monsters that feed on air and gas.

Her ticket neatly slipped into her black carry-on, Sakura continues to stroll at a leisurely pace, not in any particular hurry to get to her gate. Like usual, there is quite a bit of time to ease herself into the idea of getting into the air. Thankfully, it will be a long time between this particular flight and her next, so it is easy to think that just a few hours in the air and everything will be all better.

Perhaps not everything would be alright, but enough of it would be fine enough to make her forget everything that wasn't to her satisfaction.

But not if he was there.

She stops in her tracks.

Her eyes refuse to believe that he is here- that he could possibly be here. It wasn't his place to be here. He belonged somewhere else, nowhere near a terminal. Everything he needed was there in Tokyo.

Everything she needed was him.

But, without words, he only ever seemed to confirm that he didn't need her, that her need was extraneous and unnecessary. He was a one person island, comfortable without feeling something more than apathy for the majority of society.

"Where do you think you're going?" Time seems to stand still around her as his smooth, deep voice drifted past her like everyone else in the airport. Though he stands right in front of her, she does her best to look past his neck, past the ends of hair that have slipped over the edges of his dark blue, high-cut shirt.

"I am going elsewhere." She doesn't really know when her feet had stopped moving and led her to stand stationary in front of him. Maybe it had been the same moment when she had tightened her grip on the bag of candied pineapples in her pocket and dug her short fingernails into the palm of her right hand.

"Why?"

Giving up on looking around him, she looks him in the eyes, dark eyes like pitch, leaving her no way to escape and no peace of mind to ever want to. But now, she's seen more than enough and she wonders whether Odysseus, with his ears open to the songs of the sirens, had been as easily beguiled as she has always been by eyes like these.

"I don't have a reason to stay, Sasuke-kun," she says simply. Sakura knows better than to ask for him to give her a reason to stay. He has his pride and she has hers and neither would allow her to budge. Asking, pleading, begging- nothing would give her what she so desperately wanted.

She leans forward to brush her lips lightly over his cheek (It's not cold like she thought it would be, so there must be a beating heart underneath all the blank and cold he wore like a shield.) for the first and last time. He is not willing to say anything, but somethings have been said and others done, leaving her with enough resolution to walk around him.

Sakura does not look back to see if he's watching her walk away. She can feel his eyes, intense as always. Perhaps he thinks that she cannot do it- that she could never survive without him. Every independent piece of her screams against what she is doing. Some part wonders sharply why she wants to let go of him while another part of her ask why she has waited so damn long. That he was like a poison digging his way into her system. Teasing him into confrontation has never been her style. Like an alligator, she waits for the opportune moment.

She will wait for him to come to her.

By now, she has found her seat and shrugs her carry-on off her arm and into her lap. Absentmindedly, Sakura politely declines the wine offered by the flight attendant and pulls out a green notebook, opening it to the first clean page she could find.

"Ouch!" The spiral of the notebook had pricked her finger, letting a drop of blood leave a mark on the otherwise pristine page.

Rolling her shoulders back, she closes her eyes and leans back into her seat.

Outside her window, it begins to rain.

finite (for now)