title: bring back the silence
word count: 4,764
rating: mature
summary: he can't give it all a name. not yet, anyway. he'll have to get the taste out of his mouth first.
a/n: for kakasaku week, day 1. the theme is salty, and while i'm salty about the ending to an unhealthy degree i think i may have taken this a bit more literally than intended. oh well get ready for a little ride on the pain train :)
.
.
From this close he can smell her sweat. It's fresh and clean, purposed, running in shining streams down her neck and collarbone.
He has no time to think about how it would feel to let his tongue press along the curves and hollows of the space above her collar. Not but a few seconds to wonder how it would taste, everything hot and alive in his mouth, her pulse thriving beneath the skin and breath damp in his hair. Sakura turns against his arms where he's blocked her, swinging her leg in a hard, forceful arc to come at his side and landing her shin there for a shrill, almost caustic second. He's lucky he moves in time to dodge most of the force of her blow.
"I hate how fast you are," she breathes in half a hiss. Fast is emphasized more than hate, but Kakashi knows there isn't much behind the sentiment anyway. Part of him wishes there were.
He lets his hand jab the space beneath her own block. Her arms are too high, protecting her face and chest instead of chest and stomach. It's no wonder he can always win like this—despite her head-on offensive style, her defense is careful, and it's never in quite the right ways. His kunai snags against her shirt, opening the side with an easy rip and just barely breaking the skin.
"You—" she growls without seeming to realize it, and there's a flash of huge, turbulent heat in her eyes before she pulls a fast one on him—her fist collides with his body, just a few inches above his hip and toward his stomach. He snarls out a low, groaning cry, one that raws his throat. If she'd hit any harder or closer to the bone something would have shattered. No question.
He lands more than a few feet away. His back hits the grass in a skidding thump, one that reverberates in his chest and head; his breath leaves him in sore huffs, ragged ones that stretch the muscles of his abdomen in increasingly painful ways. A sick feeling drops inside his stomach like a tear, spreading, growing, clawing its way up his esophagus, and with each second he finds it more difficult to move.
"Sensei!" she calls. Panicked. Thrilled, despite herself—she's proud of her win. The title makes him sicker, even more so when she crouches next to him, lifting up his shirt without a second thought. It's a medic's instinct and nothing else. "Let me see."
"No." It's clipped, but she pays no mind to it. The skin she touches is throbbing terribly with blood, too sensitive, and it fucking hurts. Even so, he can feel the brush of the pads of her fingers pulling all the way to his core, her touch gentle and coated in whispers of chakra against the forming bruise by his hip. It is literally all he can do not to let his muscles jump beneath it, not to let his breath catch in stutters.
"Quit trying to act cool. I'm serious. What if I damaged something?" Her palm flats against his skin and quells some of the flare of pain. Her thumb is near his navel, the side of it grazing the edge, and he finds himself gripping her forearm with a gloved hand. Green eyes snap to his face in an instant, the pink brows contorting above them appropriately, expectedly.
He thinks, as he notices her lashes stick together at the corners of her eyes and the sweat roll from her temple, that she has no idea of how much she's damaged. He's not about to let her find out.
"Sakura, stop. I'm alright." She struggles against his grip and tries to wrench her arm free, but his fingers dig in. "I'm fine." He hates that this is the first time he's touched her—outside of combat, and even then he's been cautious—since the last time those months ago. Kakashi grits his teeth as he makes himself move, makes himself fold into a torturous crouch before standing up fully.
And I'm not your sensei, he wants to add. But he lets the words die on his tongue, suffocating against the roof of his mouth, burning like salt on a wound.
She can ask him for sparring practice all she wants to if it helps her stay alive out in the field. She can seek him out for the things they always do; things like today that act less as learning experiences and more as catharsis, still, even though the war ended two years before.
She can kiss him in a stolen, secret moment, misguided as it was that night, and let his loneliness melt out like a long-awaited sigh before he remembers himself and who she is. She can let him let her think that it's nothing, just a drop in the bucket of his lifelong mistakes, and she can move on from the moment too without broaching it again. She can let them have their strange kind of friendship, their camaraderie and understanding, and she can let them have their distance. She can rip him open in one fell swoop and leave him so completely and utterly reeling, even now.
But she can't do this—can't heal him, can't touch him unless it's to punch the wind out of him again.
He walks away.
"That's it for today," he calls tightly, lowly, then disappears in a whirl of fading chakra before he can think twice about it.
The broth of his ramen is blistering hot, abrasively salty, that unmistakable fermented tang of miso coating his tongue in a way no one could find pleasant. Naruto slurps it up happily beside him, breathing open-mouth around the heat of his noodles since he's too enthused to wait.
"Mmm!" The joyful noise rises at the end, unable to be contained. His feet tap against the wooden wall of the bar where they eat. He is only months younger than Sakura—the same age as her—and yet Kakashi still thinks of him as a kid, that bright, sun-freckled face of his so unabashedly youthful and free. Even in the most serious of times, the most dire, he's never seen him as anything else.
Kakashi often wonders why he's never seen their other two teammates the same way. Sasuke is impulsive, selfish, as insatiable as any spoiled child. And Sakura…Sakura's youth is a story of crying out loud, fighting tooth and nail to the top, clinging to hope that no reasonable person should. They're both so jaded, though, he thinks, and perhaps that's the reason. Naruto couldn't lose his optimism or purpose if he tried.
"Neh, Kakashi-sensei," he says suddenly, chopsticks in the air. "Did you hear that Sasuke's got another patrol thingie? Baa-chan says he'll be gone for, like, almost a year."
"That's too bad," Kakashi replies casually. Distractedly. Of course Sakura had sought him out yesterday, then—that fire in her glare and the power behind every move was so charged and bold, more prominent than usual, as if she'd been bursting with it. He should have known.
"Yeah." Naruto chews as he speaks. "I'm really gonna miss him. I still feel like we just got him back, y'know?"
"Mm." A half-assed shrug seizes his own shoulders, then drops without ceremony. "But a mission is a mission, I suppose. Tsunade-sama probably thinks it's a good fit for him."
"Yeah, you're right. And he likes being alone anyway." If Naruto notices the open display of despondency unfolding over his whiskered face as he talks, he doesn't acknowledge as much. "I think he's leaving tomorrow, so maybe you should go and say bye or something."
"Sure," Kakashi replies instead of saying I'll leave that to you. Sasuke won't give a shit whether they see each other or not—he's probably dying to get out of this village as it is, away from everyone here but this kid sitting half-excited at Ichiraku, the only one who cares enough to love him and be okay with less than nothing in return.
Good fucking riddance, too.
They part ways soon enough, Naruto no doubt heading toward the remains of the Uchiha compounds; Kakashi walks home, meandering absentmindedly through the town streets. Warm, heady smells of food trickle into the road from the restaurants which line it. He smells coffee after some time, all bitter earth, and knows he's passing the cafe near the hospital.
There's an unmistakable flash of pink which he sees through the front window. It has to be her. His eyes close without meaning to, sifts through the passersby seeking strong thrum of her chakra signature. It's hard not to feel it—though perhaps he's more aware of it than he needs to be. What little ramen he did eat sits heavy in his stomach, turning thickly.
He needs to leave. Now.
She sees him when he walks by—of course—and he pretends not to notice. He makes himself forget the line worrying itself between her brows, the downward pull of her lips, the distance in her gaze.
It's better this way, he tells himself. But he has no idea what to believe anymore.
He dreams of her in the strangest ways, and often.
Sometimes they'll simply be talking—he can't hear the words, never remembers them, but he can tell that they speak on friendly terms when they do, passing around vague conversations during missions or in the streets of Konoha. Usually, though, it's a lewd, specific vision he finds himself falling into, waking up hard and hot with bedsheets and clothes sticking to every slick, sweat-coated inch of his body.
He remembers the vivid ones: Sakura fully clothed, kneeling beside him on the floor, running her thumb over every one of his teeth with rapt curiosity and attention; Sakura panting, moaning high and keening in his lap while she comes nearly untouched; Sakura standing in the night ocean, his clothes clinging to him in the water while she's there, soft and naked and washed ghostly with moonlight, waiting for him to lick rivulets of saltwater from the curves of her breasts. And he hates himself for it all so, so deeply, hates how he can't move from where he wakes until he coaxes himself to climax while thinking of her.
The worst part, Kakashi believes, is that it's the relatively innocent reality that hits him the hardest. The memory of what actually happened, lightyears less developed than the events of his dreaming. He finds himself in the same place every morning now, hand wrapped around himself—grip bordering on sufferingly tight before he can even think about it, elbow jabbing repeatedly and purposefully into the ugly bruise on his stomach.
He recalls that night in glimpses: the private, soft way she approached him outside the Hokage building, the way her hand brushed his fingers where they met his gloves; he remembers how they walked toward somewhere quieter to talk at her small request, how she touched her lips to his so unexpectedly, first through his mask…and then, after he froze solid in disbelief, pulled his mask down with her eyes fluttered closed, mouth skimming against his. He remembers how he'd been rendered speechless, shuddering in the caverns of his lungs; how he couldn't bring to mind the last time he'd kissed or been kissed, at least not with such gut-wrenching, head-swimming sweetness.
His mind relives the sensation of her mouth moving against his, how every nerve in his lips frayed and flayed alive against hers. How her mouth tasted. Hot, new, wanting. The shy peek of her tongue against his. How easily he'd let her in. The soothe on the raw ache of his loneliness, so much more infinitely potent than he'd realized. And every time, that's the part that undoes him—the part where it all threatens to make him lose himself completely and then lets him fall into the memory, into her, leaning spent with self-loathing against the shower wall or the wrinkles of his pillows, or sometimes even the floor he finds his forehead crushed against until he can catch his breath.
It's a kiss, so incredibly out of the blue, that has Kakashi stuck in such deep, wet hell. A kiss he knows she sought out of her own loneliness, her own confusion, one that ended once he came up for air with his maybe this—isn't a good idea, and her yeah, you're probably right. A kiss he can't acknowledge without opening the floodgates of things better left contained. Suppressed. Unknown.
A kiss that acts as a punishment for whatever failings he has yet to repent or grieve—and this—this uncontrollable swelter of lust, or obsession, or sick attachment he finds himself irrevocably swallowed within—is his sentence.
He bears it alone, just as he has with every other.
It isn't difficult to avoid her. But then again, he notes with a forced sort of irony, it never has been. He's practically been doing so her whole life.
Making himself scarce is the easiest way to stay discreet. She seeks him out for sparring and he's nowhere to be found, reading on rooftops or standing in alleyways with his chakra signature too low to notice. She comes to deliver a message from Tsunade, but he's conveniently missing in action, taking domestic errands and small missions as they come. She even sends Naruto on hunts in her place, traipsing through the training grounds and their usual haunts to see if he can succeed where she isn't. And for a good while, it works—on his own end, at least.
Kakashi forgets that there are two things he can't avoid, though: the first is his mandatory attendance to all of Tsunade's official meetings.
The scroll falls into his hand from the mouth of the messenger sparrow at his window, and dread fills him in a slow, building trickle. As the Hokage's apprentice, Sakura is always there—and the last time he'd attended one of these was the same night that brought him to where he is now. Sick. Loathing. Needing.
He attends anyway. He has to. And he's late, of course, which draws every eye in the room on him, Sakura's included. Her stare feels like a physical weight on his chest, constricting the longer the meeting goes on; he lets his own eyes turn to her out of a strange kind of spite and hunger.
The way she holds his gaze, as blank as he can make it, tells him that she's only expecting it, and he only allows himself long enough to see the smudge of gray beneath her spring-green eyes before pretending to turn his attention to Tsunade again. Pretending his pulse isn't a hard press at the base of his neck, so high he can feel it radiating in his skin.
It's another asphyxiating hour before he makes it out of there. He doesn't give anyone time to speak to him—all he does is make a hand signal once he exits the room and he's back in his apartment, safe and with a whirl of discomfort lodged in his ribcage.
Safe, he thinks with a rough, humorless laugh. That's a relative term if he's ever heard one.
It's only when he settles into bed for the afternoon that he remembers the second thing he can't avoid: for as skilled at he is at hiding, Sakura is even better at going after what she seeks.
To her credit, she gives him until late that night before knocking on his door.
Kakashi isn't ready to see her. He may never be again, so he opens the door after a half-second of regret plants itself firmly in his conscience.
Sakura glances up at him in the dim light of his hallway, tucking her hair the color of her namesake behind her ears with only part of her usual confidence. He can see the flushed skin above the collar of her shirt, pinker against the white of her medical coat, and a chill breaks over the nape of his neck.
"Can I come in?" she asks mutedly, then walks through the slit of space he's forgotten to occupy in the doorway. His eyes fall closed when her shoulder brushes his chest. She's warmer than he remembers.
"Sakura," he says, though he's not sure which one of them it's meant for. This is so careless of him already. She doesn't respond, only makes to park herself on his sofa across the room.
"Just…sit down." The old leather crinkles softly beneath her weight, smooths beneath her hand when she pats the cushion beside her. "Please, Kakashi-sensei."
Despite how limited his space already is, this room has never felt so small. His fingers shake against the doorknob.
"Alright."
The close of the door encases them in silence. He sits as far away from her as possible, though it only puts less than a foot of space between them. They both just exist there for a moment in the tense quiet—him not breathing, her inhaling thoughtfully, like she's preparing for a fight.
"So, I haven't seen you in a while," she all but accuses, and a thickness grows in his throat. His heartbeat is a clock in his jugular, marking each second with some new awfulness. "Are you avoiding me? Did I do something?"
Yes. Kakashi's jaw tightens at the corners. Yes, you sure as hell did.
"Is this because I beat you the last time we sparred? Because I didn't really take you for a sore loser."
He needs to answer, but he can't find the words. He can't even think. She's close enough to smell, all rainy and warm from the night she passed through to get here. His nose longs to skim against her neck and drink in the world on her skin; his mouth longs to taste any and every part of her. So much. Too much.
"Let me see where I hit you," she speaks after an impatient moment of waiting. Her voice is terse, present, sure now. "I know for a fact that you haven't gotten it healed."
She's right, and he can't argue with her, so he doesn't. If anything, he's only made the bruise worse out of his own twisted, fucked sense of wanting. But if she even comes close to touching him, he'll be in true and real danger—and he can't afford that in the privacy they're sitting in.
"No, it's fine." He rakes the heel of his palm through his hair. "It's pretty much faded, so there's nothing really to look at."
"Okay, well, can I at least try and heal it remotely? You can keep your privacy intact." Surely she's rolling her eyes, but he doesn't let it bait him. He can't give himself the leniency to even joke with her right now.
"It's fine."
"Sen—"
"I'm not going to say it again."
"Why are you being so stubborn about this?" There's a note of disbelief wavering in her question, especially now that her hand is on his arm, keeping him from standing up. Even through the sleeve of his sweater he can feel heat and chakra thrumming in her palm. "I'm just trying to help you." Sakura looks up at him from his side, and he sees as much because he's finally staring back at her.
He prays that the breath which leaves him isn't as loud and weak as it feels. He really can't look at her anymore—his fingers find his brow, pressing into his temple as his eyes close again. Collecting himself. A new wash of rain patters against his window, bringing that wave of gooseflesh back in a cascade over his neck and shoulders and chest.
"What are you doing here, Sakura?" he rasps, falling resignedly toward the back of his couch. An overwhelming sense of not being able to trust himself comes with the words, one that only magnifies when he hears her shifting, can feel the warmth of her body coming so minutely closer.
"I came to see you," she confesses, so much nearer that the edge of her breath rolls over his ear and permeates the fabric of his mask. "I figured that much was obvious."
Does she know? Does she know just how close he is from that small thing alone? He has to force himself not to bite his tongue deeply enough to bleed. "What's wrong, then?"
There is a moment where she says nothing, only inhales softly and then lets it go. The raindrops grow faster outside, wind sending more of them against the glass and creaking panes.
"Honestly, I was worried you were mad at me." He can hear the fingers she smooths against her jaw in a slow tick, skin sliding methodically over skin. "But I couldn't tell if it was because I kissed you, or…or if it was because you knew I wanted to do it again."
The words are full of breath. Kakashi can't believe that they just came out of her mouth. Out of everything she could have possibly said, this is probably the absolute worst, most detrimental thing of them all. He can't…he can't let this continue.
"I'm not mad at you," he responds quietly. Go. Get up. Get her out of here. Or just leave if you have to. The right words appear just as quickly as they ebb, and all he can manage is one thing: "But I can't—I can't give you what you're looking for."
Sakura, as always, is quick to jump on the defensive. "Yeah, actually, you can."
He can almost feel the spark on her tongue, the sureness in her eyes that he can't meet, and he has to suppress a shiver.
"It's not just about some kiss." There's a lace of poison in his response, though he's not sure exactly where it comes from. Kakashi wishes he had an ounce of her conviction. "You wouldn't have come here if that was all."
"And what if it isn't?"
Fuck. The edges of his jaw lock, teeth grinding painfully hard. He shouldn't have said a damn thing. He's walked into his own trap.
"I'm not stupid, you know." She dares to move even closer, ensnaring him, forcing herself into his line of sight, but he closes his eyes. Her voice drops and it hits him in a way that makes his stomach turn. "I see the way you look at me now."
Her lips touch his earlobe in a velvet kiss, light as a whisper, and that small pressure alone is almost enough to do him in. The tip of her finger follows the line of his collarbone through his sweater. He needs to move. He needs force all of this back into some semblance of normality. He needs to be inside her.
"I know you've thought about me." Her tone is not seductive, not calculating—she's simply stating a fact, almost like she's giving a mission report. It still slips under his skin with an unholy heat. "That's why you barely let me touch you anymore, isn't it? Even when we're fighting."
He can't deny it. Not when her lips press against his jaw through his mask. Not when her breath washes over his skin in warm, thawing closeness. But he can deflect.
"This is a mistake, Sakura," he tells her, knowing he's coming unglued piece by piece. "This isn't what you want. Trust me."
I'm not the one you want.
"Yeah? How would you know that? You don't ever talk to me anymore."
For a glorious, horrible moment, he thinks he's won. His insides clench in some strange victory, some sickening free-fall. He opens his eyes without thinking and finds her pouting, almost. Angry. Face flushed, pupils dilating enough to darken her bright eyes.
Dangerous.
"Don't tell me what I want and don't want. I'll decide that for myself."
"Then let me ask you something," he prods in a low but firmer voice, even when the candy pink of her hair fills his vision and her mouth traces just above the seam of his mask. His hands shake at his sides. He refuses to touch her.
"What?" she asks against his skin. Her nail gently scrapes his cheek where her thumb hooks into his mask. Stop. Now. The inside of his chest is hollow, shaking, heart beating in excess.
"Why—"
Sakura doesn't give him a chance to continue, or even to let his thoughts connect to his body. Her thumb pulls his mask down to trace his bottom lip while she takes the top between her own. Something in him breaks at that gentle pull, at that first taste of her mouth. It cracks him so delicately—a hairline fracture that spreads in spiderwebs, splitting the glass inch by careful inch until it shatters all at once.
Against everything he's been telling himself, his hands find her waist, and part of him still has enough sense to push her away. But her hands are on his face and in his hair, locking him perfectly into the kiss. Her mouth is honey-warm, tongue like salt and sugar lemon when it just barely touches his. Testing him. Taunting him. With every pull of her lips, she draws the breath straight from his lungs.
"Sakura," he whispers into her mouth helplessly, hers grazing his while he speaks. He can feel his fingers digging into her hips. "Why are you doing this to me?"
There's a small moment before she sighs quietly against his teeth, hand moving down the bare skin of his neck. The entirety of his upper body immediately erupts in chills.
"Look." The soft shape of her breasts presses against his chest and arm. "I never really ask you for anything." Another kiss, this one as heart-twistingly tender as the very first all that time ago. "Can you at least give me this?"
Kakashi needs to ask her why—why him. Why she can't just take the one she clearly longs for instead of someone this lowly, this broken, this useless, this wholly and utterly alone? Why does she have to disrupt the life he's known how to survive all this time? Why would she want him?Why does it have to be him?
"Kakashi," she says, halting his thoughts, mostly because she's never called him by only his name. Her forehead touches his; their breaths mingle between them. He doesn't know how to feel about it, about any of this, but he knows he feels alive—even if it is in the worst way he deserves.
"Kakashi," she repeats, hands warm and real against his face, her thumbs swiping over his cheekbones. "I want to feel you." Her lips touch his again, full as a promise. "I don't want to feel anything except for you."
And as fucked up as it all is, and lost as she may be, he knows he'd never be strong enough to walk away from her now. At least not tonight. His mouth takes hers without warning, lips and teeth clashing with everything he has until it draws a noise from her throat, and he leans her back until her head rests flat against the cushions, body still but electric beneath his.
If this is what she wants, he thinks, staring down hard into the black-blown green of her eyes, the quick rise and fall of her chest, then he'll give it to her until she can't think of anything else. Anyone else.
She tips up her head to capture his mouth again, almost feral when they meet, and he lets himself go.
Kakashi knows the whole thing is reckless of him. Weak, especially. When he rolls over before the sun rises to find only himself in the bed and the apartment entirely still, he accepts that he's had this coming all along—even if it ripples through him in a way that hurts and seethes in the deepest, darkest corners of himself.
His fingers trace the place where he's been bruising himself for weeks. The place where he can still feel the heat of her tongue along the muscle, the cool of her chakra when she'd healed it. His eyes roam the curved wrinkles of the sheets beside him. Still warm, but empty.
Stupid as he may be, he's no fool. The only thing he knows he'll ever be is alone.