note: If you're coming from my tumblr, this upload has some vital scenes that I haven't published on the blog yet, as well as some changes in pov.
Leaving him is hard. Leaving him is easy. She knows she's vacillating.
Sakura hates vacillating.
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3
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She spends the first week in a hotel; she has no other place to go. Sakura uses the personal credit card that she hasn't touched since her name changed, secure in the knowledge that nobody would ever think to look for Uchiha Sasuke's wife in such a cheap, seedy place.
On Sunday, six days after she burns the afterimage of his cold eyes into her head, Ino shows up with four angry knocks at her door.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, forehead?"
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The blonde forcibly moves Sakura to her apartment in the trendiest part of the city. There are no lectures, no hesitation about being on anybody's side because she and Ino had preceded Naruto and Sasuke, and despite everything that's happened, they are immovable.
And when Sakura haltingly tells her best friend the snippets of the past year that she can remember, it's like peeling off a sweat-slicked shirt in the humid heat of summer, and Sakura's slowly, finally emerging—
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Ino takes time off from the modeling agency, and Sakura's surprised to learn that the woman has moved on from posing for the camera to helping craft the creative for campaigns.
"Yeah, turns out I really have an eye for aesthetics," the blonde had said around a mouthful of dango. "Never thought I'd get sick of dressing up in gorgeous clothes, though."
The two girls spend the next few minutes eating in companionable silence, the noise of the street outside the little food stall muffled by heavy cloth curtains. The dumplings are sweet and heavy, the exact opposite of the light, healthy fare she'd eaten for the past year. Sakura can't remember the last time she'd indulged in dango—can't remember why it's been so long because it's one of her favorite foods.
That night, Sakura gorges herself on sweets until she's almost sick, and she piles onto the couch with Ino and they watch dramatic Korean television shows even though neither of them understands a single word until five in the morning. Sakura knows exactly what Ino's doing, but she can't bring herself to care—to even begin to think beyond the moment. The future scares her and the past makes Sakura nauseous.
For once, she doesn't want to be responsible. For once, she doesn't want to do the right thing.
By the time the credits roll during the last episode, the sunrise has started to creep into Ino's apartment. Sakura stares at her sleeping friend and tries to pretend that the silence doesn't invite memories that she's better off forgetting. Just a few more hours—maybe one more day—before Sakura has to think about any of it; before she has to make phone calls and sign papers and figure it all out.
It's been so long since she's thought about her wants that beginning now feels like trying to knife through heavy waves, and Sakura—Sakura's never been a great swimmer.
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In France, she'd asked him once if he thought they were going to be happy. He'd quieted her with a kiss, the movement of his mouth an echo of the waves breaking against the rocky shore, steady and inexorable.
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Sasuke is generally perceived as a man of few words; someone who makes his intent known through his actions and not what he does or does not say. Those actually close to the Uchiha know that it's really a matter of evasion and misdirection. Naruto used to joke that the "chicken-haired bastard" would have made a great ninja during Nippon's great Sengoku days.
But Sakura had figured out that it was something else entirely: Sasuke had learned to be silent back when every word he'd said was measured against his brother's and always found lacking.
She'd adopted the same habit during their marriage without ever realizing it.
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I know you don't have the answers, she'd said once, before she'd stopped saying anything much at all. She'd laid one hand at the hollow of his throat, feeling his erratic pulse.
You don't have to do it yourself; let me help, let me in.
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Sakura doesn't leave Ino's apartment again for a week. His number never flashes across her cellphone screen, and she avoids every form of media. She can't imagine what he could have said to Fugaku, wonders if the older man had even thought to ask. One morning she was at breakfast, and the next she was not, and to Fugaku there would have been no difference at all.
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Alone in a motel room, the first few days had been the hardest. She would jerk away at night, heart jackknifing in her chest, hands searching the empty sheets next to her for the familiarity of his body. Two, three times a night, the scene would play out like bad reruns of an old movie; his hands and the warmth of his back an imprint that her body desired, and missed.
It took her hours to fall asleep again, the weight of missing him a physical ache in her limbs, an anchor to love that she couldn't deny. It would have been so easy to go back. She thinks he would allow it, would let her apologetically slip herself back into the circle of his arms, back into the empty seat at the dining room table. It would cost him nothing at all.
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She owns what she has done. Her parents would publicly shame her, would disavow their wayward daughter. It was the transfer of assets—the Haruno name and the Haruno connections—that mattered, and the marriage had already occurred. It wouldn't matter if Sakura—in the eyes of god and country, as they say—ruined herself.
Her mother might even be proud; Sakura remembers her parent's marriage, the lack of love and the cold courtesy. Maybe in the end, all Haruno Mebuki really wanted was for her daughter to have the courage to do what she herself hadn't.
If she didn't love Sasuke, if she hadn't loved him for as long as she'd known, Sakura thinks leaving him would have been like ripping off a bandaid: painful but quick, painful but necessary.
But loving Sasuke and being with Sasuke and being in love with Sasuke had been so interwoven into Haruno Sakura's life and narrative that leaving him…
(Leaving him is hard. Leaving him is easy.
She knows she's vacillating.
Sakura hates vacillating.)
This is self-discipline, she tells herself. This is good. This is healing. This is "sometimes love isn't enough". This is a reminder that happiness and Sasuke might be mutually exclusive. What is fourteen years of her love and her want, what is a year of marriage and the heat of his hand on her skin, his mouth rough against hers, what is a year of having him and not being afraid to give all of herself compared to all the unnamed years without him stretching ahead of her, without the certainty of her feelings in her heart?
Freedom, and choice, all at her fingertips.
Sakura picks up her phone, and dials a number.
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Walking into the hospital at the beginning of the six AM shift feels like coming home. The antiseptic smell in the halls; the fluorescent lighting in the older wings; the unpleasant squeak of her shoes against the linoleum floors—these are still all terrible, but it's a terrible that Sakura regards with intimate fondness.
"Sakura-san!"
Shizune is waiting for her outside the elevator on Tsunade's floor, and a rush of warmth buoys Sakura's chest at the unabashed happiness on the older woman's face. The two hug, and Shizune is still beaming when she opens the heavy oak door to Tsunade's office with one arm and ushers Sakura through with the other.
Her mentor's sitting at the same messy desk that Sakura's parked herself by hundreds of times during breaks in her shifts. Her head is bent over a mountain of paperwork, but Sakura can tell by the unhurried movements of the pen that it's mostly just for show.
(Tsunade has never approached paperwork with anything resembling calm.)
"Hello, shishou."
"Nice of you to join us again, Haruno."
Sakura's smile is large, is overflowing and full of sharp teeth that she has kept filed down and hidden for much too long. Tsunade looks up, and under the honeyed gaze of her mentor, with the hum of the hospital beneath her feet, Sakura finally begins to feel substantial again.
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A month's worth of days pass like this:
Drinking shitty breakroom coffee to try and chase the grittiness from her eyes and the sleep from her brain; relearning the tools and the people and trying to figure out where she belongs. Residency isn't something that someone just takes a break from, and her name has always been recognizable.
The rumors are ugly.
But Sakura endures it all with no complaint, because nothing can ever come close to that awful feeling of fading away; of the terrible weightlessness and listlessness that had followed. She has Tsunade and Shizune and Ino, and for the first time in a long while Sakura has herself.
And at night, her exhaustion chases away the ghosts.
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"You don't have to move out yet, you know."
Sakura doesn't look up from her half-painted toes, "I'm surprised that you haven't thrown me out yourself."
"Well, let it never be said that I'm a fan of your four thirty alarms, but I'm serious. If you need more time…"
Ino's voice trails off, and Sakura finally raises her head to meet her best friend's eyes, "Thanks, Ino. Really. But...I think I want to have my own space again. "
Sakura knows her friend will understand the subtext, the beneath the underneath.
Ino regards her for a moment longer, and then she stretches, standing from her favored perch at the end of the couch with an audible crack of her joints, "Whatever you say, forehead. You ready to go?"
Sakura wrinkles her nose at the noise, her attention back to finishing off her toes. The quick-dry topcoat she'd invested in last week is as good as its word, and with a final glance at the glossy red polish, she nods.
"Mhmm."
Ino regards the bottles of polish with a solemnity she usually reserves for work or a particularly beautiful pair of shoes. "Good. They've missed you, Sakura."
Wiggling her toes happily, Sakura beams, "I've missed them too."
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They head to a little okonomiyaki place that they used to frequent back in high school.
The food is cheap and delicious and the atmosphere warm with nostalgia, so when Sakura sees Naruto standing among the small group of her high school friends gathered out front, she squares her shoulders instead of turning back.
"Sakura! It feels like it's been a million fucking years, man." Kiba spots her first, and he matches the irreverent enthusiasm of his greeting with a hug that literally lifts Sakura off of her feet. The laugh that bubbles out of her is as helpless as it is fond, and by the time Kiba sets her back down the rest of her friends have made their way over.
"Stop hogging her, Kiba," Tenten says with a wide smile, while Neji, true to character, gives Ino and Sakura a quiet and dignified hello. The glow of seeing old, familiar faces is nearly enough to mask any lingering apprehension Sakura may have had; it feels normal, almost. Like she's sixteen again and tonight is their regular Friday night dinner after a long week of school.
Everybody starts making their way inside the restaurant, but Sakura lingers with Ino close at her back. Because Naruto still hasn't said a word, and outside of Ino he'd been Sakura's best friend in the entire world.
They stand and regard each other for a moment, and then Naruto smiles and holds out his fist, "Hi, Sakura-chan. Hey, Ino."
Sakura sags with relief; there's nothing strained in his familiar grin, and the two bump fists like it hasn't been more than a year since they'd last done so.
For the first time since walking away from Sasuke, Sakura thinks everything might actually turn out okay.
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The rest of the night is a blur of good food, good company, and warm sake. At eleven, everybody collectively decides to skip taking the metro in favor of walking the short distance to Tenten's apartment, and Sakura's swept out into the night in a huddle of laughter.
Pink-cheeked, she falls to the back of the group, content to listen to the hum of conversation ahead. Naruto eventually drifts back to walk beside her, and as uncharacteristic as the quiet is for him, Sakura enjoys it.
A light pressure on her arm abruptly halts her steps, and Sakura stares down at Naruto's hand in confusion.
He shakes his head when she opens her mouth questioningly, his blue eyes luminous in the moonlight.
"I'm glad you left."
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"I mean, it blows for the bastard, and shit I swear he misses you but—"
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"I'm glad, Sakura-chan. You haven't sounded happy in a long while."
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It's like being slapped awake from a bad dream; for the rest of the night, Sakura shakes from the relief of hearing someone else say it out loud.
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It'd been a week before her thirteenth birthday when Sakura had first begun to get an inkling of what was to come:
Kiza, I told-I told you that you should have stopped months ago—
Mebuki, I know. I-I know…
I can't believe he would ask for such a thing—
Frozen in the shadow of the landing, it'd been her mother's quiet sobs that'd finally chased Sakura from her hiding place.
Sometimes, she still dreams about that moment. Sometimes, she wishes that her younger self had had the courage to say no.
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She sends him the divorce papers on a rainy Monday. The brown packet is thick and heavy, not with significance but legalese. The hard part had never been filing the papers. The hard part had always been in her head.
Her lawyer had remarked good naturedly that hers was the most carefully thorough divorce he'd ever helped file. Sakura had laughed, because wasn't that how it'd began? How nice (how awful) for it all to come full circle.
By the time she leaves the attorney's office, the clouds have cleared and the day is drenched in golden, late-afternoon sunlight. Sakura takes it as a sign.
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It's a Wednesday and she is running on less than three hours of sleep and not enough caffeine when he finds her.
Finds, because Sakura's absolutely sure that Sasuke has no business being in the diagnostics wing on the fourth floor of her hospital, a good thirty minutes away from his estate and even further from his offices.
There are dark rings under Sakura's eyes, and her unkempt hair (has it been three days since she's had time to wash it? four?) is in a messy high ponytail; her scrubs are on their last legs and she's pretty sure her actual soul is going the same way. Sasuke, as usual, is inscrutable and perfect.
Looking like he'd just walked out of what used to be her best dreams, her worst nightmares.
For a second, Sakura feels Uchiha again, the year she'd spent in that house heavy in the clench of her fists and the widening of her eyes; in the way she freezes behind the nurses' station. She is too young and too old all at once; she is both helpless, and hopeless.
"Haruno-senpai?"
Dazed, Sakura looks down at the nurse holding out the chart she'd asked for just a moment prior, "Ah, yes. Thank you."
With that, the buzzing in her ear subsides, and she owns herself—is Haruno-san, Haruno-senpai, Haruno-sama—again.
Still, Sakura can feel his attention on her, even across the room.
One last time.
She lifts her head, straightens her spine, subtly shifts until her feet are planted a little wider apart. Then, Sakura looks Uchiha Sasuke—the one she'd loved far longer than she'd ever loved herself; the one she'd reconstructed her entire world for—in the eye, and she shakes her head. Slowly, deliberately.
She turns her back on him, and she walks away.
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It's easier this time.
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(Later, Sakura thinks she must have imagined the way every line of his body had imperceptibly tightened with pain.)
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So what happens now?
It'd slipped out before Sakura could stop herself. In the days and weeks since Itachi's disappearance, there'd been so many things—a million things more important than her situation. But their arrangement had gnawed at her insides, and now, in the first quiet moment they've had alone since she'd watched the color drain from his face and something fundamental break in his eyes—
She'd opened her mouth, and ruined it.
I marry you.
Sasuke hadn't even moved; sprawled in the shade of a chestnut tree with his head pillowed on his arms, he'd looked every inch the relaxed, self-assured boy he'd been before...before.
But Sakura had known better; Sakura knew what to look for.
Sasuke-kun. You don't have to...I-I know how you feel.
The leaves had shifted in a soft breeze, a slant of sunshine falling across Sasuke's face so that when he finally opened his eyes, they'd become almost mercury-bright.
Don't leave.
The words had been whisper-quiet, and to this day Sakura doesn't know if she'd just imagined them in the rustling of the tree.
But she'd smiled down at the teenage boy next to her, one hand brushing the bangs back from his face, and said okay.
She'd stayed.
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"Late night, Haruno-san?" a nurse calls as Sakura hurries towards the closing elevator doors.
"I like to think of it as calling an early day," she manages to get out just as she slides into the empty cab. The laughing nurse's kind face is the last thing Sakura sees before the doors ding shut.
It's barely four AM on a Sunday morning, and the hospital is the quietest that it'll ever be. She'd had to scrub in on an emergency surgery that'd gone on for longer than expected, and then had stayed to file the paperwork. The other doctors had long headed home, and when Sakura steps out into the parking garage, it's nearly empty, the only other sounds the loud echo of her footsteps and the sporadic buzzing of fluorescent lights.
And because Sakura really is so, so tired, she forgets to be wary.
The sudden pain at the back of her neck is both explosive and abrupt. The darkness that follows, immediate.
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Sakura comes to with a gasp; she comes to and she thinks she's suffocating, physically choking on the blackness, so heavy that it has gathered substance.
But no, a second later she recognizes the roughness against her face, the scratchy grain of it familiar in a distant way. She'd felt it between her fingertips before, hauling dirt and plants down to the garden that one summer she'd got it in her head to grow tomatoes for Sasuke, not that she'd had much success—
When Sakura figures it out, it's like that moment in the middle of the night when you wake up mid-fall. You know what's going to happen; you feel the ache before you even hit the ground.
By then, it's a question of momentum, and you are an object that's remained in motion for too long.
Tied up in the dark with a burlap sack around her head, this is how Sakura feels: like she is in the middle of a very long and inevitable fall, the only other thing solid underneath her feet the anticipation of the crash; a body against the floor.
tbc
note: This is going to get long. The contents aren't related to the fic itself so feel free to skip it! And just as a reminder, I post wip's and more frequent, bite-sized updates on my tumblr (username swingsdown; you can follow or just track the tag, fic: the awful daring).
First of all, to anybody who's been sticking around since the beginning or has checked in regularly during the long, long wait between chapters: thank you so much! Every kind message I get from you guys just—it makes a huge difference, and I really, truly appreciate it. Which leads to my second point...
While I really am sorry about taking so long to update, I just want to remind everybody that fanwork creators do what they do for fun. They get nothing out of making fanart or writing fanfic besides the satisfaction of providing content to the fandoms that they love. Just as artists aren't obligated to draw requests just because someone asked, authors aren't obligated to adhere to an update schedule, or to update at all. Out of all the hours that I pour into my writing, at the end of the day I don't even have something that I can put into a portfolio. I write fic because I enjoy it, and because I love the fandom, but real life takes precedence always.
I've been called some awful things for not updating, and it's messages like those that discourage me more than anything else. So, please be considerate of fanfic authors; something that took you minutes to read could have taken literal days' worth of hours to write, and you never know what other responsibilities they have going on irl.
Getting off my soapbox now. I hope you all enjoyed this chapter; it's been a while and a lot of things happened in a very short amount of words, so as always I appreciate any and all feedback that you guys are willing to give me. Thank you so much for reading!
(p.s There's a Miraculous Ladybug reference in there somewhere. Bonus to whoever points it out first.)
