It's Itasaku week and yeah I'm technically 12 minutes late but shhh. Here's to a week of new oneshots every day. Get excited, she typed as she fell asleep at her keyboard...


Meeting

(Itasaku Festival Day 1)

You were very much the moon to me.

The world had spun me on its axis 4048 times before I saw you. It was a fleeting glimpse of a back that would never turn to see me.

I saw you in the grim lines of Naruto's face, in the darkness in Sasuke's eyes. You were the pain that pooled in my tears when he so coldly pushed me away.

You were the sound of Sasuke's footsteps crunching over gravel as he said "thank you".

I stepped in your shadows wherever I went. When I saw him again after so many years, I think it was through your sorrow that I saw him then. The hollow ache of disappointment and helplessness in my chest must have been yours too. And for a long time, you were a part of the hate that pushed me to train so hard until my skin blistered and popped and my bones shattered against the hardened earth.

I blamed you for the longest time. Even when you returned him to me broken and battered, I hated you. Everything was your fault. His scars, his fears, even his missing hand was all your fault and yours alone.

Eventually we promised that things were all right. We pretended that the you-shaped hole in his entire existence wasn't there. Slowly, his smiles began to return. He took long missions, bringing me back meaningless souvenirs and trinkets. The lingering looks became kisses and we got married.

I suppose it was only then that I thought of you again.

I found you sitting in an old box in the attic. Besides the family portrait in the living room, I had never seen your face before. But there were your clothes, your old weapons. I found your awards from school and the scroll you'd earned during your Chunin exams. There was a picture of you holding newborn Sasuke and it made my stomach turn violently. I knew that look in your eyes. And for the first time in a while I remembered what it was like to see the echoes of you in everything he said and did.

I still find you in him. He tells me that you used to poke him in the forehead. When he does it to me, I can't help but feel special and second-best all at the same time. I can hear your laugh in him even though I've never heard you speak before.

When he compliments our daughter, he tells me that he wants to be more like you than like your father. He says he wants to treasure the family that you wanted him to have. He makes me cry when he says that, though I don't think he understands why exactly.

I feel like you took a part of him away from me that I'll never get back. Can't I have him back? Who are you that he clings so fiercely to you?

In the end, you were very much the moon to me. If Sasuke is my sun, the light that I see, the warmth that shines upon me when he's here, then you are the moon. If the sun disappears, so do I. Freezing to death, flinging out into the far corners of space without an anchor.

With you gone, the world continues to turn. The tides are stagnant, and that brightness that once graced the sky is missing. There's a vague ache that can't quite be explained. And yet day turns to night. The stars continue to pass by overhead.

And so you are the moon to us.

In some ways, I am glad for your absence. Because the fragments of you that I see in Sasuke, the pieces of you that I can pick up from your breadcrumb trail tell me a story of a love that is wasteful and a heart that is gentle. And I somehow wonder, if you had been here, if we had met, would I have loved you instead?