Wind-Up Dolls
Summary: A fairy boy and a nothing girl find each other. AU Homeless SasuSaku
A/N: Ino is 20, Shikamaru is 18, Konan is 41, Itachi is 23, Kisame is 30, and Madara is in his early 70s. More ages to come, as I introduce people.
Songs listened to: "Ashes on Your Eyes" by Deb Talan and "Ghosting" by Mother Mother.
"Sasuke, baby. Come here," says his mother. Her palms feel like wax paper against his cheeks, her lips like sand bones against his forehead.
"Yeugh," Sasuke gargles, wiping invisible traces of saliva from his forehead, though a smile lingers at the corners of his mouth. Sasuke is a mama's boy.
Maybe it's pity.
Chapter Eight
Sasuke
They're green. Like glass marbles with a bullet hole going through them. The hole creates a vacuum when she steps back away from the light, and the black swallows the green until there's nothing but a tiny iridescent rim. Her blistered lower lip trembles and a tiny whimper escapes her pinched mouth. He raises a hand out to maybe touch her or gesture, but his intentions are lost.
"Sorry," she says again, backing up until she's bumping clumsy bones of shoulders and elbows against the cabinet, "Um."
Careful, he tries to tell her. But the words don't come out. He feels like maybe he's stepped through a wormhole and into an alternate dimension. He looks back out the door and the circus grounds look exactly the same as they have the past two days.
"I don't know what you want-" he stops himself and tries again, "I don't know who you are."
She settles back on her haunches, twisting the joints of her fingers into the matted strings of her hair. She chews the wobbling lip between her teeth and he can barely see her. He shuts the door behind him so they are completely swallowed by darkness and his eyes can adjust.
"You're doing it wrong," says the girl, Sakura, the bitten lip tilting into a smile that's directed more toward herself than he, "You're not supposed to lock yourself in a room with the crazy girl."
"The crazy girl's not supposed to know she's crazy," he quips, and flicks on the light switch. The candied rainbow Christmas lights Karin strung up around the trailer explode into stardust, and the brittle boned phantom in his trailer bursts into bloom.
"You're a ghost," he says. Her gaze drops from the gumdrop bulbs and she grins.
Sasuke knocks on his uncle's trailer door, Sakura hunched behind him with her knuckles pressed into the hollows of her cheeks. The way she walks, exists, he's not sure if she realizes that she mirrors an abused animal with its tail between its legs. She migrates closer to him, orbits around his body in uncertain awkward spirals. He wonders where she came from and why she chose to cling to him in this mother duck routine. He is not the redemption she is looking for.
The old man opens the door, draped like a wilted stock of ivy over his cane.
"Uncle," Sasuke says in introduction, "This is Sakura. I found her in my trailer."
Sakura emerges from the shadows behind him and steps into the light streaming from the open doorway. She becomes something different. Still awkward and wounded, but unafraid and indomitable. She outstretches her hands like the fluttering wings of a heron losing it's balance, and almost stumbles into Madara's reciprocated gesture. She takes his membrane skin into both hands like a baby bird she can't release in fear that it might hop away.
"What brings you to my circus, and into the quarters of my nephew so late at night, Sakura?" he asks in a paper-thin sheen of understanding. And Sasuke wonders if Sakura can see that his uncle's eyes are those of a preying hawk.
"I came to see the fairy boy," she confesses in excited earnestness. Madara looks over her and stares at Sasuke, who presumes that he is the fairy boy. His leotard has the glittered wings emblazoned on the back, after all. He wishes he were wearing something else while he stands out in the cold, "And...and I saw your circus. I want to be part of it; I don't care how. Please."
Madara removes his hands from hers and grabs her by the chin, turning the facets of her skin to catch the light. She is grit and blisters and bones. A body exhumed from the grave.
"Sasuke?" Madara asks in mild amusement, and Sasuke immediately regrets where this is going, "What do you say?"
The old man releases Sakura and she turns around to look at him, her knobby fingers knotting the fabric at the hem of her sweater. She is looking at him, asking him to sell her soul to the devil. Her fate lives in hands.
He pulls her heart from her chest and hands it to his uncle. "Let her stay." It beats mournfully and desperately as Madara swallows it whole, and it vanishes into the devil's gullet.
Sakura
She shares a room with Ino now, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty queen. In purple footy pajamas. With little jumping sheep on them. But Sakura can't help but acknowledge that Ino still looks hot.
"Let me lay down some ground rules. You will not touch anything. You will not look at anything. You will not speak unless spoken to, and-" Ino declares, voice oozing with sardonic inflection until she bursts into giggles, "And you will not take anything I just said seriously. No, really. I'm kidding. Make yourself at home."
Ino throws herself back on her trundle bed, bounces an inch into the air, and sprawls out across the rumpled comforter. Lying on her back, she fishes through a mini fridge upside down for a few seconds, shoving aside a half-eaten bag of carrots and container of hummus before finding a bottle of Veg8able. Sakura was never very fond of tomato juice, back when she was still in high school with her much loved bottle of flavored water tucked inside her messenger bag. But she accepts the offered beverage with eager thirst, cranking the bottle open and letting its uncomfortable tang fill her nose and throat.
"I thought so," Ino continues, and after another moment's consideration, throws her the bag of carrots as well.
Sakura sits on the floor and munches quietly while Ino sings along with the radio, prancing around the room as she adjusts her belongings self-consciously. Her room is a palace of delicacy, lace and scarves and squash blossom jewelry curtained over thumbtacks and knobs and lamps. Only after Sakura has finished eating and her stomach hurts does Ino settle down again, draping herself decoratively over her bedpost.
"Okay, to tell you the truth, I know I said to make yourself at home, but...you're filthy. And I'm fine with sharing a room with you because you're like the size of my little toe, but you're in serious need of a bath," Ino says, fingering a clump of Sakura's hair, "And I'd actually suggest you cut all this off and start over."
"Um," says Sakura.
It's midnight and Sakura is in Konan's big brass tub. The water is lukewarm but soothing in its own right as Ino aids her in washing away three weeks worth of street life.
"I don't care if you're blind. There's just something wrong with a grown man being in the same room as a bathing child," says Ino, scrubbing furiously at Sakura's dirt-mottled skin. The fire dancer smiles lazily from his place in the corner, where he and Konan are linking fingers and meditating on the woman's pile of tasseled throw pillows.
"Ouch," Sakura grunts as her roommate's fingers get caught in a tangle of gnarls, "Itachi doesn't bother me."
Itachi is handsome in his crown of saltwater dipped crystals, with his face of hardened lines and freckles from a childhood of accidents. He is the kind of man that if she met him at a bar, she wouldn't mind a night of sinful dancing ending in nothing. She could forgive him for forgetting.
His lips twitch but he doesn't say anything.
Sakura braces her neck against the unyielding rim of the bathtub as Ino brings the scissors to her mane, a carpet of paper towels beneath her head to catch what can't be salvaged. She closes her eyes and remembers her mother, blonde-haired and almond-eyed.
I'm home, Sakura thinks to Tsunade, and hopes to God she can hear her.
Fugaku is a fire breather, a dancer. He takes Itachi outside at dawn and twilight to practice and Sasuke wishes on them like stars.
"You'll be like your father, someday," his momma promises, ruffling raven feather hair with her fingers. And even though it's exactly what he wants to hear, her sadness when she says it makes him scared.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Also I don't own Miss Mary Mack from the last chapter. Whoops.
A/N: So, like, short short chapter, huh? It's like 1,400 words. Most chapters are in the 2,000 to 3,000 range, and I consider those short. So this is like, whack MT over the head with a laptop short, I guess. Anyway, a little Sasuke/Sakura interaction. I wrote this in between loads of laundry and dishes and math help from my mother during commercial breaks. I like Ino. I've been looking forward to writing her for a very very long time. I hope you like her, too. (Her opening meanness was sort of in reference to my story called Somebody...I was sort of making fun of myself, I guess.)
Anyway, thank you so much for your patience and your reviews! I very much appreciate it. Please give me your thoughts; they make my day.
-MT