loss of celestial objects, readjusted gravitational pulls
rating: k+
genre: angst/friendship/romance
pairings: kakasaku, briefly mentioned shikatem
POV: Sakura
warnings: major character death, dealing with grief
other notes: prompt from kelzen in the ks tag
word count: 5,492
The worst part of waking up is that it's so familiar.
She's almost surprised that it's Kakashi-sensei's masked face hanging over her, waiting for Sakura to orient herself, and not a blank porcelain one.
She wishes desperately, incoherently for a moment that it had all been just a dream, even the good things, maybe especially the good things. Instead, Kakashi-sensei's face is a blank mask of grief.
He might as well be made of porcelain for how he might shatter under her touch.
"No," she rasps.
But she is not thirteen again, and she knows already that Naruto and Sasuke-kun are so much further away than no longer in the Village.
"Sensei, please, no."
Kakashi-sensei rests a terrible, gentle hand on her head, his eyes closing as if to ward off her plea.
If she were thirteen, Sakura thinks she would cry. Great, horrible, soul-shaking things to shatter her rib cage and leave her bleeding. But there is nothing. Only silence.
Sakura inhales, but her lungs are un-punctured, her heart pumping firm.
Sakura inhales, and stands.
Tsunade-shishō will want to see her. If she's awoken. If the Infinite Tsukuyomi has even broken.
If it hasn't?
Sakura stands and she looks to her sensei for direction.
"You're the last to wake," Kakashi-sensei tells her as he watches her, wary.
Sakura wasn't trapped, but she wonders if this is what it was to wake from perfect dreams. Except, no, Sasuke-kun was not that cruel. She had only slept the still sleep of the dreamless.
"Then shishō will have work for me," Sakura declares. "I've slept long enough."
Kakashi-sensei looks at her for a long moment, but eventually he sighs, his shoulders slumping further, and he leads her to the Godaime.
Tsunade-shishō's eyes are hazel-bright. She strips Sakura to the bone, looking for weakness.
Sakura doesn't know what she finds, but she sends Sakura to a series of tents set up for healing and doesn't bother with questions of any sort. "I have more pressing concerns at the moment," she barks.
Katō Dan bled out under Senju Tsunade's hands, Sakura reminds herself, and so Senju Tsunade ran and ran and ran, only to find that there is no outrunning blood. As she shifts from patient to patient to patient, Sakura exams the dirt under her nails, the gore in the creases of her palms.
There is no impulse to run in her bones, scalding the bottoms of her feet, baying at her heels.
There is nothing to run to. There is nothing to run from.
She is not, Sakura reminds herself, the next reflection of an ever spiralling pattern: she is herself only. She needs not repeat the mistakes of her earlier incarnations. She is not her teacher.
When she bothers to look up from surgery, someone has brought her food.
It tastes like ashes in her mouth.
She swallows razors and does her best to not cough up blood.
##
"They'll be buried together." Sakura's voice slices through the shouting like a lightning-infused blade, leaving cauterized edges and ozone in its wake.
The room stills.
Her gaze is steady and cold as she stares at each individual in turn.
She's not glaring; she wonders why they flinch.
"They'll be buried together," she repeats.
No one on the council says anything about giving Uchiha Sasuke a traitor's burial again.
##
Ino bustles into Sakura's apartment after picking the lock (a formality, in a ninja village, but one that kindly requests that interlopers stay out). She tosses the two garment bags across Sakura's spread of textbooks and scrolls and notes.
"What?" Sakura demands, scowling vaguely up at Ino with a precariously rescued coffee cup and pen in her hands.
"Two hours. Choose an outfit," Ino orders, her hands on her hips.
Ino is too pale and too sharp, her clavicle and the bones of her face showing the stress of too much work and too much stress and not enough sleep. Her eyes are all the more blue for their red rims. She's clad in a fantastic kimono and would look the part of the Yamanaka Clan Head down to the tips of her geta if not for the combination of impiety and sheer ridiculousness that is her bright orange mofuku.
Sakura wonders how in the hells she managed to convince a seamstress to make it.
Her throat aches for the sharp edges caught there.
But there are other, more important things to deal with than the phantom blades she's doing her best to swallow. The very important, very top secret research she's doing, for one. Ino's presence, for another.
"I don't–" she tries to start, but Ino interrupts.
"Clothes. Choose some. I'm not totally certain of the fit since my last measurements for you are way too old, but they'll do. Then hair. Then you're going to eat something so that you don't fall over half-way through. And then, we're meeting everyone before hand before we can get swamped by idiots who want to gloat while pretending to give their condolences."
Sakura would argue, but arguing with Ino is more energy than it's worth.
Sakura does, after all, need clothes.
The first garment bag is the traditional black outfit for shinobi attending a funeral. Sakura hasn't worn one since the Sandaime's death.
And she should. She should go with the traditional shinobi wear because that was the dream, right? To be shinobi?
But then she opens the second bag and her breath catches, ripping her throat open, shattering her rib cage, a terrible and silent implosion. But then she exhales and it is a steady thing and Sakura does not break.
She runs a steady hand through the silk.
Ino's mofuku is a wonderful outrageous thing made for laughter.
Sakura's mofuku is a traditional black. Except for the way that foxes chase hawkes chase foxes in dizzy spirals, picked out in intricate embroidery with sparkling gems for eyes.
"Ino," Sakura rasps, "I can't take this. How did you even find someone to make this in enough time? You must have paid a fortune."
"Nonsense," Ino declares. "I can afford it. Plus, once I said who it was for, Ishioka-sensei insisted."
Sakura's eyes go impossibly wider. Ino sent to the capital? And the most sought after maker of kimono agreed? There are nobles who would give their first-born for a kimono made by Ishioka-sensei.
"Ino." There is nothing else Sakura can say.
"The kimono, then," Ino announces, nodding. "Good. Let's hope those measurements were accurate enough."
The kimono fits and Sakura doesn't recognize the woman in the mirror. She fiddles with the obi, adjusting the kunai there so that the edges of the blade aren't so obvious.
Ino draws her out of the bedroom and away from the ghost in the mirror with the promise of fresh tea and left-over onigiri. Sakura isn't hungry but she chokes down the food anyways, and then sips at the warm tea.
Ino leaves her to her silence until some signal, and then she's ushering Sakura out of the apartment, down the stairs and through the streets.
Konoha is still filled with weeping sores and burned out shells where buildings used to be. Non-essential buildings have not been the priority, and the wounds that the Village has taken are still evident. The streets, too, are more quiet than Sakura remembers from her childhood, no longer bright bustling things as Ino leads her through them.
Finally, they end up outside the Academy. The rest of the Konoha 12, what's left of it, is waiting, their conversation trailing off.
Everyone else is in traditional funeral wear, but each of them is wearing a bright orange ribbon tied around their arm or their forehead or their neck.
They all look so tired and ancient and sad.
Sakura swallows scalpels that tear small bleeding things into her softest parts.
She tries to gift them with smiles, but she can't remember the right combination of muscles.
It's another silent pilgrimage as they walk together to the cemetery, Sakura and Ino in the lead.
There are too many headstones. Far too many headstones. The flowers are all fresh.
Sakura stops, arrested, but the others break around her, heading unerringly on.
"Sakura?" Ino asks, gentle, more gentle than Sakura has ever heard her.
Sakura shakes her head, and Ino sighs, but lets her stay, untangling their arms to walk ahead. Sakura stays stock still and watches as the Konoha 12 (or should it be 9 now?) orient themselves around two headstones in particular.
Tenten and Lee spin wobbling circles around one another, their gravity off for their missing celestial body.
Kiba and Shino and Akamaru buffer Hinata from the outside world.
Shikamaru and Chōji shift as Ino joins them, the three of them a stable, easy base for the rest of them to stand from.
The stones are bright and clean and new, the kanji etched beautifully. And, fittingly, they are side-by-side.
Sakura breathes past her aching ribs, and walks forward to stand alone.
And then they wait.
For the beginning of the end.
Slowly, she becomes aware of others filtering in.
And then Sai is at her side, his arms filled with flowers, two of which he hands to her.
Sakura takes them, careful not to tighten her hands around the sunflowers' stems tight enough that they break.
Civilians are amongst the shinobi, here for their lost hero.
A few members of the decimated police force stand proudly in their uniforms, uchiwa held delicately before them.
ANBU skulk in the shadows.
Kakashi-sensei appears at her shoulder.
She blinks.
Sakura hasn't seen him since they returned to Konoha.
He's wearing his usual jounin vest, a brightly coloured book peeping out from a pocket and Sakura wants to laugh because he hasn't changed one bit and then she has to bite back on the real laughter threatening at her lips because he hasn't changed one bit.
She might be twelve or thirteen or fifteen again, surprised that he's bothered to show up to practice he's that late.
Kakashi-sensei grips her shoulder.
Yamato-taichō arrives, looking haggard in traditional garb. He giggles when he sees his sempai, a choking wet thing, more tears than humour.
And then Tsunade-shishō is in front of them: young with ancient eyes that hold so much death and loss and laughter in them. Resting on her chest is a crystal, glinting in the weak sunlight.
When she speaks, her voice rolls through the gathered crowd, splitting them open like thunder does the air.
Friendship, she says. Friendship and rivalry and brotherhood. Loss and pain and so much kindness and so much rage.
Stars falling from the sky, so beautiful as they burn through the atmosphere, as they burn themselves out.
The Will of Fire, she says.
And all Sakura can hear is "jinchūriki jinchūriki jinchūriki (sacrifice sacrifice sacrifice)".
When it is finished and all there is is silence and the rolling echo of thunder, Kakashi-sensei's hand is still on her shoulder.
They step forward together to place flowers at the feet of their dead.
Sasuke, Sakura remembers, always hated it when girls tried to give him flowers.
Naruto never could quite keep the meanings straight.
When she takes her kimono off, she folds it carefully, packs it up with sachets of lavender and cedar, and puts it away in a dark, lonely corner. Never to be worn again.
##
She works at the hospital and the Hokage's office and local missions, barely stopping to sleep because there is just too much to do, too many empty spots left by bodies that are now sleeping under cold, unforgiving earth to fill.
Everyone is run ragged, trying to cope.
Slowly though, slowly they patch their frayed edges, fill in the gaping holes. Slowly though, there is less and less need to be everywhere and there is more and more time for things like sleep and food and spending time doing something that isn't outright for the Village.
Sakura still works, barely stopping for sleep.
There is almost always food waiting for her when she finally takes a moment to breathe.
She seems to have lost her taste for dango somewhere along the way. It's too sweet now, sticking to the back of her throat like dead flowers.
##
"I don't want it," Kakashi-sensei states placidly, rocking backwards in front of the desk.
Sakura is hunched over a stack of paperwork at another small desk shoved into the corner as Kakashi-sensei and Tsunade-shishō talk.
"Tough fucking luck," Tsunade-shishō snaps. "Neither did I."
"I'm of more use in the field."
Tsunade-shishō slams her fist down, making another stack of paperwork wobble precariously. It steadies.
"No, you're not. A year ago that was true, but things are quiet enough that a change in leadership isn't going to be destabilizing."
"But–"
"I'm tired," Tsunade-shishō sighs. She sounds old in a way that Sakura has never heard before. "I'm old and I'm tired and I'm heartsick. I can't wear the Hat anymore, Hatake, not like the Hokage needs to."
She grasps the crystal around her neck.
Sakura gapes. Because she has never, ever heard Senju Tsunade admit to weakness.
"I'm so tired."
"I don't want it," Kakashi-sensei says again, but this time it is with the voice of a man resigned to his fate.
He looks tall and brave and mighty clad in Hokage robes, flames chasing up the hem.
She thinks of the jōnin who walked in the door that first day and let an eraser fall on his head. They were so unimpressed, and now look. Now look.
Now look where they all are.
Kakashi-sensei's gaze catches on her. He's so far away, but she can feel the weight of it like a pat on the head, like a hand at the small of her back.
She smiles as wide as she can.
It's a shallow imitation of the bright grins she once sported for him. She hopes that it's enough.
##
Kakashi-sensei shows up and drags her out of the hospital for lunch.
Apparently, he's avoiding Shikamaru and paperwork. Again.
And Sakura is the only person other than Ino who can successfully hold Shikamaru off with just a look. So Kakashi-sensei is taking advantage of the respite she offers. Again.
She'd complain about him using her as an accessory to truancy, but he bribed her with the really good sushi place that just opened and Sakura is weak for free meals.
"How did the last meeting go with the ambassador from Kiri go, Kakashi-sensei?" she asks.
He places a gentle finger on her wrist and she whips her gaze up from where she's been reaching for piece of sashimi, startled.
"I'm not your sensei anymore, Sakura-chan, you can just call me Kakashi."
Sakura isn't quite sure exactly how wide her eyes are, but they're wide, she knows.
That's– She can't– But he's– And they–
"I–" she starts.
"Just, think about it," Kakashi says.
Sakura nods, and looks around, dazed.
By the time she gathered herself enough to pay attention to conversation again, Kakashi-sensei has already devoured more than his half of the food. Again. Without her seeing his face. Again.
She glares at him, and he just grins from behind his mask.
##
Some days, when the world is just too loud and close, when her throat bleeds for the blades and screams trapped there, when her hands threaten to shake; some days, Sakura crawls into Sai's studio through the wide open window and hides in his bed.
Sai doesn't mind. He fills the space around her with the soft not-sound of brushstrokes and breath. He doesn't make her talk.
(Ino badgers her about her feelings until Sakura snaps and then she rants about her latest boyfriend or the most recent paperwork fuck up in T&I or her new pair of shoes or the way she made her great-uncle turn purple at the last clan meeting.
Shikamaru lets her lie beside him and watch clouds. If he's feeling particularly masochistic, he goads her into playing shogi. She never wins.
Chōji for some reason decides that she has an excellent palate and so drags her out to try new restaurants and food carts and bars.
Lee runs with her until they drop and then crawls with her until they face plant and then they get up and spar until all they are is bruises and sweat and wide, pained grins.
Tenten helpfully suggests potential close range weapons when Sakura decides she wants to add to her arsenal. She decides on a tessen. Tenten then helpfully beats the necessary skills for wielding the battle-fan into her so that she doesn't have to think of why she chose it.
Kiba is the only one who tries to get her drunk. It doesn't work, but she does get a lot of free alcohol out of it.
Shino lets her talk his ear off about new medicinal procedures, provided that she lets him do the same for whatever his latest project is. He gives surprising insight from directions Sakura would never consider.
Hinata looks right through Sakura with her all-seeing eyes. There is something fierce and terrible about her now. They study fūinjutsu together and speak of nothing else.)
Sai doesn't make her talk, but some days when she finally crawls back out from under his covers, he leaves paintings for her to trip over.
She doesn't need his paintings: she sees those eyes in her dreams.
##
"No," Kakashi snarls.
Sakura stands, resolute. "I more than qualify." She raises her chin.
His face twists with rage and something else Sakura doesn't quite know how to name. On another person she might call it fear.
"No."
"There's no reason to refuse my application."
Kakashi's eyes blaze and the air around him trembles. "I said no, Sakura."
Her mouth curls with fury. "You can't do this."
"I'm Hokage," he says, resolute. "I make the final decision in regards to ANBU. And I say no."
She leaves before the tower is nothing but a smoking wreck.
Deep, deep in the farthest recess of her memory, a twelve year old spectre shakes with spiteful laughter.
She stalks down the stairs and cannot catch up with the quickly disappearing figures in front of her.
##
When the fine for the destroyed training ground arrives, Sakura pays it without complaint.
She's too angry to feel bad about the poor genin in the finance department who she leaves shaking with fear.
##
Sakura really isn't expecting to get dragged across half of Konoha by a pack of particularly tenacious ninken.
She could get away of course, but she's actually a fan of the dumb mutts, and she'll never be mad enough to hurt them on purpose just so that she can avoid seeing Kakashi.
Although, when they finally arrive at their destination, she's reconsidering that resolution.
She dreams enough of headstones as it is.
"Sakura," her Hokage says lightly, "so glad you could make it."
"Fuck you, Hatake," she spits as Bull disengages his jaws from around her thigh with an apologetic look.
She glares at him.
He shrugs.
The pack is smart; as soon as they let go, they disappear.
Better to be far, far away.
Sakura wants to shatter something. Wants to break and rend and tear and be angry.
But she stands amidst all of their dead, and there is nowhere for her to put her feet that they will not slip out from under her.
She keeps her eyes fixed firmly on Kakashi's face and not anywhere else.
"What do you want?" she demands.
"You can't do this to yourself," he says.
Sakura clenches her fists. "I'm perfectly qualified for ANBU, and you know it."
"You can't keep killing yourself and pretend that it's living," Kakashi snaps.
Sakura freezes, ice down her back as Kakashi presses down hard enough to shatter her.
"You don't get to kill yourself with work," Kakashi continues, relentless, like a dangerous man who knows just exactly where to stick a blade, "and pretend that you aren't trying to join them. Killing yourself isn't going to bring them back."
Her lungs are immolating.
"Sakura," he says, brushing a gentle thumb along her cheekbone (and when did he get so close?), "you have to grieve."
There are razor edged flowers in her throat, choking her.
"You have to cry to scream and grieve and then live."
Her hands are shaking at her sides.
"Naruto and Sasuke are dead, Sakura. There's nothing for that now. And you betray them in trying to join them. Trust me, I would know."
It's been almost two years. Sakura spent the anniversary in the middle of nowhere curing a deadly virus because she had gone to Tsunade-shishō and begged to be anywhere that wasn't Konoha for the week.
It's been almost two years. Konoha is rebuilding, her wounds now fading scars. The Great Elemental Nations are at peace.
It's been almost two years. Sakura still can't eat at Ichiraku's or walk past Training Ground 3 or listen to certain songs or hear lightning chirping or wear the colour orange or speak their names because every time she tries it feels like her ribcage is shattering and all her softest parts are spilling out, bruised and torn, and they are dead because she wasn't strong enough so she can't afford to be weak any longer.
"It wasn't your job to save them," Kakashi tells her, his words more destructive than a Chidori to the heart.
Sakura breaks.
Kakashi catches her in his arms.
They sink to the cold earth as Sakura sobs for all that she has lost and all that never got to be.
##
She cries and cries and cries until there's nothing else.
Sakura wakes in her own bed.
She only realizes after that Kakashi must have ordered his guards to clear the area and keep anyone wanting to visit the graveyard away.
##
"If you really want it," Kakashi says one day, weeks later. They haven't gone back to whatever accord they had before, now only talking of easy, useless things and seeing each other more in passing than with purpose. "I'll approve your ANBU application."
Sakura cocks her head at him.
"You're right, you're an ideal candidate. But only if you want it for you."
"What do you think?" she asks him.
Kakashi was ANBU, after all. For a long, long time.
He scratches at his bicep and doesn't look at her. "As your Hokage, I think you'd excel."
"And as my friend?"
Kakashi swings around to look at her, inhaling abruptly. Something soft is blooming on his face. "ANBU isn't an escape. Don't do it if you're only trying to outrun the past."
And oh. This is not about her. Or, rather, not only about her.
Sakura thinks about where that burning need had come from. Thinks about too much hospital overtime and chasing after the backs of ghosts who haven't walked in far too long.
"Not now. But maybe later."
And so that is what relief looks like on Kakashi's face.
He looks younger, his worries momentarily washed away.
Her breath catches and she breathes through the sudden impulse to touch the smooth skin of his brow.
They go back to seeking each other out.
##
Sakura rings her glass with her fork, catching the attention of her friends. They pause in their conversations and turn to face her.
She clears her throat. "To lost friends," she says, "and their memory we carry."
Their eyes are bright with tears and so fierce, their teeth bared in challenge to the universe.
Here we are.
Here we live.
Here we love.
"To lost friends!"
Shikamaru presses a kiss to her temple as they part ways. Ino, a grinning peck to her lips.
Sai holds her by the shoulders and looks right at her.
"When you're ready," he says, "I have pictures for you."
##
A faceless woman clad in a red cloak holds her leather clad arm up for a hawk to perch, a grinning fox at her feet.
Three figures spin in a circle, their hands joined.
A man and a woman walk down a path. Far behind them, two children wave goodbye to their backs.
Their friends sit celebrating at a table. All the seats are occupied, for all that some have no one sitting in them.
##
Sakura tracks down Tsunade-shishō. Ostensibly to hand over her pension which she hasn't bothered stopping by to pick up yet.
What Sakura actually does is help drink four bars dry and get spectacularly drunk.
When she wakes, her shishō has already escaped town, leaving Sakura with several debts to pay off and a crystal around her neck.
If she holds it in her palm, it's too warm. Maybe, she thinks whimsically, it's the Will of Fire burning.
##
"Where to next?" Kakashi asks as they eat ice cream on a bench near the gate leading out of the Village.
Once, the bench might have held bad memories. It's just wood now.
Sakura takes another lick of chocolate.
Kakashi waits, content with his own green tea.
"Suna," Sakura decides.
"Hmm. You might have to fight Shikamaru for the next delivery of top secret documents."
Sakura laughs. "Medical exchange, maybe? My chances of survival are better that way."
"I'd defend you."
"Yeah, but then we'd have to deal with civil war when Shikamaru invariably killed you for interfering in his long distance romance."
"Hey! I could take him."
"I dunno," Sakura muses, her grin cracking through her serious mien, "I think you might have gotten a bit lazy behind that desk."
"Lazy?" Kakashi yelps. "That is it. You're on. Tomorrow morning, eight o'clock, you and me."
"You have an important meeting with the Grain Board tomorrow morning," Sakura reminds him.
Kakashi waves her off, not letting his laughing glare waver. "They're used to me being late."
"Alright then. Eight o'clock."
They shake on it, and finish their ice cream.
##
The desert stretches out endlessly before her as she stands on the wall.
"It's beautiful," she tells Gaara.
He stills, not realizing, she supposes, that she had known he was there.
The moon is dazzling on the sand.
Gaara leans next to her, not close enough to touch.
"I miss him," she says.
He stills further.
"I miss him so much. It took me so long to remember how to breathe properly when I knew he wasn't going to suddenly appear and demand that we go for ramen and insist that it would be a date and smile that stupid, brilliant, fucking smile that always meant it was going to be okay." She's panting by the end of her confession.
The moon is dazzling and the sands are quiet.
Gaara bumps her elbow with his own, a sudden shock of heat.
"I miss him too."
They speak of Naruto, of what he gave them, of hope. And they speak of Sasuke too: of rage and of forgiveness that may be undeserved.
The desert takes their secrets for its own.
##
The first place she goes when she arrives back in Konoha is the Tower.
She breezes into the office, shedding sand and moonlight in her wake, her smile crashing over her face.
"Kakashi," she trills, "I'm home."
He looks up from his paperwork and…
Stutters, maybe. The pen in his hand skitters across the page and he sucks in a breath and he knocks a cup and and his eyes go wide and oh.
He isn't wearing his mask.
"You aren't wearing your mask," she says, stupidly.
His mouth is parted slightly and his lips are perfect and he has this ridiculous mole on his chin that she wants to put her–
Sakura stutters too.
The cup rolls off the desk and hits the floor.
"I have diplomatic gifts," she manages, "from Suna."
Kakashi holds his hands out, wordless.
They are gloveless she realizes as she hands over the items in question and their fingers brush. But she still can't look away from his face.
Sakura has never seen him look so vulnerable before.
"Anyways, it was great. I think Temari has almost browbeaten anyone who might oppose into accepting that she's going to marry Shikamaru. Kankurō and I did some interesting work on modifying puppetry for prosthetics. Gaara says hi. Everything was great. Okay, gotta go see Ino. Bye!" She rushes it all out in one long breath and then darts for the door.
"Wait!"
She stops.
"It's good to have you back, Sakura," Kakashi says, a soft warmth in his voice that is just for her.
"It's nice to be back," she says.
She doesn't look over her shoulder as she leaves.
##
She dreams.
"Hey! Hey, Sakura-chan!" Naruto calls out, trying to get her attention.
Sakrua sighs, but looks up from her book. She's under strict instructions from the librarian that the rare tome on Kiri kekkei genkai is not to be damaged in any way, and Naruto is likely to do something extreme to get her attention.
"What?"
Watch this! Imma beat Sasuke-teme!"
Sakura rolls her eyes.
Kakashi-sensei hasn't shown yet and it is dripping heat and so of course the boys decided to fight. She, on the other hand, is sensibly taking refuge in the shade of a large tree, reading.
She watches.
Naruto and Sasuke run at one another, and she can practically see the chakra bleeding off their hands. They really need to get better at chakra control, she muses to herself.
They run at one another, and Naruto goes through an unfamiliar series of hand signs while Sasuke-kun tries to do something with chakra along his kunai.
They impact.
BOOM!
It's enough to shake the forest at her back. A group of birds squawk into flight.
When the smoke clears, Naruto and Sasuke-kun are no where to be found.
Sakura waits. They do not reappear.
"Sasuke-kun?" she calls. "Naruto?"
Nothing.
"Sasuke-kun? Naruto? This isn't funny. Where are you?"
Nothing.
Sakura drops her book and races for the scorched place the boys met.
All she can hear is birds and the river running.
They've killed each other, she thinks. Sensei is going to kill her for letting them kill each other.
And then, spluttering and splashing and Naruto yelling and Sasuke-kun yelling back. Sakura rushes further on and finds the boys a blackened mess, bobbing in the river.
"What did you do, Dobe?"
"Did you see that? That was awesome!"
"I thought you were dead!" Sakura interrupts the splashing fight as Sasuke-kun tries to push Naruto's head underwater. "What did you do? Don't do it again! That was stupid."
Naruto and Sasuke-kun look at one another with one of those strange looks they share sometimes, one that is a whole conversation.
As one, they lunge forward, and drag Sakura into the river with them.
She shrieks.
When she emerges, dripping water from her impossible hair like some kind of vengeful water spirit, the boys take one look at her face, stop laughing, and try to run.
Sakura launches herself forward with a battlecry.
When she wakes, she feels warm and aching and so very safe.
##
"Hey you," Sakura says when they run into one another at the market.
"Yo!" Kakashi waves awkwardly, trying to balance too many bags of groceries.
"You cook?" she asks, one skeptical eyebrow raised.
"I can cook!" he defends. "Just not usually. For special occasions."
"You're finally repaying Tenzō for every meal you've ever scammed out of him?"
Kakashi barks out a laugh. "Those were gifts. One should never be so uncouth as to try to repay a gift."
"I see." Sakura nods solemnly at his attempt at sage advice.
"No, actually,"–she gets the impression he'd be scratching his head if he had any free hands–"I thought I'd invite you to dinner."
He doesn't look back at her when she stares up at him, startled, and she can see his cheeks pinking from under his mask.
"Oh."
"I mean, only if you aren't busy. I know that you're probably busy since you just got back an–"
"Kakashi," she interrupts, a finger across his lips. "I would love to."
His mouth moves under her touch, burning her through the thin material separating their skin, but he doesn't say anything. Then he nods, slowly.
"Here, let me get some of those." Sakura steals the bags from his left hand.
They walk a couple of blocks in soft, quiet anticipation.
The back of his hand keeps brushing her own, and finally Sakura can't help it anymore.
She grabs his hands firmly, without hesitation.
He squeezes once: a hello.
A man and a woman walk down a road, hand in hand. They are full up with new beginnings.