pleonexia (your hands tremor with all you are afraid of grasping)
rating: m
genre: angst/hurt/comfort
pairings: kakasaku
POV: kakashi, with a brief omake from sakura's pov
warnings: post-699, divorce, messy feelings, smut, unreliable narrators
other notes: for bluefurcape, a remix of her fic "Regret"
word count: 7,580
A/N: on ao3 this is posted as a separate fic for Reasons, but i'm including it in we were screaming colour because i'm lazy.
When he finds her in the bar, it's like all his failures come home to roost.
If he could go back, if he could do it all again, would he turn around the moment that chalkboard eraser hit his head and never look back? Would he tell the Sandaime "No, I will not. Give them to someone else, to anyone else"?
Maybe if he had, maybe if Kakashi had done something selfless for once in his fucking life, he could have spared her this.
Someone else, anyone else, could have taught them, guided them, ensured that Sakura never ended up here in this dive of a bar, so drunk she can't sit up straight let alone muster the ability to stare at the pale band of flesh where her wedding ring used to sit.
It's not his place to drag her home, back to that shell of a house that she was so fucking ecstatic about. Kakashi can still remember the smile on her lips as she played with the new engagement ring on her finger, opening the door to welcome him into her new home. For months, sparring sessions were filled with Sakura's excited treatises on paint chips and fabric swatches and furniture stores. She'd filled shelves with knickknacks from a lifetime of missions and the walls with pictures from a lifetime of friends.
Kakashi wonders when she realized that there was nothing of Sasuke in that house bursting over with colour, one room left empty and aching, just waiting for a child to fill it. Kakashi wonders when she realized that all the paint chips and fabric swatches in the world couldn't fix what had been broken a lifetime ago in the streets of Sasuke's childhood.
Kakashi wonders, and doesn't want to know.
All he ever wanted for them was happiness.
She deserves happiness.
He should have done something, anything, to make sure she never ended up here.
The jukebox croons, something sloppy and savage and full of heartbreak. "Shoulda known better than to try an' fix a broken man," a woman sings.
Kakashi breathes that in and lets it settle in his bones.
He shouldn't be here. It isn't his place. But no one else is here to get her off that sticky bar and into a bed.
It isn't his place, but it's too late now.
She's tearstained and enough to break what's left of his heart when Kakashi comes to stand next to her slumped form.
He sighs, and Sakura cracks one eye, unwilling or incapable of lifting her head.
He waits for her to recognize him.
"Sensei," Sakura slurs, drawing out the last syllable, the sound turning nonsense in her mouth. "I'm divorced."
Just like that.
I'm divorced.
Kakashi winces at the bleak acceptance of it. Sharp and unrelenting.
Sakura never has been much of a prevaricator or a liar.
For a long moment she just stares at him as best she can, eyes half crossed.
She firms her jaw and Kakashi thinks, hopes, prays that that will be it. That he'll pull her up off her seat and drag her back to her empty house, bright walls ringing with the echo of happiness never realized, stick her in bed with a glass of water at her bedside and they'll wake in the morning to never talk about it again.
Of course, Kakashi should never hope for anything, because he never gets what he wants.
The set of her jaw dissolves and Sakura lurches forward, throwing herself at him.
Kakashi catches her.
(He always catches her.)
How many times, he wonders, has he held this girl while she cries?
Too many.
Once would have been too many, Sakura twelve and so young, blood pouring down her arm as she'd gritted back sobs.
Naruto has hovered, apologizing over and over "I'm sorry Sakura-chan, I thought you saw the kunai coming, I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to."
Kakashi had had to punt him out of the way to get close enough. He'd only had enough focus to spend on one of his genin and it had had to go to the one who's subclavian artery might have been nicked.
He could deal with Naruto after he made sure he wasn't going to lose a student in a fucking sparring match.
"Hey there, Sakura-chan," he'd crooned. "I need you to move your hand for me. Can you do that?"
And she'd shaken her head, tears on her face.
She'd looked furious for all that she was terrified.
"I know," he'd said. "I know. But I need to see."
Only twelve and she'd never known war. It'd taken his breath away, the sheer bravery in her when she'd pulled her hand away from where it was desperately putting pressure.
The cut had been deep but had avoided the artery, Naruto's last minute flinch having slipped the blade sideways. Kakashi had sat with her anyways on the cot of the hospital room, Sakura too small tucked into his side as she bared her teeth against the feeling of the medic's chakra lacing her back together. He'd hated hospitals, still hates them, but he had stayed.
Sakura should have never gotten hurt in the first place.
So many times she's been hurt while he should have been fucking watching. Fucking doing his job.
It never should have come to this, Sakura twenty-five as she clutches at the front of his shirt, those impossible hands desperate and yet so careful.
(Even now, even lost to the grief of six years gone, of fourteen years gone, of seventeen years gone and so drunk she can't even sit up straight. Even lost, and still Sakura is so perfectly aware of the strength she carries in those small hands of hers.)
Her nails press into him through the cloth, sharp pricks of almost pain that Kakashi ignores.
He deserves any pain she wants to inflict on him.
He can take it.
He wants to wrap his arms around her, pull her close and safe.
Instead he stands still and lets her sob against him.
Her breath hitches, and for a moment Kakashi thinks she's going to start hyperventilating, but against his expectations, she laughs.
Kakashi has spent fourteen years listening to Sakura laugh but she's never sounded like this.
Like crows on the battlefield and baying hounds.
He shivers.
Sakura laughs and it sounds like war.
It sounds like six years of fighting on the battleground of her marriage.
It sounds like all his ghosts screaming.
It sounds like the most terrible thing he's ever heard.
"Why the fuck are you here?" she demands.
Because he has so little left.
Because she's Sakura.
Because there is no where else he could be.
Sakura laughs, and Kakashi endures.
Eventually it peters out into softer hiccuping giggles. But Kakashi will carry the memory of that sound—the sound of a heart shattering on a crappy barroom floor—for the rest of his life.
(It sounds like Obito telling them to go, like Rin's last gasp against his lips, like Minato-sensei's voice booming as the Village burned.)
Kakashi holds her until she has no poison left in her and all she is is artificial calm.
Only then does he slip his arm around her shoulders, levering her up. "Come on," he says.
Under his touch, Sakura writhes, trying to shove him off of her.
He's tempted, for a moment, to let her, before reason takes over and Kakashi realizes he shouldn't be leaving her alone if she's in such a state she can't even shake him off.
He hates himself as he pulls her out into the night, her face twisted in a snarl as she fights him.
He hates the patrons of the bar even more as they just watch on.
The cool air hits him, finally wiping away the stench of alcohol and despair. Kakashi breathes in sharply: a short, desperate gulp.
"Let go of me, bastard," Sakura hisses. "I don't need your help."
Kakashi almost laughs.
Maybe she doesn't want it. Maybe it shouldn't be him.
But Sakura certainly needs help.
No one should have to face this alone; all their dreams so much rotted flowers on the ground before them.
Kakashi keeps his arms under her, mostly carrying her as she flings abuse at him, her voice cracking, venom heavy on her tongue.
Better she directs it at him than swallow it down and let it choke her, let it rot her from the inside out, until all that is left to her is bitterness.
"You decrepit asshole," Sakura swears. "Don't try to act like you fucking care now."
Kakashi winces at that.
She's always been good at finding those soft vulnerable spots.
A side-effect of studying under Tsunade-sama, he supposes.
Certainly never something he taught her, even though he should have.
Should have done his godsdamned job.
Maybe, if he had, they wouldn't be here, staggering in the dark.
Sakura bares her teeth. "Hey. Hey! Are you listening to me?"
Of course he's listening to her.
The still half-unfamiliar streets of the Village engulf them, quiet and uncanny in their stillness.
Sakura continues to curse and struggle against him, and Kakashi leaves her too it. While an unconscious Sakura might be easier to handle, he doesn't want to think about what kind of blood alcohol level it would take. A dangerous amount, considering how in her right mind she can filter the toxin right out of her bloodstream.
Which is why his heart stops when she suddenly goes limp, legs collapsing under her.
It's instinct to catch her. (He'll always catch her.)
Kakashi threads an arm under her and cups the back of her head.
"Sakura," he breathes, thumb on her pulse.
"No," she mumbles, and Kakashi closes his eyes in thanks that she's still conscious.
And then it isn't relief but horror, but heartbreak as she mumbles "No, don't. Don't make me go back. Please, please, please, don't take me back," a hand coming to her heart and clutching, trying to pull out the hurt.
They kneel in the street, Sakura sobbing with none of the fury from the bar.
Just piteous keening.
Enough to leave them both in pieces.
"I can't," she cries into the crook of his neck, her mouth warm and wet through the fabric.
Kakashi holds her close, trying to hold her together.
"Okay," he says. "Okay, Sakura. I won't make you. I'll never make you."
He won't force her back to that shell of the marriage she built, alone, with her own two hands. The place painted with colours she chose and pictures she hung.
The house she tried to make a home.
Kakashi hoists her up into his arms and Sakura clings, one hand fisted in the back of his shirt, her heartbeat a reassuring tattoo against his ribs.
It feels like an impossibly long walk back to his apartment, Sakura fever-warm in his arms.
Kakashi's familiar with the touch of fire, but fire has nothing on the shock of her against him.
He half wonders if the burns will scar.
He's reluctant to let her down, but he needs both hands to undo the jutsu on the front door.
Sakura clings when he tries to put her down, her soft breathless whimper cracking his already shattered heart open further.
Eventually he gets her on her own two feet, one hand against the wall keeping her from wavering too dangerously.
The jutsu are muscle memory, his hands flickering through the familiar signs until the familiar feeling of them clicking into place echoes through him.
Kakashi reaches for Sakura, but she's shoving him aside, tumbling through the door, catching herself before she falls to her knees.
He wants to scoop her up again, but she's staggering for the bathroom, so he just follows, ready to offer a hand to her elbow or an arm around her waist if she needs it. Sakura barges through the door unaided, a lurching desperate bolt, to collapse on the crappy off-white tile floors.
They've never quite lost the last of the bloodstains he's brought home with him, rust trapped at the edges.
Sakura doesn't belong there, down on the cold tile with blood staining her knees, nothing but the impersonal porcelain of the toilet keeping her company as she expels the poison running through her veins.
Kakashi thinks about all the times he's been there, with nothing left to him but his ghosts and all the ways he can hurt himself.
He can't not dart forward and brush the hair from her face, fingers soft as butterfly wings as they kiss along her cheeks.
Salt-stained and sticky, he's never felt anything quite so soft.
The shock of it propels him backwards and away, as far as he can get in his shoebox of an apartment, the familiar sharp scent of her under all the alcohol and smoke trapped in his nose.
The hells, Hatake? he demands of himself.
Kakashi forces himself to keep from rubbing his fingers together, trying to capture the feeling of her under his touch again.
She's grieving. He's a sick fuck.
He drops his head as he hangs over the sink, biting his tongue so that the bright stab of pain consumes him for a moment, blotting everything else out.
He waits until the sound of her retching stops, then he pulls out a glass and fills it at the sink.
There's not much he's afraid of these days.
Kakashi drags himself back to the bathroom, fingers so careful around the glass.
She's glaring at herself in the mirror when he nudges the door open.
She's the most terrible thing he's ever seen.
Kakashi keeps his eyes focused on her poison green eyes, on the cracks showing through.
He doesn't dare let his gaze dart to the clothes she's haphazardly discarded.
He doesn't dare let himself consider anything but her hand and her face, the rest of her body an unimportant blur.
(Maybe if he thinks it enough, he'll be able to forget the weight of her breasts and the curve of her stomach and the pink thatch of hair at the apex of her thighs.)
"Drink this," Kakashi orders.
She'll regret it if she doesn't.
She's going to regret enough in the morning as it is.
They both will.
Sakura holds his gaze as she drinks.
He wishes that she'd look defiant, look angry.
She just looks tired.
Their gaze breaks and she drops back down to heave.
Kakashi pours her another glass of water and hands it to her when she's finished wiping her mouth again.
When she's done, she just stands there, vaguely aimless.
Kakashi takes her by the bare arm, his eyes anywhere but the impossible expanse of her pale skin or the way goosebumps shiver down the space between her breasts.
It's just a body.
Just Sakura's body.
Just Sakura who is twenty-six and heartbroken, her marriage dust and her home a tomb.
He leads her to the couch for lack of a better place to go.
Kakashi doesn't think he could bear seeing her in his bed.
Not when it's all he'll ever see: the afterimage of her sprawled across his covers like a crime scene.
He leads her to the couch and turns the TV on.
Kakashi is not made for this.
It should be someone else, anyone else here with her on this night.
But maybe for once in his fucking life, he can do right by this girl and help her put herself back together.
He owes her that, at least.
He's sat vigil for enough funerals.
He can sit with Sakura curled under him, curled into him, over the course of the funeral she's hosting for the life she'd dreamed of since she was little more than a girl who'd never known war and whose smile could outshine the sun.
Kakashi has sat through tragedies worse than her quiet, still tears.
Eventually, eventually, the soft murmuration of the television and the weight of her grief pull her down. Sakura sinks into him, and into sleep.
He turns off the television.
He considers getting up and leaving her to her sleep.
Just a moment.
Just another moment and he will.
Kakashi sits for a long while.
Too long.
Sakura starts shivering.
Gently, so gently, as gently as he knows how, Kakashi shifts her to lay against the couch.
She murmurs, a desperate panicked thing, hands grasping for something that isn't there.
Kakashi freezes, and catches her hands, holds them as she quiets.
Only when he's certain that she's calm again, does he cross to the small bedroom, sighing as he runs his hands through his hair and tugs down his mask. For a moment, Kakashi considers the window, considers leaving this too small apartment, considers leaving Sakura alone to her grief. He shakes his head and pulls the cover off the foot of the bed.
His breath catches when he walks back into the living room.
The moonlight catches on her hair and the tear tracks lining her cheeks and the curve of her shoulder.
She's too much.
She's a shadow of herself.
Kakashi rushes forward to tuck the blanket around her because he can't— he can't—
Because she's cold.
He tosses the blanket over her and hovers, trying to keep himself from smoothing it down over her.
Slowly, Sakura's eyes blink open, glass green and sharp enough to cut him to shreds, the pink fan of her lashes doing nothing to soften the blow.
All he can do is stand there and let her watch him, blinking away the cobwebs of dreams. Pinned, like a butterfly.
Her gaze is scientific and removed as she watches him.
Kakashi is achingly aware of the way the air in the room brushes his bare lips.
He waits.
He doesn't know what for.
(He should have run. He should have run the moment that stupid fucking eraser hit him in the head. He should have never let it come to this.)
The alcohol has obviously worn off some; Sakura moves, catching him by the wrist and twisting, pulling him under her as she straddles his thighs, pinning him down.
Kakashi should move, should do something, should do anything, but Sakura is fumbling at the drawstrings of his pants and he doesn't think he's ever had the breath stolen from his lungs quite like this before.
She's clumsy still, alcohol still burning through her, and the only way Kakashi could stop her—really stop her given the strength she can wield on command—would take hurting her.
Sakura has been hurt enough.
Instead he wraps his fingers around her wrists, not quite hard enough to bruise.
"Sakura," he says.
And fuck, fuck, fuck, he's never sound so utterly ruined.
Her name should have never sounded this way on his lips.
"No," he says, he orders, he pleads.
But oh, Sakura's never listened to him.
She keeps those impossible eyes as she slips between his splayed legs—the fucking traitorous things.
Sakura looks at him like a dare as she ruthlessly tugs the pants down just enough that she can slip one small, perfect, deadly hand to cup him.
Kakashi tastes blood, but he doesn't moan.
He isn't going to fucking moan.
But then she's got his cock out of his pants and all there is and has ever been in the world is the poison green of her eyes and the wet, perfect, obscene heat of her mouth around the him.
Kakashi moans.
It sounds like damnation.
Like one last promise shattering at his feet.
He wraps his hands around the edge of the couch, too afraid to touch her for fear of what he'll do.
He's not certain he has the strength to push her away.
Not when it's Sakura here in the intimate dark with him, the salt of her tears still staining his shirt and the knowledge of what she feels like tucked safe against his side.
Not when it's Sakura and she's not even twelve hours divorced; twenty-six and the most tragic thing he's ever seen.
She sucks softly, and it's too quiet and too clinical, the way she holds the weight of him on her tongue.
Kakashi is half-way hard and firmly in hell.
"Are you still saying no?" she murmurs.
He grits his teeth against the tease of her breath against him, the slightest brush of her lips.
Kakashi looks at her.
Really looks at her.
She looks like war made flesh, like all his sins come home to roost.
She looks like a goddess wreathed in moonlight with demons baying at her back.
She looks like the shattered remnants of a girl he was once given to protect.
She looks like the most tragic thing he's ever seen and he wants to let her devour him whole.
"This is a bad idea," he manages to grit out, more to himself than anything else.
But it isn't a no.
If he's ever wondered if he could be a good man, here's Kakashi's answer.
Sakura bears her teeth at him. "The worst idea."
And that's it, he thinks. She's going to stand up and get her clothes and walk out and they'll never speak again, not really, not in any way that matters. She's going to stand up and she's going to make sure she never looks him in the eye ever again.
One day he'll look up and he won't remember the last time he saw her.
But he'll never forget the shocking heat of her mouth around him or the way her eyes gleamed in the night.
Sakura doesn't stand up. She pulls his hand from where it's gripping the couch and places it firmly on the back of her head.
Her hair feels like moonlight slipping under his fingers.
"But I need this," she says. "Please."
But, well. Kakashi has never been good at telling her no. Not when she needed to hear it most, at any rate.
Please. Like he'll be doing her a fucking favour.
"Sakura," he tries, trying to get her to see sense.
He can't stop her.
(He wants to try to convince himself that this isn't the worst crime he's ever committed, but all he can see is her.)
Then she's swallowing him down to the root and any argument he might have tried to make is lost to white hot noise.
Kakashi thinks he might shout, hips jerking up reflexively, his hand twisting in her hair, but she just takes it.
He adamantly does not consider where Sakura learned to suck cock like her mouth was made for it.
Heat and suction and the sharp smell of her, burning him to ashes.
He wants to think he's polite about it, but Sakura just slaps him on the thigh and glares, daring him to think she can't take it.
And what is there left, when they're here?
He's doomed.
All there's left is to fall.
(The only thing left he couldn't bear is for her to bring someone else into this room with them. Kakashi forces her to look at him, forces her to remember whose cock it is that's bruising her perfect, parted lips.
He wants her to remember this because he'll never be able to forget.)
She pulls sounds out of him the way she pulls poison, merciless and with an edge of competence sharp enough to cut.
Soft and hard and everything in between, and always her eyes.
Kakashi gives himself over.
(There's nothing left for him to give.)
"Sakura," he chants. "Sakura, Sakura, Sakura."
Utterly ruined. Her name a blasphemy on his lips.
He'll never be able to forget.
Every time he says her name after this, it will bring him back here to this couch and the way her hair felt in his hands.
He's sweating and he doesn't recognize the rasp of his voice in the night.
Her nails are bright pricks of contrast where they press half-moons into his thighs
It smells like salt.
Tension coils in him, like a building storm, and all Kakashi can do is hold on.
When he comes, his eyes snap open.
Sakura's the only thing he can see.
Time stops as everything but green is washed away in ruinous, all-consuming pleasure.
It's only when every muscle in his body stops shuddering that Sakura lets his softening cock slip from her mouth.
Kakashi blinks stupidly at her for a moment before he remembers to untangle his fingers from her hair.
Sakura sits back on her heels and wipes her bruised mouth with her arm.
She stares at his stomach where his shirt has been pushed up for a long, long moment.
"I—," Sakura starts, her voice breaking. "I'm sorry,"
And then, to Kakashi's horror, she curls up in a ball at his feet and starts to sob.
Fuck.
Kakashi sits frozen on the couch, pleasure still screaming in his veins, even as the horror descends.
What has he done?
It would be so easy to just disappear.
Run away, and spend the rest of his life running.
It would be, perhaps, the least of his sins.
But it would be too much.
Instead, Kakashi closes his eyes and swallows down the scream in his throat.
Instead, Kakashi fastens his pants again and scoops Sakura up into his arms.
She's too small.
Much too small.
Surely no one so small could feel so much. Could be so much.
She clings to him.
If he had a heart left, it would shatter to dust with the way her hands clutch at him, trying to hold that which hurts her closer.
He takes her to his bed.
Not for anything else.
No.
Never for anything else.
Just to sleep.
And, he hopes, never to dream.
As softly as he remembers how, Kakashi lays her down on his bed.
He has to close his eyes against the sight of her there as he pulls the covers up over her, tucking her in.
It should be innocent.
Instead, all he can see is the pink of her mouth wrapped around his cock and her green, green eyes.
"I won't do anything else," Sakura finally whispers, breaking the silence. "I promise."
And oh.
And oh.
She thinks this is her fault.
As if Kakashi has not brought them here to this point: the taste of him staining Sakura's lips.
He sighs and perches on the bed. "I'm not afraid of that," he tells her, brushing the hair from her forehead.
No.
Kakashi is afraid of what he will do.
Of what he will do to keep her here, wrapped safely up in sheets that smell of him. To keep her here, as far away from her grief as he can get her.
(Somewhere in the distance, an empty house radiates malice.
He would burn it to the ground.)
Sakura shifts, carving a space for him.
She's always doing that and Kakashi does not understand. Has never understood, why she wants him here with her.
But he has always been helpless to resist.
He closes his eyes and curses his weakness, but Kakashi crawls onto the bed to join her, curling into her warmth.
He keeps the sheet between them though: the only defence he has left.
(Kakashi wants to lean forward and claim her mouth. Wants to move lower yet. Wants to claim every inch of her for his own, until she can remember nothing but his touch.
He doesn't.
It is not his place.
(He aches with it.))
"You think I'm terrible, don't you?" Sakura asks, her voice almost inaudible as she shifts to face him, her words catching on his lips.
No.
No.
Never.
She's the most spectacular thing he's ever seen.
"No," Kakashi swears. The truest thing he's ever said, maybe.
"Liar," she laughs.
And gods, she's got to stop sounding like that.
Like war made flesh.
He wants to draw the bitterness from her lips until all that is left is her sweetness.
He could take it.
He knows he could.
"It's my fault that Sasuke left," Sakura continues.
She notches her face into the hollow of Kakashi's shoulder.
He barely dares breathe.
"I pushed him too hard." She says it as if it's truth.
He wants to burn the world for making Sakura thinks she is not worth everything.
"He saw exactly what a desperate idiot I was being and was sick of it."
He wants to hunt Sasuke down and make him live every single one of the thousand cuts he dealt Sakura over the decade.
Kakashi wants to make Sasuke bleed.
Sakura should never sound so defeated.
Sakura deserves so much love and worship she drowns in it.
Sakura deserves everything.
(Kakashi wants to kiss her until there is nothing left, until the universe implodes.)
"I don't know about that," he offers, and it is not enough. It will never be enough.
He wishes he had the courage to say what he means,
He wishes he had a vocabulary for exactly how spectacular Sakura is.
Sakura snorts. "You don't know anything."
And, well.
She's always had clear eyes.
But she's wrong about this.
Sasuke was an idiot.
He should have been on his knees burning incense in thanks for the woman who had deigned to marry him.
Sakura holds the world in her eyes and any man at her feet should be thankful for the honour of being permitted to touch her.
Eventually he says, "That's probably true," because the gods know that he is an idiot too.
What he would give to take back this night, these past six years, his entire life.
All these mistakes and nothing left to him but the taste of ashes on his tongue.
All these mistakes, and yet this perfect woman in his bed who smiles like a tragedy.
Sakura shakes her head at him.
Her breath is warm on his skin.
"Kakashi, just tell me I'm horrible. That I'm the worst."
He is helpless to resist and he has always been a liar.
"Okay," he gives her, since he is so incapable of giving her what she actually deserves. He can at least give her what she asks for. "You're horrible and the worst."
It burns to say, in the worst of ways.
Kakashi wants to laugh for what they have become: a lying old man and a woman warped in her love, in her grief.
He wonders if either of them will ever learn to see truth or if they will spend the entirety of their lives lying.
"Fuck," Sakura swears.
Kakashi pretends that the sound of that doesn't go directly to his cock.
"You asshole."
Which, yes. He deserves that.
But probably not for telling Sakura what she wanted to hear.
Or, well, that is the least of his crimes.
He wants to laugh for the way she curses him for telling her what she wants to hear but not for letting her take him to pieces with her mouth.
There are crimes and there are crimes.
(But just maybe, giving himself over to her touch is the least of them.
But no.
Kakashi should know better than to take what he wants.
(He's never deserved it.))
"Why do you want me to hurt you?" he asks and fuck.
And fuck.
He did not mean to ask that.
Despite all that they have done tonight, that is too raw and true.
And given how Sakura has been all evening, he's betting that she will answer.
He doesn't think that he wants an answer.
(He knows he doesn't want an answer, he is too much of a coward for that.)
"Because I suck," Sakura lies.
Or maybe it isn't a lie.
Maybe she believes it.
That would be worse, Kakashi thinks.
"Mhm," he hums, as noncommittal as he knows how.
It isn't neutral enough.
Hopefully Sakura is still too drunk to notice.
"Just try to get some sleep," Kakashi coaxes. "I'll insult you in the morning if you still feel that way. Alright?"
What is one more lie.
(Sakura should never be made to feel lesser.
She should know that she is owed the world.)
"Fine," she sniffles. Her eyelashes flutter shut against his skin. "Good night."
Kakashi will take the sound of that to his grave.
It will rock him to sleep on nights where dreams are as far off as the sea.
Helplessly, he presses a kiss to her brow, stealing her warmth for his own.
"Good night," Kakashi says.
He pretends that his voice isn't cracking with it.
He wants to keep her in his bed for always: Sakura warm and soft and all his.
(This is a dream, this is a nightmare.
He never wants to wake.)
"Thank you," Sakura mumbles as she falls asleep, dreams dragging her down.
She's an impossible weight in his arms.
Kakashi drowns under the solidity of her and does not bother trying to swim.
He drifts.
It is the best sleep he's ever had.
.
.
.
When Kakashi wakes, the sun is only just kissing the horizon.
He holds a precious girl in his arms.
The most precious girl.
Her face is tearstained and he aches for her grief.
He aches for what he has brought her and what he can never undo.
Hours pass.
His left arm is numb.
Still, Sakura sleeps.
In sleep, all her grief is washed away and she is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
She's always the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
In sleep, all her grief is washed away and he wants her to never wake if it means she is happy.
Sakura deserves all the joy in the world.
He's waiting for her to wake.
He's waiting for her to wake and scream, for her to take him to pieces, for her to render him to nothing.
Sakura was hurt and lonely, and Kakashi took advantage of that. Took advantage of that and let her believe it was pity.
As if he hasn't been dreaming of the curl of her lips and the smell of her hair for much too long, for longer than he'll ever admit.
But Kakashi is a selfish creature.
He'll take what he can for as long as he can, and then he'll steal it just once more.
Sakura is heartbroken and lost and all he has ever wanted for her is joy.
He would give her joy, if he though he was capable of it.
(Kakashi knows that the only thing he is good for is grief.)
If he could, Kakashi would build her monuments and gift her sweet nothings until she understood that Haruno Sakura is the most terrible and beautiful woman he has met and will ever meet.
If he could, Kakashi would tattoo her worth onto her skin until she believed it.
(He wants so badly for her to love herself the way he loves her.)
Fuck.
Fuck.
But he loves her.
Has loved her so long that he has forgotten when it began.
Has loved her through her marriage and her grief and gods. But what if it was his fault that they are here, now, curled together in his bed, her warmth enough to burn him to ashes?
He doesn't know that he could live with that, having brought Sakura yet more grief.
He doesn't know that he could live with turning her dreams to ashes.
(Has he ever done anything other than disappoint her? Than let her down? Than see her in tears and furious because she hates that anyone could ever look at her and think her weak?
(Kakashi wants to lie to himself and say he only ever saw the core of steel at the heart of her, but he has lied to Sakura enough.
She was the one that taught him tears could be strength.))
He loves her.
It is the only truth in the world, in this moment where Sakura's breath fans across his skin and she is soft and vulnerable and his alone.
"Kakashi," Sakura sighs in her sleep, rolling closer.
Her hands wrap more firmly around his hipbone, the curve of his shoulder, cementing him in place.
Kakashi could weep.
"Kakashi," Sakura says again, harder this time, edged in a whine.
She tries to hitch her leg over him but gets tangled in the sheets.
Sakura kicks, bunching the sheets up around her hip.
Kakashi needs to get up and leave her to her sleep.
Sakura's calf snakes around his own and she pulls him closer still.
Kakashi doesn't get up.
He lets Sakura hold him in place as she grinds down on his thigh, moans cracking off against his the hollow of his throat.
They're blades to the softest parts left to him.
Her hair carries the faintest traces of flowers and it's soft under his cheek.
Kakashi wants to roll her on top of him, let her take her pleasure for him.
Kakashi wants to have her rising above him like a sunrise, washing everything else away in the light of her.
Kakashi wants.
"Kakashi," Sakura says again.
Her fingers pull at him like he's the only thing she's ever needed in the world.
He bites his tongue until it bleeds, but the pain is not enough to shatter this, what must be illusion.
Not an illusion. Not a dream.
Just everything he wanted but has never dared even whisper of.
Just everything he wanted and not ever how he would have wanted it.
"Kakashi," Sakura says.
She sets her teeth to his collarbone and worries the thing skin there.
Kakashi hisses at the spike of pleasure-pain running lightning in his veins.
He'll carry her mark for days.
(He'll carry the afterimage of it forever.)
"Oh," Sakura says.
Kakashi blinks down at her.
She's awake.
She's awake.
He braces himself.
"Good morning," Sakura smiles.
It's sunlight spilling through the curtains, the way she smiles; the most brilliant thing he's ever seen.
And then she stretches up and presses a kiss to his lips, soft and simple as anything.
"I'm dreaming, aren't I?" she asks.
Kakashi tries to speak but his throat is choked by the thoughtless ease of that kiss.
Barely more than a whisper, and the whole universe has shifted around him.
Sakura's smile dampens a hair.
Kakashi wants to put the joy back on her face, wants to say "No, this is not a dream," wants to believe it.
Sakura presses a more lingering kiss to his chin, another to the underside of his jaw.
"That's ok," she says, "it's a good dream."
She ducks her head back into the curve of his neck.
Maybe it is a dream.
Only in dreams does Kakashi get what he wants, get this.
Sakura's hands play at his waistband, and Kakashi is dumped suddenly back into reality.
"No," he says, again, too many times in the past day.
Not again.
Sakura tips her head back to pout at him.
Kakashi tears his eyes away from her lips.
"Kakashi," Sakura says, voice cracking down the middle, "don't you want me?"
Of course he wants her.
Before he can dare say it, before he can talk himself out of saying it, Sakura barks out a laughter.
He wants to chase the bitter echoes from the sound.
He'd sworn, after last night, that she'd never laugh like war made flesh again.
"Of course you don't," Sakura spits. "Why would you?"
She pulls away.
Kakashi stops her, stops the poison on her lips and the way she's trying to curl back into herself the only way he can think of in this moment when Sakura was only just breaths before naked and soft and warm in his bed.
(He doesn't want his bed, too, to become a battlefield for her, all ozone and ash and cold, cold ice.)
Kakashi stops her the only way he can in this moment; he kisses her.
It's not a whisper, the way he claims her mouth.
It's a fucking supernova.
He's burnt to ash, consumed, collapsing in on himself.
Sakura's hands bruise his hipbones as she tugs him into the cradle of her thighs.
Kakashi follows, his fingers threaded into her hair, holding her close.
She kisses with teeth, like she's trying to impress herself utterly onto his soul.
(Like she doesn't know that he's been hers, utterly, for years. Like she doesn't know he'd follow her anywhere.)
Kakashi kisses her so that the words he wants to say, can never say, not now, maybe especially not now when Sakura is less than twenty-four hours into her divorce and thinks this is a dream.
Kakashi kisses her, because now that he has given in to the most secret, most selfish desires of his heart, his is incapable of doing anything else.
He would kiss her for the rest of his life.
He thinks he could live on the taste of her alone.
Sakura takes him apart with her teeth and the sweep of her tongue and her hands reshaping his bones.
"Kakashi," she whispers.
Kakashi chases her as she pulls back.
"Make love to me?" she asks.
Her voice is sad and so very quiet, a tremor of fear underlying the question, like she thinks she's pushed too hard and he will turn away from her in disgust.
He should say no.
He's going to say no.
But, "Please," Sakura begs. "Just this once. Just once I want to be loved."
Kakashi has to kiss her again—softly, so softly, as softly as he knows how—to stop the sob ripping his rib cage open.
Her lips taste of salt and godsdamnit, but Kakashi just wants Sakura to never be made to cry.
"Yes," he breathes. "Yes, Sakura, yes. Always yes."
His voice is sheered off at the edges: a broken, crumbling thing.
Kakashi rolls them gently, presses Sakura down against the pillows.
When she reaches for his waistband, again, and fucking fuck, not again. That isn't what he meant.
This isn't going to be about him.
Not again.
Never again.
Kakashi takes her hands in his own and places them down beside her.
"Patience," he chides. "I've got you, Sakura. I've got you."
Sakura stares up at him from the blank canvas of his bed—and fuck but Kakashi was right, he's never going to forget the sight of her there—and nods.
"I know you do," she says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.
Kakashi ducks his head and presses a kiss to the curve of her stomach so that he doesn't have to see the sheer blinding faith on her face.
Sakura giggles at the soft brush, so he does it again.
She should always sound so light.
He skates his hands up her bare legs, quick brushing touches that make her shiver.
Sakura threads her fingers in his hair and tugs.
Kakashi looks up the length of her, all her hills and valleys, the only landscape he ever wants to map in its entirety.
"Kakashi," Sakura says, "please, no teasing."
Her eyes are green like spring blooming, like sunlight dappling through Konoha's forests, like all that is soft and growing and lovely in the world.
Kakashi nods. "No teasing."
And then he surrenders to her.
And then he drowns in her.
Sakura's cries will never stop echoing in the corners of this room.
He will never not taste her on his tongue.
The sight of her—head thrown back and pink blushing across her breasts, fierce delight curled into the slash of her openmouthed grin as she shatters around him and takes what is hers—will haunt him forever.
As Sakura trembles under his touch, Kakashi decides that this is one ghost he will not grow weary of carrying with him.
.
.
.
When Sakura wakes, the remnants of a headache at her temples, she's alone.
Kakashi's apartment rings with his absence.
She lays in his bed for a long while, thinking of nothing, thinking of the weight of his cock on her tongue and the gold spun dream of how it felt to have his dark eyes staring up at her as her fingers twisted in his hair.
Sakura shakes herself, and goes to shower.
She smells of him as she leaves to skulk into the hospital in search of her own clothes. Kakashi's shirt hangs off her shoulders.
When she creeps into her office through the window, a vase of flowers is sitting on her desk.
You're going to be okay, reads the note. You're going to be magnificent.
There's no signature.
Sakura doesn't need one.
She doesn't clutch the slip of paper to her heart or press a quick kiss to the ink.
Sakura slips it into a desk drawer, and goes to change.
She smells like Kakashi's shampoo and there are bruises pressed into the inside of her thighs.
Sakura is not alone in the world.
Someone cares.
For this moment, that is enough.
She ignores the sharp white band of skin along her ring finger as she opens the door and steps out into the hospital.
She has time.
The note will wait.
She has a feeling.
("Sakura, baby, I've got you, I've got you, just let go. I'll catch you. I promise. I'm here, I've got you. Love. My love, Sakura."
Sakura knows that Kakashi always keeps his promises in the end.
She breathes, and she lets go.)