paint you a rainbow (i met you on the road)
rating: g
genre: romance
pairings: kakasaku
POV: Kakashi
other notes: prompt fill for KakaSaku Month 2017 "Soulmate AU", nonlinear
word count: 2,370
And of course, of course, he's never seen something so bright as the way the sunlight glints off of Sakura's hair, but for the rest of his life, Kakashi remembers this moment of colour bleeding across the world from the place his hand rests along the curve of Sakura's cheek. For the rest of his life, Kakashi will swear that in this moment, this first moment, this average everyday moment made extraordinary—the sun rising in Sakura's smile and her hair a wreath of flame—she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
It's a cliché, sure, but the only thing that will ever be more true is every single time he'll tell Sakura "I love you".
How could anything be more beautiful? His world encompassed by that soft, stunned smile and the colour pink as the world bursts into a million hues Kakashi never dreamed he'd see.
##
The file says Haruno Sakura's hair is pink.
Not that it makes much of a difference to Kakashi in particular, but it is a bit unusual.
Somedays when his cute little genin are busy pulling weeds or lugging groceries or some other menial but all consuming task that he's fairly certain he can leave them to without coming back to the nearest half-mile of the village on fire, Kakashi tilts his head and looks at it—the impractical silky length of it—and wonders what it is about the colour that gets the poor girl such bemused second looks. (Kakashi also considers trying to say something about the length of the hair in question, but the one and only time Kakashi tried commenting on the practicality of a woman's hair, it took him four hours to break out of the genjutsu Kurenai trapped him in out of revenge.)
It's just one more shade of grey to him.
Also, Sakura almost catches him a couple of times and spends the next several weeks compulsively combing her hair out of the unfounded fear that something's wrong with it.
Kakashi only feels a little bad.
Mostly he tries to not giggle at the comically serious focus she employs as she counts brush strokes.
(He should definitely do something about that.)
Instead, he manages to convince Sakura into pinning Naruto down to braid his hair after the girl overhears Kakashi laughing and begins making increasingly more disparaging comments about her teacher's own unruly mop out of spite.
Unfortunately, Naruto ends up quite pleased with the results, but thankfully Sasuke's glare when it becomes his turn to have his hair put up in ribbons is quite endearing when committed to film.
##
Colour, they say, is the most precious gift one can receive.
To see the world in all of its beauty because of the touch of the one person who will matter most.
But Kakashi remembers how his father would finger the kimono stored in the cedar trunk that belonged to the mother Kakashi never knew and murmur under his breath the colours like a mantra he couldn't bear to forget the names of in the same way he'd forgotten how to see.
But Kakashi remembers Minato-sensei's blank eyes as he stared at his hands and Kushina-nee's blood there, sobbing "It's grey, it's grey, it's grey. How can it be grey when everything she is is colour?"
But Kakashi remembers teammates falling to their knees in the field, crying out as their colours were leeched from the world, much too far away to do anything to save the person who was dying, dying, dying and taking the colour with them.
Colour might be a gift, but Kakashi wears gloves and full length sleeves and he never touches anyone skin to skin if he can help it.
(And Kakashi is very, very good.)
##
Kakashi reaches for a stack of papers and tries to turn them around.
Sakura swats his hands away, but he catches a glimpse of multiple diagrams of human eyes.
"What are you working on, Sakura-chan?" he asks, rubbing at the back of his hand in mock hurt.
Sakura doesn't look up from the file she's working on on the other side of her desk.
"Why are you here, Kakashi-kun?" Sakura asks in turn.
Kakashi raises an eyebrow.
"Kun?"
"You said to stop calling you sensei."
"Well…" Well he did. Still, Kakashi wasn't expecting to be mocked instead!
"Would you prefer 'chan'?" Sakura says, glancing at him over the edge of the file.
She's laughing at him.
Kakashi sniffs. "I was thinking 'sama', to honour my esteemed position."
The Rokudaime Hokage's Chief Mednin rolls her eyes and goes back to ignoring him.
Kakashi sulks.
"Go away," Sakura tells him, "I'm busy."
He lingers for a bit longer, hoping to be enough of a nuisance that Sakura will leave her office to join in on the weekly Team 7 spar for the first time over a month, but eventually he has to skulk out, defeated.
"If you don't show up next week, I'm assigning an ANBU squad to drag you out of your office," he warns as he goes, attempting to preserve at least a modicum of dignity.
Sakura snorts. "They're welcome to try."
Yeah.
That's fair.
Kakashi is still going to do it though. He still hasn't gotten Genma back for that thing with the squirrels from eight years ago.
##
"Have you ever seen colour, Sakura?" Kakashi asks.
"Shut up," she snarls, and shoves more chakra into his chest, "and focus on staying alive."
Kakashi stares up at her from where he's prone on the ground.
He wonders what the blood pouring out of him would look like if he could see colour.
"If you die," Sakura warns him, "I'm going to bring you back and kill you myself."
Her chakra is a cool caress as it curls through him.
Or maybe that's the shock setting in.
"I think that might defeat the purpose," Kakashi manages.
There's blood in his mouth.
"Shut up."
He doesn't die.
Sakura doesn't forgive him for taking the hit meant for her for months.
##
"Just let me heal—"
Kakashi flinches away from her and Sakura freezes.
She's too young and too naive to look right through him the way that she does as she stares him in the face, her hands outstretched to touch the cut curved high on his cheekbone.
"… Sensei?" Sakura says.
She's only fifteen and she still believes in fairy tales and Kakashi doesn't want to explain to her how the last person he touched his skin to, he assassinated.
His world is grey, and this is only Sakura—fifteen and wide eyed, hurt edging in because she thinks he doesn't trust her, trust her abilities when, godsdamnit, the only person here he doesn't trust is himself—and Kakashi would rather die not knowing then have to live with his colours leeching back out of the world.
(He knows there's no way he'd ever get to keep them.
Beautiful things are not meant for him to touch.)
Something understanding that looks half like pity fills her soft eyes, and Kakashi wants to run from her.
"I don't have to touch you," Sakura tells him. "I just need to get close."
She doesn't mention it again, but Sakura is careful overtime to leave a breath between their skin, or even a solid layer of clothes, whenever she heals him.
(He wants to tell her how in awe he is of her sheer impossible control. He wants to say thank you. He wants to do something other than tense anytime she comes near.)
##
Kakashi finds her sniffling, her eyes swollen.
Sakura quickly tries to rub away her tears. "Sensei!"
Kakashi crouches in front of his little genin.
"Hey there, Sakura-chan," he says, as gentle as he knows how, not gentle enough. "Did you get those groceries delivered?"
He wonders if its kindness or cowardice that he doesn't ask about her tears.
Sakura wipes once more at her face but then squares her shoulders and raises her chin to look him in the eyes. "Yes, sensei. And Doi-san said he was happy with the work we did and would let the mission office know."
Kakashi pats her head. "I'm proud of you," he says and he smiles down at her.
Sakura smiles back, only a little bit wet.
"Now, we should go track down your teammates," he says, standing up to his full height.
Sakura nods firmly and leads the way.
("Do you think my hair is silly, sensei?" Sakura asks later as they comb the streets for a disturbingly untraceable Naruto and Sasuke.
Kakashi considers ignoring the question, it's so quiet.
"Makes people underestimate you," he says, and tugs on a curl. "Use that."
He doesn't tell her that it's all grey to him.
That wasn't the question.
(He doesn't know what the answer is. She's just Sakura. She's a girl and somedays she's silly, but then he's seen the way pride blooms on her face when she masters a complicated jutsu and the way her grip has slowly solidified on kunai even when her adrenaline is pumping.
She's just Sakura.
It doesn't matter what colour her hair is.
Not to him.))
##
When Sakura sees him, she walks right up to him, slicing through the crowd like a sharp blade, and presses her forehead to his flak vest.
It's instinct to wrap a hand around the back of her neck and pull her closer.
Which, huh.
Kakashi wondered when that became instinct.
"Hey," he says.
Sakura fists her hands in the back of his vest and murmurs something indistinct in greeting.
Around them, the camp bustles with activity, but no one pays them any attention. They're too busy for that.
They stand together for long minutes, just holding onto one another, saying nothing.
Finally, Sakura pulls away and smiles up at him.
She looks tired and worn and much too old to be seventeen.
There's what he thinks might be a streak of blood along her hairline.
"It's good to see you, sensei," Sakura tells him.
And then she walks away.
Kakashi stands rooted for a long time amidst the masses, long after she disappears.
When he looks at the casualty list later, it's an impossible list of names, and Kakashi wonders how many Sakura had to watch die under her hands.
For a moment, he regrets that he couldn't tell if it was blood on her forehead or not.
##
"Kakashi-sensei," Naruto is laughing, "you know that's a girly drink, right?"
Kakashi looks down at his very fruity, very grey drink.
"Alcohol can have a gender?"
Naruto rolls his eyes at him. "It's pink, sensei. That's a girl colour."
Kakashi shrugs. "I like pink."
He adamantly does not look across the bar to where Sakura is laughing, her head thrown back, neck bared and hair tumbling down her spine.
##
They're walking shoulder to shoulder in the fading day.
"You didn't have to walk me home, you know," Sakura tells Kakashi, and nudges him with an elbow. "I'm a grown jōnin."
Kakashi shrugs easily.
"It's on my way."
Sakura snorts inelegantly.
"I know where you live. It is not."
Kakashi shrugs again and muffles a smile.
She's right.
It's not.
"Maybe I wanted to spend time with my favourite head of hospital."
Sakura elbows him again, and they continue walking down the streets towards her home.
"You better be on time to the meeting with the mednin from Suna tomorrow," Sakura warns him when they reach the entrance to her apartment building.
"Sakura-chan!" Kakashi exclaims, clutching his heart. "You wound me with your baseless accusations!"
Sakura rolls her eyes at him. "I think you forget that I've known you for twelve years," she says.
Kakashi sniffs. "I've grown punctual in my old age."
"Is that why you were late to dinner, today?"
"A kitten needed rescuing, Sakura! It was an emergency!"
Sakura's face twists for a moment as she tries to maintain her scolding facade, but eventually laughter wins out and a giant smile breaks across her face.
She laughs and laughs and laughs, far more than his bad joke warrants, in truth, and Kakashi can't look away.
Unthinking, he reaches out a hand to brush a stray curl back behind her ears from where it's escaped a hastily fashioned bun, because he doesn't want anything to obscure his view of her face as she laughs.
And oh.
He isn't wearing gloves today.
He just… stopped one day, after the war, after everything, and he never got back into the habit really.
It's been years, and how has he never touched her before, skin on skin and she's the softest thing his bloody hands have ever touched.
He'd wondered, absently, despite his best intentions, what it would be like. A slow gradual dawning or a lightning bolt?
Colour seeps into his world the way Sakura's laughter crawls under his skin.
And of course, of course, he's never seen something so bright as the way the sunlight glints off of Sakura's hair, but for the rest of his life, Kakashi remembers this moment of colour bleeding across the world from the place his hand rests along the curve of Sakura's cheek. For the rest of his life, Kakashi will swear that in this moment, this first moment, this average everyday moment made extraordinary—the sun rising in Sakura's smile and her hair a wreath of flame—she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
It's a cliché, sure, but the only thing that will ever be more true is every single time he'll tell Sakura "I love you".
How could anything be more beautiful? His world encompassed by that soft, stunned smile and the colour pink as the world bursts into a million colours Kakashi never dreamed he'd see.
"Oh," Kakashi manages.
Sakura pulls him down and into her, and Kakashi goes.
"It's you," she breathes into his mouth.
Kakashi's hands flex on her cheeks and he grasps wildly for every inch of skin available to him.
Sakura kisses him and kisses him and kisses him.
Kakashi drowns, eyes wide open.
He wonders absentmindedly, if all oceans are pink.
##
"I like pink," Kakashi says.
It's the third most true thing he'll ever say.