Disclaimer: Borrowing only.
Shades of Red
Prompt by sun-summoning aka the angst anon also first posted at tumblr:
he wonders what she was like before she lost her mother. sakura's letters always described sarada as a bright little girl, warm and compassionate and clever and curious. he recalls how he would hold his wife during their brief meetings over the years and listen to her stories of sarada's antics, but as he watches his daughter move about listlessly in black, he understands he will never get the chance to meet that sweet girl now that sakura is gone.
He finds a book of his late wife's amidst the ruins of their home. He remembers her reading it, during those heady days they came to an understanding that they wanted to be in each other's lives more intimately than they've ever been, those days they've yet to figure out what that union entailed exactly.
He reads it. He reads it everyday.
Denial
"When is Mama coming home?"
Sarada doesn't talk much for the first three days after her mother died, and when she does, that is all she says. Sarada doesn't talk to her father for a week after, and once she does start responding to simple questions or instructions, she avoids her father's lone gaze, choosing to stare at a point behind his head, her feet, or her hands. He drinks in the tiniest shift of her expressions and thinks this an improvement from three days before, when she didn't even acknowledge his presence, ignoring any noise that issued from him, any event his actions precipitated.
She will get through this, they tell him, just be with her.
Where else would he be, he thinks. He left his late wife and his only child at home for twelve years to make sure their family will have a safe world to grow and flourish in.
All he has left now is a shade of that promised future. Of course, he will cling to her, lest she too fade completely, a dream he barely tasted.
Anger
Sarada refuses to eat.
Sarada refuses to move.
Sarada refuses.
Her father isn't built to cajole or coax, not even his own child bereft of her life's foundation so early, but he tries in his quietest, most patient tones. He remembers.
When Sarada still does not, he is more direct in his methods, pressing a cup of water against her lips, tucking a malformed riceball in her hands and guiding them to her mouth, carrying her to the baths and letting her soak as he sits by the door with his back to her.
One evening, as he clumsily dries her hair, she tells him.
"I hate you."
Sarada does not say it as he had in the past. She says it like the paper-strip output of an automaton, face inelastic and mask-like. He pauses to hear if anything else will come out of her mouth, finally leech the poison out of her heart, but nothing. So he continues to dry her hair, moving through the motions of getting her ready for sleep, even though he knows neither of them really sleep.
"I know," he manages to say, so do I, and continues to work the tangles out of her hair.
He wishes he can do the same with the roots of grief in her heart. But he remembers. Lest he completely severe her capacity to feel at all, he does not dare pull too hard.
So he frets.
He waits.
Her grief continues to fruit.
Bargaining
After two weeks, Sarada decides to go to school. Her mednin aunts—a multitude of them, Sasuke thinks, not ungratefully—advise it will be healthy for her to return to her routines, have a semblance of normalcy, be around friends. Her father fears it might blanket her grief, bury it in the tiny inconsequential worries a school girl might encounter.
She doesn't participate in the Academy graduation ceremony, but she wants to watch. And so her father sits with her in the audience, feeling the heat of the sun beat on his nape, after an eternity it felt like. She congratulates her friends as they pass by with their mothers and their fathers.
Sarada can smile now–he calls it a smile, the feel of it is familiar–a ghosting lift of her cheeks, a softening of her dark, fathomless eyes. He knows her greetings may come off wooden and perfunctory to some random witness, but her friends feel the effort, if not the sentiment, and her father is overwhelmed by the compassion in those young, clear eyes.
He remembers. He remembers not noticing long, long ago, because even then some of his fellow children balanced the fear and spite they aped from their parents with a compassion that prompted them to approach him no matter how tiny, how contained, he tried to keep his ruins. He notices now, and for his daughter, he is deeply thankful.
"I envied them," she tells him. "Now I envy them more. If I hadn't insisted on looking for you, I'd still have my mother. Maybe if you go away now, she'd…"
She starts shaking her head even as she says this, her rational mind instantly squelching the childish wish.
"You're all I have, I guess."
Children's hearts are resilient, he remembers his wife say, and she was rarely ever wrong.
Adult hearts, he doesn't remember what she says about them, only that in a life-threatening cardiac event, it is important to maintain oxygenation, find the source of the infarction (a block? a renegade pacer?), contain its damage, and allow the heart to heal the parts it can.
He promises his wife, once Sarada is steadier, he will look into his heart, too, seeing that he won't likely survive a heart transplant. Even if his jigsaw body could handle the stress, he cannot see himself ever letting go of the heart he has now.
After all, it is this heart that loved his wife all those years, the one that loves her now. It is the heart that loved the Sarada his wife nurtured in him.
It is the heart that loves Sarada now, and regardless of the shades she now chooses to wear, one that will continue to love her.
Depression
Just when he thinks things are starting to look up, Sarada falls apart.
"What's the point of sleeping?" she tells him just before he makes her, "she is still there when I close my eyes, but when I open them…."
He knows. When she opens them, the truth reasserts itself. Every morning, the cycle continues, and after that moment of blankness, of being from another time and memory, reality pieces itself together with more recent memories. It hurts like hell each time.
"What's the point?" she repeats. Her father doesn't have an answer.
I miss her, too, he thinks, I wish I could see her as well as you must.
But he doesn't say that. He can't think of what to say that won't sound trite or saccharine or manufactured; he is unused to filtering his words like so, unused to wishing they can issue from him more organically. Instead, he tucks her blanket meticulously about her neck and shoulders, and he wonders how many days it has been since she allowed even Chouchou or her grandparents to see her.
"Maybe it's better if I don't wake up."
This scares him. This scares him enough to realize he can bind his own child in an illusion of nothingness, just so her entire body can rest, her entire mind be devoid of dreams.
Nadir, he remembers the sound of the word rolling from his wife's tongue. The lowest of low.
This better be it, he hopes, he didn't think he'd have it in him to watch his daughter like this any longer, not when everything he knows about her are secondhand crumbs, not when even those crumbs burn in their disparity to the Sarada he finally has.
Her grief bursts.
"What are you reading?" Sasuke asked his new girlfriend. The word was new, surreal. Even more so was the natural way she seemed to open up to him, reaching easily to incorporate him into the space she was curled in. They managed to fit in her battered sofa. He didn't mind that she was mostly sitting on him, that tufts of her pink hair tickled his nose.
"A theory on the five stages of grief," she said, once she had made herself comfortable about his longer torso and limbs. "Homework basically."
She was writing some of the general guidelines attending mednins were to follow when rotating in the orphanage, she said, before proceeding to give him a brief spiel on each stage, disclaiming that it's not a stepwise process in her experience, more of an overlapping continuum.
"I overstayed my welcome in 'anger,' I suppose," he conceded.
She chuckled at this, taking it as a joke instead of a mere observation. He didn't mind.
"The theory has its critics, of course," she continued. "One says that if one is surrounded by positive things, one's experience of grief would be positive as well."
"Cryptic. How does that work, practically speaking? How does one make grief a positive experience exactly?"
"Hm."
Sakura didn't have a chance to answer further, having abandoned her book in favor of nibbling at his collarbone.
He didn't mind that either.
Acceptance
Sarada calls him Papa again.
"Papa, I'm home now," she always says after coming home from her missions. None of them usually takes her away from him for more than a day or two. "Get up. I'll help you air out the futons."
She dresses like him still, all blacks and grays, sometimes a stark white to break the monotony. For practical reasons, she says, not everyone can pull blazing orange like Uncle Seventh or royal blue like Aunt Ino.
"I have a day off two days from now," she says, after coaxing her father to help her roll rice balls at the verandah. "Let's visit mama together, okay?"
Her father nods, three rice balls later.
"We should make her some, too… I wonder what topping we will put in hers?"
"Red," her father tells her. "You should wear her red, like you used to."
End. 06/17/2015
Note: The book Sasuke is referring to is called On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1969?). It was required reading when I was in school, I kept my copy, but I've never actually finished it.
I dunno. Sasuke doesn't seem like a Tuesdays With Morrie type.