the circumference of hope

rating: g
genre: adventure/angst/romance
pairings: kakasaku
POV: alternating Sakura and Kakashi
other notes: Rogue One AU
word count: 2,376


The streets of Jedha are filled with tension, fear and threat so heavy in the air that Kakashi pulls Sakura closer into him, to keep her from doing something to get them killed or to shield her from the explosions that are soon to start or to just– Never mind. It's definitely to keep her out of trouble, nothing more.

He certainly doesn't relish the warmth of her under his hand, the way she's small enough for him to pull into his chest and keep safe with the curve of his spine.

Kakashi has lived and breathed the Rebellion for so long, and this girl, this woman who dismisses him and everything he has fought and bled and killed for, everything that he is, she steals the breath from his lungs. He wants to shake her, wants to demand how she can stand living under the shadow of Imperial flags. Downtrodden and cynical and so young and hurting that he wants to wrap himself around her, but he doesn't remember how to be soft, doesn't think she would accept softness.

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Sakura hasn't believed in the Cause for years, not since Chiyo abandoned her with a vibroknife and a blaster and the memory of so much screaming living under her skin. But Kakashi stands a hair too close and looks at her like she could be more, like he believes she is more than just quick fingers and the ability to keep her head down. He looks at her like he can't see the ugly terrible selfish wanting thing that lives under her skin and has driven every single other person away.

She wonders what those callouses on his fingers, the ones from blasters and from so much death, would feel like if they brushed along her cheekbones. She shakes off the thought before it can fully form. This is about winning her freedom and disappearing again, nothing more.

But then.

Rebels in the streets and shooting and troopers and explosions and Sakura's mouth curls up in a snarl because this is what the rebellion is: girl-children standing shocked amidst the destruction, wailing for their mothers to save them. She pulls the girl out from the mayhem and shoves her into her mother's arms.

Kakashi shoots a rebel and saves her life. She tackles him away from an explosion. His gaze burns as he watches her take out Stormtroopers with truncheons and the anger sparking lightning in her veins.

And then Y4M-4T0 appears right behind the droid that Sakura shoots, more affront than she's ever heard from a droid in his voice.

And then they are walking right into a pack of 'troopers.

And then the blond Guardian walks fearlessly into the fray, serenity in his smile and a chant on his lips.

And then the 'troopers are being mowed down by painfully precise blaster-canon fire.

And then the Partisans are there, dragging her back to Chiyo and her past and everywhere she never again wanted to be and everywhere they need to get to.

"Sakura," her mother's voice says, "my darling, my dearest, my flower child. There is a thing I need to do, that I need you to do. Oh darling, oh dearest, oh I am so sorry for the grief I have given you."

Sakura is a force of destruction with her fists. She is nothing compared to the moon that appears and tears apart the ground below Jedha in a blast of dying light.

She wonders if she imagined Chiyo pressing her fingers to her mouth, throwing out a kiss to the heaving horizon. Most likely. Chiyo would never be so sentimental and there was too much dust in the air as the world imploded.

Her hands are trembling; she has gained and lost her mothers in such quick succession, has watched Jedha be ripped so viciously from the Galaxy under the gaze of Mebuki Haruno's other child. Her hands tremble and she doesn't remember the last time she stood on steady ground.

.

.

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Kakashi hasn't believed in anything but the Rebellion in a long, long time.

"We need to get the Death Star plans," Sakura tells him, tells them all, her voice steady and her eyes blazing.

He believes her, but the Rebellion is woven through his very being, and he has his orders. So he draws directions from a scattered, scrambling boy who can no longer remember his mother's face, his brother's name. But he can remember "Eadu".

The Guardians of the Whills watch him like they can see through the shadows he weaves around himself. If he weren't what he is, it'd make Kakashi twitch.

"This is going to end badly," Y4M-4Y0 remarks as they pilot down, down, down into the rain.

Y4M-4T0 is programmed to run statistical analysis. He's usually right, and Eadu is no different, because Mebuki Haruno has her daughter's green eyes and for all that she doesn't know Kakashi's out there with a blaster pointed at her heart, she stares right through him.

The Rebellion is woven through his very being and the only thing keeping Kakashi going most days is orders and the amorphous hope that it will all be worth it one day, all of the blood and all of the death and all of the sacrifice. Kakashi has his orders, and yet. Those green, green eyes.

He lowers the blaster and blinks as if to wipe those accusing eyes from his sight.

Instead, he sees Sakura against the back of his eyelids.

Kakashi has done so much for the Rebellion, because he believes that it will be worth it, even if he doesn't live to see the day that the Empire is defeated. Maybe especially if he doesn't live to see it. That world will have no place for men with as much blood on their hands as he.

Kakashi has done much worse than shoot an Imperial scientist with her daughter waiting in a downed ship nearby, waiting for her mother to finally come home. But he can't do this, can't take the light from those green eyes when he doesn't know enough to know if the general's orders are still the correct ones. When he knows that the general's orders are no longer the correct ones.

He doesn't take the shot.

Mebuki Haruno dies anyways, and green, green eyes blaze with tears as she screams at him, venom dripping from her lips as she speaks of things she doesn't understand, how could she when Sakura Haruno has run from this fight, run and run and run.

Kakashi has been fighting the Empire since he was six years old, has given up everything for that fight until not even his bones are his own, and she dares? She dares liken him to a Stormtrooper?

He wants to shout at her, wants to rage, wants to stick needles into all her soft, aching, vulnerable places that she hides so badly.

He wants to bite her lip until she bleeds, wants to press bruises into her skin, wants to suck the venom from that vicious tongue.

He wants her to hurt like he does.

Instead he turns to ice, and leaves her speechless.

The Guardians and the pilot stare at him. It feels like accusation.

Y4M-4T0 is quiet when he retreats to the cockpit. That feels like accusation too.

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When Sakura's hands stop shaking and she can finally breathe through her grief, she sits and talks quietly with Sai about her mother. He is shaking, trembling, picking at the skin around his nails, wringing his hands, unsteady and off-kilter and not something she knows how to fix.

He steadies as she draws stories out of him, his memories chaotic and swirling, and Sakura burns with rage at Chiyo, the paranoid old bat, that lost, losing old woman who Sakura had loved and who had never quite known what to do with Sakura.

Sai speaks rambling circles until he falls asleep on her shoulder.

He's just a boy in sleep.

She eases him down onto the bench, her jacket shoved under his head. Then she steels her shoulders.

"He's angry, but not at you," Naruto tells her as she passes the Guardians.

They, too, have grief on their faces.

Sakura stumbles for the words to apologize. Jedha is gone, and Mebuki Haruno may never have wanted the Death Star to exist, but she still helped build it with her own two hands.

Sakura flexes her fingers, and Naruto takes them gently in his own.

"That's not the apology you need to be making," he chides her. Then he smiles, soft and bright enough to break her heart.

Sasuke watches her with dark eyes. "Go. Apologize. You'll feel better."

Sakura goes, and leaves them to their grief.

What are mothers to entire planets? (Grief, Sakura knows all to well, is not a matter of measurement.)

It's a long climb up the ladder to the cockpit.

"Oh," Y4M-4T0 says, "it's you. Kakashi is asleep."

And so he is.

He looks tired and worn, bruises pressed under his eyes and sadness pulling at his mouth and Sakura wants–

Her palms itch.

She resists the urge to brush the bangs from his eyes, and lets him sleep.

The hold is quiet and cold when she drops back down. She doesn't take her jacket back from under Sai's head.

When she wakes up to Sasuke's hand on her shoulder, letting her know that they'll be arriving on Yavin IV shortly, someone has wrapped her in an oversized blue parka.

When she buries her face in the collar, it smells like ozone and rain and iron.

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The humid heat of Yavin IV presses down on them as they exit the stolen Imperial shuttle. Kakashi resists pulling at his shirt; he's never been on planet long enough to become accustomed to the weather.

Sakura walks with her shoulders back, her head high, her weight braced for a fight.

Despite everything, Kakashi is still drawn, hopelessly, into her orbit.

He's furious still, that she could think that of him. Furious that her mother is dead at the hands of the Rebellion. Furious that he understands the why of that loss. Furious because he's been fighting this war since he was six years old, with no end in sight, and he knows in his bones he'll die without ever knowing peace.

Sakura looks like she's ready to fight the entire galaxy, but she curls into him when he lets himself get drawn too close.

He's furious about that too.

He isn't allowed this. Isn't allowed to want this. Isn't allowed to have it.

And yet he wants to reach out and touch her, wants to wrap himself around her so that nothing more can hurt her.

But Kakashi has fought for the Rebellion since he was six years old, and he knows exactly what the senators are going to say when Sakura goes to them, her mouth set and her eyes blazing, and demands that they go to Scarif to retrieve the Death Star plans.

That is not a thing he can protect her from.

But maybe–

Kakashi hasn't followed anything but his orders in a long, long time, because the Rebellion was the only thing in the galaxy he believed in anymore.

Until a woman with green eyes who burned so brightly when she stopped running, when she stopped ducking her head and trying to hide the star she carries in place of a heart.

The senators are not going to listen. But Kakashi is more than a Stormtrooper, more than just orders from a superior officer who doesn't have the whole picture.

And the whole picture is this: Sakura Haruno whose eyes are more green than the Death Star's laser and all the more destructive.

Kakashi has done so much for the Rebellion, because he believes that it will be worth it, even if he doesn't live to see the day that the Empire is defeated. Maybe especially if he doesn't live to see it. That world will have no place for men like him with so much blood on their hands.

What's disobeying orders in the face of everything else he has done?

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"I'm–" she pauses and Kakashi pauses with her. He's too close and he's all she can see. "I'm not used to people sticking around," she offers in apology, in explanation. It's offering up her softest, most vulnerable places and trusting him not to use them to hurt her.

His fist clenches, as if resisting the urge to touch her, and his eyes go liquid dark. "Welcome home," he rasps, his voice wrapping around her like velvet ocean, like durasteel armour, like the smell of ozone and rain and iron.

Sakura walks into the command room for their debriefing with that promise echoing in her bones.

Home, home, home.

Maybe, when this is all over, she'll finally dare reach out and hold it tight.

Kakashi has looked at her and seen the ugly terrible selfish wanting thing that lives under her skin. He has looked that darkness in the eye and held out his hand, offered up "Welcome home."

Sakura doesn't believe in much anymore, but she believes in that.

"Rebellions are built on hope," she declares to the room full of rebels.

And oh, what irony that is. Surely, somewhere in the Force, Chiyo is laughing at her.

But they are Kakashi's words, and so she believes them.

She's here, isn't she? Rebelling?

And what does she have?

Her mother's desperation in her blood. Sai's wobbling words, his desperate prayer to be brave enough, to do right. Kakashi's gaze on her, liquid dark and full of promise.

Hope.

"Rebellions are built on hope," she declares to the room full of rebels. Hers is, at least.

Maybe it will be enough.

It has to be.

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Hope is enough to see the Death Star plans off, singing through the sky, behind Scarif's failing shields.

Kakashi was right, back on Jedha, Sakura is the perfect size for him to pull into his chest, to shield with the curve of his spine.

"Welcome home," Kakashi had promised her.

The horizon rushes forward, and Sakura closes her eyes against the light, finds home in his arms.