andromeda on the rock

rating: t
genre: angst
pairings: kakasaku
POV: alternating, Kakashi/Sakura
other notes: major character death
word count: 2,082


And it was strange, because no one who knew her would ever go on to describe her as a particularly large woman, but in that moment, haloed by the sun, they would all swear that she stood with her shoulders bracing the sky, knee deep in mud.

It was that same mud she knelt in, later, Kayuga held in her arms.

Even under the midday sun, the dead goddess shimmered with starlight, casting impossible shadows.

And it was in that same mud she knelt, the Godkiller, and plunged her glowing hand into the goddess' chest, pulled out her heart, and ate it.

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It's—

Kakashi will never forget, what it was to watch the understanding come over Sakura's face like a lightning strike as they heard the noise and the sharp screaming and Kurama's roar.

He will never forget, because his Sharingan snapped on the moment the first sound hit the command tent, his own grief unravelling from his old bones, and he was positioned perfectly on the other side of the table to watch the blood and the hope drain from Sakura's face, the white hot loss and fury burned forever into his memory.

Even without that curse, the way Obito's damned eye keeps all manner of little violences trapped suspended in bloody amber, Kakashi would remember. It's not the kind of thing you forget, that devastation.

Forest fires and volcanic eruptions are less destructive.

If they hadn't all rushed outside, dreading and knowing what they would find, Kakashi would have looked away regardless. It was too intimate to watch, too intimate to see, that grief, that devastation.

It wasn't for him to touch.

But as they stare out on the horizon where Kurama is burning—a meteor streaking across the sky and away—Kaguya's head thrown back and her mouth open, devouring, he knows that if they survive this, there will be no escaping it, no escaping that grief.

In the breath before they rush onwards towards the end, Kakashi closes his eyes and prays for peace.

If they survive this, Sakura will deserve peace, and he knows she will not find it.

Kakashi has never found peace either, and as the future rises up like the sea to meet them, he wishes so desperately that he had ever clawed some from the depths of his tragedies to gift her when this is all said and done.

And, ah, well—

What's one more violence for Kakashi to carry into death?

If only he could have spared Sakura.

(Naruto and Sasuke dying and dead. He never should have hoped he could have spared any of them at all.)

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Much later, drunk to the point of drowning, Shishō asks her with the particular clear-eyed violence—all scalpel edge and no freezing—what she remembers from that endless afternoon.

But Sakura is selfish in her grief. Not even for Senju Tsunade will she pull out the last shattered pieces of her heart from the hollowed cavern of her ribs. Not even for Senju Tsunade, reflection and icon and teacher-mother.

"I remember screaming," Sakura will slur out.

It's the truth, of course, but not nearly all of it.

Not nearly.

Grief tastes like fury tastes like starlight on her tongue, and there is mud in the creases of her knees that will never wash out, blood in the creases of her palms that will never not stain. Grief tastes like fury tastes like starlight on her tongue, and even in death, torn to pieces and apart, Naruto and Sasuke reach for the other.

They do not reach for her.

Her hands are green and glowing, and there is blood on her tongue, mud on her tongue, and the sun burning against her shoulders, the sky heavy up above.

Sakura is deathless.

She rips a goddess' heart from her chest.

It is poor recompense for what has been taken from her.

She will never forget a single step of that afternoon. She will never forget that none of it was ever going to be enough to save them, to save her.

"I remember screaming," Sakura will slur out.

She won't mention that she's not really sure if she ever stopped.

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When it's over (except for the ways in which it will never really be over, war a creature he carries in his blood) Kakashi is the one to wade through the devastation to find her.

She is sunk in the mud, small and shivering, her pink hair lost under the grime, her green eyes just lost.

He barely picks her out amidst the shattered landscape, but his cursed Sharingan eye catches the barest flicker of her breathing, and Kakashi rushes to her, exhaustion dragging him down, mud dragging at his ankles and grief at his throat, and still he runs, incapable of anything else but just getting there, to her.

It's almost a shock when he sinks down to his knees in front of her—helplessly, clasps a hand to the back of her neck, pulling her forehead down to his chest and placing his mouth to her hairline, letting his eyes fall shut—that she doesn't burn him.

The light has long faded from her hands and the seals that painted her as she fought her way across the horizon have burned themselves out, and she is too small against him, too cold.

"Sakura," Kakashi says, as if that could be enough.

The weight of her against his sternum feels enough to cave him in, but Kakashi doesn't move.

They cannot stay here, but for a breath more, they rest, silhouetted by the setting sun.

The future is rushing forward to sweep them away but, for a breath more, Kakashi can hold her here, breathing, and pretend that this could be enough.

.

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There is no circumference to grief, Sakura learns. There is only moving through it, or standing still and letting it bury you.

She is undying, and even mountains shudder at her touch.

Sakura runs.

Even in her dreams, it is never enough.

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Rebuilding, for Kakashi, is this:

His skin heals, as it always does. Leaving behind scars, as it always does. His right shoulder aches now, when a storm is coming, which is new. His joints, too, crack with new thunder. Still, though, the hair he has never bothered to tame and the bruises pressed under his eyes and the familiar fit of his flak jacket.

Never in his life has he wished more that he had hands suited for anything other than wielding weapons. Still, though, he holds hammers like he isn't unfamiliar with the ways in which they are used to, instead, put things together, and he hauls debris and digs new holes for foundations. Still, though, he sits at Tenzō's bedside and brings flowers to Rin's grave and helps write trade agreements and sits, somedays, with village children and teaches them to carve faces to wood and thread yarn to hair, and hums a song he has long forgotten under his breath.

What's another grave marker but somewhere new for Kakashi to dig up his ghosts again and again?

The cherry trees blossom as they do every year, and for a moment, Kakashi pauses as a gust of wind showers petals into his path and lets his gaze go soft and out of focus until there is only pink and green and blue.

He has failed Naruto and Sasuke as surely as he has failed anyone in his long life of never being enough. It would be so easy to go to sleep and never wake up. But Mr. Ukki still waves on the windowsill of Kakashi's crappy apartment that miraculously made it out unscathed and will need watering again, soon. Kakashi swings his legs out of bed and rests his forearms on his thighs, breathes. He breathes.

Konoha is not what it once was. It will never be again. But, still, it stands.

Sakura stands, her back to the monument, the setting sun hanging over her shoulders, bleaching out the cold stone of them. She is covered in dirt from the day's construction and he cannot see her face for how she is backlit, can imagine for a moment that she is not carved with grief. Sun and sky and grief pressing down like a hand on the back of her neck, and yet she stands.

It will have to be enough.

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The hardest thing to come to grips with is, she finds, that she has been missing them for so long that it is already habit.

After the war, she kept lying to herself, we will find our way back together again.

That they are lost to her, Sakura is finding, is not a surprise.

She just thought she would have one last chance.

It should have made a sound, she thinks, when that last chance in fact slipped right through her fingers and shattered.

(She is too young to feel so old. She lost them so young, and now every day is one more day were she is undying, and they are dead. This is not fair. None of this is fair. She is so young, that she ever thought any of this would be fair.)

Again, Sakura turns her back to the statues that the village has carved of them.

And there is Kakashi, waiting for her.

And, ah. There is Kakashi. Waiting for her.

Sasuke is dead. Naruto is dead. Sakura is not dead.

Sakura cannot help wonder what she is waiting for.

She does not press a kiss to their stone faces.

The sun is setting behind her, behind them, and oh— Oh. They're already gone. They've been gone for so long.

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Kakashi owes so many debts and his soul hasn't belonged to him for a long time, now.

Rebuilding Konoha is years.

Watching Sakura rebuild herself is years.

She has them: all his years are hers.

He tries not to think too hard on who he means.

(In his mind's eye, carved into the meat of his muscle and memory, Sakura fights a goddess across the sky, mud to her knees and seals like tears cutting her cheeks and the Leaf carved into her brow. In his mind's eye, he is blinded by the sun in her hair and how all the colours of grief are subsumed by green.)

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What violence crawled into your heart and grew roots, threading through your bloodstream, to steal the oxygen from you, that endless afternoon where you fought a goddess amidst the ruins of your devastation? Tsunade asks without poetry, all scalpel edge, one night when they are sad and tired and drunk, one night where they are crystallized in the cocoon of their griefs, Tsunade's head weighted down by responsibility and years and the necklace around her neck that she never should have had to take back.

There is nothing about that afternoon that Sakura will ever forget.

Her skin burns with the metal plate of her allegiance, with the bruise of her seal, with Kakashi's mouth on her hairline.

Grief is a violence. And, of course, so is love.

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The future rises like the sea to meet him.

Forest fires and volcanic eruptions are less destructive than the brush of Sakura's lips against his cheekbone.

Kakashi surrenders.

What is one last lost fight?

What's one more violence for Kakashi to carry into death?

There is a kinder world, where he does not fall in love with Sakura, but Kakashi has been bred for devastation.

He tries not to think too hard on what had to be sacrificed to find them here.

Sakura tips her chin up so that, pressed chest-to-chest, thigh-to-thigh, he can meet her mouth.

Gently, she reaches into the open hollow of his ribcage.

Green and pink and the blue sky pressing close against Sakura's shoulders, closing them into each other.

Kakashi doesn't move, just meets her.

Just hopes.

It will never be enough.

It will have to be enough.

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Kakashi sleeps, dappled in starlight through the open curtains of Sakura's bedroom. She traces the edges of it across his features, the way the shadows turn him into something familiar again, something strange again.

Even in his sleep, he holds their clasped hands to his sternum, letting his heartbeat echo through them.

Love tastes like Kakashi's laughter against her mouth and the tangle of cotton sheets around her legs and the echoes of grief out unto eternity.

Sakura tightens her grip and does not let go.