WWSC

by FicReader21

JUST TO ME

"Hinata-chan," Naruto asks his girlfriend. "Is it just me, or is there something," he pauses, shakes his head.

Hinata turns to face him from where she's picking out tomatoes. "Naruto-kun?"

"Never mind, it's nothing," he tells her. Because it is nothing.

It's just Sakura-chan and Kakashi-sensei walking down the street together. Nothing interesting about it. They aren't even talking, let alone brushing shoulders or holding hands or kissing. Just, walking together.

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Weeks later, Naruto is in the Hokage's office with Kakashi-sensei, going over the reports that Naruto will need to be able to understand when he replaces his teacher in a few years.

Sakura throws the door open and walks in without knocking, which isn't unusual per say. Sakura has been acting as Kakashi-sensei's assistant since Shizune-neechan took over running the hospital; she spends most of her time in and out of this office and the Tower in general. It's just that, for a moment, Kakashi-sensei relaxes fully into his seat, the tension Naruto hadn't even noticed he was carrying bleeding out of his shoulders.

Sakura smiles at them, trills out, "Afternoon Naruto! Afternoon Hokage-sama! Hard at work?" For some reason though, Naruto almost thinks that Sakura-chan's smile catches on the masked man for a moment too long.

It's nothing. It's just Sakura being happy after a lunch time snack of dango.

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The next month, a group of the old-crowd are at the bar. Kiba and Genma are attempting to out do one another with terrible pick-up lines, the rest of the large group heckling and voting on best word play.

But not Sakura and Kakashi/. The two of them are huddled together in the corner, snickering at something over their shared bottle of sake.

There is nothing about their posture that should catch Naruto's eye: there's the proper couple of inches between them and their heads aren't even bent together. It's just, when he looks closer, Kakashi-sensei's right index finger rests gently on the delicate bones of Sakura-chan's wrist.

It's nothing.

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Years later, Naruto catches Sakura walking back from the gate, Sarada running up ahead. He isn't too surprised to spot Kakashi at Sakura's shoulder, the two of them walking slowly side-by-side.

"He's gone again, then?" Naruto asks her.

Sakura's face drops out of the smile that has been teasing her lips. "Yeah."

"You think the teme is ever going to stay longer than a few weeks? He has to have repaid his karmic debt by now, what with how often he sleeps on rocks." Naruto jokes.

Sakura smiles again, but only weakly. "I don't know, Hokage-sama."

Naruto frowns at her. "Sakura-chan! You aren't supposed to call me that!"

Sakura's smile warms a bit at his whining, but doesn't thaw completely.

Suddenly, a screeching "Kaka-tōchan! Kaka-tōchan!" reaches them, and Sarada throws herself at Kakashi. The man catches her effortlessly in midair, and spins the little girl in circles.

"Sara-chan," he scolds her, teasing. "No yelling in the market!"

The girl pouts from her perch on the man's hip.

Naruto freezes in place, because Sakura has just shifted to push the bangs out of Sarada-chan's face, putting her in front of Kakashi. His friends, his old teammates, they don't touch, but Sakura arches her back so that she can look at Kakashi's face, and Kakashi angles himself to align with her, and it is a natural, unconscious dance.

Naruto freezes in place, because Kakashi is holding Sakura's daughter, and they look like a family.

Naruto freezes in place, because it is a thousand little gestures that he has caught over the years coalescing into one moment of understanding. But he cannot be seeing what he is seeing.

Sakura has loved Sasuke since they were children together. She bore Sasuke's child.

Naruto is not seeing what he is seeing because there is nothing there to see.

That is what he tells himself as he bids his friends goodbye, sorry, urgent Hokage business to attend to.

It is nothing. There is no quiet intimacy in the scene he is leaving.

(He leaves the little family behind him. Sakura and Kakashi bending towards each other like flowers to the sun.)

Chapter 2

"Do you ever wonder," Sakura asks him. "If we gave up too much?"

She's dry under her umbrella, but the rain has long soaked Kakashi to the bone. Sakura doesn't step close enough to share her shelter though. Instead, she settles into place a few steps behind him, a proper distance between them.

Kakashi doesn't look away from the memorial.

"Do you ever wonder," she continues, and Kakashi does not want to hear her questions. The two of them made their decisions a long time ago, all they can do now is live with them. But, of course, Sakura ignores the threat of his silence, as she always has. "Do you ever wonder if it was worth it?"

The rage hits him suddenly, unexpected. He refuses to give her the reassurance of a reaction, so he breathes and shoves the emotion down, as has become his habit. "Go home to your husband, Sakura," he tells her, his voice not as free of bite as he would like. The anger is answer enough, more answer than he wanted to give her.

"Kakashi," she tries.

"Don't."

She huffs out a hurt little sound which cuts his rising rage to the familiar shreds of something more bitter.

"Please." He would only ever beg it of her. "Just don't."

He shouldn't be surprised when she doesn't have mercy on him. Sakura has always had a talent for ignoring him when he begs.

"You didn't come to Sarada's party. She missed you."

And Kakashi does not want to deal with the accusation in her voice. Gods, Sarada. That little girl with her black hair and dark eyes who looks nothing like her mother and all too much like her father, but when she smiles.

Well. It isn't fair for Sakura to bring Sarada into this.

"I'll make it up to her. Go home to Sasuke, Sakura."

Sakura nods, and moves to leave. "I miss you, Kakashi," she whispers, changing her momentum to dart forward.

Her admission punches the breath from his lungs, his insides crushed more efficiently then any jutsu, leaving him too off-balance to evade the soft brush of her fingers down his face. Her thumb pauses over his lips for the briefest of moments. He is incapable of reacting with anything more than a pained inhalation.

"Sakura," he begs again. "Don't."

But she is gone, across the clearing before his words can hit the air.

If he felt like torturing himself any more today, he would swear he hears a murmur of "I do wonder, somedays," as her presence fades from his awareness. But today, Kakashi will just stand in front of the memorial and let the rain wash her touch from his skin.

(Her touch has never—will never—completely leave him.)

Chapter 3

Even as he kisses her—desperate and biting and gods, he could drown in her—he hates it. He never wanted this attachment. Never wanted to want anyone this badly. Never wanted to want anyone at all.

But the marks on his skin brand him as hers, as surely as the grey that twists up her wrists, across her back, down her sternum tells his life story, branding her as his.

.

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Kakashi never wanted a soulmate, never wanted to meet the person whose life would be spelled across his skin.

His father was a ghost of a man following his mother's death. Minato-sensei burned with grief when he sealed the Kyūbi, Kushina-nee's blood on his robe. Kakashi has never wanted a soulmate, because he has never wanted to leave them with that all-consuming sorrow when he finally manages to get himself killed.

So of course. Of course the mark blooms on the skin over his heart when he is fourteen and has lost any hope he had left.

The singular green shoot on his chest is only the first, and as the years go on, he becomes a veritable garden of flowers. From the single cluster of dittany of Crete grow sycamore and red columbine and crocus and honeysuckle. And then, later, acaia and alstoemeria and black poplar and gilly-flower and bluebell.

He does his best to ignore them, doesn't linger on what strong emotions might have brought about the latest bloom, but Kakashi can't help but speak the flower language his mother taught him long, long ago.

He refuses to think of the happy child whose flowers bloom on his skin, little bursts of joy that he will not sully. Kakashi hates to think of what bloody story is writ onto that poor, happy child, what marks will become legible when they have grown into their skin. Kakashi does not want to meet them because he knows he will just bring them sorrow. But even from a distance, he knows that he infects their happy life with his curse of heartache.

(Acaia for friendship, honeysuckle for happiness, primrose for confidence.)

The years pass, the flowers bloom, and Kakashi hopes they never meet. He survives being an ANBU captain, only to almost die leading a team of genin. And then that Team 7 falls apart, as surely as his first. Sasuke and Naruto and Sakura leave him for better teachers. He has failed each of them in different ways.

(Aloe for grief, basil for hatred, amarylis for determination.)

Naruto returns, and almost in response, the flowers bloom once again. Kakashi tells himself he is not comforted by the synchronicity.

(Tulip for forgiveness, tears of the Virgin Mary for return to happiness, bamboo for loyalty.)

And then life spirals out of control and Kakashi does not have to time to check if new flowers have bloomed, because war is upon them. He hopes that wherever they are, his soulmate is safe from the violence and death. It is a naive hope; no where is safe.

The war ends. The war ends and the shinobi of Konoha finally head home. The war ends and the flowers on Kakashi's chest, stomach, shoulders, back are still brilliantly, beautifully bright.

(Milfoil for war, palm for victory, weeping willow for mourning.)

The war ends, and the children who were once his students are now adults. Capable, amazingly talented, incredibly powerful adults who will shape this era into one of peace.

Kakashi is happy. Honeysuckle blooms on his knuckles.

For the first time in a very long time, Kakashi is truly happy. There is sorrow and grief, yes, but for the first time it is muted, manageable. He stands beside the adults who were once children he knew, and rebuilds.

His gaze snags on Sakura, on the way light diffuses through her hair at sunset, on her bared throat as she laughs, on the flex of her gloved hands. Her shirtsleeves now cover her arms, hiding her marks he guesses, and her hair is longer than it has been since she chopped it off at age thirteen and she is so breathtakingly beautiful.

But Kakashi is much too old and too tired for this brilliant, beautiful woman.

Agrimony (gratitude), ivy (affection), tulips (declaration of love). And then roses, roses, roses blooming on his skin.

The flowers on his skin are like a whisper, a promise, a gift from his soulmate. They seem to sigh "I am happy, you should be happy too". So when he catches Sakura smiling at him just too long, the way her hands linger on his arm, the dilation of her pupils when he invades her space. He dares. He dares take a little bit of joy for himself.

An ordinary day: the sun warm in the sky, no missions or duties. An ordinary day, Kakashi stops Sakura on the deserted path they're walking along, and kisses her.

His marks flare to life, spilling dizzy joy to flood his veins.

"No," he thinks. "No."

Because even as he kisses her—desperate and biting and gods, he could drown in her—he hates it. He never wanted this attachment. Never wanted to want anyone this badly. Never wanted to want anyone at all.

She was supposed to be safe. She had proven that she was immune to his curse, which was the only reason Kakashi was willing to try this. But not like this. Not with her written across his skin. She was supposed to be safe. And as the thoughts roil in his head, as she becomes both Sakura and soulmate, two categories he never imagined overlapping, Kakashi drowns.

Sakura pulls away, lets him gulp a desperate breath of air. "Kakashi," she whispers into his gasping mouth. "I love you. I love you. This changes nothing. I dared to love you before I knew you were mine. I love you. I love you. You've always had me. You were writ across my skin the day I was born."

(His name is Hatake Kakashi and he brings heartache. But she knows the shape of his scars and is strong enough to stand on her own. Haruno Sakura was born with grief etched onto her skin, learned to live and breath and smile and laugh alongside sorrow, learn to live alongside the dying. She will bring flowers to his dead's monuments and lift glowing hands to his weeping injuries and breath colour into his grey life. He has never wanted this attachment, but she does not care. (Perhaps they were made for each other, but there is always a choice.))

Kakashi drowns, and stops trying to swim.

(Mallow for consumed by love.)

Chapter 4

"I," Kakashi declares, only the faintest of wobbles betraying the fact that he is out-of-his-mind drunk. "Was a really crappy teacher."

He raises the bottle to Sakura in toast. There isn't much left, and he wastes more than he'd like when his attempt at a sip results in the really terrible sake running down his cheek and chin.

"You said once, that the best thing you learned as a genin on Team 7 was that a true ninja never leaves a teammate behind. But!" Here he pauses to spill more alcohol in a sloppy attempt at a mouthful. "You were just being nice (you're always too nice, except when you're hitting people, but even then you fix them up if they hurt too bad, and, anyways, they usually deserve it), you should have said that that's the only thing you learned. Because I sure fucked up teaching you anything else."

Sakura doesn't interrupt, so Kakashi takes that as approval to continue on his rant.

"I mean, perfect chakra control! And what do I do with it? Use it to motivate the two idiots! Should have taught you something useful with it. Should have taught you anything else but what I did. Should have—"

And, well, should have. Kakashi's life if full of should haves.

He doesn't remember passing out, but he also doesn't remember the trip back to his apartment. So.

At least his transport had the decency to pull the mask back up his face and to leave the not-quite-empty bottle.

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.

.

For another person, the quiet might be nice, relaxing, companionable. Kakashi just wants Sakura to say something. Anything.

She doesn't.

He drinks instead. If he can do a good enough job of messing up his health, maybe her healer's instinct will kick in and force her to stop him. She'll need to talk to him to stop him.

It doesn't induce the desired effect, but at least the alcohol does a good job of drowning out her persistent silence.

"I just want to hear your voice again," he tells her as he leaves. He wasn't going to give her his words today—revenge for her passive-aggressive bullshit—but Kakashi figures he probably owes Sakura more than his anger. It's more than he gave her before.

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Gai is doing a remarkable job of being incredibly loud while saying nothing. He's fretting. It's annoying and terrible and green.

"Either drink or go away," Kakashi orders, holding out the bottle.

Amazingly, Gai neither proposes a challenge—drinking or otherwise—nor opens his mouth to elucidate on the Power of Youth. He drinks and remains quiet.

The cuts on Kakashi's forearms and thighs have only just recently stopped their sluggish bleeding. He's glad he doesn't have to find a way to escape his friend without opening them back up.

Gai eventually cracks, but it takes longer than Kakashi was expecting. He's almost another third of the way through the bottle.

"My Friend, I do believe we should make our way to the Hospital. While you are Strong, your wounds may be more Severe than you have Judged."

"No."

"But,"

"I can't!" Kakashi doesn't mean for it to come out so desperately and panicked.

Gai sighs, no sparkle in his face, and nods.

The two sit together silently for a long while.

When Kakashi wakes, his wounds have been bandaged.

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"I should have kissed her back."

The moonshine burns worse coming back up.

The toilet is an unsympathetic listener.

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.

The bar is sticky under his face.

Tsunade is furious.

"You're a mess."

Kakashi nods. Yes, yes he is.

"You're a coward."

Yep, that too.

"She would be ashamed."

"I know," he croaks.

Tsunade leaves him to his self-pity and booze.

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.

He really isn't expecting to be ambushed by a blond terror this early in the morning.

"I," Ino declares, hands on her hips, "am so sick of this."

Kakashi clutches at the bottle in his hand, not appreciating the sneer she's directing at his glass friend.

"You don't get to do this. You don't get to kill yourself slowly and pretend that you're trying to live."

Kakashi turns and walks way.

Ino shrieks, and runs her fingers through her cropped hair. "You aren't the only one who loved her, you selfish bastard!"

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Kakashi fiddles with the pot he's holding. He feels bare without the haze of alcohol he's been accompanied by for the past months.

"Hey Sakura," he greets her.

She is as silent as stone.

"Yeah, I know, you're mad at me. I've been pretty stupid lately."

He wishes that the silence would sound like reproach, but it doesn't sound like anything. It's just quiet. He wants it to be filled with her brilliant laughter or her excited chatter or her fierce anger. Anything but this horrible, empty silence.

"It's been six months since you kissed me," he tells her, as if she doesn't know. "I shouldn't have run. It was just—"

This time the silence is his.

"Well. I was scared. So. There's that."

Kakashi places the cactus in its pot at her feet, an attempt to cover up the aching hole that's tearing apart his chest.

"I went looking for you, you know. It took me four days, but I did come looking for you. When I couldn't find you, Tsunade-sama said you were on a mission. I kept Mrs Ukki for you." He gestures to the pot. "I was, um, going to give her to you. I was going to tell you I was sorry that I ran, and that I wasn't sorry I was such a crappy jounin-sensei when you were twelve because that meant I could kiss you. And I was going to, Sakura, I was going to kiss you and try to be happy with you because you deserve to be happy."

The tears on his cheek burn worse than any of the alcohol he's bathed himself in for the past five moths, seven days.

"You always were good at thwarting my plans and expectations," he tells her, sad and angry and heartbroken.

"I thought this time you'd fight me on it. Break my legs so I couldn't run away again, maybe. Or refuse to kiss me back. Just. Well. Not this."

Mrs Ukki waves from her place at the base of the memorial stone.

"You weren't supposed to die, Sakura. You were supposed to follow Tsunade-sama's rules and survive. The medic has to survive! You shouldn't have listened to me. You wouldn't have been trash if you'd come back without the pieces of the teammate who got torn to shreds.

You would have been alive. And I would have kissed you."

By the time he gets home, he's sorry he yelled at her. The anger and the heartbreak and the regret are twined in his heart, choking vines that obscure any other emotions. He doesn't recognize his bloodshot eyes in the mirror.

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Kakashi still hears Obito's brash laughter or Minato-sensei's fond admonishments or Rin's worry.

But he never hears Sakura.

"I think I was in love with you," he'll tell the silence when he is drunk and tired and hurt.

There is no ghost at his side to answer. Only the memory of a kiss.

His is a life of should haves.

Chapter 5

Sakura stretches her hands high over her head, her vertebrae reluctantly snapping back into place with a pop-pop-pop.

The bark of the branch she is perched on is harsh against her knee and the thick canopy above her presses the heat down, down, down.

It's been an impossibly long summer, and the weather has still shown no interest in letting up.

She can barely breathe for the humidity.

She longs for rain.

Even out here, only two weeks into a month long mission deep in the forests of Fire Country hunting bandits, she would take being sodden and miserable over this unbearable heat.

Shikamaru is going to owe her for this, the lazy bastard. It's his genin team she's supervising while he prances about Suna on a "diplomatic mission" (read: dates with Temari).

Sakura is perfectly capable of diplomacy! She could go on dates with Temari! Even the desert and avoiding Kankuro thanking her, again, for saving his life would be better than this! At least the desert is dry. Here, she feels like she's drowning in the humidity, and her hair is an absolute horror.

The next two weeks cannot pass quickly enough.

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By the time the month ends and the mission is complete:

Sakura has healed two cases of heatstroke, one broken arm, twenty-seven kunai/shurriken/sword cuts, three black eyes, one broken rib and a concussion.

Mirai and her teammates have learned eight new embarrassing stories about their sensei and three new curse words.

Six trees have been vaporized by an unidentified force.

Sakura, with the aid of her adorable and evil little genin, has devised five different plans with which to cause her dear friend Shikamaru unimaginable suffering.

Team Shikamaru has completely eliminated not one, but two bands of raiders that have been hiding out in the forest and attacking the isolated communities in the far reaches of Fire country for the past year.

Sakura is down a full foot of hair after a fit of rage and the expert application of a kunai.

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It is an exhausted Sakura who drags herself out of her filthy clothes and into bed.

It's still early in the afternoon, so the heat of the room is unbearable, even with the windows open. Sakura foregoes pyjamas or a sheet, and falls asleep.

She wakes to soft kisses on her bare shoulder.

"Yo," she mumbles into her pillow.

"Yo. You cut your hair."

"Mhmm," Sakura agrees. "Too hot for hair."

She rolls over onto her back to receive a kiss to her mouth.

"Missed you."

"'S your fault I was gone. Should'a told Shika no. Should'a taken pity on your poor wife. I could'a dated Temari! But no! You sent me to drown in mosquitoes and children and this stupid heat."

Kakashi snorts at her, and kisses her forehead in apology. "Sorry. Next time I'll send you to Suna to take Temari on a date."

Sakura relents. "Thanks. I missed you too. And the dogs. And ice cream."

Kakashi smiles at her; mouth wide and eyes crinkling, her favourite smile because only she gets to see it. She leans up and kisses his beautiful smile.

One kiss turns into two into three, and Sakura forgets the heat and the discomfort of the endless month with each decadent press of lips and teeth and tongue. She drinks in the love embed in each touch like water: rejuvenating and longed for. She doesn't like to be away from home for so long.

They fall into each other, and the weather and the world fade out of focus. All there is in the universe is the two of them, heat and tenderness and love.

They fall into each other, and outside, it starts to rain.

Chapter 6

"Hatake, you ok?" Genma pauses at the bar to worry over the esteemed Rokudaime.

From underneath the wide expanse of his hat, Kakashi makes an inarticulate sound of defeat. The act of smashing his face into the bar diminishes the effectiveness of this communication.

Genma raises an eyebrow at the out-of-place moping radiating from his friend and leader. The restaurant is filled to the brim with bright and smiling shinobi, each more than happy to overindulge at this summer's "Hey look, we all survived another year" party. This joint Uzumaki-Yamanaka extravaganza is the fifth since the end of the Fourth War. While not everyone necessarily commits to the inevitable theme, all shinobi are mercenary enough to at least show up when there is free alcohol and food on offer, even if they refuse to come in costume.

Which begs the question, with all the revelry about, why Hatake is face down and miserable in the room full of drunk men and women in scandalous beach wear. (Genma is all for this year's "Beach party" theme. The bikinis. Seriously.)

"Hatake?!"

Kakashi finally raises his head to peer at Genma, but groans and drops his face into his hands when he catches sight of something over the senbon wielder's shoulder.

Kurenai and Anko snicker.

Genma looks over to the women for an explanation.

"Our great and powerful Hokage is having difficulties," Anko pauses to infuse as much innuendo as possible into the word, "reconciling his cute little genin with Pinky over there." She nods towards a table behind Genma.

Kakashi moans.

Turning around, Genma spots Haruno Sakura dancing on a table; her friends hooting and hollering in appreciation, her movements slow and raw, her hair a tousled pink mess. The little gauzy wrap skirt and what is possibly the smallest bikini top ever conceived by man do little to hide the fact that Haruno is definitely no longer the timid little twelve year old who followed around the Uchiha spawn.

"Huh," Genma manages. "Are those, polka dots?"

Kakashi smashes his forehead against the bar. Twice.

Kurenai snickers and shares, "He sent over a drink when he saw her ass in that skirt, and didn't know it was Sakura until she came over to give him shit for only buying her alcohol when it's already free."

"He sent her a Buttery Nipple!" Anko crows out before both women devolve into laughter.

Genma claps him on the shoulder bracingly. "Well, maybe if we get you drunk enough, you'll forget the whole evening and wake up tomorrow morning not knowing that you considered the colour of your former student's nipples."

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Later that evening, the bartender brings over a drink and sets it down in front of Kakashi.

Kakashi blinks. "I didn't order this." The words are more slurred than they would have been two hours and six shots earlier.

Genma looks at the drink, then back at the bartender. "Is that a Screaming Orgasm?"

"Yep. That woman over there sent it over." He points at the table behind Genma. "The one with the pink hair."

As one, Kakashi and Genma turn in their seats to meet Sakura's gaze.

She waves, and winks.

Kakashi chokes.

"Well then," Genma muses. "I guess you aren't the only one wondering about the colour of someone's nipples. Do you think she'd let you take that top off her with your teeth?"

The ensuing punch to the solar plexus is worth the blush that burns up Kakashi's cheeks from under his mask.

Even at the bachelor party, Genma never does manage to get Kakashi to cough up just what colours exactly that itsy bitsy top was concealing.

Chapter 7

Sakura walks around in shorts and tank-tops, lounges in bathing suits, basks nude in the garden. She is all sun-kissed skin.

Kakashi, however, keeps himself wrapped up in long sleeves and pants and masks. Admittedly, he thus looks a bit absurd with his mask pulled down around his neck: his cheekbones bisected into distinct regions of exposed to the elements and not.

Sakura will laugh as she mouths along that border, pressing kisses and mirth into his cheek. She giggles as she traces the cartography of his skin.

(Secretly, she adores the distinction. The border is proof that there are pieces of her husband that belong only to herself. There are fourteen years and too much sorrow between them sometimes. Sakura likes the reminder that there are pieces of Kakashi that only she gets to see: the pale expanse of his chest, the ticklish spot behind his left knee, the curve of his mouth. Sakura likes the reminder that Kakashi belongs to her: if he pulls his wedding ring off, its echo remains, a pale band around the base of his finger. (She never knew she was possessive until she claimed him as her territory and placed her mark on his soul.))

Chapter 8

It starts like this.

Sakura is thirteen and her world has fallen apart.

She was part of a team, once. A team as precious as the sky above.

Naruto was their the sun, shining and brilliant, almost too much to look at sometimes. Sasuke was their moon, cold and bright, reflecting the light of the sun, and all the more beautiful for it. And Kakashi-sensei was their stars, distant and untouchable but guiding the way.

And Sakura? Well, Sakura was the earth below. Worlds away, forever reaching to touch them, never quite making it. Living in the warmth of their light but never giving anything in return.

It's no wonder really, that they leave her behind.

Sakura is thirteen and the heavens have abandoned her.

She stands in the rain and doesn't even notice the damp chill.

"Yo," says a voice from down around her feet.

Sakura doesn't even have enough energy to startle. Stupid idiot! yells Inner-chan. What kind of kunoichi doesn't notice she's being snuck up on?!

Sakura looks down at the voice, and blinks in surprise. "Pakkun?" Because, indeed, the drenched little mop of fur is one of Kakashi-sensei's ninken.

"Yup," the little pug confirms. "What are you doing out here in the rain? 'S cold."

Sakura sniffles. "Nothing. I'm doing nothing."

Pakkun smiles, she thinks, and says, "Great, you aren't busy! You can come help the pack in the bath, then."

Sakura blinks at him. "What?"

"The pack! We just got back from a mission that meant being in the rain all week, and we need to get the mud out of our coats. You have two opposable thumbs and nothing else to do. You're coming to help."

Sakura blinks a couple of more times. Nope, Pakkun is still definitely at her feet ordering her to come give him and his pack mates a bath. "Ok?"

"Excellent. Come along, this way."

Sakura follows the pug across the village, up a wall and through the complicated trap on the window. He's patient when explaining the various mechanisms that trigger the alarm. Sakura makes note of the construction, storing the information away in her brain. She always did like trap-making in the academy.

Finally, Sakura is standing in what must be Kakashi-sensei's apartment. She doesn't have the time to feel awkward or look around, because she barely has both feet through the window before she's been bowled over by a group of very enthusiastic and very wet ninken.

"Sakura!"

"Sakura-chan!"

"Long time no see, pinky!"

The pack is gleeful in their greetings, both vocally and with wet tongues.

Sakura has not felt this welcome and cared for in a very long time.

They eventually make their way into the bathroom with its too-small tub, but not until she's been forced into sharing with the ninken all about her training with Tsunade-shishō, the new tea-shop that opened a block down from her house and the plot of the latest book she read.

When everyone is finally clean and dry, the ninken knock her back down to the floor for one last cuddle and invite her back next week.

"Bring treats and that shampoo you like," Pakkun orders. "Kakashi won't buy it anymore, the cheapskate."

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It ends like this.

Sakura is twenty-one and she has helped put the world back together.

She is part of a village. She heals and she fights, she has patients and teammates.

Sakura is the earth. She is the strength from where people stand when they are shaken, she is the safe place to rest. She is soaring peaks and secret depths.

Sakura is the one who remains when all others have fallen away.

Sakura is twenty-one and she knows that she can survive the ground shattering to make herself anew.

She kneels in a bathroom, and doesn't even mind the soap studs staining her shirt.

"Yo," says a voice from the door.

Sakura doesn't startle. She's known he was standing there for the past several minutes; he'd triggered the tripwire alert she set when she broke in earlier.

"You know," Kakashi tells her conversationally. "I knew that someone had been breaking into my apartment, but I never imagined that it was to bath my ninken."

Sakura smiles.

"I almost didn't believe the ANBU team I set to watch."

Her grin grows, because he has known all along, and he let her into his space and his life despite his painfully private nature. Kakashi never really left her alone.

Sakura finishes washing the last of the shampoo from Akino's back. "I never broke in, sensei," she trills at him. "I was just visiting my friends. Pakkun gave me a key."

"And by key, you mean he showed you the deactivation sequence for the trap on the window."

Sakura blinks up at him, full of innocence and sugar. "Why sensei, what kind of shinobi would I be if I came through the front door?"

"An invited one?" he muses, a touch of humour in his voice.

Bull growls and Urushi takes a nip at Kakashi's fingers.

"She's always invited," Pakkun tells him. "Sakura gives the best head massages."

The ninken all yip in agreement.

Kakashi raises an eyebrow in curiosity. "Is that so? Well then, Sakura, mind giving your old sensei a head massage?"

Sakura has spent eight years worth of Thursdays in Kakashi's bathroom with his ninken. In those eight years, the shower head has been upgraded, softer towels have appeared, Sakura's favourite tea is regularly stocked in the kitchen and her favourite shampoo on the bathroom counter.

Sakura has spent eight years invading Kakashi's bathroom, his space, his life.

Smiling, she stands and pulls his face down to kiss him, fingers threading through his hair.

The ninken cheer.

It starts with a lonely girl in the rain and a pug who is reminded of a little boy with a dead team. It ends with a lonely man in an empty apartment and a woman who falls in love.

(The stars fall to earth, dying to be closer. Dying for that single moment of brilliant light and togetherness. (Sometimes the earth catches them, holds them close and dear, to live on as part of the sediment, foreign and treasured.))

Chapter 9

"My head," Kakashi declares, giddy with pain, "really, really hurts."

Sakura is torn between laughing and crying, because that is a very accurate statement.

The green chakra coating her hands is fluctuating alarmingly as she pulls deep from the last of her reserves. Shit, how his head isn't a bloody paste from the force of that explosion, she doesn't know. And she barely has enough chakra to check that his brain isn't bleeding too dangerously, let alone do something about it.

Kakashi giggles, and then brings his hands up to his head with a wince. "Ow."

Blood is leaking out of one ear, and the other side of his face is peppered with bits of shrapnel.

"I know. I know. It's ok, I've got it," Sakura reassures him, the promise uncertain on her tongue. They're deep behind enemy lines, alone, he with a pretty terrible concussion and she with barely any chakra. But they're going to get out alive. They have to.

"Sensei," she calls. He doesn't focus on her, too caught up on something around her forehead.

She tries again. "Sensei."

Kakashi reaches out and tries to grab nothing from the air.

"Kakashi!" she snaps.

He finally focuses on her eyes, or tries to, at least.

"I'm going to need your help to get us out of here, ok?" she hopes, in his addled state, that he doesn't notice how her voice breaks with desperation.

"Hey Sakura-chan, how'd you get those stars to sit in your hair? Looks like a crown. 'S nice."

Sakura chokes down a sob. "I'll tell you the secret to it when we get back to Konoha, 'k?"

"Mm'k." Kakashi agrees.

She gets an arm around his waist and throws his over her shoulder, and hoists him to his feet without chakra. Pure upper body strength and fear powering her sore muscles.

One step, and then another. She'll figure out.

She has to.

Kakashi plays with her hair, plucking at imaginary stars. Sakura takes the first of many steps towards home.

And then Sakura drags Kakashi home to Konoha, battling the unhelpful enemy forces and the even more unhelpfully addled Kakashi through the never ending Land of Earth. She goes a bit crazy and gets a bit violent, and is a terrifying pink-haired force that sweeps across the unending stretches of rock like a storm, like a fire, like a demon. (She's scared out of her mind that they'll get captured and she'll have to watch as Kakashi is killed.) By the time they stumble through Konoha's gates, Sakura has an impressive new scar down the side of her face, Kakashi will never ever say anything disparaging about chakra scalpels ever again, and Tsunade is extremely confused about why Iwa is pleading for an alliance and for the Hokage to just "keep that green-eyed demon out of Earth, please gods". The End.

Chapter 10

In hindsight, it's really stupid of him to approach her. She's seven months into a deep-cover mission and he calls her by her first name? He isn't exactly a rookie. It's a stupid fucking move.

"Sakura?"

The redhead's shoulders stiffen minutely, barely perceptible if not for the backless dress and eight years of reading her body language. She doesn't turn around immediately, as if she doesn't recognize the sound of that name on his lips as her own, but does finally relent to his presence.

She turns and startles, as if she wasn't completely aware of who was standing behind her.

"I'm sorry, you must have mistaken me for someone else." Her voice is huskier than he's used to, pitched closer to an alto than her usual mezzo-soprano. The change is less striking than the red hair; almost bloody compared to her trademark pale pink. It's discomforting, like seeing a stranger wear Sakura's face.

She's better at undercover than he'd expected; her movements and facial expressions almost foreign. If he didn't know her as well as he does, Kakashi doesn't think he'd recognize her.

"My apologies," he offers, one stranger to another. Underneath the polite facade, however, he allows her the shadow of a wince. He is sorry. He never should have even hinted that he recognized her.

Sakura's eyes glance from his face to over his shoulder and back again, a fleeting flicker of her gaze, but whatever she spots, it prompts her to relax her body language into something more open and accommodating.

"Akiko," she offers. "My name is Kita Akiko."

Kakashi frowns at her, briefly, wondering what she's playing at, but gives back, "Hatake Kakashi, of Konohagakure."

"Oh!" Sakura exclaims. "Are you a ninja? How exciting! I've never met anyone from a hidden village before, you must tell me about it. What are you doing here in the Fire Daimyo's court?"

"Diplomatic business, for the Hokage," he allows, because it's the truth. He's here for Tsunade and her annoying assistance that he'll need a good relationship with the Daimyo if he's going to be the Rokudaime. Kakashi doesn't want to be the Rokudaime, but he knows that he really isn't going to have a choice in the matter, so he better make the most of it.

Although, finding Sakura here makes Kakashi question if Tsunade was just using the latest trade agreements as an excuse to get him out of Konoha and into Sakura's presence.

He's been more ornery since she left, he knows. He just hadn't expected the Hokage to pick up on his continuing bad mood, let alone figure out the reason for it.

"Well, Hatake-san, we should dance and you can tell me all about the exciting life you must live!" Sakura takes one of his hands and tugs him towards the dance floor.

"Heh, heh. Kita-san," he rubs the back of his head sheepishly, refusing to be pulled along. "I'm not much of a dancer."

Sakura stumbles, as if his resisting weight has pulled her off balance, and knocks into his chest. She pretends to take a moment to steady herself so that she can whisper in his ear. "Hatake Kakashi, so help me, you are going to shut up and dance or my cover is going to be blown and I will kill you. Well, I'll kill you once we get out of here. And then I will revive you so that you can explain to Shishō why my seven months spent under cover went to shit because you couldn't walk away. And then she will kill you again. You will be dead twice over. And what the hell? You couldn't walk away? You had a pretty easy time doing so before I left!"

Kakashi winces at her accusation, and then realizes that they've been locked together for far longer than is appropriate. His gaze passes over the small group of guards watching them cautiously, the group of women shooting them curious looks.

"Right. Dance. Let's do that."

Sakura pulls him all the way onto the dance floor as a new song begins, the tug of a scowl at her mouth.

When they pause to get situated, Kakashi pulls her close so that they can keep watch over the room from over each other's shoulder. It will look perhaps overly intimate to observers, but they'll be able to speak without being overheard.

"Tsunade-sama sent me here to discuss some minor changes to trade agreements with Earth and Sand. I didn't know you'd be here. Sorry. I never should have approached you."

"No," Sakura spits at him. "You shouldn't have. What were you thinking?"

Kakashi sighs. "Is this the best time to get into this?"

"I don't know, Kakashi. You tell me. It's not like you're interested into getting into 'this', whatever 'this' is, when we're both safe in Konoha."

"Sakura," he pleads. For what, he isn't quite sure.

"Fine, later," she concedes. "It's actually a good thing you're here. I was going to send a message to Shishō anyway to let her know I needed backup to finish up the mission. Since you're here, you can help me out. You can take the documents back with you, I'll stick it out a couple more weeks before vanishing, and then I can let this awful dye wash out of my hair."

"Sounds good. What do you need from me?"

Sakura outlines the plan as they dance, speaking quickly but concisely. Kakashi is impressed by all that she's managed to accomplish the past few months.

Sakura finishes before the third song ends, so they continue to dance in silence before they can part without suspicion.

The music ends, and Sakura pulls away.

"Well, thank you very much for dancing with me. And such exciting stories you tell, Hatake-san!" Sakura enthuses. "I should get back to my escort, but I hope that we will see each other again."

Kakashi raises her left hand to bestow a careful kiss to her fingertips. "The pleasure was all mine, Kita-san."

Sakura blushes, and Kakashi doesn't think that it's an act.

As he brushes by her to go speak with a merchant he recognizes, he whispers to her, "I'm sorry about running away when you kissed me, Sakura. But at least I didn't run all the way to the Fire Daimyo's court. We'll talk when you get home. Maybe even go dancing?"

Sakura's little gasp follows him as he moves away. Kakashi smiles. They both have a tendency to run. Maybe together they'll figure out how to stay.

Chapter 11

The training grounds of Konohagakure are not unused to conflict, but the raw pain and fury seeping out on currents of chakra from one of the most distant and forested areas is enough to warn off any shinobi with the smallest modicum of sense.

The fight is one a long time in coming, built on old hurts and bitterness and too much left unsaid. Kakashi wishes he'd never let it finally come into being. But Sakura had challenged him to a spar with too much fury running through her veins to accept his attempts at brushing her off. She had pushed and pushed and pushed—something almost a snarl on her face—until he'd given in.

When she'd led him far from their usual training ground, it had only served as confirmation that this wasn't just about a spar.

Kakashi had known that they were reaching a breaking point. Could feel it with every mission where he issued a command for Sakura to stand down, to pull back, to not engage. He just hadn't quite been expecting this: Sakura like a poison coated blade in the night, all focused intent and fury, all the more dangerous in the hands of an inexperienced novice. He'd half expected her to cut herself to pieces in her rage, but she's focused razor-sharp and more deadly than he's ever seen, than he's ever expected her capable of being, even in his darkest musings.

He'd humoured her anger the way he usually does, darting out of range and taunting her mildly with her inability to touch him. But, instead of boiling over and burning herself out, Sakura had just stared at him through half-lidded eyes, something cold and coiled and unfamiliar hidden in their summertime leaves.

And then she'd lashed out with words as precise as her blows. Cruel quips about dead teammates and failure that were calculated for maximum impact. And Kakashi had given her exactly what she was looking for: rage. (He had never expected her to be capable of it, the ability to pass such poison through lips so used to smiling, let alone the shrewdness to know exactly what strikes would hurt the most.)

Kakashi had snapped, and gone was any facade of detachment or mild amusement. Lightning had crackled at his fingertips and Sakura had laughed, a terrible, tearing sound.

He can barely think through the rage; it's on his tongue and in his lungs and turning the world hazy red. They fight for an eternity it seems, a desperate ugly battle. He's bleeding from multiple lacerations and he's aware, vaguely, of several broken fingers, but he can't stop until he cuts that poisonous fucking tongue out of her mouth.

She gives him back his rage. They dance among the swirling leaves and the heaving ground. (Distantly, he wonders if this is what it felt like to fight the day the Valley of the End was carved.)

They fight and they fight and they fight, and with every violent move and every vicious word, Kakashi can feel more bruises pressed into his tattered soul.

Finally, he just stops, the anger in him bleeding out as abruptly as it had come.

"What do you want from me, Sakura?" he asks. He sounds old and tired and so very sad.

Sakura snarls, full of fury and frustration. She shakes with the effort of keeping herself together.

"Sakura," he sighs.

Her trembling increases, but she says nothing. The two of them stand a world apart, the ground between splintered and scorched and full of too many things said in anger and too many things left unsaid in fear.

He sighs again, and runs his undamaged hand over his masked face. "Sakura."

"I just want you to see me," she finally whispers.

Before he's even really registered her confession, he's standing in front of her: a sharp, desperate move. He can't breath. He doesn't know why.

"What are you talking about? I'm looking right at you."

"No," she says, frustrated. "That's not what I said."

All he can do is stare at her, shaking and bloodstained. He does not understand.

"I'm looking right at you," he tells her again, but he doesn't recognize his own voice.

Her mouth twists into something ugly and bitter.

"Do you even see me, Kakashi?" She's never dropped all honourifics before. "Because I'm pretty sure all you see when you look at me are ghosts."

And, oh, it's been a very long time since an enemy has stolen his breath like that on a battlefield. He feels sick.

Her green, green eyes raise up from where they've been fixed on the ground to bore through him. He would like to say he's never seen the look on her face before, but that would be a lie. It's the look she wore to the Sandaime's funeral, when Tsunade-sama called them into her office to say that Sasuke was not coming back, upon Naruto informing her that he would be leaving to train with Jiraiya.

It is a look of grief and rage and bone-deep hurt.

"You never asked," she accuses him. "You never asked why I decided to join the Academy. You never asked if my parents agreed with my enlistment. You never asked me if I was okay after the Chunnin exam. You never asked me why shishō took me on as her apprentice, or if I like being a mednin, or if I was lonely! You never asked! You never even bothered to ask!"

By the end of it, she's screaming at him.

He probably deserves it.

He definitely deserves it.

She takes a deep breath, and continues on in a calmer tone. Her voice sounds like wind through dead grass.

"When we first became Team 7, every time we trained, you looked right through me." She laughs, but it is a bitter thing. "And I get it! Naruto and Sasuke were the prodigies! I was just a silly little girl playing ninja. But then in Wave, when you taught use how to walk up trees, I did it on the first try. I checked, you know, after, when we got back. I looked it up to see how else you could apply it," her voice goes syrupy sweet. "Did you know that I'm only the fourth recorded person in Konoha to tree-walk on their first try?"

He had known, vaguely, that it was unusual, spectacular.

"And do you remember what you said to me, when I'd done it?"

He doesn't. He thinks that maybe he should.

"Nothing. You told me nothing," she spits at him. "You turned to Naruto and Sasuke and mocked them because the girl did it first."

He flinches.

"And you looked right through me when I told you that I was learning to heal. You blanched and you ran off and you never asked me why or said you were proud or even smiled! You just looked like you'd seen a ghost. So who is it, Kakashi? Who is it you see when you look at me, because it certainly isn't Haruno Sakura!"

His eyes are closed as if in defence against her rage and her accusations and her questions. Because she's right. When she was his student, and after, when they weren't even teammates anymore, he never looked at Sakura to see more than pink hair or her crush on a boy or Rin's face.

Unexpectedly, there's a nose buried in his chest and fists twisting his vest and a girl in his space.

He opens his one good eye, brings his arms up, and just holds her as she sobs.

Kakashi has not been a good teacher or teammate, but he will hold her as she cries.

"I wanted to be able to stand beside the rest of Team 7 and fight," she confesses to his zipper.

Kakashi closes his eyes again, and braces for yet another blow.

"That's why I wanted to be a mednin like Tsunade-shishō." She punctuates this statement with a jerky nod. "So that I never had to be left behind again while my teammates fought and bled and died without me.

I swear, I'll get better. Please, Kakashi, I'll get better and stronger, and I swear I won't be a burden on missions. I swear! I won't hold you back and I won't get hurt again and, and—"

And Kakashi doesn't know where to start to make this okay. Not when his fear and his weakness have reduced brilliant, exceptional Sakura to this. Has she always believed this, he wonders, that she's not good enough? That she's never been good enough?

Has he ever taught her otherwise?

When he was twenty-six and saddled with yet another genin team, he'd been made more than aware that failing a Team 7 containing the last Uchiha and the Kyūbi jinchūriki wasn't actually an option. And he hadn't wanted them, not one bit, hadn't wanted the responsibility of his traitorous kōhai's little brother let alone his sensei's child. Hadn't wanted to ruin those children too, not when he'd failed Itachi and Minato in such different yet resplendent ways. But he understood the shapes of their scars, and he'd thought that maybe he could do it, be almost the sensei Team 7 needed. Thought maybe that he could be trusted with the faith the Sandaime was putting in him. He could look at his students and understand their pain and do something about it, even if it wasn't enough.

But apparently, he'd been so blind—him, Sharingan Kakashi—that he'd never been able to see past his own hurts and failures to the way his only female student was drowning.

He tries not to laugh, because of course he had failed Sakura just as deeply and terribly as Sasuke and Naruto. Of course he could have never been anything like the sensei they needed.

And then he'd gone and made it worse, again, later as her taichou, through his own fear and weakness.

It had been a simple mission, a routine supplies drop for a handful of the border bases, should have been nothing for shinobi of their calibre. But then there'd been an ambush and a fight, and then Sakura had thrown herself desperately in front of Sai as one of the enemy nin surprised him with a chakra coated blade.

Ozone and charred flesh is a smell Kakashi knows so intimately, but he has rarely been more aware of the way it burns itself into his nose as the times he's held wonderful, beloved girls in his arms as they fade from the lightning running through their veins. His hands had trembled as they tried to decide the best way to pull the sword out of her stomach.

Kakashi couldn't look Tsunade-sama in the face when he ran into the Konoha hospital with her bloodied and burnt apprentice cradled in his arms. He couldn't stand to see the blame he knew would be in her eyes.

He had sat at her bedside for the long days she remained unconscious, and then had fled and not returned when she'd stirred awake with a slurred "'Kashi, e'ryone okay?", her hand reaching out to touch him, to make sure he was real.

And then he'd pushed her back, refused to let her fight, made her think that sacrificing herself for a teammate was something punishable. That risking an injury she knew she could survive to save a friend something potentially worse made her weak. That daring to bleed meant she was worthless.

When the truth was that all Kakashi could see when he looked at her for weeks afterwards was the echo of blood on her cheek from where he'd smoothed her hair back with the same hands that had wrenched a blade and a wretched sob of pain from her gut.

When the truth was that Kakashi was so, so scared of losing her.

"No," he raps. "Gods, Sakura, no. You're not—" He sweeps his hands up the length of her back to thread them through her hair and pull her away from where she's buried in his chest so that he can see her eyes.

"You're not a burden, Sakura. Never that. You're. Fuck. You're everything, okay? And you almost died on me."

He doesn't know what to do or say with those impossibly green eyes staring up at him. Especially not when they're red-rimmed and spilling over with so much hurt. He wants— He doesn't know what he wants.

"But—"

Kakakshi disentangles one hand from her hair to rest lightly on her lips. Her breath is warm and moist and her skin is soft.

"You're everything, Sakura. And it's not fair that I've been too scared of everything, that I've made you think you are anything less."

And he doesn't know where this truth is coming from, doesn't know how he's letting it tumble out of his mouth, except that she deserves it and he's much too tired to stop himself.

"I should have asked," he tells her. "Especially when not knowing didn't make me care any less."

She's trembling under his touch, her lower lip wobbling with the threat of more tears.

She's never been afraid to cry in front of him; in their world of pain and weakness and betrayal and death, he's never seen anything so brave.

"Sakura," he whispers, and he doesn't have the words to tell her that she should never have had to cry because of him, especially when he had been the person entrusted with her safety.

He thinks about the accusations she has thrown at him, thinks about all the things he's never wanted to know for fear that knowing would just make it worse when she was gone, would just make the place she used to occupy all the more obvious.

But Sakura is more than just a girl with pink hair and a crush on a boy, more than a ghost of Rin. Sakura is hands that shatter and hands that heal, Sakura is blinding smiles and fierce glares, Sakura is late night chats over fire-warmed tea and early morning spars and afternoon laughter and a hundred other moments, big and small. Sakura is abiding love and so much hurt, and Kakashi was lost long ago.

If she were gone, he'd be left only with a gaping hole in his heart and a lifetime of questions he never dared ask.

"Sakura," he manages to get out around the blades in his mouth, "why did you join the Academy?"

When she laughs, it is not joyful, but she nods and attempts a smile.

Kakashi does his best to smile back, and drags two fingers through the tear tracks on her cheeks.

When he pulls her back in for a desperate hug, she smells of salt and iron and ozone and forgiveness.

It is not okay, but maybe some day they might be.

Chapter 12

prologue. you knew since you were young that Fate was not your fan

Hatake Kakashi is run ragged from a brutal ANBU mission, all he wants to be is curled up in his own bed with his dogs and to not move for a century or two; so, of course, a man falls out of the sky and almost lands on him, not quite six kilometres out from Konoha.

"What," he blankly demands of the Universe at large.

The man doesn't move from where he's crashed through several stories of branches to lay broken on the ground a few metres below the limb upon which Kakashi has slammed to a halt. The rest of his team is quick to scatter into a defensive formation, senses on high alert, ready for an attack.

"Taichou?" Itachi ventures from the rear point of their diamond.

"I don't have a fucking clue." He's debating jumping down to poke at the insensate man since no attack appears to be forthcoming.

And then a second form crashes down from the heavens, except Kakashi unthinkingly snatches this one before they can hit the ground.

Tenzō snickers.

Kakashi looks down at the slight figure cradled in his arms, takes in her outrageous pink hair and her mask. Her unfamiliar pink hair and mask.

"What?" Hatake Kakashi demands again of the Universe, this time more forcefully.

The Universe doesn't answer, and Tenzō's snickers transform into giggles.

He really, really has no interest in dealing with this shit right now. Or ever.

But, because the universe hates him, apparently he's not going to get to pour himself into bed at any point tonight.

Fuck. This.

i. everyone here was someone else before

"Ow."

Sakura considers the all too familiar sight of the interrogation cell around her. Not just familiar for being an interrogation cell—she's been a shinobi for long enough to have seen more than a few of them—but because she knows this particular interrogation cell. She's patched up her fair share of prisoners in this cell, she recognizes the pattern of gouges in one of the walls.

"Really, Hokage-sama," she demands, "is this really necessary? I mean, obviously we fucked the jutsu up if we got knocked unconscious for our troubles, but aren't chakra suppression cuffs just a bit excessive for punishment?"

No one bursts into the room, so Sakura continues to address herself to the one-way glass. "I mean, okay, you said you wanted us to stop with the fūinjutsu testing without Naruto there to check our work, but he's been gone for months and who knows when he'll be back! We thought we had it handled!"

Nothing. "C'mon, sensei, I'll do your paperwork for the next month, just tell Ibiki to let us go!"

That finally gets her an answer, as Ibiki stalks into the room a half minute later. Sakura tilts back onto her chair's back legs and smiles charmingly up at him. "Ibiki-san!" she greets cheerfully, and doesn't get a whisper of a smile in return. Sakura smothers a sigh at her latest failure to make Ibiki show any emotion not related to sadism or apathy. She's determined to win that bet with Sai!

Except, and it's strange, usually she can get at least an inkling of amusement from the man at her antics. But he's grim and impenetrable, and Sakura has the sinking feeling that something more is wrong than a failed jutsu.

Sakura tenses, and sends out another, barely perceptible spike of chakra to double check this isn't a genjutsu; she did it on instinct upon coming to, but something is very, very wrong.

"You see," Ibiki drawls, "I'm real curious how you know my name and how, exactly, you got your hands on this." And he slams her ANBU mask and captain's scarf on the table between them.

Sakura's eyes are flickering between a hundred little details that she'd overlooked in her confusion and pain and embarrassment at quite how badly their jutsu must have failed for Kakashi-sensei and Tsunade-shishō to slap her upside the head with chakra suppression cuffs and leave her to rot in an interrogation cell only half-healed as punishment for her recklessness. The fine lines are missing from the corners of Ibiki's eyes and mouth, his shoulders are more square, the paint in the room is a different shade. Sakura cannot feel Tsunade's chakra on the other side of the cell wall.

"What the fuck is going on?" she demands.

"That's what I would like to know," a very much alive Yamanaka Inoichi replies as he enters the room.

All the air whooshes out of Sakura's lungs; she feels gut punched. She bites her tongue instead of reaching out to touch him. She's much too used to seeing the walking dead after the war, but she still can't breathe for the shock of it. He looks so much like Ino did before she died.

Sakura can't quite bring herself to look away from Inoichi's face; she can tell that whatever expression on her own is not what he expected from his demand, and that it's making him uncomfortable. She's pretty sure that it's because no foreign shinobi attempting to infiltrate the village would look at Konoha's Head of T&I with quite as much desperate loss—although, without knowing quite where, or when, she is, Sakura doesn't actually know if Inoichi is even Head of T&I yet.

"What's the year?" she rasps, already trying to figure out how their jutsu fucked up this bad.

She can see how they both do a double take at her question, although she probably couldn't have without her many years reading both men's expressions.

"You really want us to believe," Ibiki sneers, "that you've time travelled? Really, that's the story you're going with?"

Sakura raises two cuffed and trembling hands to her mouth for a moment. "My teammate and I were testing a transportation seal for moving groups of people across long distances. Something must have been wrong with the seal." Or something must have gone wrong in the process of sealing. Sakura frowns, and tries to think back, but her memory fragments after surveying their chosen clearing for the test and setting up traps to protect their backs.

"Sai!" she gasps. "Did my teammate come through to?"

Ibiki tilts his head. "No."

Sakura's jaw clenches and she looks away from their too pointed gazes. She can only tell herself that Sai is smart and capable, he's survived much worse, he'll be fine. He has to be fine.

"Now, back to this time travel you claim to have undergone." Inoichi leans forward. "How, exactly are you planning on convincing us that's in any way true."

Sakura grimaces. This would be easier if she knew what year it was, but she'll just have to think fast.

"Hello Ojisan," she greets Inoichi, bobbing a bow with a tired smile, "my name is Haruno Sakura. Please take care of me."

ii. there is something 'bout the face, almost a memory

"What do you make of her?" Inoichi turns to Ibiki as they stare at the woman claiming to be a time traveller through the one-way mirror. His own emotions are a flurry of confusion and worry.

No one outside of the village should have known that Ino-chan had brought home Haruno-kun just three days ago in order to introduce her "new, best, beautiful friend Sakura-chan!" The idea that any hostile group might be keeping such close watch on his daughter… it's taking everything he has to stay calm and not rip through the woman's mind looking for danger to his family.

"She's a good liar. Although why, if she can lie like that, she's claiming to have time travelled, I've no idea."

"And what do you think, Inoichi-san?" the Sandaime asks him, calmly exhaling a mouthful of smoke.

Inoichi scrubs at his chin. "I don't know. She looks like Haruno Sakura; I've never met another person with colouring quite like hers. But it's a strange plot. I'd like your permission to try reading her."

The Professor hums, and sinks back on his heels, puffing on his pipe.

Hatake Kakashi skulks in the corner like a particularly angry racoon. Inoichi can feel his suspicion and aggravation hanging in the small room, almost suffocating. "What about you, Hatake-san?" he asks, as politely as he can manage through the tension aching in his jaw.

For someone bearing only a quarter of his face, Hatake manages to convey an impressive amount of disdain. "Time travel?" he demands. The "really?" implied.

"She seems insistent," Inoichi shrugs.

He's never been made to feel so stupid with such little expression by someone so much younger.

"What do you think she's here for," he demands of the boy. Because Inoichi sure as hell has no idea what she's hoping to get out of this ridiculous scheme.

Hatake frowns. "I don't know."

Yeah. Inoichi has the feeling that's going to be a common sentiment around this woman who claims her name is Haruno Sakura and smiles the same bright smile as the little six year old girl he knows.

(What is impossible, he wonders, in a world of chakra and demons?)

iii. to look Death in the eye and smile

"Hello Sakura-chan," a dead man greets her.

Sakura is not stupid or naive enough to believe that the Sandaime actually believes her claims of time-travel. But she can't help but bow in greeting, a happy grin tugging at her mouth.

This second time around of dealing with long-dead Hokages is much more enjoyable than her first. At least it's only her own life on the line, and not the safety of the world.

"Hokage-sama," she returns, "it's good to see you alive."

She's impressed: he doesn't blink.

"Ah," he sighs, "I suppose I am not surprised that an old man like me would not live forever."

Sakura says nothing.

"Yamanaka-san is going to need to investigate your claim. I'm sure you understand, Sakura-chan. This is, after all, a hidden village."

Sakura manages a tightlipped smile that suggests no real pleasure. "I understand, of course. I apologize in advance," she turns to Inoichi, "if this goes badly."

The man blinks at her, nonplussed.

Sakura shrugs. "The one and only time Ino tried Shintenshin it, um, well—" she trails off, not really quite sure how to explain Inner-chan. "I'm sure it'll be fine!"

The Sandaime sits back in his seat to watch, seemingly relaxed.

Sakura takes a deep breath, and looks straight into pupil-less blue eyes. "I am sorry," she tells the man, "for what you are about to see."

vi. what was not and shall never be

Kakashi watches carefully as the Yamanaka tries not to shake in his seat.

The Sandaime carefully pours tea. Kakashi sips carefully through his mask and waits for the interrogation specialist to gather himself and speak.

"She really is Haruno Sakura," Yamanaka-san finally manages, a cup clenched in his hands. "Either that, or someone has figured out how to implant fake memories well enough to fool me."

Which would be… troublesome. Dangerous. Unprecedented.

"And they would also have to know an astonishing amount about Konoha and its inhabitants. More than could be explained by a couple of spies. She knew more than enough secrets that anyone who could have put them in her head wouldn't need such a convoluted plan to get what they wanted. They would already have Konoha in their grasp."

That doesn't sound ominous at all.

"There is something else troubling you," the Sandaime prompts, clever eyes glinting.

Yamanaka-san hesitates, and then shudders. "It was strange. I've never met anyone quite so aware while under that specific jutsu."

"Aware enough to deceive you?" Kakashi asks.

"No," Yamanaka-san snaps. And then more calmly, "No. She did try to shield me from a few things, but couldn't stop me if I pushed."

"Shield you?" Morino-san enquires.

Yamanaka-san hesitates again. Kakashi's eyes narrow. "Konoha in ruins. My daughter mourning my death. Sharingan eyes. And—" he stops, his face carven with grief.

"And," Kakashi prompts.

Yamanaka-san takes a sip of tea, steadies himself. "And hands with spluttering green chakra cradling my daughter's cheek gently as she dies."

The room is silent for long moments.

"Do you believe her?" the Sandaime asks, old and tired.

Kakashi doesn't think he does, if only because it is too much to imagine a world where Konoha burns.

"Yes," Yamanaka-san breathes. "Yes."

v. start again from the beginning

"Sai!" Sakura yelps as she's led through a door into a makeshift hospital room.

He's even more pale than usual and his heartbeat is much to fast on the monitor.

"Why hasn't anyone healed him?" she demands of her escort.

Hatake Kakashi glares at her. Sakura tries not to look at him straight on.

"He's been treated to the best of our abilities," he informs her cooly.

Sakura sneers. The medical program is in shambles without Tsunade-shishō if this is all they can do. Absentmindedly, she channels chakra just under her skin, enough to boost her musculature, and pulls. The chakra cuffs snap, seals extinguishing, and she merrily makes her way over the bed, healing chakra buzzing at her fingertips.

"What," Hatake demands, a kunai at her throat. Sakura doesn't draw his attention to the chakra laced finger she has poised over one of his tenketsu. If he tries to slit her throat, she'll drop him.

"Oops," Sakura coos. As if she couldn't get out of any bindings if she really wanted to. Honestly. "As you can see, if I wanted to, I would have fought back earlier. I'm just going to heal my teammate."

She's bitter that they lied to her, let her believe that Sai was lost somewhere else in the time stream, let her believe she was alone.

Hatake reluctantly steps back, pulling the blade from her throat. "One wrong move, and your teammate is dead," he warns her.

Sakura finally turns to him and smiles, a thing of bared teeth and barely restrained threat. "I wouldn't."

He blinks, unimpressed, and Sakura smothers down her fury.

She doesn't know what to make of this man-boy who holds only shades of her Kakashi. He is so sharp, she's surprised he doesn't cut himself to pieces.

But she wrenches her attention away from him, despite the way that, apparently, Hatake Kakashi in any world is enough to hold her arrested. She doesn't usually want to rip his throat out with her teeth, though.

Sai is too warm and broken. It takes much longer than she'd like to burn out the incipient infection and to patch the damaged organs and mend the shattered bones. By the end, she's almost shaking with exhaustion, covered in sweat, and so, so tired. But she can't afford to show weakness, not even though she's home and in the company of two of the men she loves and trusts most in the world.

All it takes is a simple scan of chakra to remember that the Kakashi in the room with her is not hers. Not her sensei and taichou and teammate and general and Hokage. Not her companion and friend. Not hers.

She aches to reach out and smooth away his sharp edges, but they are not hers to touch.

"Is there any water?" she asks him from her slump on the floor beside Sai's bed.

She doesn't bother opening her eyes when he grunts at her, and so is surprised when a cold glass is pressed against her hand. She startles, bewildered that she let him get so close.

She watches him through half-slitted eyes as she drinks.

He looks at anything but her, and yet the full force of his attention presses down on her, familiar and unfamiliar: he has never watched her with so much suspicion.

Sakura tells herself it doesn't hurt, and lays her head back, waiting for Sai to wake.

vi. getting the gang back together

"Team Ro," Kakashi-taichou announces, "meet the new teammates."

Tenzō wonders at the thinly veiled resentment and reservation in that cold tone. His senpai is not pleased.

The man smiles widely, too bright and too fake. It makes Tenzō's skin itch. The woman is more subdued, but at least the soft tilt of her mouth seems real. And her hair is pink. Which.

Well. Tenzō has only ever seen one woman with pink hair.

"These are Leopard and Vulture. They're only recently returned to the village after a long term undercover op, so." Kakashi-senpai shrugs and moves on, laying out the plan for the day's training. It mostly involved putting the new teammates through their paces, trying to figure out how they'll fit with the rest of the team.

Leopard and Vulture watch them with careful, wary eyes. Vulture's gaze especially catches on Kakashi-senpai and Itachi-kōhai. Something ancient and sad stirs in the depths of her green, green eyes.

They're impressive, and more than keep up with the pace their taichou sets. Tenzō can see the reservation mounting in his senpai's posture as the day drags on, especially as they're all more than aware that Leopard and Vulture are both holding back.

Tenzō can't help but wonder what long-term mission they were on, exactly, to leave them so wary of their comrades and to put Kakashi-senpai so on edge.

When taichou finally dismisses them all as night is falling, Vulture steps forward.

"I'm available, if anyone has any injuries that need looking to."

Most everyone declines, their taichou's suspicion bleeding over, but Tenzō holds back as one by one his teammates fade away into the dusk. Vulture is murmuring to Leopard as she holds blinding green hands to a particularly vicious cut on the man's shoulder. When she finishes, Tenzō approaches.

She turns to greet him with a smile. "Tenzō-san, wasn't it?" she asks, something small and secret at the corner of her mouth.

"Yes," he bobs his head in greeting.

"I'm Sakura," she tells him, "and this is Sai."

Leopard waves a hand.

"I think I might have cracked a couple of ribs," he says. "Do you mind taking a look?"

Her smile blossoms into something warm and open, and Tenzō feels it in his toes, and holds back blush through force of will. She's beautiful like that, tired and soot-stained from one of Itachi-kōhai's kaiton jutsu and smiling.

"Yeah," she murmurs. "Of course."

He doesn't even feel the need to tense as Sakura-san approaches him carefully, hands aglow.

He waits and watches her furrowed brow. She sucks her bottom lip in as she concentrates. Her chakra is like a summer breeze as it flows through him, gentle and carrying sunshine.

She steps back.

"What's the diagnosis, doctor?"

Sakura-san blinks. "Oh, yeah, a handful of your ribs on your right side were definitely bruised or cracked. They should be good now, but let me know if you keep feeling any discomfort."

Tenzō pauses, taken aback. "You healed them already?"

Sakura-san cocks her head. "…Yes."

"Oh."

"Why?" she asks, confused.

Leopard— no, Sai-san, whispers something in her ear.

"Oh, right." She shakes her head. "Never mind. You're good to go!"

Her smile is not quite as effortless this time, but Tenzō doesn't press, still too in awe of her skills. He murmurs a thank you, and then leaves the two strangers alone in the training ground.

"I would never hurt him." Sakura-san's voice carries in the quiet dusk.

Senpai doesn't answer, but his chakra disappears form the clearing.

vii. whispers in the dark might have never been spoken

"Sai."

"Yes, Ugly."

"What are we going to do?"

"We can attempt to reverse-engineer the seal. The Hokage has already promised us Jiraiya-sama's aid when he next returns to the village."

"And if we can't?"

"…"

"We could fix things."

"Should we?"

"Can we not? Can you really tell me that if given the chance, you wouldn't put an end to Danzou's machinations or try to stop the Sound/Sand invasion or do everything you could to throw a wrench in Madara's plans?"

Sigh. "No. But what if we make things worse?"

"Worse?"

"Konoha is safe. The Five Great Nations are at peace. Madara is defeated. What if we make the smallest change, and that never happens? At least we know that in our future, the world is safe."

"And everything that we lost? Everyone that we lost? We just sacrifice them on the alter of maybe?!"

"I don't know, Ugly. I don't know."

"I miss them."

"They're all right here."

"You know what I mean. Don't be obtuse."

"Yes. I know what you mean."

"I'm glad you're here with me, Sai. I don't think I could do it alone."

"You could."

"Maybe. But I'm glad I don't need to."

viii. we held the world in our hands and tried not to crush it

Sakura and Sai's super awesome, not at all crazy (oh gods, we're all going to die aren't we?) plan to save the world.

— Dickless could have come up with a better plan, Ugly, this is ridiculous.

— Shut up, Sai. We've totally got this.

1) Kill Danzou

— Should this really be number 1?

— I don't care. I just want him dead.

— Dibs.

— No way. It needs to look natural.

— You can't put a hole through his chest.

— Hey! I can totally do natural! I don't need to tear his spine out!

2) Stop the Uchiha massacre

— Are you sure? Life would have been easier without Duck-butt around to fuck things up.

— I thought you liked Itachi?

— … we could pin the murders on Duck-butt instead?

3) Adopt Naruto

— Ugly…

— It's happening. Oh! And I almost forgot! #4!

4) Rescue chibi!Sai + rest of Root kids

— …

— Are you crying?

— No.

5) Akatsuki. Just. I don't even know where to start.

— Fuck.

— Yeah, that's gonna suck.

6) Madara

— FUCK!

— ugh. we're gonna die.

7) Obito

— Ugly…

— I don't know why you're even bothering trying to argue with me.

8) Fix Gaara's seal

— How exactly do you plan on convincing the Yondaime Kazekage to let us at the Ichibi's jinchūriki?

— I'm working on it, okay?!

8) Do something about Orochimaru and Sound

— Have you noticed that you keep getting less specific the further down the list you go?

— Shut up, Sai, and start helping.

10) Get good blackmail on Kakashi-sama and Yamato-taichou

— Sai. That is not helping.

11) Work on reversing time travel seal.

12) TBD

ix. there is no universe where i don't know you

The sword slices into Sakura's hands as she stops it from impaling Hatake. She grits her teeth against the pain, chakra already cycling to pull the poison from the wound. With a flex of her arms, she snaps the blade from its hilt, startling the enemy nin wielding it enough that Hatake can take the moment to snap his neck. They nod at each other, and dart back into the fray.

She does not think about how fighting alongside him is as natural as breathing, the way she subconsciously tracks his movements, how she always finds herself guarding his back.

This is not her Kakashi and he never lets her forget it.

(She aches.)

When the fight finally dies down, Sakura goes teammate to teammate healing injuries while the rest deal with the bodies, removing weapons and marking hitai-ate and faces. Hatake is grim faced and serious, more so than Sakura has ever seen him for a simple ambush. In another world, she would ask what's bothering him, but as things stand now, she ducks her head down and concentrates on the deep lacerations to Itachi's thigh.

"Why doesn't taichou trust you?" the boy chirps—for he is but a boy. Much too young for this bloodshed and pain.

Sakura tries to smile. "He doesn't appreciate that way Sai and I were forced onto his team."

Itachi nods, solemn faced and serious. "But you trust him." It isn't a question.

"Yeah," Sakura snorts out a laugh. "Yeah, I trust him."

Itachi frowns. "Why?"

She looks away from those too keen eyes. "He reminds me of someone."

Maybe if they're trapped here for long enough, one day she'll get to look Hatake in the face and recognize the man looking back.

She doubts it though. They will never have the trust between them required to sprout anew the fresh beginning that she was only just starting to nurture with Kakashi.

She aches for all the things she never got to have and will never see again.

x. who knew we could be so vicious as to carve these violent scars

"Haruno," he growls.

"Sakura," she spits back at him. "Call me by my godsdamned name!"

"Fine. Sakura." It shouldn't feel quite so dangerous on his tongue. "Why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"Like what?" she demands, eyes blazing and furious and full of things for which he has no name.

"Like that. Like it cuts you to pieces to look at me straight on." She snarls. "Like I'm breaking your fucking heart."

He thinks that six months ago, hell, three weeks ago, he would have triumphed at the way she gasps—a hurt broken thing—and curls into herself. But he just feels worn and tired.

"What do you want from me?" he asks.

She presses a hand to her cheek and looks away. "I don't want anything from you."

That hurts deeper than Kakashi would have ever expected, and he startles himself when he takes her by the shoulders and slams her against the wall, looming above her, boxing her in with his shoulders and height. His throat hurts.

"What?"

"I'm sorry!" she screams at him. "I'm sorry, okay, but I look at you, and all I can see sometimes is my Kakashi. And I know, okay. I know you aren't him, that you might never be him, but I can't stop myself."

Kakashi swallows and doesn't know why he's shaking.

"Do you want me to be?"

"What?"

"Do you want me to be him?" he asks, the question shredding his vocal chords.

She's trembling under his touch.

"Sakura." He presses his thumbs more forcefully into the hinge of her jaw. A shift of his fingers and a little more pressure, and he could snap the bones there or press her trachea until it collapsed. "Do you want me to be him."

She takes a steadying breath and looks him in the eye. "There are no worlds in which I don't love you, Hatake Kakashi. But at least my Kakashi might have one day loved me back."

He doesn't know he's going to kiss her until he can taste her tears on his tongue.

She's so soft under his hands, he is afraid that one day he'll break her.

"I can't promise you a fairy tale," he pulls back to pant into the skin behind her ear.

"We're shinobi," she tells him, and nips biting kisses along the tendons of his neck. "We were never meant for happily ever afters."

As Kakashi swoops back down to her mouth to drown, he spares a thought for that other Kakashi, and wonders if he even knows what he's missing.

And then he doesn't care, because the only thing in the world, in any world, is Sakura and Sakura and Sakura: the blazing heat of her mouth and the soft floral scent of her hair and the callouses of her fingers and the way every curve and edge of her body slots into his own.

Hatake Kakashi has never claimed to be a selfless man. The Universe has never given him anything before, so he will steal Sakura until she, too, is taken from him.

He drowns. The way it feels to bury himself in everything she is leaves no room for regret.

epilogue. we were young legends, too brilliant for the world to bear

Sakura and Sai have been missing for weeks, with nothing but a clearing reeking of ash and blood and ozone to speak to their disappearance.

Kakashi had summoned Naruto and Sasuke back to the village has soon as they determined that the enemy nin who'd attacked were all accounted for: strewn dead across the patch of forest. No one could pick up a trace leading out of the clearing that would suggest Sakura and Sai had been taken. They were just gone, a scorched, intelligible seal left as a marker.

Not even Naruto with the weight of the remnants of the Uzumaki library behind him could figure out quite what, exactly, had happened. Sakura's notes and Hinata-san's testimony were enough to tell them that they were attempting a transport jutsu not dissimilar to the Hiraishin, but the seal in the clearing didn't match the notes, and Naruto was at a loss for what had caused the change.

Kakashi is afraid of the dark circles growing under Naruto's eyes and the ancient despair etched into his brow, and what they mean. If they don't find them, if they can't find them, Naruto will never recover.

And Kakashi doesn't dare think about himself. He can't afford to, not when there is an entire village resting cupped in his hands. And besides, he is much too used to sorrow like this.

He can't afford to consider if this is something he could have stopped. If he could have said something, done something, anything, to make Sakura turn away from this path.

He knew she felt overshadowed and useless, but he'd thought that ANBU and her research projects and her friendship with Sai and, and. And the understanding growing between them. That it was enough.

(That he was enough. Even though he knows better. Even though he knew that there was never enough of his heart and soul to keep her, not as old and tired and heartsore as he was. Even though they've (he's) been hers for much longer than he'd ever admit.)

There are mission scrolls waiting for his approval and new bylaws to read over and an upcoming council meeting to prepare for. It feels like the shops should all be closed and the streets filled with wailing, but Konohagakure has not fallen to pieces with Sakura's absence: some several tens of thousand of lives go on, heedless to the tragedy. And so Kakashi, too, must go on.

(He can barely breathe.)

But the days roll out, weeks turning into months, and if Naruto's smiles are dimmed and Sasuke more terse, and if Tsunade-sama drowns herself in drink and Kakashi's ANBU guards watch on as he whispers prayers to the Memorial Stone. Well. The shinobi of Konoha know how to hold their tongues and let their heroes mourn.

"Hokage-sama!" Kakashi startles awake from where he's been drooling across important paperwork.

"Enter," he commands.

Shikamaru strolls into the office, his shoulders tense despite his attempts at nonchalance and his entire being radiating exhausted despondency.

"What is it?" Kakashi demands, attempting to appear at least mildly like a competent village leader and not like a man who spent most of the night on his knees trying not to weep or scream invectives at the sky.

Shikamaru hesitates, but then reaches out a hand holding a scroll. "This appeared in The Clearing not an hour ago."

Kakashi couldn't have stopped his hands from shaking even if he wanted to.

"It's addressed to you," Shikamaru tells him, and then bows, making his way out without waiting for an order.

Kakashi spends long minutes just staring at the scroll on his desk, trying to muster up the courage to open it. Finally, with the only strength left to his tired and withered heart, he nips a cut onto his thumb with a canine, and smears blood onto the scroll.

It opens with a near-silent "poof".

As the smoke clears, he takes a moment to consider that this could actually be an assassination attempt and not a message from Sakura or Sai, but he can't muster up enough emotion to care.

It's not an attempt at assassination, but his heart stops regardless.

We don't know, says the letter, if this will make it through. But we are fairly certain that if we were to try to send ourselves, we wouldn't survive the journey a second time; the timelines have drifted too far. Jiraiya's predictions match our own, and we finally decided that staying here to help would do more good than perhaps failing to return somewhere we were no longer needed.

We're sorry.

I'm sorry.

Except that I'm not. We've managed to do to much good here for me to regret it as much as I should. It was time travel, or something like it, at least. And while we didn't come far enough back to stop to the Kyūbi attack, we came back far enough.

(There is a world, Sasuke, where the Uchiha stand tall as the village's shield.)

But I'm sorry, Naruto. Sorry that we didn't come back far enough to save your parents. I can only hope that it's enough to know that somewhere, there is a brilliant, blond jinchūriki named Naruto with a warm home and people who love him. It's okay that you didn't save me. I didn't need saving. This time I got to save you.

Shishō… thank you for everything. There aren't words. I survived this because you made me strong.

Tell everyone who you think needs to know that we are safe and happy. Tell everyone who doesn't need to know that we're dead. Travel between times, like immortality, is not something that any world needs the monsters in the dark seeking out.

And Kakashi.

I'm sorry.

I—

I'm sorry we never got an ending. That we never got a goodbye.

I would have said yes, you know, when you finally asked.

I would have said yes.

Please don't lose that courage. Don't waste away in front of the Memorial Stone. I'm not there. You won't find me.

Please live. If not for yourself, then for me and Rin and Obito. The only thing any of us ever wanted for you was happiness.

I love you all.

I'll miss you forever.

But just remember that I'm safe.

I'll see you at the end of all things,

Sakura.

It takes him six tries to get all the way through.

And then he stops and puts his head down on his desk, and sobs for all the things he lost and never had.

He's aware, distantly, of the guard at the door turning people away as he cries.

It's been a long, long time since he's cried.

When he's finally worn himself out, just dry hitching breaths as he tries to calm himself, he considers leaving. Just stripping off the hat and robes, dropping his vest and hitai-ate, walking past the gates and into the forest, never to return.

But Hatake Kakashi has never known anything but the bonds of duty. They have been the only things keeping his head above water again and again and again, as he lost mother and father and teammate and teammate and teacher and kōhai and team and now, finally, might-have-been love. (There are no might-have-beens about it.)

For a moment, he toys with the knot at the back of his head.

And then his eyes catch once more on Please.

He was never very good at refusing Sakura anything.

His hands shift papers and scrolls aimlessly, but he finally turns back to the other object accompanying the letter.

It's a framed painting, wrapped carefully in butcher's paper.

Kakashi approaches it with the same caution he would a primed explosive tag.

The paper tears off in easy strips, revealing the picture below.

It's obviously Sai's work. The brushstrokes and eerie detail couldn't belong to anyone else.

Kakashi presses a fist to his mouth and bites down on a wail.

The couple in the wedding portrait could not look more in love. She turns her face upwards—brilliant, beautiful smile on her face—towards the man curving around her. His hands span her abdomen, holding her like she's something precious, but firmly, with the knowledge that she wouldn't break. There are no colours to highlight the black ink, but Kakashi knows that the woman's eyes are green and her hair is pink and that the man is wearing a red and white kimono.

A young Hatake Kakashi stares down at Haruno Sakura, stripped of his mask and his walls. And Sakura smiles up at him like Kakashi has only ever seen once before, one lazy summer afternoon when Sakura blinked awake from a dream and looked at him like he was a gift from the Universe, just for her.

Years and worlds away from the place where Hatake Kakashi takes Haruno Sakura home and loves her and loves her and lets her love him in return, Hatake Kakashi—Rokudaime Hokage, tired old man—collapses in front of a portrait containing all of his dreams, and weeps.

Perhaps some day in the future, he will be able to smile, bittersweet and sad, for the happiness of that other Kakashi. But for now, all he can do is mourn that which he has lost, and that which he never had.

He is a coward, but in some other world and some other time, Haruno Sakura brings him sunshine and teaches him to laugh.

Perhaps some day in the future, he will be able to remember fondly when she did so for him, and not rue all the long days stretching out before him that are all the darker for her absence.

Haruno Sakura was flung from a world and a time that she believed did not need or want her.

She was wrong.

And he will never get to tell her that he misses her.

There are no happy endings here.

post credit. begin anew, but forget not your foundations

A family picture:

Sai stands centre-front, wearing his best, most bland smile. A serious looking chibi!Sai is perched on his hip and a bby!Shin peers curiously over his shoulder from where the boy is wrapped around his back, to stare into the camera.

Tenzō sits cross legged at Sai's feet, his face buried in his hands.

To his left, Kakashi twirls a giggling chibi!Sakura, their linked hands and the force of their motion causes the girl's feet to come off the ground.

To his right, a very pregnant Sakura keeps a squirming and shouting chibi!Naruto under one arm, her other hand holding back a furious chibi!Sasuke by the forehead as the boys try to get at each other. Itachi looks on, amused.

(Behind the camera, Gai yells something triumphant as he takes the picture. Happy families stretch out on picnic blankets that create patchwork motifs across the repurposed training ground.

The future of Konoha run and laugh, play acting ninja. No shadow of war looms above their heads. These are not children who will inherit loss; they are the inheritors of the Will of Fire.

Sakura looks down at the boys in her grasp, and cannot help but smile.)

Chapter 13

Kakashi wanders absentmindedly into the hospital lobby, face almost completely obscured by mask and book and hat. Despite the obstructions, he nimbly manoeuvres around mothers attempting to corral children and rambunctious genin running wild and jounin doing their best to escape behind the backs of the nurses. The chaos fades out behind him as the varied citizens of Konohagakure take in the rare and unusual sight of the Rokudaime Hokage entering the hospital willingly, instead of being dragged in unconscious and/or bleeding profusely.

"I sent that summons over an hour ago Hatake!" Shizune grumbles at him when she finally spots him in the chaos.

Kakashi sighs. Jounin these days, no respect for their honoured Hokage-sama.

"Maa, maa, Shizune-san. I was passing through the central market when a little girl tugged at my robe, needing help finding her mother. And surely I—who is entrusted with the safety of all villagers, even the smallest—couldn't have left her there to fend for herself! She was lost and all alone!"

Shizune glares, unimpressed.

"Well, you're here. Go deal with Sakura." She storms off, muttering about "damned lazy idiots" and "paperwork" and "gonna kill him".

Kakashi makes a mental note to check his food and drink for poison for the next couple of weeks, just in case. Then he smiles cheerfully at a group of Academy students pointing and whispering in his direction, giving them a cheerful wave before slouching towards the stairs and up to Sakura's office.

She doesn't answer when he knocks.

He tries again.

A soft, strangled moan bids him enter.

Kakashi pushes the door open, wary of thrown objects. Shizune was stressed enough about getting Sakura out of the hospital that he's expecting her to be in a towering mood that no one out of the remaining members of Team 7 would dare attempt to tame. (Only someone who managed to survive Team 7 would be foolhardy enough to try and calm a storm.)

Instead, he finds Sakura sprawled awkwardly on her desk, her face pressed into the wood and her arms akimbo.

He approaches with caution.

"Hey there, Sakura-chan," he greets, reaching out carefully to push the hair out of her face. He frowns when he touches her cheek; she's fever-warm and the fine pink curls at her temples are damp with sweat.

He drops down to kneel at the side of her chair, trying to get a better look at her expression. Her brow is drawn with discomfort and her usual light tan has turned ashen.

"Oh, love," he chides, "why haven't you gone home?"

Sakura cracks open one eye with great effort. "'m not sick."

Kakashi stares at her in disbelief, a hand still on her cheek. "Really, now?"

"'m a mednin. I don't get sick."

He rolls his eyes. "I think, dear one, that the fever you're currently running would disagree."

With great effort, she pulls herself up off her desk to sit upright in her chair. "I can work. Go 'way." She wavers.

Kakashi slides one hand to her waist and the other behind her neck. The curls there are damp as well. With slitted eyes, he leans forward to press a lingering kiss to her forehead. "Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure you're running much too hot at the moment."

"Mmm," she agrees. "I am attractive, thanks. But I appreciate compliments such as 'beautiful' and 'stunning' to simply 'hot'."

He laughs and shakes his head at her. And then he swings her up into his arms.

"Hey!" Sakura squawks, but she can't seem to manage the energy to actually fight him off.

Which just goes to prove his point.

"I'm taking you home," he informs her.

Sakura argues pointedly as he carries her down the stairs and out of the building. The lobby freezes at the sight of a kitten-weak Haruno Sakura—usually the terror of land formations and perverts everywhere—being carted around like a particularly sulky child by their Hokage. The further they get from the hospital, the more she fades, and by the time Kakashi is turning the corner to their apartment building, she's murmuring disjointed threats into his vest.

Her forehead burns the hollow of his throat where it presses against his mask. He answers her threats with soft promises to make it up to her later and hummed agreements that yes, yes he is the worst, he will totally stand still so that she can hit him for this in just a moment, when she can find the energy to lift her arm.

He juggles a near-delirious Sakura as he disassembles the traps around their front door, one arm firm under her thighs as her fever burns through his clothes. She's an unhelpful deadweight as he tries not to drop her or get them skewered by a couple dozen kunai.

Finally, they're inside, and Kakashi toes of his sandals and heads to their bedroom.

"Sakura," he cajoles, "I'm going to need you to cooperate if we're going to get you into some pyjamas."

"Too tired," she slurs. "Can' you do it for me?"

"I'll try. I just need you to stay awake for a little bit longer, okay?"

"M'k," she agrees.

Sakura is sick and feverish and sliding into sleep, but Kakashi can't help the little glow that suffuses his being as he carefully pulls off her boots, shimmies the pants down her hips and thighs, tries to pull her coat and shirt off without getting her hair or her arms too tangled. He never thought he would get this: these precious small intimacies in soft, quiet moments, without the clawing urge of need and want and now.

He wants her to let him take care of her always. Not because she needs protecting, but because she trusts him enough to be vulnerable.

By the time she's down to underwear and a bra, she's fading fast, barely able to keep her eyes open let alone be more than an awkward collection of limbs if he tries to get her into pyjamas.

"Can' sleep in a bra. 's uncomfor'ble," she whines.

Dutifully, Kakashi unhooks the clasp and helps her extricate her arms from the straps.

Then he helps her lay down with a hand on her cheek and the other at the small of her back.

"Sleep, love." He soothes her with slow strokes of his knuckles along her cheekbones. "Sleep."

He tucks the blankets in around her and leaves to go prepare some soup.

.

.

.

Two nights later, Kakashi wakes suddenly to the sense of imminent threat. He goes for a weapon, but someone has pinned his wrists. He almost head-butts them, but then freezes when he realizes who exactly is looming above him, a pink curtain of hair shielding their faces from the world.

"Sakura," he sighs, heart slowing back down to something approaching a normal rhythm.

"You," Sakura grins in the dark, "use pet names when you're worried."

Kakashi blinks at the random midnight non sequitur. "What."

"You." Sakura punctuates the sentence with a fierce nip to the tendons of his neck. "Use pet names."

"No, I don't," Kakashi immediately denies.

Sakura licks a smug line up his throat. "Yes, you do."

"You have no proof." When being interrogated by an enemy, deny, deny, deny.

He can feel her smile against his skin.

"Love."

Pointed nip at the tendon again.

"Dear one."

Soft bite at his jaw.

"Darling girl."

Sharp teeth on his earlobe.

Kakashi gasps. "Lies." It doesn't sound as certain as he'd like, all choked off groan and wanting.

"Hmm," Sakura presses into the sensitive skin behind his ear. "That's too bad. I liked them. I'll have to find the man who was in my bedroom whispering them as he held cool cloths to my forehead and thank him." She shifts her weight back on her heels and moves to roll off of him.

With all of his infamous speed, Kakashi grasps her by the hips and flips them.

Sakura gloats up at him where he's holding himself above her by his forearms on either side of her head.

"What was that about not using pet names?" she asks sweetly.

Kakashi growls, and then drags his gaze down from her smug eyes, along the flush creeping up her throat and across her chest, to where she's still braless and soft and pink and perfect.

"Darling girl," he drawls, and shifts so that he's no longer looming above her but rather is in perfect position to suckle a bruise into the delicate skin at the hollow of her throat.

"Dear one." He punctuates with a firm bite to the underside of her left breast.

"Love." He pulls her right nipple into his mouth to worry between his teeth.

Sakura moans and her hands fly up to tug desperately at his hair. "Kakashi!"

He looks up at her through his bangs, and laves an open mouthed kiss over the tender nub.

"Yes, sweetheart?"

Sakura's eyes are dark and hungry, with only the faintest ring of green. "Please," she begs.

"Please what, baby girl?" He switches his attention to her other breast, this time laving the nipple with broad strokes of his tongue.

She pulls at his hair with vicious, greedy hands.

"Please, oh gods, please Kakashi. Please don't stop."

Kakashi manages a smirk around the lovely, perfect tit in his mouth.

"Oh my dear, all you ever have to do is ask."

He traces slow kisses down her abdomen, stopping now and then to suck bruises into her skin. When he's low enough, he stops to admire her pretty pink curls, before skipping down to bite at the inside of her thighs.

He can smell her, musk and sugar and girl, so pink and sweet and just for him.

His hands draw circles along the sensitive skin at the backs of her knees. She claws at his back, almost enough to draw blood along his shoulder blades.

He lingers, teasing, never quite where she wants him, until she's sobbing his name, "Kakashi, Kakashi, Kakashi. Please. Please, I need your mouth on me. I need your tongue on my clit and your fingers in my cunt. Please, gods, Kakashi."

He darts a glance up past her heaving chest to catch a glimpse of the desperation on her face.

"I've got you, gorgeous. You're ok. I'm gonna take care of you."

He finally leans forward to trace his tongue over her labia, flush and swollen and aching for his touch.

"Kakashi," she keens. "Don't tease, please."

And, well, if she's going to ask so prettily.

He pets lightly at her pussy, his fingers collecting slick from her dripping slit. When her hips finally come up off the bed, he sucks her clit into his mouth as he thrusts two long, calloused fingers into her cunt.

Sakura cries out and pulls at his hair to the point of pain. Kakashi lets the sounds of her moans and of his fingers scissoring in and out of her to crawl under his skin.

She's scorching under his mouth, a blaze of heat nothing like the fever-warmth of the previous days. He wants to let her burn him to ash.

If he could, he would live on the taste of her alone.

Two fingers become three, and Kakashi angles them so that they drive up into that perfect spongy spot that tears high mewling cries from Sakura's lips. Her hips tilt further, her fists twisting in his hair as she rides his mouth, chasing her orgasm. Kakashi can't look away from the desperation etched on her face. He bites lightly at her clit, and Sakura stutters out a cry and tenses under his fingers.

"That's it, beautiful. Oh sweetheart, oh baby girl. That's it. C'mon. Come for me Sakura, come for me now," he orders, fingers pumping at a furious pace as he pushes her over the edge.

Sakura arches off the bed, body freezing in a perfect curve as she screams something that might have been his name.

He doesn't know if there's any sight in the world he prefers to that of Sakura's face as she orgasms; she always looks triumphant, like she's taken something from the Universe that is rightfully hers.

Kakashi draws it out, thumb high on her clit as he murmurs praise into her hipbone. "So good for me. So gorgeous. Oh Sakura, yes. Good girl. That's it."

Eventually, she manages to nudge his hand away from her over sensitized skin, and he ducks to press thankful kisses across her abdomen until she laughs, breathless and happy.

"Mmm," she rasps. "Thank you."

"Oh, dearest, you never have to thank me for that."

Sakura smiles down at him, lazy and content. "Give me a couple minutes and I'll thank you anyways.

Kakashi drops one last kiss to the gentle curve of her stomach before crawling up to curl around her. "If you insist, my lovely wife."

Sakura darts in to peck chastely at his lips. "I do, my beloved husband."

She lays her head onto his chest, and Kakashi doesn't bother trying to hide his smile from the night. He traces circles on the backs of her arms, and waits for her to catch her breath.

They have all the time in the world.

Chapter 14

"No. No way. Nu-uh. You can't make me." Sakura scowls at her Hokage from across his desk. The bastard doesn't even do her the decency of sitting like the leader of a hidden village should; he's slouched in his robes, book perched in one hand, eyes half-closed.

"Sakura-chan," he teases. "Don't you want a team of cute little genin of your very own?"

She glares at him. She has a feeling that he is enjoying himself way too much.

Kakashi is coming to realize why the Sandaime looked so godsdamned gleeful the first time he pulled a sullen nineteen year-old Kakashi into his office and slapped him upside the head with a set of personnel files. The pout on Sakura's face is too good not to treasure.

"Hokage-sama," she responds, stiff and annoyed. "I am very busy with my duties as both field medic and researcher. I do not feel that I am properly equipped at this moment to properly train and care for a genin team."

Aw, Sakura-chan is so adorable when she breaks out the officious speak. The years working under Tsunade, doing the Godaime's paperwork and managing diplomats, have served her well.

Unfortunately, all mischief aside, Kakashi actually does need Sakura to take on this team. He sighs, and sobers up.

"Sakura. You're doing good work at the hospital and in the field, and I know you're overworked. The medical divisions were the hardest hit during the Fourth War, and we're still recovering from those losses even now. That's why I need you to take this team; the three kids all have excellent chakra control and an interest in healing. You'll be working with them specifically as a medical unit. Sure, it's going to mean having to get through the first couple of years of low rank grunt work, but you'll be able to train three medics, from scratch, up to your standards."

Her glare has lightened. Kakashi heroically does not grin in triumph. This is a delicate operation, and if he pushes her too far, Sakura will balk just to spite him.

"I need you, here," he tells her, sincere and only the smallest bit manipulatively.

Sakura's face twists up in a complicated manoeuvre as she flips through emotions too quickly for him to follow. She knows that she's being played, but she'll cave. It's Kakashi. She trusts him to not steer her wrong.

"Fine. I'll do it. Give me those files. You owe me for this, Hatake. Is this writing even legible? Who the hell lets you get away with doing your paperwork this way?!"

Kakashi leans back in his chair with a smile and lets Sakura criticize his competency as Hokage.

.

.

.

Sakura considers sending a clone alone to meet her new genin so that she can finish up the delicate experiment she's running on a potentially problematic bacterial strain that has recently appeared in the burn ward. She waffles, before finally deciding that she won't be one of those jōnin-sensei who put as little effort as possible into their genin team.

Instead, she calls over an underling to finish overseeing the results and heads out to meet up with clone and genin at Training Ground 8.

She likes to think that henging herself into a large, red-skinned man to attack and slaughter her clone in front of the terrified genin is a nice lesson in bonding through shared trauma.

It's gratifying that they're more scared of her after she turns back into herself than they ever were of the red giant; they try to fight off the giant, Haruno Sakura they just stare at and cower from.

.

.

.

Emi, Yoshiro and Kouki are surprisingly well behaved. So incredibly competitive that it puts her own childhood rivalry with Ino-pig to shame, but in a quiet and academic way that carries none of the hurt or spite she remembers from the first several years of their bickering.

Oh, they complain and whine about the hard work, about their oni-sensei, about how they haven't learnt any super cool healing jutsu and how are they "supposed to be amazing medic-nin if sensei never teaches us anything other than boring exercises to light fire or walk on water?".

But ultimately, Sakura is having fun teaching her little genin. It's gratifying to see the way they light up under her praise and attention, the way they hound her for new techniques and stories from her chunin days, the way they want to grow up to be "just like sensei".

It's worth it. The late nights and the time away from her projects and the fear that she's going to let these precious kids down is worth it.

.

.

.

This is not worth it.

Sakura hates D-rank missions.

She thought they were terrible when she was twelve and incapable of successfully managing a feuding Naruto and Sasuke. Bagging groceries and weeding gardens and catching cats was in no way worse than having to stand by and watch with horror as her cute little genin manage to bungle the tasks spectacularly. She would swear that her genin team wasn't possibly as inept as this Team 13 of hers.

To be fair, twelve year-old Sakura spent so much time sighing over Sasuke-kun's perfect hair and handsome scowl, that her memories don't necessarily offer up an accurate picture of Team 7's successes, or lack thereof.

Present day, jōnin-sensei Sakura is approaching the point where she will begin to understand why Kakashi spent almost all of that time with his nose buried in the latest Icha Icha. (Or, well, she would if his consumption of those terrible books had been limited to his supervision of D-rank missions performed by his genin team, instead of pretty much every time she was in his presence from the ages of twelve to nineteen.) Even being subject to Jiraiya-sama's purple prose and unrealistic body proportions would be less painful than watching the disaster unfolding in front of her.

For today, the bored chūnin at the mission desk assigned them the task of fixing up a barn belonging to one of the farms that radiate out from the various villages that lay south of Konoha.

The morning started out alright. This is their second day trip outside the city walls, so she reviewed proper packing and gear. Yoshiro overpacked and Emi underpacked, but none of her three tried to smuggle anything too outrageous out with them. No packs laden with ramen here.

The first leg of the journey they practiced tree walking. The kids had been doing well at the water walking, so Sakura felt that it was as good a time as any to get started on the more useful method of travel. Any kid growing up in the Land of Fire can climb trees. It's a skill learned almost concurrent to walking. But the delicate art of leaping from tree to tree—chakra boosting each push off, the release controlled enough that the limb doesn't splinter from the force—is one that requires much practice before any shinobi can calculate each bound perfectly, without even thinking about it.

After lots of bruising, some splinters, a greenstick fracture and four loose teeth, Sakura decided that maybe it was time to finish the journey at ground level.

Her genin had been various shades of relieved by that time. The "coolness" of the mode of travel had worn off with the chakra expenditure, the falls, and the exploding branches.

Their stamina has improved enough that running the rest of the way made for a decent workout and not a devastating exercise, making it to their destination with—theoretically—more than enough time to accomplish the day's mission and make it back to Konoha not long after nightfall.

Of course, what with Sakura being a veteran of Team 7, she insured that they had more than enough supplies to overnight if necessary. Multiple times over.

Sakura is not taking any chances that Team 7's remarkable luck in missions gone sideways is in fact her fault, and not Naruto or Sasuke or Kakashi's. Her genin team's tendency to fall into bizarre situations and then survive is, come to think of it, probably some combination of Kakashi's bad luck and Naruto's bizarre ability to yell inspirationally at enemies until they turn into friends. Sakura and Sasuke were just along for the ride.

Although, no, she takes that back. Some of the insane situations they managed to fall into were definitely Sasuke's fault.

Sakura refuses to take on any of the blame. She was just an innocent bystander in the ongoing saga of Naruto and Sasuke's epic tragi-bromance. And any and all mishaps that Sakura may or may not have been involved in those long years that Sasuke was in his avenger phase and Naruto was getting "educated" by Jiraiya-sama were definitely Tsunade-shishō fault.

That's her story and she's sticking to it.

Regardless, Sakura might be prepared for both a month's sojourn in the forest and a small-scale war. Just in case.

Beyond the general exertion of the trip and the phantom pains of healed injuries (and pride) after misstepping while running through the trees, Team 13 arrives at their destination eager and ready to work. Or well, eager and ready to get "this dumb D rank, don't you know we're super awesome and ready for something cooler, sensei?" done.

A woman with a sunburnt face and ropey muscles gives them instructions on their task for the day and directs them towards the supplies. Sakura sits back and lets her team plan out their attack, offering suggestions in the way of leading questions when they turn to her.

When they manage to figure out the best way to start fixing the barn roof, Sakura curls up on a tree branch with her latest scroll on poisons—a generous gift from the Kazekage for a certain off-the-books mission that Sakura was certainly never on and that certainly never ended with a trouble making noble dead from a heart attack—content to sink into the text after laying out a delicate jutsu to alert her to any intrusions.

She lets the shouts of her team and the sound of hammers fade to the back of her mind as she sinks into the complicated treatise on dosage responses in relation to the recipient's family's geographic area of origin. For a while, there's a startling amount of yelling, falling (or being shoved) off roofs, and howls of pain as hammers connect with the wrong kind of nails. Sakura considers offering her assistance, but after weighing it in her mind, decides that they're smart kids, they're bound to figure it out.

She's sure they'll be fine.

By the time lunch rolls around, Sakura has a mess of notes with various items underlined, circled, and marked with exclamations, and a nice collection of hypotheses and potential uses for the information worked out. She calls her genin over to eat, and they collapse thankfully at the base of her tree.

"Sensei," Yoshiko whines, one arm thrown over his face as he and his mass of hair sprawl across the ground, "this sucks."

"Oh come off it, Yoshiko," Kouki chides, "you were having fun figuring out the math for the new beams we were putting in."

Emi scowls around the sore fingers she's sucking in her mouth. "Speak for yourself."

Sakura laughs and jumps down from her branch. "Let me see those fingers, Emi-chan. Everyone gather round." She talks them through the simple healing, explaining how she's repairing the bruised tissue and answering questions as she goes. It drags the process out from a thing of a matter of seconds into long minutes, but she loves watching their faces light up as their knowledge of how the body creates and processes bruises becomes functional, and not just something written in a dry book.

As she lets the green chakra fade from her fingers, Yoshiko finally explodes with a "that was so cool!" that has Emi and Kouki nodding along.

"And just think!" Sakura exclaims. "One day soon, you'll all be able to do that yourselves!"

Excited, the genin turn, chattering, to fall on their lunches like particularly ravenous wolves before rushing back to their job.

For the afternoon, Sakura offers up her super strength to help shift some of the heavier pieces of wood and hold them in place, speeding up the pace of work. They finish as the workers in the field start trundling in for the day, nodding at the bemused greetings they receive in response to Sakura absentmindedly holding large pieces of wood above her head with a single hand while she skims through a research report in the other.

Finally, Emi declares the job finished, and they track down the sunburnt woman from the morning, garnering her approval of a job well done before they head on home to Konoha.

As they get closer and closer to the walls without incident, Sakura can feel the tension coiling in her shoulders. It's irrational, she's aware, but she won't relax until they're back safely.

The precedent that working on Team 7 set does not suggest that any mission will ever end without at least one encounter with a dangerous missing nin, even though Sakura has worked with a wide range of teams and on a wide range of missions where the threat of a missing nin has never even breathed in her direction. She can't help it.

She wonders if Naruto ever has the same fear when he's out and about with his own team of genin.

Given that it's Naruto, who probably enjoys wrestling the kami on his day off, she thinks it unlikely.

Surprisingly, they make it through the gates without incident, getting a cheery greeting from the chunin at the gate. Sakura then sends her genin home with reminders to drink some water, eat a good meal, get a decent night's sleep, and to not forget to write up their mission reports for the missions desk, on pain of supreme discomfort and a training session with Lee.

(Team 13 does not appreciate it when their sensei invites "the Green Monster of Konoha" to help out with their stamina or taijutsu training. ("He's inhuman." "He's evil." "Sensei, no one but a demon would ever inflict that atrocity of an outfit on our poor, innocent eyes.") Sakura loves it. Lee's the best.)

Sakura, unfortunately, needs to report in to the Tower that they've returned safe and sound, without any complications on the way, so she heaves a sigh and tromps over to check in.

To her surprise, Kakashi is present.

She looks around the room, confused. "… Is someone due in from an S-rank, or something?"

Kakashi mimes a blow to the heart. Or, well, that's the impression he manages to give off with only the smallest flexing of his facial muscles. Sakura still hasn't figured out the jutsu he uses for that, because she refuses to believe that his face is actually just that expressive. Maybe it's the same one Gai and Lee use to manage to be able to project so much… sparkle.

"Sakura-chan! Can't I just make sure that my cute little grand-genin had a good time?" Kakashi demands, aping hurt.

Sakura mouths "grand-genin" in amazement. What even?

Then she collects herself and rolls her eyes at his theatrics. "Mission complete, Hokage-sama. Here—" she hands him a small scroll "—is the confirmation from the client. We encountered no enemy combatants, and all members of Team 13 are safe and accounted for."

"Excellent job, Sakura-sensei!" Kakashi praises with his most solemn Hokage face.

Sakura shivers at how weird it looks on him.

"But really," he asks, reverting to his normal demeanour, "no problems?"

"Besides the fact that I'm still on edge that nothing bad did happen?" she asks sardonically.

"Ah."

"Yeah. Easy missions with no disasters kinda freak me out, to be honest."

Kakashi nods in agreement. "The Curse of Team 7."

A laugh burbles out of her, the last of the stress finally bleeding out of her with it. "That's the one. Thanks, by the way, for making us Team 13."

"Oh no," Kakashi insists earnestly, "we've actually pulled the title 'Team 7' out of circulation, just in case."

Sakura laughs harder, and then stops abruptly, because she can't actually tell if he's joking.

"You're joking."

"Don't want to take any chances with curses, Sakura-chan."

He has to be joking.

He's probably joking.

Right?

Sakura narrows her eyes at him, and Kakashi just smiles at her, opaque and unreadable as always. She wouldn't put it past him to have actually stopped assigning any Team 7s just in case he ever got the opportunity to mess with someone like this.

Fucking shinobi sense of humour. Always with the long game.

"Right." She glares some more. "I should head home then. Will you be at the bar for drinks tomorrow?"

Kakashi shrugs, and goes to pull out his book. "I'll try," he tells the pages, "but Shikamaru might hold me hostage until a certain set of paperwork gets done." He peeks over the edge of his book with pleading eyes.

"No. I'm not coming in tomorrow to do paperwork you've been avoiding. Stop lazing off with Icha Icha and get your own damned work done, or deal with the consequences."

"But Sakura-chan," Kakashi cajoles, "shouldn't I be able to call on my most favourite, most helpful, most kind and generous ex-student in my time of need?"

Sakura stomps out of the room, calling over her shoulder as she leaves, "I'll let Sasuke know you're looking for him!"

She doesn't turn around to see if Kakashi pouts because she doesn't need to. She can practically feel the sulk following her out the door.

.

.

.

"Naruto," Sakura whines into the sticky bar, "how do you do it?"

If Sasuke laughs at her misfortune, she's going to kill him, she swears. Or she's going to trick Kakashi into making him take a genin team. Either or. They'll ultimately end the same way.

"Do what Sakura-chan?" Naruto chirps, before reaching for another shot.

"Keep your genin alive? I swear, mine try to kill themselves every time I turn my back."

The three of them are clustered together at their usually weekly drinking session. Sakura is just glad that Sai is out of town, because he would definitely be laughing at her. Kakashi has yet to show, which is too bad really: she wanted to ask him how he managed to keep Naruto and Sasuke alive, if not particularly sane.

"Emi-chan and Yoshiro-kun and Kouki-kun aren't trying to kill themselves! They're just full of energy and the Will of Fire and—"

"Youth?" Sasuke offers drily.

Sakura and Naruto shudder in unison at the disturbing eeriness of Sasuke spouting Gai-isms.

"Emi cut her arm open to try out the new technique I just taught them for mending tears in skin, and somehow managed to cut deep enough that she hit the radial and ulnar arteries," she tells them flatly. "And then later that day, Yoshiro almost drowned."

Naruto blinks at her, stunned, before recovering and breaking back out in a wide grin. "But that's why they've an amazing sensei to teach them and save them!"

Sakura drops her face back down to the bar and lets out a mild scream.

Sasuke pats her back in an awkward and painfully inept attempt at sympathy. But at least one of her teammates is taking pity on her situation.

"It could be worse," Kakashi informs her from the stool next to her, "your genin could be attempting to blow each other up with assassination jutsu in attempt to prove their strength over that of their rival."

Sakura almost jumps out of her seat. "Gods-damnit! How do you do that?" she demands. She's a jōnin, it really shouldn't be possible for fellow shinobi to sneak up on her like that. "And when did you even get here?"

Kakashi raises his half-empty glass in greeting. "Yo."

"Ugh." She lets her head loll on her shoulders.

Naruto and Sasuke have already turned away from their little byplay and are arguing the merits of chidori vs rasengan. Again.

Sakura rolls her eyes at them and spins her stool so that she can face Kakashi straight on.

"I hate you," she informs him casually. "It's all your fault that I'm stuck trying to keep three little idiots alive."

"I know," Kakashi sighs with something that is suspiciously rapturous.

Sakura eyes him suspiciously, and leans in to speak lowly under the rising noise in the bar. "I'm warning you now, my revenge will be painful."

Kakashi, too, spins to face her, his knees on either side of her own. "Counting on it," he tells her just as low, the slight gravel in his voice scraping down her spine. He takes a drink through his mask with slitted eyes.

Sakura shifts, vaguely discomforted, and then pulls on a mask of arrogance. "You'll never see it coming."

"Just like I never saw the guinea pig?"

She pauses, tilting her head as she tries to decipher his meaning until: "Oh gods! You remember that?"

He laughs. "It's a bit hard to forget arriving to training only to have a guinea pig thrown at your face. I don't think the poor thing ever recovered from the trauma. What was up with that, by the way, I never did figure out."

Sakura downs her drink in an attempt to drown out the embarrassment. "Um. Well. It may or may not have been an attempt to see under your mask. Naruto said that everyone was scared of rats, but we couldn't find one, so we went with the next best thing at the pet store which was, apparently, a guinea pig."

Kakashi blinks at her.

"There was more to the plan, okay? It just… made a hell of a lot more sense at age twelve than it does in retrospect."

Kakashi blinks one more, and then bursts into uncontrollable laughter. Sakura looks on bemusedly as he doubles over, clutching at his stomach. His foot bumps hers and she can almost feel the tremors through his body. Unbidden, a smile rises to her own lips as she watches; she doesn't know if she's ever seen Kakashi so uncontrolled and free with an emotion before.

It's sort of beautiful.

.

.

.

"Are my kids okay?" Sakura croaks.

Kakashi startles from where he's been perched on the back two legs of his chair, crashing down in an embarrassing show of uncoordinated limbs at her bedside.

"Hey," he gentles her, pushing her back down onto her pillows from where she's struggling to get up. "They're all safe. Yoshiro-kun took a pretty nasty blow to the head and Emi-chan had a broken arm, but Shizune took care of those and any small cuts and bruises while you were in surgery with Tsunade.

It's you who isn't okay."

"I'm fine," she rasps, moving to sit up again.

Kakashi brings his hands back to her shoulders, tracing soft patterns onto her collarbones in an attempt to calm her. "Sakura, you need to relax and not get up, okay? Tsunade wanted to look at you before you got up."

Something in his voice must catch her attention, because she finally focuses her gaze on him.

"Are you okay?"

He tries to laugh it off. "I'm not the one in a hospital bed and I'm certainly not the one who had a hole punched through their abdomen not twenty-four hours ago."

"Kakashi," Sakura sighs, her hands coming up to circle his wrists where he's still holding onto her.

"You almost died. On a mission I sent your genin team on. We're supposed to have better protocols for mission vetting and assignment than this!"

"Kakashi," Sakura tries to smile, "you are my Hokage. This is what it means to be shinobi."

He snarls. "No. Not anymore. Not while I'm Hokage."

Sakura inhales sharply through her nose, taken aback by the ferocity of his words. "Ok," she tells him. "Ok. Then we figure out how it was missed, and we fix it."

She presses a set of pressure points at the inside of his wrists, causing his fingers to unclench from her shoulders. Then she pulls his left hand up, and presses a soft kiss to the palm. He turns his hand to cup her cheek, and she hums as she presses her face into it.

"We'll fix it," she promises.

Kakashi looks down at her, something raw in his gaze, before he nods jerkily in agreement. "We'll fix it."

He keeps staring at her, jaw clenching and unclenching, his thumb tracing distractedly back and forth across her cheekbone. Just when Sakura thinks he might— he might just— that he—

Tsunade-shishō barrels into the room, yelling about idiot apprentices who forget to dodge, followed closely by Team 13.

Her kids vibrate near the door until Tsunade-shishō does a diagnostic and gives her the all clear. "You'll be tender for a couple of days, and you'll need to take it easy for a week or so, but you're all clear." She flicks Sakura on the ear in admonishment. "Don't do it again, kid."

Then her students throw themselves recklessly at her, voices tripping over one another as they ask her questions and apologize. When they finally get situated—Kouki sitting at her feet, Emi curled under one arm, Yoshiro wrapped carefully around her middle—Sakura looks up to smile at Kakashi, only to find him gone.

She sighs, and isn't quite sure what she's missing.

.

.

.

As Sakura crouches silently on the roof, waiting for her prey to walk by, she can't help the evil grin spreading across her face.

Revenge will be sweet.

"Target has just passed the first check point," Yoshiro's voice rings in her ear.

"Hard contact in T minus three minutes," Emi confirms. "Initiating Operation: My Team Is Better Than Your Team."

Sakura suppresses the urge to hum as she waits.

Naruto should have never ever proclaimed loudly to the bar at large that his was the best genin team in Konoha, no wait, in all of the Great Elemental Nations!

Sakura learned many things from her shishō, but the knowledge of when to walk away from a bet in the making was not one of them. Which is how she's ended up in this ridiculous series of one upmanships. (She would regret it, except for how she's going to win. Naruto will never come back from the embarrassment that is about to befall him.)

She is going to get so much dango out of this. And she will eat it and watch and laugh as Naruto mourns all of the ramen he can't afford to buy as a result.

And, to add to her enjoyment, is the knowledge that Sasuke is miserable in his roll as referee for the competition. He never did like having to mediate Sakura and Naruto's bets, not even when they were genin themselves.

"Mayday, mayday," Kouki hisses.

"What is it, Miss Kitty?" Sakura demands.

Kouki pauses for a moment at the reminder of his ridiculous codename, but powers through. "The Target has just been joined by the Rokudaime. Do we abort?"

Fuck. Sakura thinks. "Negative, Miss Kitty. Operation: MTIBTYT is still a go. I repeat, still a go." Kakashi is always down for a little schadenfreude, there's no way he'll bust them.

The minutes stretch out as her team's reports roll in at a constant pace, confirming positions and timing.

Sakura doesn't even bother trying to hide her smile as she sees Naruto and Kakashi turn and enter the street below her.

She measures their speed, and counts down. "Six, five, four, three, two, one. Mad Dog and Sir Fish, release the cow."

Years later when Sakura is asked to retell the story to tables full of drunk shinobi, she'll never actually quite be able to piece together the series of events that occurred that warm, spring day, even though she was there and watched it with her own two eyes. She will, however, be able to smugly say that her Team 13 pulled one over on both the Rokudaime and the Nanadaime while they were in their prime: a claim that not even demons and gods could make.

Naruto would refuse to ever acknowledge that Operation: MTIBTYT was a success as, he claimed, it wasn't him who ended up caught in it. Sasuke eventually agreed, and the bet went on to provoke greater heights of ridiculous stunts before Team 13 finally won by virtue of having caught Tora III the most times. (It was a bit anticlimactic, really, but the panel of judges—Sasuke, Sai and Shizune—were very particular in tallying up the points.)

While Sakura was miffed at being denied immediate victory, she was easily assuaged by having won a different, much older bet.

Because by the time the events of Operation: MTIBTYT finally came to a dripping, slimy halt, Kakashi was left standing in the street, robes half on fire, with his mask torn from his face.

Everyone freezes.

Sakura and Naruto look at each other, blink, and then turn back to Kakashi.

For a moment, the entire street is silent but for the screaming chickens making off down the road.

"YES!" Sakura yells, and throws her hands in the air. "YES! Fucking shannaro, bitches!"

And then she flies over to Kakashi and plants an exuberant kiss on his stunned lips, before turning back to point at Naruto.

"You and Sasuke owe me so. much. money."

Naruto's mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. "Kakashi-sensei?" he asks, voice small and disbelieving. "How could you?"

Sakura by this time is dancing in place, her triumph too great to be contained. Yes! She finally managed to see behind the mask!

And she freezes again.

Because Kakashi isn't wearing his mask.

And she just kissed him.

She stops dancing.

In the time it takes her to blink, Kakashi is looming in front of her. She can't look away from the perfect little mole on his chin. She resists the urge to reach up and touch it, to smooth her fingers along the skin of his jawline, to trace the shape of his lips.

"Sakura," Kakashi warns her. "I'm going to kiss you again."

"Ok," she nods, and he steals the word out of her mouth.

The street might be filled with Naruto, her genin, and a large collection of gaping villagers, but Sakura can't quite bring herself to care. Kakashi's skin is warm under her fingers and his hands are firm at her waist, and she wants to spend a lifetime mapping the angles of his bones.

They kiss for an age, lips and tongues and teeth and soft gasps and enough heat to burn her to ashes. She would gladly burn, if this is what it got her.

Finally, Kakashi pulls away, laughing as Sakura chases him, stopping her with a hand to her cheek.

"Sakura," he says. "Sakura." Like her name is a language unto itself.

"Kakashi," she says back, and only just realizes that she loves the way his name fills her mouth and spills over. Only just realizes that she says it like it's the only word she'll ever need to know.

Kakashi smiles, and Sakura has never seen anything more beautiful.

She's going to wake up to that smile every morning for the rest of her life, she swears. And she does.

Chapter 15

Kakashi is high atop the Coastal Wall, in prime view to spot the military helicopter as it descends. For a moment, he considers just taking two steps forward and walking away, into the ocean's depths, never to return. It takes a small eternity to remember that he is only skin and blood and bones, only singular. Alone. To take those two steps would mean plummeting to his death.

For a moment more, he considers it anyways. But then his left eye aches with phantom pain, and he remembers.

He turns his back on the blue, blue sea, and finishes his shift.

When he finally makes his way down the precarious amalgamation of poles and ladders and creaking elevators that pass for safe passage to stow his gear in its locker, she's waiting for him.

She's impossible to miss amidst the faded crowd, not only for the crisp edges of her uniform and the shine of her shoes, but because Marshal Senju Tsunade has the kind of overwhelming presence that is bigger than her body. She clears an impressive bubble of space around her as she strides through the trudging, ashen masses, like a goddess of war among ghosts of a battle lost long ago.

"Hatake," she booms when she gets close enough.

He wonders if he should be surprised she found him. He wonders if he should be surprised she even looked.

Hatake Kakashi hasn't been a Ranger in the Pan Pacific Defence Corps for a long time, after all.

But from up atop the Wall, Kakashi can see as far as he ever could in a Jaeger, and he's well versed in what imminent doom looks like. He wasn't surprised, like many others were, when they almost lost Sidney to the sound of rupturing barriers and panicked screams. As he stood in that crowd of defeated workers, looking on as the last of their hopes and desperation fell to the might of a Category IV Kaiju, he had to bite down on the bitter laughter clawing its way up his throat. The Coastal Wall is a product of his own two hands; he can't think of any other way it would end. Kakashi drags himself out of bed everyday to help build a wall that he knows is simply going to crumble and fail. He drags himself out of bed and up towards the sky, and the only reason he can think of why he does it is the way his eye flares warning when he considers just letting himself sink down beneath the waves.

Isn't that the way Rangers are supposed to die? Amidst the waves?

And Marshal Senju stands in front of him, daring him to do just that. "Haven't you heard, Hatake?" she prods. "The world is coming to an end. So where would you rather die? Here? Or in a Jaeger?"

It is not a question.

There is no where else he could be, at the end of all things.

They alight from the helicopter into the pouring rain.

Marshal Senju is opening a black umbrella when Kakashi feels something brush up against his mind like a wary cat. Without thought, his head whips up as the umbrella gets handed to him, looking for the source.

Even through the curtains of grey rain, the life in her green eyes steals his breath away. He's so caught up in trying to catch his runaway breath that he's barely listening as the Marshal introduces them.

An old, sleeping part of him is waking up, shaking off the years of nightmares. He doesn't need to know her name, because he'd know her anywhere. Every instinct is singing "mine mine mine".

Maybe he should be scared that he's already reaching out grasping physic threads, trying to wrap himself around her. And he is—scared, that is—on a visceral level that remembers the way it felt to die: once, as Lightning Havoc is torn to pieces and their bodies with her; twice, as Obito is ripped from the conn-pod and from his mind; three times, as he drags the carcass of what they once were to the Alaskan shore, bleeding memory and oil and ichor into the already poisoned depths of the Northern Pacific.

But already he can feel her, close and burning, and he's been cold for so long.

The Marshal is finishing introducing her, and Kakashi has enough presence of mind to bow his head in greeting and pretend that he caught any of it. And then, as his hearing is playing catch up, he feels "she personally handpicked your co-pilot candidates" register like a blow. Because what? Why does he need to try out co-pilots when his co-pilot is standing right in front of him, screaming at him loud enough to hear for miles?

The girl is practically glaring at him, angry and frustrated, and Kakashi realizes she has no idea why.

"I imagined him differently," she confides in the Marshal who ducks her head and suppresses a grin, and while Kakashi's Japanese should be rusty, he finds the language ready and waiting for him when he reaches for it.

He isn't quite sure it's his own knowledge.

"Better or worse?" he challenges.

He wants to learn every single one of her smiles; this sheepish one is a good start.

"Sorry," she tells him, and he doesn't think she sounds really all that sorry. There's too much challenge in her eyes for that. "I've just heard a lot about you."

And as she turns to lead them into the base, Kakashi can almost feel her laughing. He does his best to brush off the rising trepidation as he follows her inside. Surely, none of his old friends would be sadistic enough to tell her about that one time with Gai and the dresses and the cat of that senator's wife?

Surely not.

Kakashi moves closer to the Kaiju organs floating in their containers, taking an almost vicious pleasure at seeing one of the great brutes reduced to a science experiment. He's practically vibrating with the Marshal's promise that soon, soon he will be taken to see his Jaeger, and the wanting is only made worse by the girl pressed hot and close against his mind.

He wants to pull her into him, skin on skin on skin, as close as two people can get without the Drift, and his hands are shaking with the need. He keeps them locked together in front of him as a reminder not to touch.

The elevator starts down with a lurch, and one of the two men—not more than boys, really—who had raced in as the doors were closing looms threateningly beside Kakashi.

"Stop trying to scare the new guy, Sasuke," the blond calls over, rolling his eyes.

"It's Dr Uchiha, idiot," the dark one snaps back, before turning to scowl some more at Kakashi. "Do not touch the rare specimen."

Kakashi raises an amused eyebrow at the posturing but shifts away. He's well versed in the peculiarities of the Uchiha family.

"Ignore Sasuke," the blond continues on, undeterred, "he's always a bastard. I'm Uzumaki Naruto, physicist and engineer!" He's very… bright. An interesting contrast to his dark and brooding companion who still hasn't stopped scowling at Kakashi's proximity to the floating Kaiju bits.

Kakashi's heart absolutely does not break at his last name and his blue eyes.

"He's just protective of his specimens," Uzumaki leans in to whisper loudly. "I'm pretty sure he tries to make out with them when he's alone. Kaiju groupie, y'know?"

That at least gets a reaction beyond a scowl.

The grumpy Uchiha splutters and starts to turn red. "Make out— I do not— Groupie!" He punches Uzumaki in the arm. "I am a scientist," he snaps. "Kaiju biology could revolutionize fields, including medicine and industrial processing. If I believe that observing one in person would be beneficial to my studies, that is called being a good scientist. Not that you would know what that would look like."

"Hey!"

The boys start tussling and Kakashi looks over at the Marshal. She looks torn between amusement and annoyance.

The girl is radiating mortified anger. He's surprised she hasn't yet leapt across the elevator to beat proper behaviour into them.

"Dr Uchiha and Dr Uzumaki," Marshal Tsunade announces dryly, "our science division."

Kakashi is pretty sure his dead expression manages to convey his disbelief quite nicely.

This? This is what the PPDC has been reduced to: immature little boys and the reanimated corpses of dead Jaegers? (This is what Obito died for?)

"Haven't you heard, Hatake?" the Marshal demands, her eyes full of the ancient rage and grief of a woman who has spent her entire life fighting impossible odds. "We aren't an army any more. We're the resistance."

The Shatterdome opens up in front of him and Kakashi can't help but look around like a rookie, a faint smile pulling at his lips. The immense space stretches up like the walls of a cathedral: a monument to humanity's indomitable spirit.

"The War Clock. We reset it after every Kaiju attack," the Marshal announces as she sees his gaze catch on the numbers ticking up above the entrance. "Keeps everyone focused." She turns impossibly more grim. "The frequency of attacks is accelerating."

Which— Kakashi can feel the breath catch in his throat at the casual way the Marshal throws it out there. As if humanity's time isn't running out. How hadn't he noticed? (Because he wasn't looking.) "How long until the next reset?"

"A week, if we're lucky. My experts—" Kakashi is pretty sure he can hear the curl of sardonic amusement in that title, "—believe there'll be a Kaiju attack even before that."

As they march through the Shatterdome, Kakashi can see the places where Jaegers should be standing cold and empty. The Marshal tracks his gaze and grimaces. "At it's prime, the Hong Kong Shatterdome hosted thirty Jaegers. We have four."

He can't help the shiver that goes up his spine. Four? Globally? What happened? Except, of course, that he knows exactly what happened; he watched it play out on tv as politicians poured money into the Wall and his fellow Rangers died beneath the waves. After a while, he finally had to turn away, because he couldn't bear to watch yet another one of his friends' name scroll across the ticker tape of some morning talkshow like they were just a footnote and not once a living, breathing person he had fought and laughed alongside.

(Like they weren't a person he had walked away from, and left to their death.)

Marshal Senju nods. Yes, it really is that bad, and they really have lost so many and so much. She details the various Jaegers and their specifications as they pass by, pointing out their pilots and putting names to faces. Kakashi recognizes them, of course. Even with the decline of the Jaeger program, the media still love their heroes.

The Sand siblings, whose Crimson Tessen is a whirling riot of blades and teeth and fury.

A and Killer B, whose unimaginatively named Alpha Bravo is a tank of a Jaeger. But they are legends who, together, have held the Siberian North for six years.

Striker Omniscient is only arriving, her pilots with her, and the Marshal beckons them over.

"Hyūga Neji and Hinata. Striker Omniscient is the first and last of the Mark Vs, and the fastest. They'll be running point for us."

"Point?" Kakashi's head swings around to look at her.

"When we go to drop a nuke into the Breach," she tells him, glaring, like it's no big deal. Like they haven't tried that before and failed. Like good men and women haven't died in the attempts.

When he goes to open his mouth and argue, she shuts him down. "I don't answer to you, brat. You haven't been around in a long time. Better minds than yours know what we're doing." She jerks her head at the girl and then motions for the Hyūga cousins to follow her. Kakashi can do nothing but clench his jaw as she strides away.

"Hatake-san," calls a voice he would know anywhere.

He shakes himself, and looks down at the girl waiting for him. "Of course. Lead the way, Miss Haruno."

Haruno. He holds the shape of it in his mouth long after the last syllables have faded into the loud Shatterdome bay. Haruno Sakura, who smiles lightly up at him with green eyes that hold secrets he wants to unravel and whose mind rubs curiously against his own and whose pink hair surely holds a story that he wants to hear one night in a dark room, wrapped up in blankets and each other.

He shakes himself again, and follows her up the twisting levels of the Shatterdome.

"There she is," she declares, warmth in her voice, and she gestures forward.

And there is Lightning Havoc, waiting for him.

Marshal Senju had said he'd recognize the Mark III they dragged out of the Jaeger graveyard when she was baiting him off the Wall.

She's just as beautiful as she's always been, if not a bit more scarred. He can practically feel her dreaming as she sleeps. The song of her heart has chased him through his own, these long years apart.

Without thought, he steps forward to the railing, aching to be closer. His hands clench and his breath catches and all he can do is blink away the tears threatening in his left eye.

Haruno steps up beside him, her own hands wrapped around her tablet, and she lets out a happy little sigh. Kakashi can feel her pleasure and pride curl around him.

The Marshal had said Haruno was in charge of the restoration, and Kakashi wants to drop down onto his knees at her feet to give thanks. Because he never thought he would ever see Lightning Havoc again, standing tall and proud and gorgeous, let alone get another chance to Drift with her. Never thought he would see her doing anything more than stumble and fall and die on a icy plain, so far from home and aching from her missing arm and her missing pilot, the way she does in his memories.

Standing in front of Lightning Havoc once more beside this girl who burrows into his mind and settles among old scars, he thinks he might be able to gaze across the ocean once again and not imagine drowning.

A familiar voice jolts him out of his thoughts, and he spins to catch a glimpse of Tenzō. He turns his back on the girl and their Jaeger, and goes to greet his old friend, but they linger at his edges, pulling at forgotten dreams.

Kakashi steps up to the mat in the Kwoon, Haruno's critique of his tactics and skill and her belief that he isn't the right person for the mission Marshal Senju has cooked up looming over his shoulders.

And if he's also remembering the way he burned with want as her green eyes traced over his skin and scars, well. It isn't pertinent to the moment at hand. Although, it doesn't help his concentration that she's standing watching,and that he can feel her frustration and envy at being denied her chance clawing at him. Fifty-one drops and fifty-one kills in simulation: it's a fucking travesty that she's standing on the sidelines watching this farce.

As he runs through the candidates, each match sharp and jerky and wrong, wrong, wrong, he can feel her aggravation building. Each time one ends, he stops to look at her, and each time her mouth twists into a displeased frown, he can feel his own aggravation rising in response.

She digs hooks into him and pulls out emotions he thought he stripped himself of years and lifetimes ago.

"Four points to two," she scowls at him as the latest match ends.

Kakashi finally snaps and stalks over in her direction. "What?," he demands, "You don't like them? You selected them personally."

"Excuse me?" He can practically see her hackles raising.

"Every time a match ends you make this little gesture—" he mimics her, "—like you're critical of their performance."

She sets her jaw and glares at him through narrowed eyes. "It's not their performance, it's yours: your gambit. You could have taken all of them two moves earlier."

"You think so?" he asks, biting down on a started laugh.

She's mad at him.

She wants him to do better.

"I know so."

He feels smug at her proud declaration.

Kakashi turns to Marshal Senju standing beside her. "Can we change things up? How 'bout we give her a shot." He points to Haruno with the bo staff in his hand, as if the Marshal doesn't know exactly who he's talking about.

"No," she commands calmly, except Kakashi can see the panic and sorrow in her eyes. "Only candidates with Drift-compatibility—"

"Which I have," Haruno blazes.

"Sakura!" The Marshal's voice drops to a murmur. "This is not only about a mental compatibility, it's also about a physical compatibility."

And Kakashi rocks back on his heels with a smirk. Because if that's it, if that's the Marshal's best excuse? Well. Kakashi knows exactly how compatible they are. And he knows exactly what buttons to push to get them the chance to show her.

"What's the matter, Marshal? Don't think your brightest can cut it in the ring with me?" Kakashi asks, sly and disinterested, mockery glittering under his lashes as he looks up at the Marshall.

Haruno's head swings up, startled, and the Marshal bites down on her instinctive snarl.

Kakashi just smiles on.

They stare at each other for long moments, Marshal Senju's pride pricked at Kakashi's careless challenge.

She could deny it.

It would mean denying her own teachings.

"Go," she huffs, angry at being outmanoeuvred, and takes Haruno's ever present tablet from her hands.

Haruno seizes the change.

She doesn't look away from him as she walks down the steps into the Kwoon, unbuttons and folds her shirt, unlaces her boots and places them just so at the side of the mat. When she raises herself to her full height, strong and sure and fierce with the bo staff in her hand, Kakashi has never wanted anything as much as he wants to fight her in this moment.

"Four strikes marks a win," the Marshal reminds them.

And they dance.

Even without the Drift, Kakashi can feel her bright and burning, close and not close enough. Every whistle of their staffs through the air sings, every crack of them meeting echoes in his bones.

He doesn't remember afterwards the way they trade barbs and challenging glances and points. The only thing he remembers is the way she came at him like a hurricane and how every bought drew out longer and longer as they learned each other until finally she had him trapped by the leg, rising above him like the sun, and he couldn't breathe for how beautiful she is.

"Enough," commands the Marshal. "I've seen what I need to see."

Haruno bows, and Kakashi is almost trembling for the adrenaline and rightness screaming through their veins. He lets his hand hover over the small of her back, because he can't not touch her as their minds sing. "She's my co-pilot," he tells the Marshal, because nothing in his life has ever been more true.

"That's not going to work."

Kakashi blinks, because he can't understand how she doesn't see it. He can feel their nascent bond like a physical presence vibrating in the space between their bodies. "Why not?"

"Because I said so, Hatake," the Marshal declares. "I made my decision. Report to the Shatterdome in two hours and find out who your co-pilot will be."

Kakashi wonders if she can hear Haruno's heart break as clearly as he can. It is all he can do to keep himself from reaching out and wrapping her in his arms as she storms out of the Kwoon.

Hyūga Neji smirks at him, and Kakashi turns away instead off punching the smug bastard in the face.

"Sakura!" he calls out when he sees her in the hallway that holds both their rooms. And oh. Oh. So that's what it feels like to say her name.

"What was that all about?" he asks her. "I mean, I'm not crazy. You felt it, right?"

And, well, there's a possibility he hasn't considered before. Maybe she hasn't felt it. Maybe whatever part of his brain that processes psychic signals broke the day Obito was ripped out of their link. Maybe he is crazy, and he's so broken, he's reaching for a connection that isn't there.

"We are Drift compatible," he tells her, demands of her, desperation and hope riding the edge of his words.

She retreats from him into the doorway to his room, curling into herself even as he can feel her digging deeper into his mind. "Thank you for standing up for me. But there is nothing to talk about."

He wants to cry for the defeat in her smile and the wailing loss in her head. She turns to open the door behind her, and stops, confused, when it doesn't open for her.

"Um. That's my room," he tells her, amusement and apology colouring his tone in equal measures.

Her embarrassment is almost visible. "Excuse me," she murmurs as she brushes past him, darting to the other side of the hallway and towards her own room.

"I mean, come one. I thought you wanted to be a pilot." He follows her, he'd follow her anywhere.

She opens her door.

"Sakura," he pleads with her, "this is worth fighting for. We don't have to just obey her."

She freezes, and goes cold. "It's not obedience, Hatake-san," she tells him, striding forward to get into his space. "It's respect." She nods at whatever she must see in his face, and then she hurries back to her open door.

"Would you at least tell me what her problem is?"

Sakura just stares, and closes the door on him.

He's left standing in the hallway, the all-too familiar taste of never-realized dreams and crushed hopes bitter on his tongue.

Kakashi goes to knock on her door before he leaves for the first neural test with Lightning Havoc and his new co-pilot.

His hand stops, hovering.

He turns away.

"Two pilots on board," the cool, robotic voice informs him.

"I'm gonna take this side, if you don't mind," he tells whoever it is, "my right arm is kinda shot."

"Sure," Sakura answers, and he can feel her dizzy joy pull at his own.

He couldn't stop himself from smiling at her like an idiot even if he wanted to.

"Are you going to say anything?" she demands with laughing eyes.

He shrugs. "No point. In five minutes you're gonna be inside my head." He looks her up and down. "You look good."

And she does. Pink hair and burning green eyes and fierce chin and sleek black dive suit. She looks like a pilot. ("Mine. Mine, mine, mine," sings his blood. Or maybe that is Lightning singing, he isn't sure.)

She nods, and ducks her head, not quite blushing. He wonders if she can feel his appreciation the way he can feel her shy pleasure at the compliment.

He nods back, and they focus on the task at hand.

Kakashi walks her through the procedure, even though she knows it backwards and forwards: no stimulation can ever prepare you for your first real Drift. There's nothing like it in the world.

"Don't chase the RABIT," he warns her as the neural interface spins up. "They're only memories; just let them flow, don't latch on. Tune them out, stay in the Drift." He wonders which one of them he's warning. "The Drift is silence."

It's such a strange descriptor, the cliché that they all use—instructors and scientists and pilots— "the Drift is silence". Silence, when you are two who are one. Silence, when you are made of memory and iron and a nuclear core. Silence, when all that you are is made for war. And yet, when you find that perfect balance in the Drift, silence is all there is.

"Neural Drift, initiated," the computer says.

And Kakashi lets himself go, down into the Drift.

And

Everything

Else

Falls

Away.

Obito-Kakashi reaches desperate hands out to Kakashi-Obito as they are ripped from their conn-pod. Lightning Havoc cries out as she loses her eye and her heart in one fatal swoop. The only thing Kakashi can do is let her cry of horror and pain rip through him and through his throat.

Kakashi-Sakura stumbles out of alignment, dragging Sakura-Kakashi with them.

But while Kakashi-Sakura shakes off the memory and recovers, Sakura-Kakashi slips further, and follows the RABIT.

Down.

Down.

Into memory.

In the streets of Tokyo, Sakura screams as Hanzō bears down on her.

Lightning Havoc screams with her.

Afterwards, as Kakashi clutches Sakura to him in the conn-pod, the shattered remnants of their aborted Drift lingering like a haze, all he can do is close his eyes against all they have lost and all they have left to lose.

Hyūga Neji storms out of the Marshal's office.

Given what they've managed to glean through the closed door, Kakashi is pretty sure he's not going to appreciate what is about to come out of the man's mouth.

It really isn't all that gratifying when he's right, but Kakashi doesn't exactly care what some young asshole says about him. Hell, Kakashi's probably thought worse. He's more than capable of controlling himself, even when the prick flicks him in the chest.

Sakura, however, isn't having it.

"Stop," she orders. "Now."

Kakashi's pretty sure that his hand on her shoulder is the only thing keeping her from going for the Hyūga's throat.

The man's face twists with something terrible, and Kakashi is fairly certain there are undercurrents here that he is missing.

"Yeah, that's right," Hyūga taunts. "You just hold back your little girlfriend. One of you bitches needs a leash."

Kakashi is furious at the purposeful, cutting misogyny of that, but it is the sharp bite of Sakura's hurt that pushes him to punch the man in the nose.

It isn't much of a fight.

"Apologize to her," he commands, and has to stop himself for taking another swing at the man on his knees at his feet.

"Screw you." The Hyūga stands and tries to get another shot in.

And gets himself thrown into a couple of walls for his trouble. "I said, apologize to her."

The Hyūga's second attempt at retribution goes no better than the first.

Kakashi is normally not quick to anger. He hasn't been hot-tempered since Obito's death. He's learned patience and restraint and that it is much better to let an opponent beat themselves than to ever even lift a finger of your own. But, for some reason, the way Sakura's heart is cracked behind him and this man-boy's refusal to take responsibility for it has him here, pining a spitting child to the ground. He can't quite find it in himself to regret it.

"Hey!" comes the Marshal's voice down the hall. "Hey! Enough!"

They disentangle and jump to their feet, but still watch each other like feral things.

The quiet Hyūga—Hinata, he remembers—has exited the office alongside Marshal Senju and steps into her cousin's line of sight. "Enough, Neji," she orders, and there is a kind of steel in her timid voice.

The Hyūga sneers over her shoulder, but lets her lead him away.

"Hatake, Haruno. My office. Now."

Sakura's pain cuts Kakashi to the bone as she asks the Marshal to be dismissed.

He doesn't know if he's ever hurt as badly as he hurts for her.

"What are you doing?" he demands as Sakura leaves the room. He's choking on his disbelief.

The ensuing argument doesn't exactly go his way.

He doesn't care. He would take on a thousand lifetimes of dressing downs from a coldly furious Senju Tsunade for Sakura.

(Even if he does know what the woman looks like wreathed in light: a goddess of war triumphant, a young girl's salvation.)

There are no lifetimes now where he will not fight for Haruno Sakura.

The gazes in the mess hall are heavy. Conversations fall silent as he moves through the room.

There is only one place he can bear to be.

He and Sakura sit on the scaffolding across from Lightning Havoc, watching as her crew do minor upgrades.

"Her heart," Sakura says, as the chest plating is slowly removed, "when was the last time you saw it?"

"Not in a long time," Kakashi murmurs, and can't look away from the awe on her face.

Not in a very long time indeed.

The first Double Event happens.

Crimson Tessen and Alpha Bravo sink into the Pacific's depths.

With nothing else for it, Marshal Senju closes her eyes and lets Lightning Havoc walk into the waves.

After.

After they fight Sasori back from the city.

After they rise and rise and rise in Deidara's grip, only to fall, sword still outstretched, the Kaiju falling in pieces beside them.

After the long journey back to the Shatterdome, their grief for their fellow Rangers starting to pierce through the adrenaline and victory.

After the Drift ends and they are pulled out of their dive suits and ushered into medical through the ringing cheers of the 'Dome.

After.

Kakashi and Sakura lie curled together on his bed, everything but their tanks and underwear thrown to the side as they press skin on skin on skin and are still not close enough.

Nothing is close enough, after the Drift.

Her breath is warm and moist at the hollow of his throat and she smells like salt and iron and the memory of jasmine tea.

Their legs tangle and they're pressed flush.

She's so small in his arms—his hands span her back, encircling her ribcage, and he can feel the vulnerable bumps of her vertebrae under his palms—she takes up so much space, usually, physically and in his head, that he's never noticed.

He can more feel than hear her low humming as he traces abstract patterns through the whisper thin material of her shirt.

"How long does it take?" she finally asks, and he can almost taste her frustration at needing to speak the question aloud, even if she doesn't need to specify what "it" is yet.

The Ghost Drift: an afterimage of being bigger than your body, of holding more than your own soul.

"Time."

He feels her frown. "That's specific, thanks."

He can only shrug. "It depends on the people. And the duration of the Drift. And how long since they last Drifted. And a hundred other little things. But it does pass."

"What if I don't want it to?" she dares ask.

Kakashi can only let out a little bark of sad laughter. "No one does."

Sakura does her best to pull him closer into her.

"I never thought—"

Never thought that it would ache so much to be reduced down to one. To be torn from memory and closeness and mineours. To be towering fire and steel and multitude, only to be left in nothing but your skin with calcium bones to hold you up.

"Yeah," Kakashi sighs into her hair. "It's like that."

The Shatterdome gives them the night to untangle, to remember who is Kakashi and who is Sakura, to let the Ghost Drift fade away.

"We're going to die, aren't we, attempting to collapse the Breach?" she asks him, tilting her head back to look him in the eye.

Kakashi lets himself stare at her, appreciate the soft shape of her mouth and the acceptance in the curve of her brow. "Probably," he admits.

She nods. "Okay." And buries herself back into his chest.

She won't regret it, he knows.

Neither will he.

He got to have this, after all, when he thought all he would ever know again was the formless grey of the dispirited masses, the insufficient height of the Wall, and Obito's unceasing screams in his head.

If all he had to trade for this—for Sakura, bright shining Sakura, Sakura who rebuilt Lightning Havoc (his body) and gifted it back to him, Sakura of the stubborn chin and need to prove herself and rage for all that has been lost and tender, awful love for Senju Tsunade, for Sakura—if all he had to trade was his life?

No. He won't regret it.

Not if the reward was the safety of the world and the change to hold this wonderful, priceless girl in his arms.

As they fall off into shared dreams, Kakashi's eye does not ache with the memory of dying.

Their grief for Tsunade, for teacher-mother-mentor-protector-saviour-friend, burns as they fall through the Breach, Kaguya speared on their sword.

As they fall, they dream dreams of lives they never lived.

She throws her head back as she laughs at him, the raven pin on her robes catching the light—

He can't stand still, feet shuffling in front of the altar, and his head whips up as the doors to the church open, white lace swirling into the aisle—

The blood in her mouth is bitter and metallic. She glares at the man above her as he brings down his sword—

Beep. Beep. Beep. The measurement of his life falling away. Whispering from the other side of the curtain around his bed. When the new doctor, the last doctor, the one whose care he is going to be in as he dies, steps around, all he can do is laugh an old man's hearty chuckle at the colour of her hair—

He is a legend in the Order. And oh, when she watches him move through Form III katas, lightsaber an extension of his arm, she gets why—

"This is wrong," he tells her, "I'm supposed to be older." She laughs and asks why. "Because I'm supposed to care of you always, that's why—"

The moonlight is soft on the Memorial Stone as they stand together. "We made it," she breathes, disbelieving. "Not all of us," he disagrees. "No. Not all of us. But that's why we carry their Will of Fire forward." He sighs, but nods. "We live on, because they didn't get the chance to." When he dares look at her face, she is smiling. She is beautiful. Maybe this time, he will learn how to start a new beginning—

They fall through the Breach.

Kakashi will never regret giving Sakura his oxygen and sending her home.

"You bastard," she breathes, dripping water from her hair.

Sakura, Kakashi thinks, is not going to be happy with the decontamination bath the medics are going to force on her after her little dip in the poisonous Pacific Ocean.

"You utter bastard, I thought you were dead."

He likes the feel of her forehead against his own. Not so much the tears that she's leaving on his face though.

"I'm never going to forgive you for staying behind to die," she informs him.

Kakashi smiles and smiles and smiles. "I'm not worried," he tells her. "I'll spend the rest of our lives making it up to you."

And in the Drift, their love sings.

Pacific Rim!AU

Cast (even though some of them didn't appear)

Mako Mori = Sakura

Raleigh Becket = Karachi

Yancy Becket = Obito

Stacker Pentecost = Tsunade

Luna Pentecost = Jiraiya

Tendo = Tenzō!

Hercules Hanson = Hinata

Chuck Hanson = Neiji

Newt Geiszler = Sasuke

Herman Gottleib = Naruto

Hannibal Chau = Orochimaru

The Wei Triplets = the Sand Siblings (Gaara, Kankurou, Temari)

Sasha and Alexei Kaidanovsky = A and Killer B

It didn't make it in, since this fic was about Kakashi and Sakura, but if you'd like to imagine what Sasuke and Naruto where up to, they were making deals with Orochimaru (who is convinced that Kaiju DNA holds the secret to immortality), getting chased by angry Kaiju (Sasuke is PRETTY SURE HE'S GOING TO DIE!) and trying an untested Drift together with a baby Kaiju brain ("And you say I have bad ideas." ~ Naruto, probably).

edit: Just realized that, while I disclaimed to some extent on the original Tumblr post, I didn't actually mention anywhere here on AO3 that most of the dialogue in the piece and the story arc is taken from Pacific Rim (remixed to some extent). I'm not sure how happy I am with the distance of a year (and without the mind scrambling effects of trying to rush towards filling prompts for a shipping week) to reflect on the success of this piece as a fusion fic-I'm a little uncomfortable with how little transformation I applied-but I am still proud of the character bits and am generally unwilling to delete even my oldest and most egregious fic. It's a learning process, I supposed. Here's to ever improving as a writer, and proper accreditation and citation methods.

Chapter 16

Ino accosts her just as she's passing by the Yamanaka's flower shop.

"Ouch, Pig! What? Stop it!" Sakura tries to fight off the blonde as she's dragged into the store, past the front counter, and into the back room, but unless Sakura is willing to cause some major property damage and be forced to pay for it—again—she's limited to pinching Ino viciously in the side in an attempt to get her to let go.

"Ha!" Ino puffs triumphantly as she finally lets Sakura out of the headlock she was in. "Now, who did you fuck last night?"

Sakura blinks. "What?"

Ino narrows her eyes. "Don't even start with me, Haruno Sakura, I was there when you had your first orgasm. I know exactly what you look like after good sex."

Sakura sighs, and presses her face into her hands. Why is her best friend like this?

"Fine. Yes. I had sex last night. But no. I'm not telling you with who."

Ino's eyes narrow impossibly farther. Sakura winces as the blonde puts her hands on her hips, and has the sinking feeling that she's not going to like what Ino is going to do to her in order to get the gossip she wants. Everyone ever involved in steering Ino into Torture and Interrogation deserve an eternity in the deepest, darkest, most squirrel filled hell imaginable; she didn't need help being even more terrifying and manipulative.

(Gods, Ino is Sakura's favourite.)

"Well then," she sighs, "I guess I'll just have to tell Chōji who ate his last stash of chocolate that one time. After all, he was so distraught when he found it missing."

Sakura gasps with horror. "You wouldn't."

"Wouldn't I, though?" Ino declares airily.

"I was PMSing," Sakura says, outraged. "You would break the girl-code for this?"

And then Sakura slumps back against the wall, because she knows she's lost. Sure enough, a pleased grin drips onto Ino's mouth.

"What was that about the girl-code, Sa-ku-ra-chan?"

She doesn't have to sound so gleeful about it.

"Are we abiding by the girl-code now?" She claps her hands together. "Perfect! Then you won't mind sharing who fucked you so well last night that you're walking funny."

Sakura blushes, mortified, and turns her head so that she doesn't have to see the salacious smirk on Ino's face.

"Oh-ho!" Ino chortles, and pulls Sakura's hair away from her neck. "And what are these?"

'These' are a succession of blooming hickeys down the delicate skin of Sakura's throat.

Damnit. She should have remembered to heal those.

"How far down do they go, exactly?" Ino wonders aloud, wiggling her brows.

Sakura pulls away from her grasp. "None of your business."

"Sakura-chan," Ino cries, "you're such a mean friend! Won't tell me about your hickeys, won't tell about your bedroom partner. I thought that friends were supposed to share these things? I tell you all of my sex stories."

"I know," Sakura deadpans, "it's terrible. Please stop."

Ino's tears end as quickly as they began. "Just remember, cho-co-lates, Forehead."

Sakura looks away, fidgets, clenches her jaw, shakes her head. Then she sighs. "Fine," she grumbles. "But you're only getting his name, you unconscionable snoop."

Ino smiles at her, smug and serene.

At least, Sakura consoles herself, the name she's about to give her is going to slap the smug right off of Ino's face.

"It was Ibiki, alright? And it was the best night of my life."

Ino blanches. Her mouth opens, closes, opens again. "What," she croaks.

"Oh, is that the time?" Sakura mimes looking at a watch she doesn't wear. "I'm going to be late for my meeting at the hospital. So sorry, Ino, gotta go!"

She cackles as she shunshins away.

.

.

.

"You told her I was Ibiki?" Kakashi demands as they lay entangled under a tree in a deserted training ground. He sounds like he can't decide whether to be horrified or impressed.

"Yep!" Sakura declares, still laughing at the way blood had drained from Ino's face and she'd wavered. "And the best part is she had to go into T&I afterwards and try to look Ibiki in the eye!"

"Marry me," Kakashi demands.

"Hmm." Sakura traces patterns under his vest. "Ask me again in another year and I'll say yes."

Kakashi startles, sitting up and dislodging Sakura from her position sprawled across him.

She pouts.

"Really?"

"Yes, really," Sakura tells him, smiling.

"Oh."

They lose the next minutes to kisses made sloppy by their inability to stop grinning and interrupted by clumsy attempts to rid themselves of their clothes. The training ground they're hiding in is remote and rarely used; they have plenty of time.

"You!" a furious voice declares.

Kakashi and Sakura scramble for his mask in the tangled pile of garments they've created. Sakura mourns vaguely that this is what she's come to: more worried about someone seeing her lover's face than them seeing her naked body.

But, oh, it's just Ino, who's seen all of her more times than Sakura really cares to consider.

And then, oh no! It's Ino!

"You lied to me!" the angry blonde exclaims, throwing a shaking hand up to point at Sakura in accusation. "How could you?"

"I can explain?" Sakura offers weakly.

"I had to look at Ibiki from across a table in a very important, very intense interrogation and try not to picture him fucking my best friend!" The last bit ends in a shriek.

"But you should have seen your face?"

Sakura's—admittedly feeble—attempts at diffusing the situation fail.

At their wedding reception, Kakashi will relate with great relish the sight of Ino chasing a mostly naked Sakura around an empty training ground.

Ino is only later appeased by Kakashi's solemn promise that he is absolutely on board with Sakura sharing every single intimate detail of their first night together. Sakura pouts, and only gives in when Ino threatens to rip the memories from her mind if she keeps dragging her feet.

She lies about most of what happened and Kakashi backs her up, even going so far as to add lurid details to Sakura's bland retelling.

("Wasn't that last bit a chapter in Icha Icha Tactics?" Sakura asks later.

Kakashi smirks. "Yes. Yes it was. Should we try it, just in case she ambushes you at some point to get proof?"

"Oh, well, for the sake of building a better cover. Gotta be a good shinobi, and all."

Ino never does ambush her, but it was worth it, regardless.)

Chapter 17

(19)

Naruto sneezes for the nth time that evening. "Kakashi-sensei, Sakura-chan," he whines from the dubious safety of the other side of the fire, "aren't you finished yet?"

Sakura rolls her eyes where she's still straightening barbs on Kakashi's left wing. "Don't be a baby," she chides.

"But Sakura-chan—" Naruto sneezes again "—the down makes my nose itch."

"Tell Kurama to suck it up and deal," she orders.

Naruto subsides with an exaggerated sulk, and Sakura settles back into the soothing rhythm.

Time passes. Eventually, Sakura nods her head at her work, pleased. "You're all good, Kakashi," she tells him.

He tucks his wing back in and pulls himself up from where he's been stretched out on his stomach, back into a sitting position. Sakura takes a moment to appreciate the way his forearms flex with the motion and his shoulders roll back, relaxed, as he finally settles crosslegged and sits back with the bowl of soup Sai offers up. She shakes her head at her lack of self-restraint, and turns back to pack up her oils and brushes and glues.

She likes these nights; safe around the campfire after a successful mission, no one hurt and no world ending, all of them together with the chance to nurse their minor bruises and mild feather damage as they eat and tell jokes and just be together. She never thought they would get nights like these, not after everything.

Kakashi runs a finger her distal-most primary—almost too light to feel—pulling her out of her head. "Here." He hands her her own bowl of soup, their hands brushing at the exchange.

"Mm," she hums as she breathes in the aroma of definitely not ramen. Sakura is very thankful that it's Sai's night to cook.

Naruto launches into a wild retelling of the afternoon's events, as if they weren't all there to witness them, and Sakura laughs, pelting him with small rocks and bits of twigs alongside Sai when he gets a little too elaborate in his story telling.

Kakashi's chuckles are a low rumble at her side, and all Sakura can do is throw her head back and let the laughter spill out of her and into the moonlight.

They may have all lost so much, but they still have this: their cast and warm nights beside campfires, safe in their bonds and their shared might.

(6)

Sakura glares at the mirror, furious tears in her eyes.

Her hand trembles with the kunai held in its firm grip, just the way Iruka-sensei showed them.

She only gets most of the way cutting up through the coverts of her right wing where they transition to scapulars before the pain gets to be too much. Kaasan comes running at the sound of her pained cries, only to find Sakura collapsed in a mess of tears and blood and sheared feathers.

"Sakura-chan," she gasps, freezing in the doorway, her hands outstretched, "what have you done?"

Sakura cries tears of grief and shame. "I don't want them. I hate them. I want them off. I just want them off!"

"I don't— what— Sakura," Kaasan stutters, without the faintest clue what to do. "Oh, my darling girl. No."

And then Kaasan is hovering over her, trying to figure out what she can touch without making things worse.

Sakura must lose some time, because one moment she's trying to avoid Kaasan's horror-stricken face, and the next there are two unfamiliar Winged Ones wearing hitai-ate taking up all the space in her doorway.

"Shit," the woman says, taking in the disaster. "You've sure done a number on yourself, kid."

The man ignores his partner's crassness, and kneels down at Sakura's side. "Hey there," he croons, "it's gonna be alright, ok sweetheart? We're going to get you to the hospital, and they'll fix you up, and we'll figure this out."

Maybe, Sakura thinks hopefully, they won't be able to fix the damage and they'll have to get rid of them, and then Ami and the rest of the kids at school will stop yanking at her primaries when no teachers are watching and laughing at her colouring and mocking the way her barbs are never quite straight because Kaasan and Tōsan don't have wings and still haven't quite figured out grooming. Maybe then they'll go away and leave Sakura alone.

She hates her wings, she thinks, as she looks at the soft brown and almost green plumage of the shinobi scooping her up. She wants them gone, she tells herself, as the man uses the the impossible spread of his wings to propel them forward and up above the rooftops, his partner at his heels.

She doesn't want them.

Not when she'll never have anyone to fly with.

You can't be a Winged One without a cast.

So Sakura isn't a Winged One. She's just a freak with wings.

(As they speed through the air, the wind currents sing against her skin, and Sakura would almost feel warm and safe amid the clouds, if not for the way every wingbeat jostles her shoulders and tears at the wounds she's carved. They speed through the air, and Sakura falls in love with flying.)

(12)

The door opens, and Naruto's stupid eraser falls on the shinobi's head, erupting into a cloud of chalk dust.

"My first impression is: I hate you all," he cheerfully announces.

He's tall, at least. And he has to be a jōnin if he's a jōnin-sensei. But Sakura had always thought jōnin were supposed to be more… impressive. They certainly weren't supposed to fall for dumb, juvenile pranks and they certainly weren't supposed to be late. The fact that he's slouched and wearing a weird mask and has soot-grey wings that are vaguely ragged around the edges doesn't exactly make her first impression any better.

And then he ends up being a lazy, sadistic pervert, so. Yeah. Sakura isn't exactly all that ecstatic that Hatake Kakashi is Team 7's sensei. Somehow, not even Sasuke-kun's presence quite outweighs the disappointment of a sensei who can't be bothered to take care of his wings and Naruto.

(Sakura has been looking for a cast to belong to her whole life, but Kakashi-sensei flinches away when she absentmindedly reaches out to pull at a loose feather, his whole body recoiling from her touch. She never quite musters up the courage to ask him if he'll take her flying. By the time she thinks he might have been willing, Sasuke-kun and Naruto are gone, and Sakura can't catch a glimpse of soot fading into moonlight despite how much she tries.

On the rare afternoons where Shishō is drunk or busy or agreeable enough to leave Sakura to her own devices, she finds a place to stretch out her wings and bask, and does her best not to watch the skies with envy.

Winged Ones were never meant to fly alone.)

(15)

She snaps her wings closed and plummets.

Where she lands, the world shatters.

Sakura is a creature of air, and so the earth shivers at her touch.

(13)

"Um, Shishō? Are you sure this is a good idea?" Sakura asks as she looks down, down, down at the ground below. She's never quite realized how high up the Hokage Mountain goes.

"Of course this is a good idea," Senju Tsunade declares, "it's one of mine. And anyways, I don't know what you're worried about, your wings are plenty large enough now to carry you."

"Yes, but—" But Sakura has only ever dared used them for lift in a fight, or to glide down from the roof of a tall building. She's never jumped off the Hokage Mountain and hoped that instinct would kick in and catch her.

"Don't worry, I'll even heal anything you break instead of making you do it yourself," her shishō promises.

It is not as comforting as Sakura thinks she meant it to be.

"Ok," she mumbles to herself. "You can do this. You. Can. Do this."

"Of course you can," Tsunade-shishō grumbles. "You're my apprentice."

And then she places a firm hand between the blades of Sakura's wings, and pushes her off of her head.

Sakura screams as she falls, panic momentarily overriding sense. But even if Sakura doesn't know what she's doing, some ancient sleeping instinct does, and it jolts awake with the rushing wind in her ears. Her wings snap out, and for a terrible, irrational moment, she thinks they'll snap off with the force of gravity pulling them down, but they catch and she angles her weight and Sakura is flying.

She would whoop, but she doesn't have the breath for it.

"Nice job, Sakura-chan," Shizune greets her.

Sakura looks up to see black wings casting a shadow above her.

And she laughs, because flying next to Shizune are two of Tsunade-shishō winged ANBU guards and one of the nurses from the hospital and Genma-san and no, Sakura is not alone.

They spend a brilliant summer afternoon riding the thermals, and Sakura learns what it is to be Winged.

(15)

The first time Sakura flies with Kakashi-sensei, it is on their desperate sprint to Suna. Naruto is a furious blur, driven on and forwards and never quite fast enough with his terror and rage for Gaara spilling over and out of him like fire or acid or something else caustic and deadly. Without that drive, Sakura and Kakashi-sensei sometimes take to the air, dropping back down to run as their wings tire.

It is a brutal race with no happy ending, and yet, Sakura's heart sings.

(16)

Sakura looks up from where she's been preening Shizune to find Kakashi-sensei lurking. He's not obvious about it, but Sakura has spent more than enough time analyzing his moods and idiosyncrasies that she's pretty good at knowing when he wants something but isn't quite sure how to trick someone into giving it to him without them figuring out that he wanted it in the first place.

She wishes that he wasn't so broken that he couldn't just trust that he could ask her and she would say yes.

But he's settling under a nearby tree with his nose in Icha Icha Tactics, so Sakura figures that he's willing to hang about until Shizune is gone before he tries to con her into doing whatever it is he wants.

She falls back into the rhythm of pulling out old feathers and straightening barbs and just stroking calming lines, enjoying the way Shizune slowly unwinds under her touch. They don't do this often, but it's an excellent form of relaxation after a particularly intense surgery. They saved the patient, but the poor kid will have a long journey ahead of him if he ever wants to walk again.

Finally, Sakura swings her leg back over Shizune's hip so that she's no longer straddling the other woman's back. She stretches, wings flaring as she does so and says, "Alright, you're all done. Careful with that secondary though, it's still isn't looking so good from when you got hit last month."

"Yes, Sakura-sensei," Shizune rolls her eyes. "Thanks. I'll see you for tea, tomorrow?"

"Of course, unless I see you in the hospital before that, but here's to hoping we don't get any emergencies in the next twenty-four hours."

Shizune laughs in agreement, and then ambles away with a wave.

Sakura waves back. Then she turns her attention on the tree where, yup, sure enough, Kakashi-sensei is still slouched with his book.

She considers for a moment how best to deal with him, before finally settling on the straightforward approach. It's not like he won't see any of her attempts at subtlety from a mile off.

"Hey sensei," she sing-songs, "what can I do for you this fine day?"

Kakashi-sensei looks up slowly from his Icha Icha, blinking, as if in surprise. "Oh, Sakura-chan, I didn't see you there!"

Sakura just stares at him, unimpressed. Even if he hadn't sought her out, it's not like a man of his skills wouldn't know she was there. "I'm sure you didn't," she drawls.

And yeah, ok, her sardonic disbelief gets her the quirk of amusement she was expecting, but it's muted by something else, something that Sakura doesn't quite recognize on Kakashi-sensei's face.

He almost seems shy?

It surprised her enough that she hesitates, and doesn't push.

"Well," he finally gets to it, "you see, since you're my most precious, wonderful student, I thought you could help me with a little thing."

Sakura just narrows her eyes in suspicion. Kakashi has lured her into more than one unpleasant task he hoped to avoid using that tactic on her, including, but not limited to: washing his dogs, watering Raidō-san's plants while he was gone on a mission for four months, doing his paperwork, and running interference when Tsunade-shishō tried to kill him after he was almost five hours late to a very important meeting with some very important dignitaries.

"Depends on the little thing."

"Ah, well," he scratches the back of his head, and suppresses a wince.

"Are you hurt?" she demands, instincts kicking in. "You're supposed to go to the hospital if you're hurt, you idiot, not sit around and wait for me to finish preening Shizune!"

He fends off her glowing hands.

"Stop it!" he almost squawks, and if Sakura weren't so worried, she'd laugh. "It isn't serious, it's just a feather."

Sakura's eyes narrow further. He's a terrible master of the understatement. "Turn around and let me see."

He gives in to her demand with the appearance of beleaguered defeat, but Sakura notes the tension in his shoulders as he gives her his back. But his discomfort is soon forgotten as Sakura sucks in a pained wince at the sight of his wings.

"Just a feather?" she demands, almost shrill.

It takes all of Sakura's not unimpressive skill to salvage his wings enough that he'll still be able to fly without having to wait a few months for more feathers to grow back in. But the entire time that she's working, Sakura can't forget the way he's as sharp as razor wire under her touch. She's careful to narrate her every move, but he doesn't relax until he's half-way across the clearing from her, walking away with a smile of thanks, leaving her with a mess of bloody, damaged feathers and more questions than she ever believes she'll have answers.

She takes one of the undamaged feathers that fell out in the process of mending, and tucks it into a pocket. She doesn't let herself think on why.

(21)

"Will you two come down from there so that we can eat?" Ino demands, hands on her hips. Her voice isn't nearly as strident when Sakura isn't on the ground.

She does a barrel roll as a particularly eloquent "fuck off".

Genma laughs behind her.

Normally, Genma is all earth tones and Kakashi is a raincloud and Shizune is a shadow, but today, with the brilliant sunshine glinting off their feathers, they explode into a thousand colours without names. Sakura has never felt more at home than she does in this moment, wingtip to wingtip with her fellow creatures of air.

They spiral together for a while longer, ignoring their earth-bound friends beneath them.

In the distance, other Winged Ones take to the skies, but whatever urgency drives them is not their concern today. Today, they are free to fly as they like and to take their time enjoying the kiss of the breeze on their cheeks and the warmth of the sun on their backs and the good company.

Sakura's stomach grumbles a protest though, and she sighs. Food.

She rolls over Kakashi's back, a playful move to catch his attention. "Race you to the ground!"

He grins, a wild thing, and together, they fall.

Sakura never feels quite as alive as when the ground is rising up to meet her, gravity at her back, and all she needs to do to overcome them is throw her wings open and let them catch.

"Finally," Ino grumps when they finally return to the ground, laughing and shoving at each other over who won. "Although, were the dramatics really necessary?"

Sakura sniffs dismissively at her and Kakashi just smiles his blandest smile.

Ino stalks away, grumbling about mannerless Winged Ones.

"Hey." Kakashi catches her by her elbow.

Sakura turns into him. "What?"

"You've got—" He motions at her head. "Never mind, just let me—" His fingers are so, impossibly gentle as they comb through her hair, settling the wind-tangled mess. "There."

He lets his hands linger as they trail down her cheeks, his eyes everywhere but on her.

"Thanks," Sakura manages despite her suddenly racing heart. She feels like she's in free fall.

Kakashi clears his throat, and lets his hands drop away form her skin.

They walk side by side, shoulders bumping now and again, towards the tables of food and their boisterous friends.

The secret silence between them echoes throughout the afternoon, every time their eyes catch.

Sakura doesn't quite know what to make of it yet, but she learnt long ago to trust her instincts to catch her before she hits the ground.

(23)

"Have I ever told you—" Kakashi presses a kiss along her spine "—that you have—" and another one "—the most beautiful wings." And another.

Sakura is already flushed from his hands and his mouth on her, but she blushes harder, and rubs her flaming cheeks into the pillow she's resting on.

"They're not—"

"Yes. They are."

He goes back to peppering kisses down her back and across her shoulders, fingers soft and light as they stroke along her secondaries.

The lamp light casts a warm glow in his room, stretching shadows up the walls and painting them in amber hues.

"Gods, Sakura, when you fly; it looks like fire."

She shifts under him, uncomfortable with the awe in his voice.

"I'm not—"

"The red turns almost orange, but the pink at the tips? It catches the light, turning to spun gold when you angle your feathers the right way."

And Sakura has never been able to love her wings, not when she remembers being six with a kunai in her hands and the belief that maybe if they were gone, she wouldn't feel like such a freak. But she trusts Kakashi—always and forever—and she trusts he would never lie to her, not about this.

She doesn't know how to believe him, but she trusts the sincerity and awe in his voice and in his touch as he holds her like she's something beautiful, something precious.

A gentle finger trails down her cheek, brushing away the traitorous tears spilling over. He leans forward, and kisses them from her skin. "You're fire, Sakura," he murmurs into her ear, "like a phoenix."

And she can't, she can't not turn her face, searching for his own, to capture his lips in a searing kiss.

They tumble into a pile of limbs and scarred skin and pleased gasps and murmured names and feathers: soot and moonlight, blazing red and gold-spun pink. They tumble together, and they do not hit the ground.

(Winged Ones were never meant to fly alone. Sakura snaps her wings open, and from the corner of her eye she catches falling leaves or shadows or thunderclouds on the horizon. Winged Ones were never meant to fly alone, and so Sakura doesn't.)

Chapter 18

Sarada has never had to walk home from the Academy on her own.

Kaachan cannot always be there, because sometimes kaachan is busy keeping Konoha and Konoha's people safe. (People say kaachan is like a sakura blossom, is just like her name, but Sarada knows that kaachan is not a delicate flower; kaachan is the cherry tree, who bends in the wind but never gives completely, who weathers storms, whose roots hold together the earth, who shelters and protects. Kaachan holds the Village in her small hands, as surely as tōsan or Naruto-ojichan or Tsunade-baba. So Sarada gets that she can't always be there, not when her steady hands are needed.)

But just because Kaachan is not there, does not mean that Sarada ever has to walk home alone. Sai-ojichan shows up and chases her and Inojin through the streets with ink kittens or ink lions. Shizune-obasan just happens to be leaving the Academy after giving some of the upper years a lesson on basic iryojutsu. Shino-ojisan is wondering if she would like to help him go look for a specific beetle in the Nara forest, since he knows she likes insects. Hinata-obachan is making cookies and invites her to come along.

Sarada never has to walk home from the Academy alone if she doesn't choose to. Doesn't have to open the door to quiet stillness, the house too empty without kaachan's sunshine filing the rooms. Doesn't have to open the door and be faced with the gaping hole left by otōsan's absence, made all the more obvious by his pictures on the wall—too solemn and too sad—that are almost older that Sarada herself.

A normal Friday, Sarada rushes out of class, spilling over with excitement because kaachan promised to make her favourite dinner tonight as a reward for her marks on the last taijutsu test and then they are going to a movie because the next instalment of their favourite series is premiering and Sarada can't wait.

She stops short when she rushes out to see tōchan slouched next to the swing-tree, his silly hat perched sideways on his head. She always loves to see tōchan, but usually he has a silly smile—just for her—to match his silly hat, and right now he isn't smiling. Sarada slumps her way over to him. "Kaachan can't make it, can she?"

Tōchan ruffles her hair gently. "Sorry, Sara-chan, she got called in for an emergency surgery."

Sarada nods. "Are they going to be okay?" Because tōchan is tense and worried, and she knows what that means, but he does him best to smile at her despite his thoughts still trapped in the operating room with kaachan and the hurt shinobi.

"They've got your mom there! And no one ever has quite as good of a chance of surviving as someone with Sakura fighting for them."

Sarada sighs, and buries her face in Tōchan's stomach. His flack jacket is unyielding, but he smells like dogs and paperwork and safety.

"We were gonna go see the new 'Princess Danger' movie," she mumbles, holding back tears. Because Sarada understands that sometimes her kaachan's steady hands are needed by the Village, but sometimes she wants to keep them all to herself anyways.

"Do you want to go see it with me?" tōchan asks, gently stroking her hair.

She shakes her head.

"Do you want to build a fort and bake cookies and watch episodes of 'Tales of a Gutsy Shinobi' together until your mom gets home and yells at us for eating too much junk food?"

Sarada nods.

"Excellent! Come along then, Sarada-hime!" And he sweeps her up onto his shoulders, pulling a startled shriek of laughter from her.

"Tōchan!" she screams. "Put me down! Put me down!"

"No can do, Sarada-hime, we gotta move." And so he runs, hands firm on her calves, holding her safe. Sarada whoops, and tangles her fingers in his hair, startled by the speed but trusting that tōchan would never drop her.

They while away the evening, working their way back through "Tales of a Gutsy Shinobi" and eating far too many cookies, as promised, until Sarada drifts off during one of Menma's many speeches about friendship. Sarada is eventually pulled out of her drifting by the familiar scent of hospital and the familiar touch of kaachan's hands; she must have gotten home and crawled right into the fort without bothering to shower. She and tōchan are whispering, kaachan reassuring him that her patients will live. Sarada falls back asleep, unaware of the way her tōchan catches her kaasan's hand and presses a grateful kiss to its palm, safe and secure with her favourite people.

She wakes to a bouquet of flowers on her desk and a new set of senbon needles. She doesn't need to ask who they're from, the unsigned note that simply reads "Good job with that feint that gave you the opportunity to put the Nara boy on his knees."

Sarada smiles, and adds more water to the vase, stows the note in the chakra sealed box she keeps under her floorboards, and goes to add the senbon to her weapon pouch.

Kaachan and tōchan are singing softly together as they make pancakes in the kitchen.

The Uchiha house is filled with sound and light and other good things.

Sarada never has to walk any path alone, not if she chooses not to.

(Here is the Uchiha clan's new beginning: a girl who will never walk alone, let alone believe she has to. The Village stands behind her and she knows strength beyond her own.)

Chapter 19

Sakura is raised on a steady diet of love stories. Her mother giggles behind books whose covers feature women dipped low by men with flowing hair. Her older cousins bat their eyelashes at boys who preen like birds at the attention. She and Ino whisper under blankets in the night, movie stars pouting out from magazine pages.

Sakura is raised on a steady diet of love stories, and she knows that love isn't love until it tears you apart and turns you into something new. Something beautiful.

Love is heartbreak and tears and passionate declarations in the rain.

And then, well.

Uchiha Sasuke happens. A boy with wounded eyes who snarls at gentleness, but Sakura knows, Sakura knows that she can push past all his jagged edges, smooth them into something soft just for her. Sakura knows this, because that is how the story always goes.

The girl loves the broken boy hard enough, and if she is good and beautiful and true, if she is enough, then she fixes him.

And they live happily ever after.

And so Sakura shatters her own heart to pieces as she turns away, leaving Ino staring at her back, blue eyes so wide and shining with something Sakura refuses to name.

And so Sakura cries into her pillow at night, reliving every "you're annoying", every cold dismissal, every moment where Sasuke-kun turns away because it doesn't matter how much she loves him, it isn't enough.

She tries harder.

And so Sakura chases the jagged remnants of a boy into the night, and it isn't raining, but she declares her love anyways because this is the way that stories are supposed to go. The girl saves the boy.

(The ragged ends of Sakura's hair kiss the back of her neck and she can still see Naruto crawling forward on his hands and knees, spitting blood and and she can still feel Sasuke trembling and terrible in her arms as he shivers with something she does not recognize and she can still remember throwing herself into the rushing path of sand, ready to die. Sakura still wears her pretty red qipao, but her hair is short and ragged, her nails are unpainted and torn.)

Sakura declares her love in the cold dark to a boy who is more jagged edges than anything else.

A blank-faced ANBU shakes her awake from her cold dark slumber where the boy she loved layed her down on a bench like it was a funeral pyre.

A blank-faced ANBU shakes her awake. It is not a girl who believes in love stories who stands.

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.

.

—Love stories,—fifteen year old Sakura declares vehemently to Ino, both of them drunk off of sake they stole from the drawer with the false bottom in the Godaime's office,—love stories don't exist.—

Ino laughs. It is a bitter thing.—Fuck him,—she declares,—you've got me.—

They hook pinkies, the motion coated with déjà vu; they've done this before. It won't end the same way, they know better now then to break themselves for a boy.

The worst part of waking up the next morning to a furious Tsunade towering over them—sunlight pounding through their heads, their mouths like ash—the worst part is the terrible kindness riding like a ghost in the hazel eyes that glare down at them from their tangle sprawled across Sakura's bedroom floor.

—Alcohol doesn't fix broken hearts,—she tells them.—Trust me. I would know.—

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.

.

Sakura is raised on a steady diet of love stories, so she knows that love is heartbreak and tears and passionate declarations in the rain. Sakura once loved a collection of jagged edges that looked like a boy from the wrong angle, so she knows that heartbreak and tears and passionate declarations in the rain only serve to cut you to pieces.

Love, Sakura knows, isn't for her. She's got quite enough scars in her collection, thanks.

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—Morning,—Kakashi kisses the skin of her shoulder where the shirt she stole has slipped.

—Good morning,—she smiles from around the edge of her mug, leaning back into his chest.

His hair is a disaster zone she notices when she tips her head back onto his shoulder. She smirks up at her handiwork, and resists the urge to thread her fingers back through it, pull him down to her mouth (or lower, still). She has work, this morning.

It's easy, standing in Kakashi's kitchen barefoot, bruises painting the length of her neck. It's easy, this thing they do, take each other home to muffled groans and clever fingers and pleasure, only to nod at one another the next afternoon as they pass in the market shopping or warm up for a team spar or meet at the gate for a mission. It's easy, the two of them, pleasure and companionship and no expectations except that they'll still be friends in the morning.

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Kakashi drops languid kisses down her spine, and Sakura keeps her cries tucked behind her teeth, her hips twisting as she demands more from the press of his long, lovely fingers inside of her.

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—You?—Kakashi gasps.—Is this?—

Sakura bites on her lip, keeping back the smile that wants to break over her face at the brilliant excitement blooming on his.

—Well, y'know,—she says,—it was just lying around in storage. I figured Jiraiya would want someone to appreciate it.—

Kakashi drops the journal filled with handwritten notes and doodles of hazel eyes onto the couch, scooping her up in his arms.—Thank you, thank you, thank you,—he whispers between the kisses he peppers along her nose, across her cheeks, on her forehead.—This is perfect.—

Her happiness at his simple joy finally overpowers her restraint, and her smile splits her face. Kakashi catches it with his own.

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.

—I'll see you tonight?—he asks.

—Tonight,—Sakura confirms.—Don't be late.—

—Late? Me?—Kakashi teases, and then turns almost serious.—I'm never late to the things that matter.—

Sakura only realizes that it's strange he dropped a chaste kiss on her lips when she sees Ino staring at her, one perfect blond eyebrow raised.

She blushes.

—Huh,—Ino muses.—I did not see that coming.—

—It's nothing,—Sakura insists.

Ino just looks at her, not even deigning to address what they both know is a lie.

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.

Sakura knows that love is heartbreak and tears and passionate declarations in the rain, knows that it is not for her.

And yet, she stands one day in a busy street, her best friend looking at her with those piercing blue eyes, fingers pressed to her mouth in shock, and she realizes that she didn't fall hopelessly in love. She walked right into its open arms, letting love wrap her softly in its warm embrace.

Love, Sakura learns, doesn't need tear you apart. You are already enough, already something beautiful.

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—Sakura,—Kakashi calls, toeing off his sandals.—I'm home.—

Home. Home. Not because it's Kakashi's apartment, but because it's where Sakura is.

—In the kitchen,—she calls back, turning the heat down on the stove.

He catches her when she throws herself at him as he walks through the doorway.

—I love you,—Sakura tells him, the words bubbling out of her now that she knows.

Kakashi hitches her up higher, his hands firm and sure and easy as they support her weight. She grasps his hips more tightly with her thighs, plays with the soft hair at the nape of his neck.

His smile, as it creeps over him, is soft and terrible, but Sakura does not tremble at the sight. The man she is wrapped around is full over with exquisite gentleness; there are no jagged edges here.

He kisses her breathless. The woman who pulls away to smile back is one who believes in love stories.

They must be true: she's living one.

Chapter 20

The girl behind the counter might just be wearing the fiercest glare Kakashi has ever seen on a service employee.

To be fair, if he were the one wearing an apron with a smiling frog wielding a sword on it that was the same shade as his hair he might just be grumpy too. And he, at least, isn't in possession of fiercely pink curls. Grey on grey would be much less of an eyesore, he's sure.

It doesn't help that the decor is retro pastel-pink diner, either.

"Welcome to Ice Cream Hidden Under The Pad," she says, "what can I get for you today?"

The amount of peppy cheer she manages to infuse into the question is impressive considering the way her smile looks like it's about to leap off of her face and start a bar fight.

Kakashi takes his time browsing through the flavours; there are the usual standbys, of course, and some of the names are ridiculous puns, but oh, there. Yes. That will do perfectly.

Kakashi looks the girl straight in the eye, and smiles his best, most innocent smile. "Two scoops of bubblegum, please," he says, tapping on the glass.

The girl's left eye twitches. It's beautiful.

"Of course," she spits, cyanid laced honey. "Would you like that in a regular or a waffle cone."

Kakashi pauses, taps his bottom lip through his mask as he considers the cones. "That fancy waffle cone, the one with sprinkles."

She points a trembling finger at the monstrosity of a cone with pink sprinkles attached by white chocolate, confirming his order.

"Exactly!" Kakashi cheers. "That way, it all matches!"

He doesn't even need to let his gaze dart between her hair and her apron or the space around them; she definitely gets what he's going for.

And, wow, her face is turning pink too. He's impressed she hasn't leapt over the counter and smashed his ice cream cone in his face yet. Or strangled him with her thighs or something equally as deadly. Despite the pink hair, she looks like the kind of girl who could strangle a man with her thighs. And not in an enjoyable way but in a "leave you dead with your neck snapped" way.

"That'll be five ninety-seven," she informs him after handing over the offensively pink ice cream cone.

Kakashi pays, and can't bring himself to regret the indulgence as he walks backwards out of the store, all the better to make sure she doesn't kill him while his back is turned.

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.

The first time Kakashi walks into Ice Cream Hidden Under The Pad it's because it's hot enough out that the tar on the roads is melting and he's curious about what kind of ice cream shoppe has a sword-wielding frog as a mascot.

The second time Kakashi walks into Ice Cream Hidden Under The Pad it's because Obito drags him in, wanting to see for himself the "girl who managed to make your dumb face smile so hard". Rin accompanies them as a chaperone because, apparently, Obito and Kakashi still aren't allowed out in public alone after the incident at the karaoke bar.

The fist fight over proper dance moves for accompanying ABBA was not Kakashi's fault, he maintains, but Rin had just stared at him with her hands on her hips until he decided that it was best to just give in. And anyways, this way there will be someone to keep an eye on Obito so that he doesn't bother the girl too much.

Although, as he tried pointing out as Obito dragged him out of his apartment—Rin trailing behind, amused—there was no guarantee that the girl would even be working this afternoon.

Unfortunately, Obito is hard to deter and also a tremendous fan of ice cream.

And so Kakashi finds himself once again passing under the stern gaze of the warrior frog and into the pink-filled ice cream shoppe.

Despite his warnings, the girl is working again, handing ice cream over to a dad with two little kids, a bright smile on her face. They pay as Kakashi, Rin and Obito linger near the entrance, taking in the decor. Or, well, Rin is. Obito is vibrating with excitement as he watches the girl make change.

The small family finally heads to a booth to eat, leaving Kakashi and his friends to step forward.

"You!" the girl snarls, and then quickly tries to school her face into polite blandness. "I mean," she continues through gritted teeth, "welcome to Ice Cream Hidden Under The Pad, what can I get for you today?"

Kakashi rocks back on his heels, biting down on his glee because she's beautiful when she's furious.

Rin elbows him in the side. He flinches and turns to glare at her.

"Ow," he mutters.

Rin just elbows him again, harder this time. "Learn to flirt like a normal person," she orders.

Kakashi splutters. "I'm not flirting!"

He really needs to figure out how to go back in time and kill the person who taught Rin her "disappointed in you" face. It's devastating.

Luckily, Obito has rushed forward to bother the girl, and so Rin has to leave off making Kakashi feel bad for something he definitely is not doing in order to try to wrangle Obito into something approaching a normal energy level. Given the way he's vibrating as he stands at the counter, Kakashi is betting that Rin is going to have her hands full with that.

"Wow!" Obito exclaims. "Kakashi wasn't lying, your hair really is pink!"

You learn new things everyday. Today, Kakashi learns that, despite burning with more intensity than the sun, a glare cannot, in fact, incinerate you where you stand, regardless of how hard the glarer tries.

The girl turns away from trying to fry Kakashi to a crisp to smile, strained, at Rin. "What can I get for you."

"Good afternoon!" Rin says, pinching Obito viciously on the thigh under the counter, where the girl can't see. Her voice is trying its best to convey apology, but then she unthinkingly ruins it when she continues, "Could I get one scoop of strawberry, please? What do you want, Kakashi?"

Rin turns to look over her shoulder at him, so misses the way the girl's fingers clench around the clean ice cream scoop.

"Mint," he blurts out, because, as amusing as he finds it to make her face change colours as she bubbles over with barely contained rage, he didn't actually come here to be an asshole with his friends, and he wants to get out of here and leave her be.

Mint, he says, and Kakashi realizes with dawning horror that the eyes narrowing at him are green, green, green.

Obito, having recovered from the bruise definitely forming on his thigh, manages to actually rescue Kakashi, which is impressive considering his timing is usually miserable. "One scoop of blueberry and one scoop of cookies and cream, please," he sing songs, looking down at the ice cream adoringly.

The girl tears her narrowed eyes away from Kakashi to look at Obito with something approaching disbelief.

Kakashi doesn't blame her, what even are those two flavours together?

Rin chats with her about the heat wave they've been having as she prepares their ice cream. Obito drops back to elbow Kakashi in the ribs, managing with impressive accuracy to hit the bruise Rin left. Kakashi flinches.

"She's kinda cute, hey?"

Kakashi turns to stare at him, unimpressed.

"I mean, if you're into terrifying women who can probably murder you with an ice cream scoop."

Kakashi looks exaggeratedly at Rin, and then back again.

Obito shrugs. "'S what I mean. I mean, one of the very many reasons I love Rin is that she can kick my ass."

Kakashi sighs, because yes, unfortunately, he does know this. He does his best to block out the many, many memories of the all the times Rin has kicked his ass.

"Guys, come grab your ice cream," Rin calls.

When Kakashi takes his scoop of mint, their fingers brush, and his gaze jolts up to met green, green, green. His eyes darts back down to the ice cream, which is a much safer green to stare at.

Rin pays for all three of them.

Green, green, green eyes sear his back as they leave.

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For some unknowable reason (Obito), Ice Cream Hidden Under The Pad becomes their regular spot that summer.

It takes four more visits to find out the girl's name, not for lack of trying on Obito's part, and they only do because a boisterous blond rushes in one afternoon calling "Sakura!" at the top of his lungs.

"Naruto!" she snaps. "Inside voice!"

"Sorry, Sakura," he grins, not sounding very sorry at all, "just excited to see you, is all."

She rolls her eyes. "It's nice to see you too, Naruto. How was hiking?"

Kakashi absolutely does not pout as she talks with the blond boy, not even bothering to look over at their table and scowl. Instead, she's smiling and laughing and…

He's not jealous. He doesn't care what Obito claims as he teases Kakashi all the way home.

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"Why are you even still here?" Sakura demands, collapsing onto the other side of Kakashi's booth.

He startles up from his book, glancing around at the empty shoppe and then back to the girl in front of him.

No, that definitely is Sakura sitting in his booth.

She rolls her eyes at him and pushes the sundae she's brought with her into the middle of the table. Then she holds out a spoon.

It's a surprisingly non-violent movement, but Kakashi flinches back dramatically anyways.

She rolls her eyes again. "Shut up, you baby. If I haven't killed you yet, I'm not going to start now. Besides, you and Obito are my best customers, I'm not going to go and put an end to that stream of revenue."

He opens one eye to peer at her suspiciously, then reaches forward, slowly, to take the spoon from her.

As soon as her hand is free of the offered utensil, Sakura is diving into the sundae between them.

"Mmm," she hums with a mouthful of chocolate. "You know, I'm surprised I've yet to get sick of this."

She's… talking with him? Why is she talking with him? Sakura doesn't like him. In fact, Kakashi is pretty sure the only thing she likes about him is that he's a convenient target to glare at.

Doesn't mean, of course, that he doesn't still do his best to pull pink into her cheeks.

Fuck, Obito is right, he really does actually like this girl.

Well then, that's embarrassing.

Not the liking Sakura bit, because not only does Kakashi know she could kick his ass (she competes in MMA, he might have tracked down a couple of her fights on YouTube), but she's also smart and funny and when she smiles she's so beautiful he aches with it. No, what's embarrassing is that Obito is right.

He's never going to live that down.

"How long have you worked here?" he asks, curious.

"This is my sixth summer," she says from around another mouthful of ice cream. "And my last. It's almost sad really, end of an era."

Kakashi swipes a bite of vanilla and banana, and she doesn't go to stab him with her spoon. Success.

"What are you doing next summer instead?"

Sakura reaches back and shakes her hair out of its ponytail.

Kakashi takes another bite to mask the way his mouth has gone dry from the sight of pink curls kissing her cheeks.

"Next summer I've got an internship lined up at the hospital: something a little bit more relevant to my future plans than scooping ice cream. I feel bad though, Minato cried when I told him I couldn't come back."

Kakashi snorts because, yeah, he can imagine that. The owner of Ice Cream Hidden Under The Pad loves Sakura fiercely, as far as he can tell from the few times he's run into the man.

Sakura smiles, laughing with him. "I promised him I would still stop by and visit the shoppe though. And anyways, it's not like Naruto and I are going to stop being friends and he'll never see me. Kushina would kill me if I stopped showing up to their family reunions, she says that my pink hair means everyone stopped making fun of her for being a redhead."

And, somehow, that spawns into funny personal anecdotes about meeting families of friends.

Kakashi grins, triumphant, when he reduces her to gasps of laughter with a story about meeting Obito's uncle, Madara, for the first time.

Sakura gets up at one point to lock the door, and Kakashi helps her wipe down counters before they collapse back in their booth to sip at hot chocolate.

Eventually though, Sakura starts to yawn.

"Crap! It's almost midnight!" she exclaims, checking the time on her phone.

"I—" Kakashi doesn't want this peaceful bubble they've created to pop, leaving them once again at odds. He has a terrible feeling that if it ends, that's it, he won't ever get to sit with Sakura again and make her laugh so hard that she can't breathe. "Can I walk you home?"

Sakura pauses where she's picking up their mugs to return to the kitchen.

He doesn't quite know what to make of the emotions that flutter over her face, too quick to catch, but then she smiles, soft and shy.

"Yeah," she says, "I'd like that. Just give me a second to put these in the back and grab my sweater and bag."

Kakashi rocks awkwardly as he waits at the door for her to return, his hands shoved into his pockets.

"I'm ready to go," she says as she steps back out from around the counter, twirling a set of keys on her finger.

And, oh. Kakashi has never seen her out of that atrocious pink apron, and now she's wearing a cardigan that looks so soft it takes everything he has not to reach out and run his finger down her arm to check.

He waits, shifting his weight, as she locks up.

"This way," Sakura nods, heading off down the street.

The heat of the day has faded somewhat, and the bite of autumn is almost in the air. When Sakura shivers despite her sweater, Kakashi lets himself drift closer, close enough that their arms brush now and again as they walk quietly.

Too soon, Sakura nudges him and stops in front of a short apartment building. "This is me," she says. He wonders if he's imagining the regret in her voice.

Kakashi scuffs a foot along the pavement, angry that he let this chance for… for something go to waste. He doesn't know what he should have done, but he should have done something other than walk in silence, only letting their arms brush now and again through that impossibly soft cardigan.

"Good night, Sakura," he offers weakly.

Something in her face falls. "Good night, Kakashi."

He buries his hands back in his pockets when the impulse to grab her and stop her from darting up the stairs punches him in the throat.

And then, miraculously, as if she can hear the way his fingers are tingling with the need to touch her, she whirls, glaring down at him like something terrible from the added height of the stairs.

"Why'd you do it, that first time you came in? Why did you order that fucking pink ice cream cone?" she demands, blazing.

Kakashi is helpless to do anything more than stare at her, burning.

She growls. "Why did you keep coming back?"

When he looks, her hands are trembling.

He wonders if her fingers are tingling too.

"Because," he croaks, the dark night and the way the streetlights make her hair glow stripping him of the sarcastic shields he usually hides behind, "because I like making you blush."

"Oh," Sakura puffs out, all of the burning intensity draining out of her.

He can't tell for the lighting, but he would swear that her cheeks pink.

Kakashi nods, a jerky, embarrassed thing. "I'm"—he jerks his thumb over his shoulder—"I'm going to head home."

"Kakashi," she calls, and he can't not stop and turn to face her again.

Something soft is blooming on her face.

"Come in tomorrow, okay?"

She wants him to come back.

Kakashi ducks his head, hiding his own soft smile.

"Yeah," he says, "okay."

.

.

.

When Kakashi shows up at Ice Cream Hidden Under The Pad the next afternoon and asks for a waffle cone with two scoops of bubblegum, Sakura shoves a spoonful of it into his mouth to shut him up as he laughs.

She forgives him though, and chases the taste of pink on his tongue when she yanks him most of the way over the counter, and kisses him.

(Obito and Rin, looking on, cheer.)

Chapter 21:

The worst part of waking up is that it's so familiar.

She's almost surprised that it's Kakashi-sensei's masked face hanging over her, waiting for Sakura to orient herself, and not a blank porcelain one.

She wishes desperately, incoherently for a moment that it had all been just a dream, even the good things, maybe especially the good things. Instead, Kakashi-sensei's face is a blank mask of grief.

He might as well be made of porcelain for how he might shatter under her touch.

"No," she rasps.

But she is not thirteen again, and she knows already that Naruto and Sasuke-kun are so much further away than no longer in the Village.

"Sensei, please, no."

Kakashi-sensei rests a terrible, gentle hand on her head, his eyes closing as if to ward off her plea.

If she were thirteen, Sakura thinks she would cry. Great, horrible, soul-shaking things to shatter her rib cage and leave her bleeding. But there is nothing. Only silence.

Sakura inhales, but her lungs are un-punctured, her heart pumping firm.

Sakura inhales, and stands.

Tsunade-shishō will want to see her. If she's awoken. If the Infinite Tsukuyomi has even broken.

If it hasn't?

Sakura stands and she looks to her sensei for direction.

"You're the last to wake," Kakashi-sensei tells her as he watches her, wary.

Sakura wasn't trapped, but she wonders if this is what it was to wake from perfect dreams. Except, no, Sasuke-kun was not that cruel. She had only slept the still sleep of the dreamless.

"Then shishō will have work for me," Sakura declares. "I've slept long enough."

Kakashi-sensei looks at her for a long moment, but eventually he sighs, his shoulders slumping further, and he leads her to the Godaime.

Tsunade-shishō's eyes are hazel-bright. She strips Sakura to the bone, looking for weakness.

Sakura doesn't know what she finds, but she sends Sakura to a series of tents set up for healing and doesn't bother with questions of any sort. "I have more pressing concerns at the moment," she barks.

Katō Dan bled out under Senju Tsunade's hands, Sakura reminds herself, and so Senju Tsunade ran and ran and ran, only to find that there is no outrunning blood. As she shifts from patient to patient to patient, Sakura exams the dirt under her nails, the gore in the creases of her palms.

There is no impulse to run in her bones, scalding the bottoms of her feet, baying at her heels.

There is nothing to run to. There is nothing to run from.

She is not, Sakura reminds herself, the next reflection of an ever spiralling pattern: she is herself only. She needs not repeat the mistakes of her earlier incarnations. She is not her teacher.

When she bothers to look up from surgery, someone has brought her food.

It tastes like ashes in her mouth.

She swallows razors and does her best to not cough up blood.

.

.

.

"They'll be buried together." Sakura's voice slices through the shouting like a lightning-infused blade, leaving cauterized edges and ozone in its wake.

The room stills.

Her gaze is steady and cold as she stares at each individual in turn.

She's not glaring; she wonders why they flinch.

"They'll be buried together," she repeats.

No one on the council says anything about giving Uchiha Sasuke a traitor's burial again.

.

.

.

Ino bustles into Sakura's apartment after picking the lock (a formality, in a ninja village, but one that kindly requests that interlopers stay out). She tosses the two garment bags across Sakura's spread of textbooks and scrolls and notes.

"What?" Sakura demands, scowling vaguely up at Ino with a precariously rescued coffee cup and pen in her hands.

"Two hours. Choose an outfit," Ino orders, her hands on her hips.

Ino is too pale and too sharp, her clavicle and the bones of her face showing the stress of too much work and too much stress and not enough sleep. Her eyes are all the more blue for their red rims. She's clad in a fantastic kimono and would look the part of the Yamanaka Clan Head down to the tips of her geta if not for the combination of impiety and sheer ridiculousness that is her bright orange mofuku.

Sakura wonders how in the hells she managed to convince a seamstress to make it.

Her throat aches for the sharp edges caught there.

But there are other, more important things to deal with than the phantom blades she's doing her best to swallow. The very important, very top secret research she's doing, for one. Ino's presence, for another.

"I don't–" she tries to start, but Ino interrupts.

"Clothes. Choose some. I'm not totally certain of the fit since my last measurements for you are way too old, but they'll do. Then hair. Then you're going to eat something so that you don't fall over half-way through. And then, we're meeting everyone before hand before we can get swamped by idiots who want to gloat while pretending to give their condolences."

Sakura would argue, but arguing with Ino is more energy than it's worth.

Sakura does, after all, need clothes.

The first garment bag is the traditional black outfit for shinobi attending a funeral. Sakura hasn't worn one since the Sandaime's death.

And she should. She should go with the traditional shinobi wear because that was the dream, right? To be shinobi?

But then she opens the second bag and her breath catches, ripping her throat open, shattering her rib cage, a terrible and silent implosion. But then she exhales and it is a steady thing and Sakura does not break.

She runs a steady hand through the silk.

Ino's mofuku is a wonderful outrageous thing made for laughter.

Sakura's mofuku is a traditional black. Except for the way that foxes chase hawkes chase foxes in dizzy spirals, picked out in intricate embroidery with sparkling gems for eyes.

"Ino," Sakura rasps, "I can't take this. How did you even find someone to make this in enough time? You must have paid a fortune."

"Nonsense," Ino declares. "I can afford it. Plus, once I said who it was for, Ishioka-sensei insisted."

Sakura's eyes go impossibly wider. Ino sent to the capital? And the most sought after maker of kimono agreed? There are nobles who would give their first-born for a kimono made by Ishioka-sensei.

"Ino." There is nothing else Sakura can say.

"The kimono, then," Ino announces, nodding. "Good. Let's hope those measurements were accurate enough."

The kimono fits and Sakura doesn't recognize the woman in the mirror. She fiddles with the obi, adjusting the kunai there so that the edges of the blade aren't so obvious.

Ino draws her out of the bedroom and away from the ghost in the mirror with the promise of fresh tea and left-over onigiri. Sakura isn't hungry but she chokes down the food anyways, and then sips at the warm tea.

Ino leaves her to her silence until some signal, and then she's ushering Sakura out of the apartment, down the stairs and through the streets.

Konoha is still filled with weeping sores and burned out shells where buildings used to be. Non-essential buildings have not been the priority, and the wounds that the Village has taken are still evident. The streets, too, are more quiet than Sakura remembers from her childhood, no longer bright bustling things as Ino leads her through them.

Finally, they end up outside the Academy. The rest of the Konoha 12, what's left of it, is waiting, their conversation trailing off.

Everyone else is in traditional funeral wear, but each of them is wearing a bright orange ribbon tied around their arm or their forehead or their neck.

They all look so tired and ancient and sad.

Sakura swallows scalpels that tear small bleeding things into her softest parts.

She tries to gift them with smiles, but she can't remember the right combination of muscles.

It's another silent pilgrimage as they walk together to the cemetery, Sakura and Ino in the lead.

There are too many headstones. Far too many headstones. The flowers are all fresh.

Sakura stops, arrested, but the others break around her, heading unerringly on.

"Sakura?" Ino asks, gentle, more gentle than Sakura has ever heard her.

Sakura shakes her head, and Ino sighs, but lets her stay, untangling their arms to walk ahead. Sakura stays stock still and watches as the Konoha 12 (or should it be 9 now?) orient themselves around two headstones in particular.

Tenten and Lee spin wobbling circles around one another, their gravity off for their missing celestial body.

Kiba and Shino and Akamaru buffer Hinata from the outside world.

Shikamaru and Chōji shift as Ino joins them, the three of them a stable, easy base for the rest of them to stand from.

The stones are bright and clean and new, the kanji etched beautifully. And, fittingly, they are side-by-side.

Sakura breathes past her aching ribs, and walks forward to stand alone.

And then they wait.

For the beginning of the end.

Slowly, she becomes aware of others filtering in.

And then Sai is at her side, his arms filled with flowers, two of which he hands to her.

Sakura takes them, careful not to tighten her hands around the sunflowers' stems tight enough that they break.

Civilians are amongst the shinobi, here for their lost hero.

A few members of the decimated police force stand proudly in their uniforms, uchiwa held delicately before them.

ANBU skulk in the shadows.

Kakashi-sensei appears at her shoulder.

She blinks.

Sakura hasn't seen him since they returned to Konoha.

He's wearing his usual jounin vest, a brightly coloured book peeping out from a pocket and Sakura wants to laugh because he hasn't changed one bit and then she has to bite back on the real laughter threatening at her lips because he hasn't changed one bit.

She might be twelve or thirteen or fifteen again, surprised that he's bothered to show up to practice he's that late.

Kakashi-sensei grips her shoulder.

Yamato-taichō arrives, looking haggard in traditional garb. He giggles when he sees his senpai, a choking wet thing, more tears than humour.

And then Tsunade-shishō is in front of them: young with ancient eyes that hold so much death and loss and laughter in them. Resting on her chest is a crystal, glinting in the weak sunlight.

When she speaks, her voice rolls through the gathered crowd, splitting them open like thunder does the air.

Friendship, she says. Friendship and rivalry and brotherhood. Loss and pain and so much kindness and so much rage.

Stars falling from the sky, so beautiful as they burn through the atmosphere, as they burn themselves out.

The Will of Fire, she says.

And all Sakura can hear is "jinchūriki jinchūriki jinchūriki (sacrifice sacrifice sacrifice)".

When it is finished and all there is is silence and the rolling echo of thunder, Kakashi-sensei's hand is still on her shoulder.

They step forward together to place flowers at the feet of their dead.

Sasuke, Sakura remembers, always hated it when girls tried to give him flowers.

Naruto never could quite keep the meanings straight.

When she takes her kimono off, she folds it carefully, packs it up with sachets of lavender and cedar, and puts it away in a dark, lonely corner. Never to be worn again.

.

.

.

She works at the hospital and the Hokage's office and local missions, barely stopping to sleep because there is just too much to do, too many empty spots left by bodies that are now sleeping under cold, unforgiving earth to fill.

Everyone is run ragged, trying to cope.

Slowly though, slowly they patch their frayed edges, fill in the gaping holes. Slowly though, there is less and less need to be everywhere and there is more and more time for things like sleep and food and spending time doing something that isn't outright for the Village.

Sakura still works, barely stopping for sleep.

There is almost always food waiting for her when she finally takes a moment to breathe.

She seems to have lost her taste for dango somewhere along the way. It's too sweet now, sticking to the back of her throat like dead flowers.

.

.

.

"I don't want it," Kakashi-sensei states placidly, rocking backwards in front of the desk.

Sakura is hunched over a stack of paperwork at another small desk shoved into the corner as Kakashi-sensei and Tsunade-shishō talk.

"Tough fucking luck," Tsunade-shishō snaps. "Neither did I."

"I'm of more use in the field."

Tsunade-shishō slams her fist down, making another stack of paperwork wobble precariously. It steadies.

"No, you're not. A year ago that was true, but things are quiet enough that a change in leadership isn't going to be destabilizing."

"But–"

"I'm tired," Tsunade-shishō sighs. She sounds old in a way that Sakura has never heard before. "I'm old and I'm tired and I'm heartsick. I can't wear the Hat anymore, Hatake, not like the Hokage needs to."

She grasps the crystal around her neck.

Sakura gapes. Because she has never, ever heard Senju Tsunade admit to weakness.

"I'm so tired."

"I don't want it," Kakashi-sensei says again, but this time it is with the voice of a man resigned to his fate.

He looks tall and brave and mighty clad in Hokage robes, flames chasing up the hem.

She thinks of the jōnin who walked in the door that first day and let an eraser fall on his head. They were so unimpressed, and now look. Now look.

Now look where they all are.

Kakashi-sensei's gaze catches on her. He's so far away, but she can feel the weight of it like a pat on the head, like a hand at the small of her back.

She smiles as wide as she can.

It's a shallow imitation of the bright grins she once sported for him. She hopes that it's enough.

.

.

.

Kakashi-sensei shows up and drags her out of the hospital for lunch.

Apparently, he's avoiding Shikamaru and paperwork. Again.

And Sakura is the only person other than Ino who can successfully hold Shikamaru off with just a look. So Kakashi-sensei is taking advantage of the respite she offers. Again.

She'd complain about him using her as an accessory to truancy, but he bribed her with the really good sushi place that just opened and Sakura is weak for free meals.

"How did the last meeting go with the ambassador from Kiri go, Kakashi-sensei?" she asks.

He places a gentle finger on her wrist and she whips her gaze up from where she's been reaching for piece of sashimi, startled.

"I'm not your sensei anymore, Sakura-chan, you can just call me Kakashi."

Sakura isn't quite sure exactly how wide her eyes are, but they're wide, she knows.

That's– She can't– But he's– And they–

"I–" she starts.

"Just, think about it," Kakashi says.

Sakura nods, and looks around, dazed.

By the time she gathered herself enough to pay attention to conversation again, Kakashi-sensei has already devoured more than his half of the food. Again. Without her seeing his face. Again.

She glares at him, and he just grins from behind his mask.

.

.

.

Some days, when the world is just too loud and close, when her throat bleeds for the blades and screams trapped there, when her hands threaten to shake; some days, Sakura crawls into Sai's studio through the wide open window and hides in his bed.

Sai doesn't mind. He fills the space around her with the soft not-sound of brushstrokes and breath. He doesn't make her talk.

(Ino badgers her about her feelings until Sakura snaps and then she rants about her latest boyfriend or the most recent paperwork fuck up in T&I or her new pair of shoes or the way she made her great-uncle turn purple at the last clan meeting.

Shikamaru lets her lie beside him and watch clouds. If he's feeling particularly masochistic, he goads her into playing shogi. She never wins.

Chōji for some reason decides that she has an excellent palate and so drags her out to try new restaurants and food carts and bars.

Lee runs with her until they drop and then crawls with her until they face plant and then they get up and spar until all they are is bruises and sweat and wide, pained grins.

Tenten helpfully suggests potential close range weapons when Sakura decides she wants to add to her arsenal. She decides on a tessen. Tenten then helpfully beats the necessary skills for wielding the battle-fan into her so that she doesn't have to think of why she chose it.

Kiba is the only one who tries to get her drunk. It doesn't work, but she does get a lot of free alcohol out of it.

Shino lets her talk his ear off about new medicinal procedures, provided that she lets him do the same for whatever his latest project is. He gives surprising insight from directions Sakura would never consider.

Hinata looks right through Sakura with her all-seeing eyes. There is something fierce and terrible about her now. They study fūinjutsu together and speak of nothing else.)

Sai doesn't make her talk, but some days when she finally crawls back out from under his covers, he leaves paintings for her to trip over.

She doesn't need his paintings: she sees those eyes in her dreams.

.

.

.

"No," Kakashi snarls.

Sakura stands, resolute. "I more than qualify." She raises her chin.

His face twists with rage and something else Sakura doesn't quite know how to name. On another person she might call it fear.

"No."

"There's no reason to refuse my application."

Kakashi's eyes blaze and the air around him trembles. "I said no, Sakura."

Her mouth curls with fury. "You can't do this."

"I'm Hokage," he says, resolute. "I make the final decision in regards to ANBU. And I say no."

She leaves before the tower is nothing but a smoking wreck.

Deep, deep in the farthest recess of her memory, a twelve year old spectre shakes with spiteful laughter.

She stalks down the stairs and cannot catch up with the quickly disappearing figures in front of her.

.

.

.

When the fine for the destroyed training ground arrives, Sakura pays it without complaint.

She's too angry to feel bad about the poor genin in the finance department who she leaves shaking with fear.

.

.

.

Sakura really isn't expecting to get dragged across half of Konoha by a pack of particularly tenacious ninken.

She could get away of course, but she's actually a fan of the dumb mutts, and she'll never be mad enough to hurt them on purpose just so that she can avoid seeing Kakashi.

Although, when they finally arrive at their destination, she's reconsidering that resolution.

She dreams enough of headstones as it is.

"Sakura," her Hokage says lightly, "so glad you could make it."

"Fuck you, Hatake," she spits as Bull disengages his jaws from around her thigh with an apologetic look.

She glares at him.

He shrugs.

The pack is smart; as soon as they let go, they disappear.

Better to be far, far away.

Sakura wants to shatter something. Wants to break and rend and tear and be angry.

But she stands amidst all of their dead, and there is nowhere for her to put her feet that they will not slip out from under her.

She keeps her eyes fixed firmly on Kakashi's face and not anywhere else.

"What do you want?" she demands.

"You can't do this to yourself," he says.

Sakura clenches her fists. "I'm perfectly qualified for ANBU, and you know it."

"You can't keep killing yourself and pretend that it's living," Kakashi snaps.

Sakura freezes, ice down her back as Kakashi presses down hard enough to shatter her.

"You don't get to kill yourself with work," Kakashi continues, relentless, like a dangerous man who knows just exactly where to stick a blade, "and pretend that you aren't trying to join them. Killing yourself isn't going to bring them back."

Her lungs are immolating.

"Sakura," he says, brushing a gentle thumb along her cheekbone (and when did he get so close?), "you have to grieve."

There are razor edged flowers in her throat, choking her.

"You have to cry to scream and grieve and then live."

Her hands are shaking at her sides.

"Naruto and Sasuke are dead, Sakura. There's nothing for that now. And you betray them in trying to join them. Trust me, I would know."

It's been almost two years. Sakura spent the anniversary in the middle of nowhere curing a deadly virus because she had gone to Tsunade-shishō and begged to be anywhere that wasn't Konoha for the week.

It's been almost two years. Konoha is rebuilding, her wounds now fading scars. The Great Elemental Nations are at peace.

It's been almost two years. Sakura still can't eat at Ichiraku's or walk past Training Ground 3 or listen to certain songs or hear lightning chirping or wear the colour orange or speak their names because every time she tries it feels like her ribcage is shattering and all her softest parts are spilling out, bruised and torn, and they are dead because she wasn't strong enough so she can't afford to be weak any longer.

"It wasn't your job to save them," Kakashi tells her, his words more destructive than a Chidori to the heart.

Sakura breaks.

Kakashi catches her in his arms.

They sink to the cold earth as Sakura sobs for all that she has lost and all that never got to be.

.

.

.

She cries and cries and cries until there's nothing else.

Sakura wakes in her own bed.

She only realizes after that Kakashi must have ordered his guards to clear the area and keep anyone wanting to visit the graveyard away.

.

.

.

"If you really want it," Kakashi says one day, weeks later. They haven't gone back to whatever accord they had before, now only talking of easy, useless things and seeing each other more in passing than with purpose. "I'll approve your ANBU application."

Sakura cocks her head at him.

"You're right, you're an ideal candidate. But only if you want it for you."

"What do you think?" she asks him.

Kakashi was ANBU, after all. For a long, long time.

He scratches at his bicep and doesn't look at her. "As your Hokage, I think you'd excel."

"And as my friend?"

Kakashi swings around to look at her, inhaling abruptly. Something soft is blooming on his face. "ANBU isn't an escape. Don't do it if you're only trying to outrun the past."

And oh. This is not about her. Or, rather, not only about her.

Sakura thinks about where that burning need had come from. Thinks about too much hospital overtime and chasing after the backs of ghosts who haven't walked in far too long.

"Not now. But maybe later."

And so that is what relief looks like on Kakashi's face.

He looks younger, his worries momentarily washed away.

Her breath catches and she breathes through the sudden impulse to touch the smooth skin of his brow.

They go back to seeking each other out.

.

.

.

Sakura rings her glass with her fork, catching the attention of her friends. They pause in their conversations and turn to face her.

She clears her throat. "To lost friends," she says, "and their memory we carry."

Their eyes are bright with tears and so fierce, their teeth bared in challenge to the universe.

Here we are.

Here we live.

Here we love.

"To lost friends!"

Shikamaru presses a kiss to her temple as they part ways. Ino, a grinning peck to her lips.

Sai holds her by the shoulders and looks right at her.

"When you're ready," he says, "I have pictures for you."

.

.

.

A faceless woman clad in a red cloak holds her leather clad arm up for a hawk to perch, a grinning fox at her feet.

Three figures spin in a circle, their hands joined.

A man and a woman walk down a path. Far behind them, two children wave goodbye to their backs.

Their friends sit celebrating at a table. All the seats are occupied, for all that some have no one sitting in them.

.

.

.

Sakura tracks down Tsunade-shishō. Ostensibly to hand over her pension which she hasn't bothered stopping by to pick up yet.

What Sakura actually does is help drink four bars dry and get spectacularly drunk.

When she wakes, her shishō has already escaped town, leaving Sakura with several debts to pay off and a crystal around her neck.

If she holds it in her palm, it's too warm. Maybe, she thinks whimsically, it's the Will of Fire burning.

.

.

.

"Where to next?" Kakashi asks as they eat ice cream on a bench near the gate leading out of the Village.

Once, the bench might have held bad memories. It's just wood now.

Sakura takes another lick of chocolate.

Kakashi waits, content with his own green tea.

"Suna," Sakura decides.

"Hmm. You might have to fight Shikamaru for the next delivery of top secret documents."

Sakura laughs. "Medical exchange, maybe? My chances of survival are better that way."

"I'd defend you."

"Yeah, but then we'd have to deal with civil war when Shikamaru invariably killed you for interfering in his long distance romance."

"Hey! I could take him."

"I dunno," Sakura muses, her grin cracking through her serious mien, "I think you might have gotten a bit lazy behind that desk."

"Lazy?" Kakashi yelps. "That is it. You're on. Tomorrow morning, eight o'clock, you and me."

"You have an important meeting with the Grain Board tomorrow morning," Sakura reminds him.

Kakashi waves her off, not letting his laughing glare waver. "They're used to me being late."

"Alright then. Eight o'clock."

They shake on it, and finish their ice cream.

.

.

.

The desert stretches out endlessly before her as she stands on the wall.

"It's beautiful," she tells Gaara.

He stills, not realizing, she supposes, that she had known he was there.

The moon is dazzling on the sand.

Gaara leans next to her, not close enough to touch.

"I miss him," she says.

He stills further.

"I miss him so much. It took me so long to remember how to breathe properly when I knew he wasn't going to suddenly appear and demand that we go for ramen and insist that it would be a date and smile that stupid, brilliant, fucking smile that always meant it was going to be okay." She's panting by the end of her confession.

The moon is dazzling and the sands are quiet.

Gaara bumps her elbow with his own, a sudden shock of heat.

"I miss him too."

They speak of Naruto, of what he gave them, of hope. And they speak of Sasuke too: of rage and of forgiveness that may be undeserved.

The desert takes their secrets for its own.

.

.

.

The first place she goes when she arrives back in Konoha is the Tower.

She breezes into the office, shedding sand and moonlight in her wake, her smile crashing over her face.

"Kakashi," she trills, "I'm home."

He looks up from his paperwork and…

Stutters, maybe. The pen in his hand skitters across the page and he sucks in a breath and he knocks a cup and and his eyes go wide and oh.

He isn't wearing his mask.

"You aren't wearing your mask," she says, stupidly.

His mouth is parted slightly and his lips are perfect and he has this ridiculous mole on his chin that she wants to put her–

Sakura stutters too.

The cup rolls off the desk and hits the floor.

"I have diplomatic gifts," she manages, "from Suna."

Kakashi holds his hands out, wordless.

They are gloveless she realizes as she hands over the items in question and their fingers brush. But she still can't look away from his face.

Sakura has never seen him look so vulnerable before.

"Anyways, it was great. I think Temari has almost browbeaten anyone who might oppose into accepting that she's going to marry Shikamaru. Kankurō and I did some interesting work on modifying puppetry for prosthetics. Gaara says hi. Everything was great. Okay, gotta go see Ino. Bye!" She rushes it all out in one long breath and then darts for the door.

"Wait!"

She stops.

"It's good to have you back, Sakura," Kakashi says, a soft warmth in his voice that is just for her.

"It's nice to be back," she says.

She doesn't look over her shoulder as she leaves.

.

.

.

She dreams.

"Hey! Hey, Sakura-chan!" Naruto calls out, trying to get her attention.

Sakrua sighs, but looks up from her book. She's under strict instructions from the librarian that the rare tome on Kiri kekkei genkai is not to be damaged in any way, and Naruto is likely to do something extreme to get her attention.

"What?"

Watch this! Imma beat Sasuke-teme!"

Sakura rolls her eyes.

Kakashi-sensei hasn't shown yet and it is dripping heat and so of course the boys decided to fight. She, on the other hand, is sensibly taking refuge in the shade of a large tree, reading.

She watches.

Naruto and Sasuke run at one another, and she can practically see the chakra bleeding off their hands. They really need to get better at chakra control, she muses to herself.

They run at one another, and Naruto goes through an unfamiliar series of hand signs while Sasuke-kun tries to do something with chakra along his kunai.

They impact.

BOOM!

It's enough to shake the forest at her back. A group of birds squawk into flight.

When the smoke clears, Naruto and Sasuke-kun are no where to be found.

Sakura waits. They do not reappear.

"Sasuke-kun?" she calls. "Naruto?"

Nothing.

"Sasuke-kun? Naruto? This isn't funny. Where are you?"

Nothing.

Sakura drops her book and races for the scorched place the boys met.

All she can hear is birds and the river running.

They've killed each other, she thinks. Sensei is going to kill her for letting them kill each other.

And then, spluttering and splashing and Naruto yelling and Sasuke-kun yelling back. Sakura rushes further on and finds the boys a blackened mess, bobbing in the river.

"What did you do, Dobe?"

"Did you see that? That was awesome!"

"I thought you were dead!" Sakura interrupts the splashing fight as Sasuke-kun tries to push Naruto's head underwater. "What did you do? Don't do it again! That was stupid."

Naruto and Sasuke-kun look at one another with one of those strange looks they share sometimes, one that is a whole conversation.

As one, they lunge forward, and drag Sakura into the river with them.

She shrieks.

When she emerges, dripping water from her impossible hair like some kind of vengeful water spirit, the boys take one look at her face, stop laughing, and try to run.

Sakura launches herself forward with a battlecry.

When she wakes, she feels warm and aching and so very safe.

.

.

.

"Hey you," Sakura says when they run into one another at the market.

"Yo!" Kakashi waves awkwardly, trying to balance too many bags of groceries.

"You cook?" she asks, one skeptical eyebrow raised.

"I can cook!" he defends. "Just not usually. For special occasions."

"You're finally repaying Tenzō for every meal you've ever scammed out of him?"

Kakashi barks out a laugh. "Those were gifts. One should never be so uncouth as to try to repay a gift."

"I see." Sakura nods solemnly at his attempt at sage advice.

"No, actually,"–she gets the impression he'd be scratching his head if he had any free hands–"I thought I'd invite you to dinner."

He doesn't look back at her when she stares up at him, startled, and she can see his cheeks pinking from under his mask.

"Oh."

"I mean, only if you aren't busy. I know that you're probably busy since you just got back an–"

"Kakashi," she interrupts, a finger across his lips. "I would love to."

His mouth moves under her touch, burning her through the thin material separating their skin, but he doesn't say anything. Then he nods, slowly.

"Here, let me get some of those." Sakura steals the bags from his left hand.

They walk a couple of blocks in soft, quiet anticipation.

The back of his hand keeps brushing her own, and finally Sakura can't help it anymore.

She grabs his hands firmly, without hesitation.

He squeezes once: a hello.

A man and a woman walk down a road, hand in hand. They are full up with new beginnings.

Chapter 22

Sakura tugs at the hem of her dress and scowls.

It's not the length of the skirt that's bothering her; Sakura is proud of her legs, thanks.

It's that Ino broke into her apartment two days ago and stole almost all of her underwear. Apparently, cotton boy shorts with smiling fruit on them "aren't appropriate for a woman over the age of seventeen, seriously, what the hell Forehead, your pink hair is bad enough."

Which, okay, rude. There's nothing inherently juvenile or girlish about pink hair, Ino. Sakura gets her hair colour from her grandfather. It's gender neutral.

And Sakura is more than willing to fight anyone who disagrees.

She'll even do it without chakra.

Anyways, Sakura's underwear.

Ino even managed to raid Sakura's stashes of clothing at the hospital, Naruto's apartment, and Sai's studio. The only underwear left to her are scraps of lace or satin that ride up uncomfortably: see, purchases made under peer pressure that Sakura immediately regretted and thus has never bothered to wear outside of a lingerie store.

But, they're all she has until she either figures out where Ino has stashed all of her underwear or gives in and replaces her comfortable cotton undies.

To make the whole underwear situation worse, Sakura doesn't have any shorts short enough to wear under the dress that Hinata of all people managed to persuade her into. (She suspects Ino's influence, but Hinata's rarely employed puppy dog eyes are catastrophic. The Village should use them as a weapon of mass destruction; Sakura's suspicions didn't stand a chance.)

Worst of all, there's nothing she can do to reclaim her pride if a sudden breeze blows her skirt up. She's two days away from winning a bet with Shizune that she can go a full week without causing anyone physical harm. And since her last failed bet landed her here in this damned dress and underwear, lingering in the doorway to Konoha's second-best restaurant, avoiding going in to meet her blind date, Sakura has sworn not to lose again.

(It's unfair. Naruto learned to be a Sage, Sasuke got a deadly sword, and Sakura inherited miserable luck. Shizune was Tsunade-shishō's student too, and yet! Sakura's the one who always loses. (One day, Sakura will win, and then they'll see who is going on blind dates and taking extra shifts during jōnin annual check-up season and tromping through bogs to get to casinos to which Tsunade-shishō owes massive gambling debts.))

Sakura tugs at her hem again and pushes her hair back behind her ears.

Oh well. Nothing for it. Might as just get the whole awkward evening over and done with so that she can bitch to Shizune about her terrible taste in men. (See: Shizune's long-term relationship with Genma. (Okay, so, Sakura is still bitter about the thing with the assassins and the Hokage's office and the jutsu that ended up with Sakura in a soaking and sheer white sundress, covered in blood, in front of the entire graduating Academy class. Gemma will not be forgiven until the genin stop blushing and avidly staring everywhere that isn't her chest.))

She sighs, and pushes open the door.

"Welcome," the hostess greets her, "do you have a reservation?"

Sakura resists the urge to roll her eyes. It's not the hostess' fault Sakura has terrible taste in friends and terrible luck.

"I'm meeting my date," she explains. "I don't know if he's here yet."

"Oh! Well, then, do you have the name for the reservation?"

"It's, uh, a blind date," Sakura explains.

She can practically see the coo forming on the hostess' lips. The girl's eyes glimmer with excitement.

"Do you have a way of identifying the gentleman? I can take a look and help you find where he's seated."

Sakura smiles, sweet and thankful and so very false. "No, no," she insists, "I'll just wander through, if that's alright with you."

The hostess' face falls. "Of course. Let me know if you can't find him and I'll come help."

"Thank you," Sakura says, and goes to find her date.

Yellow tie, she reminds herself. Yellow tie, yellow tie, yellow tie.

Why a yellow tie? That's a terrible colour. Should be distinctive, at least, and Sakura has a sunflower pinned to her hair as her own identifier, just in case.

Blue tie. Grey tie. Purple with green tie? Weird.

Nope, nope. Not that one. Oh! That's a cute dress.

Ah. Yellow tie.

Sakura looks up.

Then she almost turns around and walks out of the restaurant.

Sakura might have claimed she could go a full week without causing anyone physical harm and she might have sworn that this time, this time! she would finally win a bet with Shizune.

But this goes too far!

Secrets revealed while drunk on really cheap wine at bachelorette parties are supposed to stay secret.

"Sakura," Kakashi says, and grabs her hand.

Sakura stills.

He isn't wearing gloves.

She's not sure why the realization strikes her so hard, right in the solar plexus.

She can't breathe.

He has such elegant fingers.

"You should stay," he tells her.

"I don't—"

"At the very least," he smiles, "you're getting a free meal with a friend."

Sakura licks her lips. "Did you agree to this because Genma bribed you with good food?"

She braces herself for an affirmative.

Instead, Kakashi stands, and pulls out her chair.

Her heart stutters, and she's helpless to resist as he guides her to sit with a broad hand to the small of her back.

"Well," she finally manages when Kakashi sits back down across from her.

His eyes are dark and sharp, glinting with something she doesn't quite recognize.

"If Genma's paying then I'm getting desert, too."

.

.

.

Sakura's got herself convinced they're there for the free food up until her chocolate mousse arrives, because it's just the too of them trading stories about work and Sakura's latest research and Kakashi's latest excuse for being late to a meeting.

It's just the two of them as they always are, laughing and sharing smiles.

It's just the two of them.

She almost forgets it's supposed to be a date, almost convinces herself it's just two friends scamming a free meal, as they are both wont to do.

But then her chocolate mousse arrives and Sakura opens her eyes after they've fluttered shut, chocolate lingering on her tongue, and Kakashi's gaze is fixed on her mouth.

His eyes are dark and sharp, and on anyone else she'd know what to call that look on his face, but she's never seen it on Kakashi.

His knuckles are white where he's gripping the table.

"Kakashi?"

His touch is scalding when he reaches out and wipes at the corner of her lips.

It's like a blade going through her when he sucks the chocolate off his thumb.

"Oh."

.

.

.

She loses the sunflower in her hair at some point without noticing.

"I liked that tie," Kakashi bemoans when she drops it on the ground of the alley where he's got her backed up against a wall, the brick scraping her shoulder blades.

She doesn't even notice the pain, too caught up in the way their hips slot together.

"It's a terrible tie," she tells him. "Don't worry, I'll buy you a nicer one if you're good."

He shudders, and Sakura rakes her nails down his back.

.

.

.

"Fuck," Kakashi breathes when he inches her skirt up her thighs. "Fuck. Sakura."

His eyes catch helplessly on the scrap of black that Ino claims is underwear.

And, yeah, okay. So cotton boy shorts covered in smiling watermelon probably wouldn't have gotten that reaction.

.

.

.

When he's still a mess of filthy curses and compliments when it's just her stretched out on his sheets, no scraps of lace to be seen, Sakura thinks, briefly, before his mouth making its way down her stomach steals the last of her coherent thoughts, that maybe Kakashi would appreciate the smiling watermelon.

Maybe it's just her, and the rest of it doesn't matter.

Then his tongue is on her clit and her hands are in his hair and anything that isn't the press of them together falls away.

.

.

.

"So," Sakura says to Kakashi's nipple the next morning, "you weren't actually my blind date, were you."

Kakashi's fingers trace maddening circles along her hipbone. "Nope."

Sakura thinks about that for a moment. "He's still alive, right?"

His silence is not reassuring.

"Kakashi," Sakura warns, a growl.

His fingers flex at the sound and she can feel the slightest tremor through his ribcage where her chin rests.

"He's a chūnin. He should be able to handle the Forest of Death no problem."

Sakura tries not to laugh, but fails, and swings her leg over to straddle his waist, masking her giggle.

"Only a chūnin? I'm offended that Shizune doesn't think better of me."

"To be fair," Kakashi says, going for nonchalant, but Sakura's nails trailing down his chest put a hitch in his voice, "he's a very pretty chūnin."

"Meh," Sakura shrugs, "I've seen prettier. I don't have much use for pretty."

"No?" Kakashi asks.

She steals the question from his lips.

He smoothes his hands down her hips to help support her weight.

She loves the soft sounds he makes, the ones the press of her mouth and the sweep of her tongue drag from the back of his throat.

She loves them; it feels like victory to reduce Kakashi to little choked off moans and his fingers pressing bruises to the creases of her thighs as he struggles not to move.

"No."

"Hmm?" Kakashi murmurs, chasing her as she pulls away to answer his question, his eyes blinking open from where they've fluttered shut.

"I don't have much use for pretty," she reminds him, and then she has to dip back down to chase the blush across his cheekbones, follow it down his neck to where it spills across his chest, a sharp dusting of kisses.

"What," Kakashi gasps and Sakura can't not turn the brush of her lips into the sharp edge of teeth, and bite at the tendons of his neck now thrown into sharp relief from where his head has dropped back on the pillow.

"What," Kakashi tries again, "do you have use for, then?"

Sakura trails her mouth up to his ear, catches the lobe between her teeth until he whines.

"You. Only you. I want only you, Kakashi."

He trembles under her and his head jerks to the side in a reflexive "no".

He doesn't believe her.

It's alright. Sakura will press it into his skin with her mouth and her fingers until the truth sinks so deep in his bones he can't shake it loose.

.

.

.

She loses her bet with Shizune when she punches the older woman for looking so smug.

"You weren't even the one who set the date up! He took it upon himself!"

Shizune sniffs. "And who do you think had the brilliant idea to have a very loud conversation about possible blind date candidates with Ino and Hana right in front of him?"

Sakura glares suspiciously.

"And you just lost the bet."

Sakura punches her in the arm again for good measure.

And then she eats the box of fancy chocolates she'd bought Shizune as thanks out of spite.

.

.

.

Maybe Sakura's got her shishō's luck.

She's willing to brave whatever disaster the universe is going to throw at her if it means she gets to keep Kakashi.

.

.

.

"Gods," she'd whispered to Shizune from their sprawl across the floor. "Gods, his fucking hands."

They'd giggled about fingers and shinobi dexterity.

What she'd really meant was, "I want to hold them for the rest of my life."

.

.

.

For their first anniversary, Sakura buys Kakashi the ugliest tie with dogs on it that she can find.

He buys her underwear.

The cherries on the front are really cute.

Chapter 23

"Kakashi," Sakura demands, "how drunk were you?"

Kakashi runs a hand through his hair. "Really drunk."

"Obviously." She stabs him in the chest with two fingers.

"Ow!"

Sakura rolls her eyes but stops trying to poke at it. "Infant. I know for a fact that you've had worse injuries than me poking a brand new tattoo. Hells, I've inflicted worse injuries on you."

"Sakura-chan," Kakashi moans, "you're so cruel to this old man."

She rolls her eyes again.

"Here I am, making a romantic gesture, and you mock my pain."

"This is supposed to be romantic?" Sakura asks, gesturing at his chest.

And, yeah, to be fair, it's very pretty. Almost too pretty for the sharp planes of him: all achingly lovely lines and a blush of pink bleeding across the petals.

And, yeah, okay. He got a cluster of sakura blossoms tattooed over his heart. It's romantic.

He still deserves to be mocked.

"Isn't it?" Kakashi asks.

She thought that the flowers were a pretty pink, but the blush blooming on his cheeks and down his neck, down lower still, is even prettier.

Sakura wants to put her mouth on it.

"Depends," she says, "on whether you think it's still a good idea."

Kakashi shrugs, deliberately artless, but he can't look her in the eye. "You're"–he coughs–"you're inscribed on my soul regardless."

Oh.

Oh.

Sakura pulls him down and kisses him breathless, takes his terrible, lovely, vulnerable words into her mouth and holds them there, safe, where they can't be snatched away by a stray breeze.

Oh.

Kakashi tugs her in closer with his hands on her hips.

She wants to fall into him and never leave.

"I love you," he gasps when they finally wrench away to breathe.

She'll never let him take it back.

(He'll never want to.)

.

.

.

"Yeah," she whispers to him later, wrapped up together in their bed. "It's romantic."

She bares her teeth in a wild grin.

"I love you," she tells him.

His smile is soft and sweet and shy. And it is hers.

He's hers, forever.

Chapter 24:

"This is a bad plan."

"Shut up, it's totally going to work."

"As opposed to every single other time we've tried this over the past two hundred years?"

"Maybe that's our problem. Magic is about intent, you know. If you're going to keep being a pessimist, it's going to skew the results of the spell."

"Excuse me, but I was perfectly optimistic the first ten or so times. It's just a little hard to hold on to that optimism when nothing works."

"Look, I like to think I've gotten better. And, anyways, I've got a really good feeling about this one. That sorceress we traded those healing amulets with really knows her stuff. I think this is going to work."

"You say that every time, and yet…"

Sakura finally throws the chalk at Kakashi, but he just dances out of the way.

"C'mon, Kakashi. It's going to work. Don't you trust me."

He sighs and ruffles his feathers. "Don't ask me that. Of course I trust you. I just don't trust your spells."

Sakura scowls. "Turn a prince into a frog one time!"

"Four times. It was four times."

"Well, yeah, but the last three times were on purpose, once I figured out how I did it. And they deserved it! It was poor Jeremy who didn't really deserve being a frog for four years while we tried to find a counter-curse, and then what's-his-face, Marvin? Marlon?"

"William," Kakashi supplies.

"Right, William showed up and dropped a kiss on his lips and, boom, prince. True love. It's a kicker. Too bad your an asshole crow, or maybe you would have found someone to kiss you by now."

Kakashi glares at her, beady eyed, his feathers ruffled up about his neck. "You tried kissing me," he accuses.

Sakura shrugs. "I was twenty-seven, drunk on too much wine at that christening, and feeling sentimental. It was worth a shot."

"You chased me around the party until you caught me by my tail feathers. And then you clutched me to your chest for two hours and rocked me, calling me 'your baby' and then dropped kisses all over my face."

"That doesn't sound right."

"Excuse me, but who was the sober one at that party? (Unfortunately.) Oh, right, it was me."

Sakura sniffs. "I think you're exaggerating."

"What ever helps you sleep at night."

"Whatever." Sakura sits back on her heels and stretches her hands above her head, vertebrae clicking back into place. "Okay, I'm pretty sure the transfiguration circle is set. You want to check my runes while I go get the candles?"

"Someone should, so might as well be me."

"Hey!" Sakura shouts over her shoulder from where she's bent down, rummaging through her cupboards. "That was an honest mistake! And I've never done it again. Geeze, a girl can't make a mistake a hundred and forty years ago?"

"You did the same thing last week," Kakashi reminds her.

Sakura sticks her head into the lowest cupboard and pretends she can't hear him.

And then she sneezes.

She really needs to dust these more.

And clean them in general.

Is that a vial of dragon's blood?

She grabs the vial and sticks it in her pocket.

That's definitely supposed to be with the "volatile substances" and not shoved into the back of a mostly forgotten about cupboard.

Oops.

Ah! The box of black candles.

"Oof!" Sakura exclaims as she flops backwards onto her butt, dust billowing around her. "Yes! Found them."

"You've made a mistake here," Kakashi calls. "Unless you're trying to turn me into a potted plant?"

"Don't be silly. A potted plant can't bring me tea when I'm hungover."

Kakashi nods an agreement and skips out of her way as she moves around the transfiguration circle on the ground, sticking candles in place as she goes.

"Bring over the feathers and the crystals while I fix this?" she asks.

Kakashi grumbles, but goes.

Sakura tilts her head as she glares at the runes in question. Yup. That's definitely wrong. Nice catch, Kakashi.

Sakura is terrible at keeping plants alive.

Ino despairs, but then, Sakura's a battle mage by inclination and training, not an alchemist or a portioner or a herbologist. Keeping plant life isn't usually of immediate concern.

Kakashi flaps his way over and drops the feathers and crystals in their proper places with a clatter.

Sakura considers the transfiguration circle they've set up, referring back to the slightly illegible hand written scrawl on the paper beside her. Is that ketchup staining the corner?

Sakura hopes it's ketchup.

She really, really hates blood sacrifices.

They're so messy, and the paperwork for the High Council is a bitch.

"Alright," she tells Kakashi. "I think we're good to go."

Kakashi hops into position.

"Don't kill me," he asks.

Sakura smiles at him. "Don't die."

Ritual complete, Sakura settles herself and adjusts her red robe, making sure it drapes properly. She takes a long drink from the glass of water set to her side.

Then she picks up the paper and speaks.

.

.

.

It's a lot of flames flaring and steady chanting and the odd squawk from inside the circle.

And then it's flames flaring to the ceiling and voices not Sakura's chanting beside her and something that is too pained to be a squawk from Kakashi.

She thinks she screams, a sharp note of worry and panic.

The candles go out.

Power rushes through her, like the one and only time she tried playing with live lightning, leaving her in shock and trembling, her nerves sparking and ozone on her tongue.

Sakura passes out.

"I hope Kakashi is okay," she thinks, as she falls to the floor.

Her workshop is silent, and all is still.

.

.

.

"Ow," Sakura complains to the ceiling.

"Shut up," a familiar and unfamiliar voice responds. "You didn't just get turned inside out."

Sakura considers that for a moment. The voice is right. That sounds painful. Even more painful than being the conduit for the power that just passed through the room.

Gods and spirits. What was that?

And then she remembers—

"Kakashi!" Sakura sits bolt upright and then groans, clutching her head. "Ow."

"Oh, stop it, you're fine. You were just momentary a conduit for divine power. Stop being a wimp."

Sakura relaxes into the hands drawing circles at her temples. They're nice hands: warm and sure.

Wait.

There isn't supposed to be anyone else with hands in her workshop.

Sakura's eyes wrench open.

Familiar dark eyes stare back.

Except they aren't set above a beak and surrounded by black feathers.

She blinks.

"Huh," Sakura manages through a suddenly dry throat. "I'm taking it worked then? Who'd of thunk? That crazy bat actually did know what she was talking about."

The man (definitely not a man, not if the silver hair and the way she can feel the magic sparking in his blood are any indication, but man works for now, he's definitely man-like, just look at those biceps) gives her a sardonic look.

"I knew you weren't really optimistic about our chances."

It's definitely Kakashi's voice, but it resonates differently. It resonates in her bones.

Sakura surpasses a shiver.

"What? I was totally optimistic. Or, like, optimistic that it probably wouldn't kill you. Or do permanent harm."

Kakashi laughs.

And, oh. That's new.

It's unfair, really. She's spent two centuries with a crow.

Sakura really wasn't prepared for all this.

All this being the alarmingly nude not-man crouched at her side, his warm hands cupping her face.

The familiar bond pulses between them, still strong and steady.

Sakura might be over two hundred years old, but she really wasn't prepared for all this.

"You know," she says, "I don't think you ever did tell me what you actually are that day you showed up after I did the familiar spell."

Kakashi smiles at her.

His teeth are sharp.

"No, I didn't, did I?"

Sakura swallows.

"I don't figure you'll let it slip now that I managed to undo whatever the hell that curse was?"

Kakashi tilts his head. "You're a clever girl, I'm sure you'll figure you out."

"Right." Sakura nods. "I'm just going to pass out now, if that's alright with you?"

He murmurs something, but Sakura doesn't hear, she's already falling back into the dark place where shadows shift and sometimes the future speaks.

She sleeps, and Kakashi's broad hands bear her down to the floor.

She sleeps.

(She does not know what he is. Not yet. But he is hers. It hums in her veins, a promise.

"Sleep, sweet girl," a familiar and not-familiar voice croons in her ear. "Sleep. We have all the time in the world.")

Chapter 25

"This is a bad idea," Sakura says as Ino pulls her by the arm.

"Nonsense," Ino declares, as imperious as ever, "this is an excellent idea. All of my ideas are excellent."

Most heroically, Sakura does not mention every time an idea of Ino's has resulted in the both of them cowering on a sofa in the family parlour of the Yamanaka's townhouse as Mrs Yamanaka lectures them on proper conduct expected of young ladies of their status, Mr Yamanaka's hysterics a familiar refrain in the background.

For Mr Yamanaka's sake, Sakura says, "Quite right, my dear. Exploring Vauxhall's dark walks is a most excellent idea, certain to not end in your father's tears, your mother's disappointed frown, the Ton's gossip, or our reputations in ruins."

Ino sniffs. "You're so dramatic."

"Oh, yes, I'm sure. Of the two of us, I am most certainly the dramatic one."

"I'm glad we agree," Ino responds, delicately ignoring the sarcasm so thick in Sakura's voice she is half surprised it isn't dripping off her tongue.

For all her protest, Sakura feels the thrill when they wind their away from the well lit paths of the garden, hedges rearing up to envelop them in the cool dark.

The dark walks are not a place respectable young ladies venture.

But, then, Sakura is bored of being a respectable young lady. She always has been.

And she is not afraid of the dark.

"Wait," she says, stopping as a thought hits her, "Ino, please tell me that we're not here to meet one of your paramours."

Ino has several.

"Ha!" Ino laughs, the golden sound spilling out around them, a light of its own. "And how do you not that I haven't lured you out to seduce you, my dear Sakura?"

Sakura looks up at her friend through her lashes and lets the smallest pout sit on her lips. "Who ever said I was in need of seducing?"

Again Ino laughs, and Sakura has to smile for the mirth.

Ino laughs, and the whole world laughs with her, Sakura is no exception.

On they walk, the darkness a companion, past fumbling hands and gasping mouths. Sakura blushes and does not watch.

Soon, she is certain they are lost the in the twists and turns of the close, but with Ino tucked close at her side, Sakura is not afraid, for all her attempts to remind Ino what the papers say about the dark walks of Vauxhall gardens.

As long as no one they know finds them here, they will emerge unscathed.

Sakura is not afraid of any danger they find here, but the Ton is not something she can fight.

They are all at the mercy of Society.

Well, perhaps Sakura wouldn't have been, or at least not to the extent, if not for Ino.

But being the dear bosom companion of the Yamanaka heiress, especially being what she is—the daughter of some unknown gentleman with a dowry that is little more than chickens and wheat—means that all the World is watching.

"Did I tell you about meeting young Mr Namikaze while shopping for ribbons with Miss Hyūga the other day?" asks Ino.

Sakura gasps. "No! You did not! Please, tell. Is she still as in love with him as always?"

"Oh, yes," Ino says, and then descends into the latest gossip concerning their circle of friends.

Sakura is smothering giggles after Ino shares a particularly cutting anecdote about the ongoing courtship between the well-known rake Mr Shiranui and the previously believed perpetual old maid Miss Kāto when they step out of the shadows and onto the path.

Sakura inhales sharply and feels Ino freeze momentarily.

"Hello, ladies," the one on the right slurs, and Sakura recognizes the sound of too many intoxicants in his voice.

"My good sirs," Ino nods back, sharp enough to cut.

If the men are smart, they will recognize the warning there.

Unfortunately for Sakura and Ino, the men are much too drunk for that, and they laugh, leering at the not quite modest cut of Ino's gown and the way Sakura's skirts cling to her hips.

Her lip curl back in a snarl, even as she's doused with the sudden cold clarity of danger. Not that she thinks anything truly horrific will happen. But the threat is enough of a reminder.

"Good evening," Sakura presses, urging them with the soft lilt of her voice to leave the two of them be.

Sakura and Ino both dip shallow curtsies, barely more than nods, and move to walk by.

The men move with them, blocking there way.

"Now, now," the man on the left says.

He sounds more sober than his friend, but that might make him more dangerous too.

"We couldn't let two beautiful ladies such as yourselves walk around the dark walks unaccompanied. Let us escort you back to your party, I insist."

His voice oozes down Sakura's spine.

She bares her teeth in a mockery of a smile.

"No thank you, sir," Ino answers. "My friend and I are perfectly safe, I assure you. We are not in need of your assistance nor your protection."

"Nonsense, my dear," he disagrees.

Sakura feels Ino stiffen at the sheer dismissal, the intolerable insult in that tone, and does her best to keep her own posture lose.

For men like these, half the thrill is in the fear.

"What kind of gentlemen would we be if we did not."

There's a threat there, in his cold, cold eyes.

"Sirs," Sakura says, before Ino can answer, "while we are most appreciative of the offer, we must decline. But we will keep the memory of such chivalry to warm our girlish hearts."

The words are sweet, but Sakura is not.

Her smile is more teeth than anything else.

Slowly, she disentangles herself from Ino's grip.

Something hot and vicious flares in the more sober man's eyes and he lunges for Sakura.

It's as easy as breathing to bring him over her shoulder and crashing to the ground.

"I said," Sakura repeats, "that we decline."

He groans, too winded to work up to rage.

His drunk friend, unfortunately, is not.

He charges with a furious roar.

Sakura wheels, hands coming up to defend herself, but—

A tall figure is in his way, and suddenly the drunk is twisted in an arm bar, a quicksilver shadow at his back, holding him still.

"I would not," a molten voice suggests.

Sakura shivers.

"Ino," Mr Nara sighs, "why do I always find you in these situations?"

It's more a plea than a question.

Ino giggles, only mostly forced, and near throws herself into her childhood friend's arms.

Mr Nara catches her, as he always does.

Ensured that Ino is safe, Sakura turns back to her unnecessary, but nevertheless appreciated, saviour.

"Thank you, sir."

Dark eyes capture her for a breathless moment, and Sakura is made momentarily helpless under their gaze.

Then she catches her breath, and the moment is over.

"I think," says the unknown man to the drunk in his grip, "that you're going to take your friend and leave now, before anyone is embarrassed any further."

He releases the man lightly and makes sure he's steady.

The drunk swears, something uncomplimentary that would make a proper respectable lady blush, picks up his friend, and stomps off, the two of them glaring back over their shoulders but not daring to attempt retribution.

Sakura does not blush or cower, just watches them carefully until they round a corner and are finally out of sight.

When she turns, her would-be rescuer is watching her with those dark eyes.

Sakura curtsies deeply, hyperaware of the pale length of her neck as her head dips and the strength with which she clutches her skirts.

"Sir," she says.

"My lady," he answers with a shallow bow, his eyes never leaving her.

She wants to ask about the scar bisecting the left side of his face. She wants to run. She wants to go back in time to an hour ago and try, again, to convince Ino that exploring the dark walks is a terrible idea. She wants to step forward and see if he will flinch at her touch.

Sakura blinks, taken aback at herself.

"Miss Haruno," Mr Nara—blessed, blessed Shikamaru—interrupts, shattering the fraught breath caught between them, "it is my pleasure to introduce you to my good friend, Mr Kakashi Hatake. Hatake, meet Miss Sakura Haruno."

Mr Hatake steps forward and lifts her hand.

Sakura stifles a gasp at the shock of the heat of him, even through his gloves.

Her mouth bleeds as she holds herself still, the soft brush of his kiss to the back of her knuckles a terrible, earth shattering thing.

"Miss Haruno," he says.

Sakura nods. "I must thank you again, kind sir, for your timely interruption."

A ghost of a smile paints his mouth.

Sakura is all too aware of her hand still held lightly in his own.

"I am certain," he says, "that you had the situation perfectly under control."

The worst part of the way he says it is not the way his voice reverberates in her ribcage. No. The worst part is the knowing way he says it, condescension no where to be found. Like he believes that his aide was not necessary and that Sakura could ensure that no man could touch her if she were not willing.

Any other man she would smile demurely and disassemble, but this man.

But this man.

"I did," she says, "but I thank you all the same."

He dips his head slightly in agreement to hide the grin pulling at him. "Then you are most welcome, my lady."

"Now," Shikamaru says, "let us get you back to your mother without getting all of us a lecture."

Ino laughs, finally free of any fear, and so Sakura laughs with her, incapable of anything else.

She lets her hand rest on Mr Kakashi's arm the entire stroll back to the well lit and well frequented expanse of the gardens, focusing on Mr Nara and Ino's jocular argument instead of the steady presence beside her.

"Miss Haruno," he says to her as he leaves their party.

Ino is currently being clucked over by her parents and Mr Nara is attempting to extricate himself. Mr Hatake is unknown to the rest of them.

"Mr Hatake," she answers.

For a moment, she thinks that he's going to take her hand, press another kiss to the bare skin there, but he just bows, and is gone.

"Sakura?" Ino asks, threading her arm through Sakura's own.

Sakura turns her gaze away from the slim figure slipping away into the crowds.

"Nothing," Sakura says.

She does not think she will ever see him again.

.

.

.

"My," Ino says, hooking her chin on Sakura's shoulder. "Is that Mr Hatake? He never attends public balls. In fact, the only time I've ever seen him at a ball at all was when his grandmother was there to order him into attendance."

Sakura does not freeze.

She does not.

Across the wide expanse of ballroom, dark eyes pin her to the spot.

Sakura stares back, and waits.

She does not know what will come of this, but she has always had a fondness for dancing.

Chapter 26

Sakura watches Sasuke walk out of Konoha—again, yet again, one more time, never the last time, he's always leaving and never staying, he's forgotten how to stop running from all that he has done and all that has been done—and for the first time, she feels free.

She watches as he gets farther and farther away, until the distance and the trees swallow him up, and she aches—of course she aches, it's Sasuke and all she's ever wanted for him is to feel like he could stay, like he was welcome, like he was loved—but it isn't a sword through her abdomen, a hand around her heart. She aches like a fading bruise when you press too hard, blooming sunset on your thigh. She aches, but it's manageable and she can breathe through it.

Ten years is so long to be waiting, waiting for a boy to come home, a boy who maybe never was and, she can now accept, was lost to her long ago.

Sakura reaches up and touches her cheek where Sasuke had smoothed benediction along the bone.

It does not tingle for his touch.

Hand still to her cheek, Sakura tilts her head back and breathes, a soft smile tucked into the corners of her mouth.

Above, a summer storm threatens, the black clouds so completely contrary to her mood that Sakura has to laugh.

"What's so funny?"

Of course.

Sakura keeps her head tilted back, waiting.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey," Kakashi says.

He stands at her side and Sakura resists the urge to lean into him.

He's too far away to manage it, anyways.

"So," Kakashi continues, "what's the joke?"

Sakura laughs again. "Me, I think."

And, just like that, the clouds open.

Sakura's laughter gets louder, settling in her stomach as she shakes with it.

Yes. Maybe she is a joke.

She feels like a punchline.

She's just so happy that doesn't feel like a tragedy anymore; it feels like a gift.

Sakura can feel Kakashi's eyes on her, but she just keeps her head tilted back, her laughter blending with the rain on her tongue.

She likes to think that, just maybe, he's laughing too, laughing at how ridiculous she's being, laughing at the rain, laughing because they are alive and here, together, and oh, ten years ago Sakura never thought she'd know happiness like this again.

Eventually, her laughter falls off, leaving her warm and sore for it, cheeks stretched wide.

Sakura links her hands behind her back and sighs, a soft content thing with giggles still riding its edges.

"You're okay?" Kakashi asks.

Sakura cracks one eye to look at him.

There's something almost wary about the set of his shoulders.

"Yeah, Kakashi. Just…"

He doesn't look away from her, eyes fixed on her face.

They're standing shoulder to shoulder, but Sakura has the strangest feeling that he's pulled close, incapable of pulling away.

"Just, happy," she finishes.

Then she smiles.

Kakashi's eyes widen briefly.

Lightning cracks the sky open and Sakura turns back to it, another delighted laugh on her lips.

The thunder booms through them, drowning out any response Kakashi might have made.

They stand together in the rain, getting soaked to the bone, but Sakura has never felt warmer.

"Hey, Kakashi?"

"Hmm?"

"I'm glad you're here with me."

Another roll of thunder follows.

And yet—

"No where else I could be," she'd swear Kakashi answers.

The rain kisses Sakura's face, and the future stretches out before her, just waiting for her to reach out and take it.

For now though, Sakura keeps her head back and lets the last of the past wash away.

("Be happy for me," Sasuke asks, orders.

Sakura doesn't take offence. He's trying to be as soft as he remembers how.

"No," she smiles at him, "no, I'm going to be happy for me."

Something startled flashes through Sasuke's dark eyes, quicker than a lightning strike. And then a wry smile cracks over his face, something like the awe of dawn breaking held in the corners.

"You really aren't in love with me anymore, are you?"

Sakura takes his hand gently in her own.

He lets her.

"I'll always love you Sasuke. But no, I'm not in love with you."

Sasuke squeezes her hand, a press of fingers lighter than the flutter of a butterfly's wing.

"You should tell him."

Sakura cocks her head. "Tell who what?"

That wry smile turns ever so slightly mischievous, the boy Sakura once knew and thought lost peeking through.

"You'll figure it out. You're smart."

"Sasuke—" Sakura starts to warn.

He cuts her off, dropping her hand to smooth his thumb over her cheekbone.

"I'll see you around, Sakura. Try to keep Naruto out of trouble for me, will you?"

Sakura looks up at the infuriating man in front of her.

Oh, but she never thought they would make it here.

"I'll do my best," she swears.

"And take care of yourself."

"I'm not the one about to head out again for parts unknown," she reminds him.

Sasuke just looks at her.

"Yes, Sasuke-sensei," she sing-songs, "I'll be careful."

Dark eyes look right through her, measuring the weight of her promise. Then he nods.

His hand drops.

Sasuke shoulders his pack and stars walking off.

"I'll need advance notice if I'm going to make it back for the wedding," he calls behind him.

"What wedding?" Sakura demands.

Sasuke just salutes and keeps walking.

Sakura rolls her eyes, but she knows he'll never give her a straight answer if he doesn't want to.

Oh well.

She's sure she'll figure it out.)

Chapter 27

Kakashi claws at the surface, trying to keep himself above water. He desperately wants to breathe, but if isn't the cool dark below pulling him down, it's the acrid smoke choking the air from his lungs and scalding his throat, leaving him helpless to resist the soft embrace of the sea.

It's waves and screams and the crash of wood and steel and fire—the whole world in flames with only the deep, eternal respite below—and his arms are just so tired.

It's blood, staining the sea and sky red.

(Whirling red, spinning crimson, screams trapped behind his teeth. And what are they, these men who are not men, who do not bleed the way men should bleed on steel? Kakashi's friends on fire and all the world in flame.)

It's blood, and he wonders how long it will take for the sharks to arrive. He wonders what will take him first: the cold, the fire, the exhaustion, the teeth.

Every paddle, every kick—the next even more impossible.

Kakashi coughs water, coughs smoke, as his head comes back up again, clearing the waves once more in favour of the acrid black sky.

He's so tired. It would be so easy to stop.

Even the screams are dying out now and, when he can manage to blink his vision clear, Kakashi can see The Leaf sinking, sinking, sinking down amidst the flames.

Twenty years of his life—and everything and everyone in the world who remains to him—surrendered to the sea.

Kakashi gasps: salt and iron.

All that is left to him: the flame and the waves and the bitter knowledge that he will never know what Otherness came in the night and stole the world from him.

Kakashi claws at the surface but oh, drowned gods and hanged gods, oh but he is tired.

Kakashi closes his eyes, and lets the sea sweep him up, lets the sea pull him down.

Once upon a time—

But no, this is not a happily ever after. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

(And yet.)

Once upon a time, a man surrendered to the waves, and the cool dark welcomed him down.

(hello hello hello welcome welcome welcome been waiting have waited waiting for you)

Salt and iron.

Flames and sea.

Once upon a time, a man surrendered to the waves and the waves—

(blood in the water)

—the waves swallowed him up whole.

Firelight, blood in the night, red sky dawning—

"Hello," says a girl who is not a girl, who is the sea made flesh, who is sun pinked skin and fish scales, who is salt and iron and flames on the water, "I've been waiting for you."

Hair like the sky's last blush as it kisses the waves, like blood in the night, she smiles with more than enough teeth to take him.

The sea smiles softly, smiles terribly, and Kakashi—

Kakashi drowns.

Chapter 28

lvii.

The sun soaks into his old bones and Kakashi hums in pleasure.

"You sure you aren't part cat?" Sakura teases. She cards her fingers through his hair.

Kakashi leans into the touch. "Don't let the Pack hear you say that."

"Of course not," Sakura laughs. "There aren't enough meaty bones in the country to apologize properly for that insult."

She leans forward and presses a kiss to his forehead.

"Come sit with me."

Sakura rolls her eyes but circles the bench and folds herself into his side regardless.

"I feel old," he says.

"Hey! What does that make me?" Sakura demands.

Kakashi cracks open an eye and stares at his gorgeous, incomparable wife.

Her hair has been grey for years now but her eyes are as green as they've ever been and her smile still as sweet.

He kisses her softly at the corner of her mouth where the legacy of that smile sits. It's so comfortable resting there that the laugh lines have long since settled in to stay.

"Eternal," he says.

Sakura laughs and swats him on the shoulder.

He catches her laughter on his tongue.

"If you're old, I'm older," she grouses, submitting to the kiss.

"Never," Kakashi says.

Sakura pulls back.

The light is low and warm, and it turns her hair almost pink again.

"I love you," she says.

She's always been the most spectacular thing he's ever seen.

"Sit with me until the stars come out?" he asks.

(Sit with me forever?)

Sakura leans forward and presses a kiss to his temple, his cheek, his chin.

"Always."

xxxi.

"Do you, Hatake Kaka—"

"Yes! Of course!" Kakashi interrupts.

Tsunade-sama rolls her eyes and hits him over the head.

Sakura muffles her giggles with her mouth pressed against the back of his hand in a reassuring kiss.

"Let me finish, brat," Tsuande-sama orders.

Distantly, Kakashi is aware of the sound of his tōchan and Naruto sobbing on each other, but everything that is not the tears welling in Sakura's eyes and the blush sweeping down her cheeks and the red of her kimono is insignificant in this moment.

"Do you—" Tsunade-sama glares him into silence "—Hatake Kakashi, take this woman, Haruno Sakura—"

"Yes!"

He's waited long enough for this. (He'd have waited forever.) He has no interesting in waiting any longer.

It's all—the grief and the blood and the fury and the sorrow and the hurt—it's all worth it when he can look Sakura in the eyes, press a kiss to the heel of her palm and whisper "Hello, wife."

Sakura kisses him sweetly on the mouth.

"Hello husband."

xxiiv.

"Sakura," Kakashi pants into the hollow of her neck.

Sakura's nails prick his shoulders and she urges him on with her heels pressed into his ass.

"C'mon, Kakashi, sweetheart, please. Please." Her voice cracks clean through on the last word, sobbing as he manages to get a thumb on her clit to trace sloppy circles.

She's hot and wet and perfect around him and he never—Kakashi grunts as the walls of her cunt flutter, clamping down—he never thought he'd get this, get her.

"I need, I need—"

"I know," Kakashi tells her, "I know. I've got you. Gods, Sakura, you're so perfect."

"Please."

Kakashi hitches her further up the wall and Sakura tilts her hips and there—

She digs bloody crescents into his skin and Kakashi slaps a hand over her mouth.

"Sakura, baby, you have to be quiet."

The hospital is not the place for a midmorning quickie, but Kakashi has been gone three weeks without her and he aches in all the places she's been missing.

Sakura wrenches her mouth free and swoops to kiss him messy: teeth and tongue, all violent desperation.

"Kakashi," she whines.

Kakashi pulls her down harder to meet him.

They crash together.

"C'mon, Sakura, I need you to come, for me, please, now now now—"

Kakashi bites down on her shoulder.

It's enough.

When she's done spasming around his cock, he lays her down on her desk and eats her out until she's crying and trembling and she can barely bear to let him stroke her hair, whispering how much he missed her into her temple as he holds her close.

xxiv.

"You know," says Naruto-sensei, scratching the back of his head.

The Hokage robes fit him, turning him into something even more larger than life, but he'll still always just be Naruto-sensei to Kakashi.

"I just can't figure out who I'm supposed to threaten," he finishes.

Sakura scowls. "Naruto, if I remember correctly, we had a conversation about you trying to scare my dates off over twenty years ago."

"I know!" Naruto-sensei says. "That's the problem! Kakashi-kun couldn't even throw a kunai twenty years ago!"

"Actually—" Kakashi starts, insulted at several layers of implications inherent in that statement (first off, yes he could throw something as simple as a kunai when he was three, what does Naruto-sensei take him for?) but Sakura interrupts him.

"Naruto," she smiles sweetly. "Two words."

The Beloved and Respected Rokudaime pales at the honey dripping from her tongue.

"Snow. Princess."

Sakura's smile is so sharp and vicious and lovely that Kakashi falls in love with her all over again.

"Right!" Naruto-sensei says. His voice squeaks. "Have a great date you two, ramen is on me!"

Kakashi blinks, and the blond is gone.

"Are you going to tell me—"

"No," Sakura says.

"Not even if I do that thing you like? You know, that thing with my tongue?"

Sakura tips her head back and tugs him into her by his belt loops. "Nice try." She draws him down into a kiss that is too dark and filthy for a bright summer day.

"Do we have to go for lunch?" Kakashi manages when she finally pulls away with a sharp bite to his lower lip.

Sakura laughs and does her best to tidy the hair her fingers have made even more unmanageable.

"Yes."

Kakashi sighs, but they go.

They get kicked out of the restaurant when their game of footsie gets too competitive and Sakura almost breaks the table.

As he sucks bruises down the line of her stomach, Sakura a spill of pink hair and so much bare skin across his sheets, Kakashi can't bring himself to care.

xviii.

Kakashi hitches her closer and grits his teeth against the feel of her front plastered against him.

He's got his thigh shoved between her own, and she has one knee pressed high against his hip and and an elbow around his neck.

"Gods fucking damnit," Sakura-sensei snarls.

He can almost feel the phantom touch of her teeth to his neck as she curses quietly in the hot dark.

The broom closet they're shoved into in an attempt to avoid the passing patrol that was not supposed to be there is much too small.

Kakashi swallows thickly and hopes she can't hear the way it catches at the back of his throat.

"Alright," Sakura-sensei whispers, "from the mission brief, we know they have a sensor. Limited range, but we're fucked if they get too close; you can't conceal you're chakra well enough to fool them—"

Kakashi winces at the reminder.

He's a jōnin. He should be better than this.

She pinches his other hip and Kakashi barely manages not to flinch.

"Don't do that, it's not your fault. The only person I know other than me who could definitely hide their chakra enough is Tsunade-shishō; I told you when you were thirteen that you shouldn't dismiss iryōjutsu. Anyways, it's too late now, but I think I've a genjutsu that should hide us well enough, provided they're only performing a passive sweep."

"How can I help?" Kakashi asks.

"Make sure we don't fall over while I set this," she orders.

And then Sakura-sensei pulls away with what minute space is left to them and shifts to turn around, fitting her spine along his chest and her head under his chin.

Kakashi flails for a moment, unsure of where to put his hands, but Sakura-sensei just snorts and shoves one up against her stomach.

"Make sure I don't slip, will you? This is going to be finicky."

She goes mostly lax against him, retreating down into focus, her fingers shifting smoothy through hand seals.

Kakashi swallows again and tries not to think about the way his hand spans the space between her hips.

He doesn't wonder if her could encircle her completely with both, thumbs dipping down to tease the edge of her underwear, her breasts pressed against his chest and her mouth at the hinge of his jaw.

This is not, he reminds himself, the fucking time.

She's so warm and he aches with the way she trusts him so thoughtlessly with her body, the way she turns effortlessly into his arms.

Kakashi feels something drop over them, like mist off a waterfall, enough to make him shiver.

Sakura-sensei's spine straightens and she pulls ever so slightly out of his grasp.

"There," she murmurs, "I sure fucking hope this works. Shishō is going to kill me if we get caught on a milk run. And I'm going to track down whatever fucking chūnin team messed up the recon this bad and give them a refresher on paying attention to detail."

His fingers twitch at the silken venom in her voice.

They wait silently, the sound of their breathing too loud, and Kakashi tries to not drown in the familiar scent of her: the faintest trace of something floral undercut by loam and iron.

He wants to lose himself in her, and all he has are reasons for why it's a bad idea, why it'll never happen.

Finally—an age, an eternity later—Sakura-sensei relaxes.

"They're gone," she says.

Kakashi agrees; he heard the soft shuffle of their feet as they passed.

Sakura-sensei flashes through another set of hand signs and Kakashi can practically feel the genjutsu slough off his skin.

"C'mon, Kakashi-kun," Sakura-sensei says, smiling up at him over her shoulder, "we've a mission to finish."

The door doesn't dare creak as they slip out of the closet.

Kakashi's palms ache with the loss of her.

xv.

"So," Obito drawls, following Kakashi's line of sight, "Sakura-sensei, huh."

Kakashi shifts his gaze abruptly to Sai-sensei who is doing his best to avoid a violently graceful taijutsu sequence.

He winces when Sakura-sensei sends him sprawling. That's going to be a broken bone.

Or three.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Kakashi says, dismissing the accusation implicit in Obito's voice.

"Sure you don't," Obito agrees, annoyingly cheerful. "You absolutely aren't checking out Sakura-sensei's ass in those shorts. She looks amazing, by the way."

Obito is laughing through a bloody mouth when Kakashi sends him flying.

Kakashi has the sinking feeling he did not win this one.

xii.

"Hi there, Team 7!"

Kakashi, Rin, and Obito whirl, startled.

Instead of their sensei, who is very very late (not that that is terribly unusual, but usually he sends a toad with a message to warn them if he's going to be especially late), a woman in an undone jōnin vest waves at them.

"Naruto got sent unexpectedly on a mission, so he asked me to take over for a couple days, just until he gets back, instead of leaving you to your own devices."

She's got pink hair and a smile almost as brightly obnoxious as Naruto-sensei's and Kakashi would dismiss her right off the bat except that—

Well.

There's a purple rhombus on her forehead and she appeared behind him without Kakashi noticing even a whisper of her and, once, just last year, he caught green eyes laughing behind an ANBU mask when his tōchan was summoned to the Hokage's office in the middle of the night.

Anyways, Naruto-sensei might be an idiot, but he's a capable idiot.

And he cares about them, his team.

Naruto-sensei wouldn't send someone untrustworthy to lead them in his absence.

"You can call me Sakura-sensei," she trills.

Kakashi glances worriedly at Rin out of the corner of his eye; his teammate is practically trembling.

"Haruno-sama"—Rin bows deeply—"it's an honour to meet you."

Obito blinks, mouth agape, at their teammate.

Rin is always polite and respectful to adults, but she's never obsequious.

Who is this woman?

Wait—

Kakashi takes another look at the purple rhombus that the woman wears like a crown.

This is Haruno Sakura?

He kinda always just thought she'd be taller.

"None of that now, Rin-chan!" Rin blushes. "Sakura-sensei is just fine. Naruto told me you're thinking of becoming a mednin. We'll chat later, yeah? But for now—"

Kakashi tenses at the sly grin on her mouth.

It's much too reminiscent of Naruto-sensei at his most mischievous and cruel.

"I think we should start off with a little game of tag." Her grin splits higher. "First rule is: don't get hit."

Where her heel comes down, the ground gapes.

Kakashi bolts.

iii.

It's—

She's just a girl, Sakumo thinks when she comes out into the waiting room where he's spent the night, fingers threaded through his hair tugging until, along with the purple bruises pressed under his eyes and the clothes he's yet to change out of, he imagines he looks a mess.

She's just a girl, but her jaw is set.

Her hands are clean but she still smells of viscera under the overwhelming tidal wave of disinfectant.

He doesn't need her to say it for him to know.

"I'm so sorry, Hatake-san," the doctor says, "we tried our best, but it was just too late."

He collapses back down into a chair, presses a closed fist to his mouth to trap the howl there.

"If you'd like, I can take you in to see her."

She's too young to have eyes so old.

What is he going to tell Kakashi?

"I— Please, Haruno-sensei. Yes. I'd like to see my wife."

Haruno Sakura smiles, a thing so soft and so sad that it shatters his heart all over again.

"Let's sit for a while first," she decides.

She's decidedly ungrateful as she flops into the seat next to him.

She's too young to carry grief at the creases of her mouth.

It's quiet in the pre-dawn hour, the light not yet kissing the horizon and spilling a blush across the sky.

They sit, the two of them.

"Thank you," Sakumo finally says.

She turns to look at him, hair whipping around her face, startled, but he doesn't look back.

"Thank you for doing what you could," he continues.

"It wasn't enough," Haruno-sensei spits.

He does turn now, one hand cupping her cheek like she's a child of his own, like she's just a girl and not a doctor with blood on her hands.

"Sometimes it never is. But, still, I thank you. No one else could have done more, I know this."

Her fingers flex panicked against the back of his hand, but she doesn't pull away.

"Thank you."

nulla. initium

Sakura sighs and leans harder against the glass.

They're so small.

"What are we doing here, shishō?" she asks. Her head lolls on her neck so that she can look at her teacher.

Senju Tsunade stands with her arms crossed as she watches.

"We're here," she says, "because this is where I come to remember."

Sakura raises an eyebrow. "Remember what?"

"What we're fighting for."

Sakura turns back to watch the newborns slumber on, safe and warm in the nursery.

"And what are we fighting for?"

Tsunade-shishō throws her head back and laughs, a brash thing filled with years and grief and joy. "The future."

Sakura purses her lips in consideration and taps a nail on the glass, thinking.

The Will of Fire.

Yeah, she can keep fighting for that, through the miles of blood, against the grasping tide of death.

Sakura blows a kiss at the glass to make Tsunade-shishō laugh, and turns away, back to the lab.

Poisons won't find antidotes for themselves.

Behind her, a grey haired bundle rolls over.

Neither of them have any idea what will come.

But there's hope (there's always hope).

They'll make it through to the end.

Chapter 29

"Well," Kakashi drawls out. His voice is flat; his lungs being currently squished by the weight on his chest. "I'm both terrified and aroused right now, which is an interesting bit of self-discovery. Still, Tenzō, could you come pull Sakura off of me before she rips my throat out?"

Sakura snarls and digs her claws further into Kakashi's vest.

He winces.

"Also, Naruto, I'm taking away your jutsu experimentation privileges for a month."

"Are you grounding me, -ttebayo?" Naruto demands.

Kakashi doesn't break eye contact with his currently animalistic girlfriend. "Yes."

(Sorta-a-lion-ok-not-really-but-she-has-the-ears-and-the-tail-and-the-personality Sakura, it turns out, really likes naps on the couch when it's been dragged into a patch of sunlight.

It takes Naruto most of the week to undo whatever it was he managed to do.

Even once Sakura is back to normal, she never really does quite shake the instinct to rub against trees or chase people who start running abruptly.

Kakashi refused to comment on the application of teeth and nails in their bedroom (and out of it).)

Chapter 30

Sakura's hands are sure as they unwrap the gauze, quick brushes of skin that spark something he dares not name along his nerves.

Her hands disappear and he hears her moving around the room.

"Can I open my eyes yet?" Kakashi asks.

"Don't you dare."

Sakura is all no-nonsense, her words edged in the sharp crack of her doctor voice.

It's the kind of voice that means "do as I tell you or you'll regret it."

Kakashi doesn't open his eyes.

Instead, he listens to the soft susurration of her breathing and the not-sound of her feet sliding over the floor and the clatter of medical instruments.

Then, Sakura is standing in front of him again.

If he opened his legs, he wonders if she'd slip right in between them, caught up in him.

Kakashi flexes his hands once in the linen of the bedspread he's perched on but doesn't dare try anything more.

Sakura lays a single finger along his temple. "Don't move," she orders.

Kakashi stills himself and wills his heartbeat to slow.

The rush of her chakra is familiar and foreign, and he breathes through the impulse to fight her. It's Sakura. He knows in his bones that she will never hurt him, but instinct rears at the brush of it, crushed velvet and orange blossoms in his nose, something not quite astringent.

He quickly settles into the touch and Kakashi lets his mind wander as Sakura performs her exam.

She's warm, her thighs pressed against his shins as she leans in, concentrating.

Beneath the unnatural sterility of the hospital, Kakashi would swear he can smell her. Her presence is the only thing that can keep him still in this place of death and dying.

He wants to lean forward and—

"How much longer?" he asks her.

Sakura huffs in exasperation. He can practically taste her breath on his tongue.

"Longer if you keep distracting me. Sit still, this is important."

Kakashi hasn't moved but he humours her, and sits stiller.

"I know you'd prefer it if it wasn't me doing this. It really should be Rin, she's the one who figured out how to do a Sharingan transplant with a non-Uchiha recipient under hostile conditions with, like, three months of real medical training."

Kakashi frowns at the tension and self-depreciation in her voice.

Kakashi wants to tell Sakura about the half-envious, half-admiring way Rin watches her. Kakashi wants to tell Sakura about the way the only other person he's seen rooms full of medics turn to in a moment of crisis, faith unflinching on their faces, is Tsuande-sama. Kakashi wants to tell her she's spectacular, unparalleled, astounding.

Instead, he says,"Rin's on that mission in Snow. And she trusts you and your skills."

He could wince, because he feels Sakura flinch ever so slightly, like that was a barb. Not that he's ever done anything to reassure her.

And still, Kakashi doesn't know how she doesn't know, how she can't see—

("Stop scowling at her, bastard," Obito orders him, one particularly pointy elbow to his ribs, "she thinks you hate her."

Kakashi splutters. "I don't hate her."

Obito rolls his eye. "I know that, and Rin knows that, and three quarters of the whole Village knows that, but Sakura doesn't. And that's because you look like a constipated hedgehog every time she so much as looks in your direction."

Kakashi scowls.

Actually. For real this time.

"See! That's what I mean. You could at least try smiling at the poor girl if you can't begin to hold a civil conversation with her."

Kakashi crosses his arms.

From the corner of his eye, he catches Sakura looking quickly away.

He wants to smooth his thumb over the soft rounded weight of her shoulder as she curls into herself.

He wants to never make her feel small ever again.)

It aches that if he were to kiss her, she'd think it was a joke, some mean-spirited thing, a way of crushing her smaller.

How she doesn't know—

(The words cleave to the roof of his mouth and never before has Kakashi been a coward, but she brings him to his knees.)

Well. Kakashi remembers being twelve and the way he sneered at pink hair and a bright smile and how she followed after that Uchiha teammate of hers like he was the sun and she was helpless to resist his gravity.

Well. Kakashi remembers being twelve and the way she would thunder at his dismissals, finger in his face—as if he couldn't put her in the ground one-handed—because she was scared of nothing but rejection from a boy who could never deserve her.

(Somedays, he drowns in all the things he regrets.)

"Well, if Rin trusts me with her teammate, I can't let her down now, can I?" The cheer in her voice rings hollow.

Kakashi never wants Sakura to know anything but joy, but all he ever brings her is another crack for her patched together heart.

"Sakura," Kakashi says. He stops her with his fingers around the delicate bones of her wrist. "I trust you."

A silence.

Kakashi can almost hear her blink.

"Oh," she says.

It's soft and surprised and he wants to drink it down, wants to pull a thousand more out of her (his fingers on her skin, drawing circles, and lower still).

"Well then," Sakura says.

More silence.

Her chakra practically curls itself in his coils.

He wants to keep her there, so deep under his skin he doesn't know anymore what it is to be without her.

"You can open your eyes," Sakura says. "I'll need to check your pupil reflex and a few other things."

Kakashi's eyes slowly blink open.

Pink and peach slowly coalesce into something sharper.

Hatake Kakashi looks Haruno Sakura right in the eyes, the first thing he's seen in weeks.

Yeah, he thinks, he wants to blink open to that sight every morning for the rest of his life.

"What can you see?" Sakura asks, her voice tight with controlled worry.

Kakashi smiles, the curve of it coming up to touch his eyes.

"Something beautiful," he says.

The scolding he gets for activating his Sharingan without her permission after a risky surgery to fix the chakra drain from the donated eye is worth the memory of the shock blooming on her face, a blush kissing her cheeks and her mouth dropping into a soft rounded 'o' and her green eyes flashing for a breath of a moment with something pleased and fierce: his to keep forever.

Chapter 31

"Why—" Sakura slaps Kakashi's hand away from where he's pulling at the opening of her robe that is belted firmly across her chest "—does anyone have to be naked? Let alone me specifically?"

Kakashi pouts.

It isn't a particularly good look on a man of his advanced age.

The asshole.

"Sakura-chan," Kakashi whines, "you promised."

"You said Chapter Four of Paradise, not Tactics," Sakura hisses back.

Kakashi shakes his head at her sadly. "Maa, maa. In your old age, your hearing is going. It's such a tragedy, Sakura-chan. I most definitely said Icha Icha: Tactics when we made that bet. And you agreed. So now you have to do the scene with me."

Distantly, Sakura wonders if her blush has managed to outshine her hair yet.

"You cheated on that bet," she says.

Kakashi just looks at her.

Sakura doesn't let the indignation waver on her face.

"Sakura," Kakashi says, "we're both jōnin. If you didn't cheat too—just apparently not as well as me—then I'm sending a genin team to track down Tsunade-sama so that she can come back to the Village to glare at you disappointedly. That would just be embarrassing."

Now it's Sakura's turn to pout.

She's pretty sure she carries it off better.

"C'mon, Sakura-chan, a bet's a bet, you know the rules."

Sakura doesn't shudder.

She does know the rules.

The rules were originally implemented to keep any member of Team 7—usually Naruto—from weaselling out of paying up after a lost best. The punishments for breaking the rules only managed to get progressively more extreme over the course of the better part of two decades.

Sakura really really doesn't want to renege on the deal.

"I hate you," she tells Kakashi.

He smiles.

It is much too gleeful.

Sakura wants to punch it off of his dumb face.

Sakura puts all the steel she's accumulated over the past twenty years into her spine, squares her shoulders, sets her chin, and drops her robe.

She's a fucking mednin, one of the best in the world, and she doesn't blush if she doesn't want to.

"There, now," Kakashi says, "that wasn't so hard, was it?"

"When this is over, I just want you to know, I am going to kill you," Sakura grits back through the smile she's plastered on her face.

Kakashi doesn't even flinch.

The asshole.

"Let's get this over with."

Sakura stomps to the door, Kakashi following at her heels.

If he laughs at her, she really is going to punch him.

Haruno Sakura's reenactment of Junko's declaration of love to the beautiful princess in her tower at dusk—the setting sun turning her pink hair to gold fire, nudity and all—goes down in jōnin history.

The jōnin are, of course, the only ones who remember, because Sakura spends two days tracking down everyone else who was witness to the scene and wipes the memory from their minds.

She'd have tried to get the jōnin who were there watching too, but she's already exceeded her monthly allotment of damage to training grounds and public spaces.

"I hate you," she says.

Kakashi tries to kiss the pout from her mouth but Sakura pulls away.

He kisses her shoulder instead.

"How about I make it up to you by playing out the princess' enthusiastic reciprocation of Junko's declaration?"

Sakura considers the offer.

Kakashi's mouth drops from her shoulder to the upper curve of her breast.

"Fine," she consents, "but you have to wear the costume."

Kakashi makes an agreeing sound and his mouth slips lower still.

(He tries to distract her, but Sakura definitely remembers before the night is through that he promised to wear the thigh high stockings and the nightgown.)

Chapter 32

"I got you something while I was on my mission," Kakashi had told her.

"Trust me, I think you'll really like it," he had said.

"No, I didn't go shopping when I should have been working towards getting the mission finished as early as possible," he had promised.

"Seriously, I think I did really good with this one."

By now, Sakura should know better than to trust Kakashi when he has that particular glint in his eyes.

Because with a quick swipe of blood and a poof of smoke, there is a very strange sword sitting on an unfurled scroll in the middle of Sakura's coffee table.

"Kakashi," Sakura says, "please tell me that isn't what I think it is."

It's too thin and the wire trailing from the base of the hilt is too unusual for it to be anything other than what Sakura thinks it is.

Still, she hopes.

Kakashi sighs happily and sits up straighter. If he had a tail, she thinks it would be wagging he's so proud of himself.

"It's the Nuibari," he says, and trails a hand to hover along the length of it, fingers curled in a possessive touch that lingers over the sharp tip of the weapon.

Sakura slumps backwards on the couch and buries her head in her hands.

"Hokage-sama is going to kill us," she moans.

"Nah, Minato-sensei is going to think it's hilarious that Konoha, and more specifically you, is currently in possession of three of Kiri's famous swords."

He's laughing.

She's going to kill him.

"Where did you find it?" Sakura asks.

She shouldn't ask.

She doesn't actually want to know.

Except that she does want to know, because information is the most precious thing she can hold between her two hands.

Especially as Kiri is going to hate her even more now.

Really, two swords was quite enough. And they've been in a subtle game of diplomacy for the past five years trying to wring as many concessions out of Kiri as possible for the return of the two swords that Sakura most definitely accidentally ended up with, no Mizukage-sama, she certainly has not been hunting down their owners to claim them as her own in an effort to make a name for a "pink haired nobody".

The scrolls, reports, and detailed map concerning last sightings of the currently missing Kabutowari are definitely simply an exercise in curiosity. That is her story and she's sticking with it.

The poison that she dragged Shizune into helping her create that was responsible for decimating almost four Kiri jōnin squads was definitely retribution for that little insult though. Sakura will admit to that.

"My team may or may not have had a run in with some missing nin who may or may not have originally defected from Kiri. Allegedly."

Kakashi sounds significantly too pleased with himself.

Sakura restrains herself from wrapping a covetous hand around the hilt of her new sword.

The sword. Not hers. Because they're marching to the Hokage's office and returning it to Kiri right now.

Any minute.

Like.

Maybe after an hour and a decent sparring match.

"I don't know whether I should kiss you or slap you," Sakura breathes.

And yup. She is definitely picking up the sword.

The balance is strange and it's so much lighter than Kubikiribōchō.

As much as Sakura appreciates the intimidation factor of the Seversword (she particularly enjoys leaving a pink ribbon tied around the hilt to match her hair) and the dexterity allowed by the Thunderswords (though she's never found much use for Kiba's ability to channel lightning, unfortunately), there is something deeply appealing to her about the mental image of threading her enemies together.

Morbidly appealing, sure, but Sakura is Senju Tsunade's student, and she learned more than just how to mend flesh and bones under her teacher.

It takes a certain kind of temperament to be the kind of medic who can survive out in the field.

Mostly, admittedly, a very much not gentle one.

"It's beautiful," she murmurs.

Kakashi perches his chin on her shoulder to watch down the length of her arm as her muscles flex as she holds the sword level.

"I'm going to vote for a kiss," Kakashi tells her.

"Hmm?"

"I definitely think that you should kiss me and not slap me. I mean, preferably. And then we can go try that new sword of yours out."

Namikaze Minato's diplomatic headaches are not improved by both his wife and Senju Tsunade laughing at him.

"I thought the Mizukage was going to cry!" he shouts, pulling at his hair.

He's fairly certain if he were to look in a mirror, he'd notice that his hair is currently, as it has been for the past three weeks, standing up on end like it got in a fight with a tornado and lost.

The two start howling even louder.

Minato scowls.

Finally, Tsunade manages to collect herself enough to ask, "What's the bad news, then?"

Kushina is still laughing.

"That was the bad news!" Minato says. And then, over the renewed laugher, "It was scarring! No man of that advanced age should look so horrorstruck."

"Maybe," Kushina chokes out around giggles, "the shock will finally kill him and that nice Terūmi girl will take over."

Minato shoots her a disbelieving look. "'That nice Terūmi girl' sent an entire ANBU team back to Konoha screaming."

"I know," Kushina sighs dreamily, "she seems like she'll make an excellent neighbour."

Minato thinks about responding to that, but pulls himself back to the problem at hand.

"And now Kiri is baying for both of our idiot student's blood as a term of the armistice deal."

"The war is over already?" Tsunade asks.

Minato blinks. He probably should have led with that. "Oh, yeah, that's the good news. Kakashi and Sakura decimated Kiri's front lines using her collection of Kiri swords and the blow was so demoralizing that Kiri is in retreat. They're already calling for peace talks. Or, well, they're ordering us to surrender for peace talks which, coming from Kiri, is practically a white flag as they roll over and show us their underbelly."

Tsunade smirks. "I know exactly who you should send as our lead diplomat and head of security."

"Hello," Sakura says, leaning forward on her braced hands to look down the long table, "I'm Hatake Sakura, and I speak for the Hokage."

Her smile is soft enough to pierce.

Every single Kiri nin at the table and lining the room bares their teeth.

Sakura smiles softer.

Kakashi's hands rest idly on the twins sheaths at his waist.

A very large sword leans up against Sakura's chair.

"Shall we begin?" she asks the room at large.

This is definitely not how she thought meeting a boy in a kimono in a field of flowers would turn out.

Sakura makes a mental note to kiss her husband for a good long while after she's done making Kiri nin cry across a boardroom table.

Chapter 33

You are seventeen when you sit up in bed with a start—a kāton jutsu on your fingers and a blade in your hand—and you scream.

You scream because you remember and you killed her, you killed her, you killed her.

She's dead.

And it's all your fault.

It's too many memories that you can't sort because how do you fit lifetimes and lifetimes away in square boxes to be stored under your bed?

It's too many memories and how are you going to keep living when she's dead and she died at your hands, a smile on her lips?

You live, of course, because dying will mean seeing her just so much sooner and you couldn't stand that.

You don't know how you will ever stand looking her in the eye after the last time: lightning in the air and blood on her mouth.

(You mourned Rin, but you didn't know, because you're always the last to remember, she always remembers first. You mourned Rin, your teammate and friend, but you didn't mourn her properly because you didn't yet have centuries of lifetimes in your head of the lives you have lived together.

If you had known then, you would have killed yourself before anyone could have intervened.)

You can't see her again.

But you know with the great gaping wound in your heart where she is missing, that for all you will not die for fearing seeing her again (she will forgive you and you will burn under it, you do not deserve forgiveness, certainly not from her), you won't be capable of living either.

You look at the mask tossed half-careless on your table.

That's alright, Konoha has no real need for weapons with functioning hearts.

All you'll need to be is sharp.

Given by the way you're bleeding under your own edges, there's no fear of you being anything but.

"Kakashi," the Sandaime sighs.

He looks old.

Almost as old as you.

"If you keep going on like this, you're going to get yourself killed."

You blink, but other than that, you don't sway from your position in front of his desk.

He sighs again.

"Fine," he says, "I know what to do with you. You're no good to the Village dead."

You're excused from his office.

As you slip out of the window, you wonder why that felt so much like a threat.

One genin team, two.

Three.

Four.

With each one you refuse, the Sandaime's sighs grow longer.

"One day," he says, "there will be a team you can't fail."

You smile, a false thing that doesn't really touch your one good eye.

You wonder why you bother.

"What was wrong with this one, might I ask?"

You shrug.

"It's in the report for the Academy teachers," you say in lieu of an explanation.

You think you wrote something about temperaments ill-suited to the field.

Konoha is the Nice Village. You don't have much space for future psychopaths: too messy. You aren't sure how the Academy and its psych profiles missed it.

It has the nice benefit of being true, too.

You failed the last team because they reminded you of—

Nothing.

You aren't cut out to be in charge of a group of genin and none of these kids are cut out to be shinobi.

If they get sent out into the field with you, the only way they're coming home is dead.

The Sandaime watches you as you leave.

You let it go.

He might be your Hokage, you might be loyal to the bone, but you learned lifetimes ago when to submit to orders and when to skirt them.

You sink back down into the depths of ANBU and don't give a moment's consideration to the next group of kids you'll send back to the Academy with their tails between their legs.

It's a miscalculation, is what it is.

That you don't consider what team the Sandaime will give you next, that you don't consider what year it is and who, exactly, is graduating.

That you decide that you're going to put the absolute minimal effort into looking into the team you've been assigned because you think you know everything about them that matters, and the girl matters least of all.

That you let the chalkboard eraser fall on your head so that the dust obscures your vision and you aren't prepared, how could you have ever been prepared—

Minato-sensei's boy and his pink-haired teammate are yelling at you, and you don't know what you say, if they can see that you're falling apart at the seams because you're gone with a poof of smoke to obscure the most panicked, desperate flash step you've ever managed because—

Her file said her eyes were green, but you can't breathe.

Rin is dead, and yet—

It won't be the first team you've failed a team because they reminded you of the one person you don't ever dare think of.

Except, of course, it's Minato-sensei's boy and Itachi's brother and there is no failing this team, this cursed Team 7, so much history ground into its new bones you're already anticipating it all falling apart under the weight.

"You pass!" you tell them after the sorriest excuse for teamwork you've ever seen.

And then you convince Gai to beat you half bloody in a taijutsu-only spar so that you don't go curl up under the blanket on your bed and weep.

It's easy ignoring Sakura, you tell yourself.

It's what's necessary, you insist, for all that it might be unfair.

The Kyūbi's jinchūriki and the Last Uchiha require so much of your attention. And she doesn't. Sakura does just fine on her own.

It's not about you and your feelings.

She's just a girl.

She has pink hair and green eyes and she listens closely and mostly does as she's told and she reminds you of nothing, of no one.

(There's too many lifetimes of memories screaming in your head and it all sounds like the way she calls you "sensei" with absolute faith.)

The months pass and you dare think, dare hope—

It's fun, these three kids and the way they pull real and honest laughter out of you.

You feel lighter than you have in years.

You feel lighter than you have since you were seventeen and you remembered and you realized what you had done.

"Hey sensei," Sakura says as she seats herself down next to you by the fire.

"Hey, hey, Sakura-chan," you answer. "You should be sleeping. I'll come wake you for your shift when it's time."

She shrugs and burrows herself deeper into her cloak, curling down to lay a cheek on her knees as she stares into the fire.

"I know," she says. "But I couldn't sleep."

"Hmm?"

It's an invitation, one that you know you should make.

(That you mean it is inconsequential.)

"Weird dreams," is all she offers.

You nod.

You understand weird dreams.

"Well," you say, "you're welcome to stay up with me."

Sakura smiles softly at you in the dark, the firelight catching in her eyes and for a moment your breath catches in your chest because she looks too old to be the silly pink bubblegum girl you know her to be.

Too old, for someone so young.

(She looks like someone you know, like a secret you carry in your heart, like an echo through all your lifetimes.)

You shake your head to clear it and that flash of firelight passes; she's just Sakura again.

The crackle of the fire and the sighing of the trees lulls her to sleep.

You don't wake her when she slumps to rest her head against your thigh, not even when the dawn starts breaking and it has long since been time for her watch.

"Sensei," she tells you later that morning with a slight frown on her face, "you should have woken me."

"Don't worry about it, Sakura-chan, you'll need a good night's sleep for the mission later today."

You ruffle her hair and then go to extricate Naruto and Sasuke from their latest tussle.

Sakura's eyes follow you for a long while after.

You can feel them: she looks right through you.

That it all falls to pieces is no surprise.

That it's your fault is expected, too.

And yet Sakura looks up at you as you promise that everything is going to be alright and believes you.

For a breathless moment, you wish you could make it true, just for her, just to be worthy of that belief.

It's a relief that she goes to Tsunade-sama, you tell yourself.

Sakura deserves a teacher who will do right by her.

As you sink back down under the wave of missions that require shinobi of your caliber, shinobi that are in such great demand after all the impossible losses the Village has suffered, you can ignore the way you are grieving.

You have never deserved your grief.

"Hey, Kakashi-sensei," a familiar voice sighs as she slumps down next to you on the bench.

You blink.

"Sakura-chan," you say.

She's older.

It shouldn't be a surprise.

And yet, somehow, it is.

You'd expected her to stay twelve, but she's fourteen now and her limbs are gangly and her hair is still short and she's wearing hospital scrubs and she looks too tired to be fourteen.

Or, well, you don't have the best measure for that—at fourteen you'd fought a war and lost everything—but she looks so tired, bags pressed heavy and hollows in her cheeks.

You're expecting her to say something, to strike up a conversation, but she doesn't.

She just closes her eyes and tips back her head and breathes.

You watch her.

You shouldn't, but she just reminds you of—

But you checked her birthday years ago now, and she was born too early.

She's just Sakura.

You need to stop looking for someone else in her face.

She cracks an eye and you freeze, caught.

Your heart breaks and the guilt consumes you because you're looking so hard for something you'll never find that you imagined something ancient and steady in her eye, something so full of joy and grief and rage that you want to cry with it, it's so familiar.

But she's just Sakura, and she blinks, and it's gone.

"I hope you're doing alright, sensei," she says. "Maybe we can spar one day, like old times."

She smiles at you as she stands and stretches.

"Enjoy the sunshine."

Her smile is sunshine.

Only as she starts walking away do you see the blood still smeared on her scrubs and the way her hands are shaking.

You should say something, and you're half way out to reaching for her, taking her by the back of her neck and pulling her down to your chest where she can be safe but you—

She walks away in the mid afternoon light and you clench your hands into fists.

You leave for a mission that night and you aren't back in the Village for months.

Green eyes chase you through your dreams.

"Why can't you see me?" asks a familiar voice, a thing full of layers that echoes out to the edges of infinity, to your very beginnings. "Why aren't you looking? I'm right here."

You wake with tears on your cheeks.

She's dead.

You killed her.

There is nothing left to find.

Tsunade-sama hits you with a set of personnel files when you step into her office.

Or, well, she throws them at you and you catch them with grace and absolutely no yelping.

Nope.

None.

(Shizune politely stifles her sniggers behind her hand.)

"I'm putting the team back together," Tsunade-sama declares.

You blink and flip quickly through the files.

"Hatake," she says.

You look up at her, wary of the weight in her voice.

"Don't fuck it up this time."

You're amused as you hide underground where your old students can't reach you.

They've grown, but they're still just kids.

And then, unexpectedly, impossibly

there

is

light.

And all too familiar green eyes laughing down at you.

(You thought you were past all of this, but then Sakura laughs and you are caught on the edge of it, incapable of turning away, because you ache so badly with what you lost and what your treacherous memory keeps trying to find in the considering way she watches you when your back is turned.)

The months spool out in front of you, and you are so very bad at time, at understanding the measure of it, how it can move so fast.

A side-effect, you suppose, of remembering back to the start of it all.

It's joy and laughter and fun, despite the shadows moving, in spite of the shadows moving.

And then it's war.

Which—

You look back on your long, bloody history and wonder why you're surprised.

The war ends with Sakura supporting your weight, her hand in yours.

It shouldn't feel so right.

The war ends and the time will come where you will mourn all that you have lost, but right now all there is in the world is Sakura: worn and and bruised and bloodied.

She's still barely more than a child, and yet she's the oldest, most terrible thing you've ever seen as she pieces people back together with gentle hands that hours, days, weeks before helped tear the world apart.

Now she puts people and the world back together.

When she catches your eye and takes a moment to smile up at you from whatever person or project she's currently labouring over, she's the softest thing you've ever seen.

It's easier, then, that there's so much work to sweep you away from these dangerous thoughts.

She's just Sakura.

And yet, when she stares right through you, you can't breathe for wishing she was someone else.

Konoha rebuilds.

The world rebuilds.

You try to rebuild yourself a little too.

You aren't very successful: you've been broken for far, far too long.

Sakura watches you and you—

You don't look back.

You don't dare.

The years unfurl in front of you and you do everything you can to avoid catching her eye.

It should be easy to sink into missions and the shadows and yet—

She keeps finding you even when you're hiding, even when she shouldn't be capable of it.

One day you're at a grave, the grave, the one you barely ever dare visit and you're alone until you realize suddenly, abruptly, that you aren't.

And you know exactly who is standing just a few steps behind your shoulder.

"Sakura," you greet her tersely.

She takes that as an invitation, stepping until she burns along your spine.

"Kakashi," she greets back, softer.

She looks down to the grave at your feet.

Sakura shifts slightly, biting her lip, considering a question.

You don't nudge her chin. You don't stop her from worrying the skin there until the blood wells up.

You don't care, you tell yourself.

"Who was Rin?" Sakura asks.

The question cracks through you.

For a moment, you are as stunned as the day she cracked the earth around you.

You didn't think she'd dare ask.

And as it dawns on you, Rin's name on Sakura's lips, the rage crashes down on you too.

Oh.

It's been a long time since you were angry.

It hurts.

"Don't," you hiss.

You don't recognize your voice.

Sakura flinches.

"Don't you say her name. Not you."

Sakura takes a step back, her hands flying up to protect herself.

"Kakashi?" she tries to ask, but you are pouring onwards, eighteen years of self-loathing bleeding from your veins.

"You'll never replace her," you say.

Sakura's eyes go wide and shocked and hurt.

"You mean nothing in comparison."

She doesn't move as you stalk away.

You don't look back, even as you hear her fall to her knees and break.

Sakura avoids you after that with a subtlety you never would have expected from her.

You tell yourself that you do not miss her.

The guilt though, that you shred yourself on.

Sakura isn't who you want, you tell yourself, but she never could have deserved your hatred. That, and all your impossible years, should have never been hers to bear.

Months and years.

You catch glimpses of her sometimes on the wind, and then she's gone.

You tell yourself, as you stand at Rin's grave, that you aren't looking for her.

"Fucking hell," a familiar voice snarls, "I'm going to kill Sai."

"I'm guessing," you say, "that this closet doesn't actually hold any of the promised bottles for restocking the drinks table."

It's a very small closet.

You really aren't sure how you managed to get locked in here before you noticed she was here.

(Except, well, that maybe you did know she was here and that you just didn't care, just needed to see her for a moment, for a breath.)

"Oh, no, it's in here. And don't worry," Sakura promises, "I don't care that Yamato has probably done something to the door, I can break it no problem."

You smother a grin because, yeah, you know she probably can.

Sakura tries to manoeuvre around you without touching you.

But the closet is much too small for that.

Every brush sets you on fire.

You try not to think of the dress you've caught glimpses of throughout the night.

It'll be hard enough forgetting as it is.

"Godsdamnit." Sakura stumbles into you.

You catch her.

And you absolutely don't flinch at the way she freezes in your hands.

"Sorry," you say.

Your hand is much too high on her thigh.

"Not your fault," she says. "I know you don't want to be in here with me. Don't worry, I'll get us out and we never have to see each other again. I promise."

Your hands flex until you think you might carve bruises into her. "Sakura—" you try to say because no. No. She should never sound like that with you.

(Except, of course, that you haven't spoken in actual years and the last time you did you tore her to shreds, an injured wild thing lashing out at the person who least deserved it.

It's not Sakura's fault she'll never be who you so desperately wish she could be.)

"You don't have to lie," she interrupts you with a bitter laugh. "I'm a big girl, Kakashi, I can take it. Don't worry about me."

She sounds ancient and tired and you want to cry.

"Sakura—"

One thigh under your hands tenses and it pulls out of your grasp as she kicks the door.

It splinters, and light pours in.

You blink, and she's gone.

You don't rub your fingers together for the rest of the night, remembering how soft she was under your touch and you certainly don't wonder if she carries bruises from you pressed into her thighs.

You shouldn't be here.

You don't belong here.

She won't want to wake up and find you here.

But she almost died thinking that you hate her, when it couldn't be further from the truth.

The only person you hate is yourself.

Your friends watch you carefully, sideways, as they stream in and out of Sakura's hospital room, all of you waiting for her to wake.

You aren't sure what you'll do if she never does.

"Hey," says a familiar voice, a rasp of sound in the dark.

You startle, neck cracking as you sit up abruptly from where you've been slumped over the bed from your seat in a chair.

"You're awake," you say.

Sakura reaches out a hand and touches you.

You still.

"No," she says, "I'm dreaming. Or else you wouldn't be here. You're only ever here in my dreams. Except it isn't really you, is it? I just keep seeing you in Kakashi. It isn't fair."

You aren't breathing.

"I miss you," she says. "I don't understand why I can't find you anywhere. I just keep finding you in the wrong places."

She's sad enough to shatter what's left of your heart to so much dust.

"Don't worry," Sakura promises, "I won't give up."

And then she says a name.

An ancient name.

A name from the beginning of time.

A name from your beginning.

Sakura falls asleep with your name on her lips.

Your very first name.

(Only one person out of thousands has known that name for lifetimes and lifetimes and lifetimes.)

It's impossible, is what it is.

Because Rin is dead and Sakura is the wrong age.

Except that Rin never knew that name and you have always looked at Sakura and seen someone impossible hiding behind her eyes.

It seems about right (if you're right), that the two of you have know all this heartbreak because of your mistake.

It seems about right, in a way that makes you wish a little bit that you could die.

Because you should never be responsible for hurting her the way you've spent the years hurting Sakura with your own blindness and guilt.

"Kakashi?" Sakura says, confused, as she blinks awake. "What are you doing here?"

You take a breath and you say—

It's a name.

And ancient name.

A name only you have said for thousands of years.

And as the last syllable of it falls off your lips, Sakura is already clambering out of bed, careless of her injuries, right into your lap.

You hold her as tight to you as you can manage as she sobs into your chest.

"I thought you had forgotten me. I thought I was wrong. I thought I would never find you."

Sakura cries into your arms until she is naught but the heavy weight of a girl against you.

You hold her easily.

"I'm sorry," you tell her, press into every inch of her skin you can reach. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Words will never be enough.

Lifetimes will never be enough.

You hold her anyways because you thought you'd lost her when, in truth, you'd never even found her.

You hold her as tight as you can and hope that it is at least something.

You're never going to let her go.

A series of shouts, and you look up from your prayers.

Your heart stops.

She cannot—

And yet she is.

"No," you moan when she clambers up to join you. "No, no, no."

She smiles as he cups your face in her hands and presses her forehand down to your own.

"Please," you say. To her, to the gods, to anyone willing to listen and tear her down from here, anyone willing to carry her far away from this fate, from your fate, from the fate you have submitted to because you thought that it could mean her salvation. "Go. Please. My love, please."

Her fingers tighten at the hinges of your jaw, anchoring herself closer still. "I'm sorry," she tells you. She's crying. "I can't. I won't. They won't take you from me, I won't allow them to."

You're crying too.

"You need to live for me," you beg. "Please. I want you to live."

Your eyes are wide open because you can't not steal these last glimpses of her, and her smile breaks your heart open further.

"There's no living without you," she says.

The villagers are screaming around you, but all you can hear is her.

"I wish I could. There's so much I wish, but I won't be separated from you."

You wish your hands weren't bound behind you so that you could hold her. You settle for pressing your foreheads tighter, for leaning deeper into her touch.

"I love you," you say.

There's a sizzling of torches around you.

"I love you," she answers.

As you looks at this girl who loves you, who is going to die for yu, this girl who saved your life and then pled and pled and pled trying to save it a second time and who holds you now in this moment of your deaths like you're the most precious thing in the world, you swear to yourself that no, you will never be separated.

The screaming and the flames are louder now.

You reach down, down, down into the depths of your soul and reach out, out, out until there she is: so much softness and a heart as wide open as the horizon.

You tie a knot.

"I'll see you soon," you promise her.

When you burn, no one can bear to watch the flames straight on. You burn too fast, too hot, too colourless.

The village falls deathly silent when the flames die down as quickly as they erupted: a wild pyre, tall enough to touch the sun.

All there is are ashes.

(Over and over and over again, you keep your vows, across lives and years.

"I love you," you promise.

"I will not be parted from you," you swear.

"I'll see you soon," you breathe.

Over and over and over again, you find each other.

You tied the two of you so tightly with the love that you shared that not even the gods had the heart to sever you.

That all too often you end in tragedy does not erase the way you press foreheads and choose love over despair, again and again and again, across all your lives and all the impossible years.)

"I almost missed you," you tell Sakura.

She laughs.

It's only a little heartbroken.

"It's a good thing I was looking for you, then."

She hooks her fingers at the hinge of your jaw, and pulls your foreheads together.

"Don't worry," she promises, "we'll always find each other."

You breathe in, iron and flower petals and the warmth of her, not a curl of smoke to be found.

It's hard to believe it in this life, that you will find each other in the next and the one after that, not when you almost missed her here, here where she was right in front of you the whole time.

But here she is, and here she always ends up, in every lifetime, all the way back to the beginning, all the way back to that first life where a girl dragged your half-dead body back to her home and nursed you until you woke up to green green eyes smiling down at you.

You reach down, down, down into the depths of your soul.

You ring with her laughter, a great cacophony of it, the best thing you've ever heard.

You almost missed her, and yet:

She has never once been missing from you.

"I thought I was wrong, that something had gone wrong and my compass was off and I'd never see you again," she tells you one night, years later, in the dark.

You kiss her softly, sweetly, until you melt away a little bit of despair.

"You couldn't," you tell her, "you'll never. You chose me, and I'll never let you go."

There are bands around your fingers and holes still where you tried so viciously to ignore your instincts.

But you keep your vows, in the end.

You always do.

And you always will.

Chapter 34

And of course, of course, he's never seen something so bright as the sunlight glinting off of Sakura's hair, but for the rest of his life, Kakashi will remember this moment of colour bleeding across the world from the place where 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 sky 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.

Some days 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 glances. (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.)

Anyways, it's just one more shade of grey to him.

Also, Sakura almost catches him a couple of times and proceeds to spend the next several weeks compulsively combing her hair out of the unfounded fear that something's wrong with it.

Kakashi feels only 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 goad 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. (Kakashi is their teacher and deserves more respect: it's the least Naruto can do for his beloved sensei to take on Sakura's wrath in his place.)

Unfortunately for Kakashi's sense of humour, 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 names of the colours like a mantra he couldn't bear to forget, even though he'd forgotten how to see them.

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 at 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 in 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 hasn't gotten Genma back for that thing with the squirrels from eight years ago yet.

"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 skin to skin, 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 every time 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 any time 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 it is 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 eye. "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 as 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 right answer is. She's just Sakura. She's a girl and some days 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 will remember 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 sky 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.

Chapter 35:

Sakura adjusts her mask once and then forces her hands back down to her sides.

She isn't nervous; she's a professional.

It's just discomforting to be joining a team outside of her usual roster. Teams weave rhythms, and there's no guarantee that Sakura will slot smoothly into what they've already built.

Plus, there's always the fact that some people don't think much of her due to a plethora of reasons that include everything from the colour of her hair to her specialization.

Admittedly, she usually disabuses them of any disregard pretty quickly, but Sakura is still getting really tired of having to prove her worth again and again.

You would think that there'd be a general level of respect going in—she had to pass the same tests as anyone else to wear an ANBU mask, after all—but even now, despite all of Tsunade-shishō's work and Itachi-senpai's reputation, there's a snide dismissal that mednins have yet to shake.

Sakura inhales and smoothes out her chakra.

Looking or feeling nervous is the worst mistake she could make.

ANBU can smell fear. They feed on it.

(Which Sakura knows especially; nothing is more fun than tormenting new interns at the hospital. Genin are so easy.)

Then she slips in through an upper window of the building that she's been instructed to meet her new team in, a sharp grin stretched across porcelain and green eyes shining out from shadows.

"Oh," she says when she walks into the room.

Or, well, when she flashsteps through the door with her fastest shunshin, narrowly missing the flock of senbon coming for her middle mass and neatly sidestepping the simple but vicious genjutsu laid out at her feet.

"It's you assholes."

Tenzō waves at her sheepishly in apology for his teammates.

Sakura rolls her eyes but waves back.

She's going to kill Naruto's dad.

Kushina-san will probably forgive her.

The Hokage sighs when they troop into his office.

It's only a little pitiful.

Behind her mask, Sakura smirks. Of the four of them, she's the only one not currently completely caked in mud.

He stares them all down in turn, ending with their esteemed taichō who is more concerned with bemoaning his ruined book than the disaster that is his team.

The Hokage sighs again, and then turns to face Sakura.

"Was it relevant to the events of the mission?" Namikaze Minato asks.

Sakura shrugs.

Not exactly.

"Then I don't want to know. You're all dismissed. Please go shower. Kakashi, I want the mission report by tomorrow, and it better both be in your own handwriting and longer than three sentences. Tenzō, don't let him convince you to forge anything for him."

In unison, the bow and file out quietly, but Sakura can practically taste poor Tenzō's blush behind his mask.

They're all too tired to push and shove as they make their way back to headquarters. They could all go home, of course, but the water pressure in the ANBU headquarters is some of the best in the village.

Also, Sakura doesn't want to pass by an opportunity to tease Tenzō.

She and Genma mock him gently about his ability to stare down a full platoon of Iwa nin without blinking, but gods forbid he refuse Kakashi something if he asks, as they all undress. Sakura heals bruises and cuts as they are bared, superficial things that could be safely left alone for the sake of conserving chakra for the journey home, but minor annoyances that are a matter of moments to heal now that they're safely ensconced in Konoha.

"Shit, Haruno, I thought you were a healer?"

Sakura looks down at the scar across her stomach that Genma is gesturing to.

"I took a poisoned sword to the stomach when I was fifteen. A tactical move but, in retrospect, not my best decision ever. Shishō refused to fix it for me, and since I didn't have the control, it stayed. It makes for a good reminder these days."

"A good reminder of what?"

She shrugs and doesn't answer despite the pestering that follows her as she waves to the boys and leaves them for the women's showers.

Later, hair heavy and dark with water dripping over her shoulder as she pulls on a shirt, Kakashi appears behind her, two fingers pressed to the matching scar on her back. "That you survived."

His breath is warm on the back of her neck and his fingers burn.

"What?" Sakura breathes, more a gasp than a question.

"The scars, they're a reminder that you survived."

Sakura blinks over her shoulder at him, up and up and up.

His eye is dark and inscrutable and she feels pinned, like a butterfly to a wall or a kunai to a post.

"Um, yeah."

Kakakshi nods, and then he's gone.

As she walks home, Sakura's lower back aches with the phantom weight of a hand pressed there.

If her twelve year old self had known quite how much nudity being a skilled shinobi would result in, Sakura's not certain she would have ever agreed to take the chūnin exams.

It's sparring under the hot sun and peeling themselves out of drenched uniforms after too many days camped in the rain observing a target and shirts torn with blades and being up to her arms in blood as she tries to keep her teammate alive and pranks and seduction missions and falling asleep with your sandals still on but waking up in your pyjamas and so much time spent with these boys she once only knew in passing who are now her dear friends.

Sakura is a shinobi and her body is a tool. And yet, she lights up where Kakashi touches her, even if she doesn't know what he sees when he looks at her, the slash of his grin hidden under porcelain and his eye spinning as he watches her tear through enemies and obstacles like it's all a dance created just for her.

Once, she ends up with torn knuckles and too many injuries to heal amongst the four of them for her hands to make the cut.

Kakashi wraps them carefully with bandages and presses a brief, fierce kiss to each one.

And then when they're back in Konoha, the two of them get in a screaming match over being responsible in the field and they don't speak directly to each other for three weeks.

All is forgiven when Genma drags the whole team out to a spa for "team bonding", but Sakura still doesn't quite know where to put her feet where the ground won't crumble abruptly out from under her.

"And how is my favourite little student?"

Shisui rubs his cheek against hers in greeting and Sakura reluctantly pulls her kunai away from where it's pressed against his jugular.

"Oh," she says, "it's you."

He gasps dramatically and collapses into the seat next to her.

Across the table, Naruto and Sasuke roll their eyes in unison.

"And you two, I guess," Shisui adds dismissively. "But I saw you yesterday at dinner, so I don't really care."

Naruto and Sasuke exchange a meaningful glance and Sakura is halfway across the table trying to temporarily disable Naruto's vocal chords, but he manages to get most of the way through "Sakura has a crush!" before her chakra scalpels do their job.

"Sakura has a crush on her ANBU captain," Sasuke finishes, as Naruto's mouth opens and closes in outrage.

"Sasuke!" Sakura shouts, betrayed.

Sasuke shrugs, and dodges Naruto's increasingly dramatic arm gestures.

"Aw," Shisui coos, "my little student is all grown up."

He tries to smoosh her cheeks together.

Sakura tries to stab his hand with a chopstick.

Shisui desists, and instead half-collapses on the table, chin in his hands.

"We're very proud of our ickle Sakura-chan!" Sasuke deadpans. And then, even more impossibly dry, "Sakura and Kakashi, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S—"

Something black and dark passes over Shisui's face.

Sakura sighs dejectedly and buries her face in her hands, trying to decide if running now will save her.

"You're in love with Hatake Kakashi?!" Shisui shouts.

"Kill me now," Sakura demands.

"Yes," Sasuke answers.

Naruto pelts them all with napkins and gestures demandingly at his throat.

It's going to be a long lunch.

"Hey, Sakura-chan," a half-familiar voice drawls out.

An arm swings around her shoulders.

Sakura looks up from the medical charts in her hands to Uchiha Obito.

"No," she says, and walks away.

She only manages to shake him because she goes to Itachi's office to ask for a consult and ends up sulking at his desk pilfering from the candy stash in his bottom drawer and doing Itachi's paperwork in trade for using his office as a safe haven from busybody Uchiha clan members for the next several hours .

Sakura inhales sharply through her nose.

Oh, it is on.

She's going to ruin him.

"Kakashi," she says, sweet as sugar, laced with cyanide, "I'm going to need you to get my zipper for me."

The stunned silence that echoes out from that statement brings a smile to her face.

"Um… Sakura-senpai?" Tenzō sounds confused but not disapproving, bless his heart.

"I'm going to beat Genma's head in, but I don't want to ruin my dress," Sakura explains patiently.

It's an expensive dress and she's never going to find another quite like it. She's not ruining it for Genma's idiocy. But then, she also isn't going to let said idiocy pass by without avenging her honour.

"So, Kakashi is going to help me out of this dress, and then I'm going to demonstrate exactly what I learned while I studied under the Sannin. All three of them. And then I'm going to meet Ino for drinks and I won't even have to stop back at home to touch up my makeup."

Sakura wonders what her smile is doing to make the boys stare at her quite like that.

The power rushes heady in her veins: honeyed wine and late afternoon sunshine, thick enough to run your fingers through. They should know by now that she is not a creature to be dismissed.

"Kakashi," she says, "the zipper."

Kakashi approaches her on silent feet, wariness in every line of his body,

"Are you sure about this?" he murmurs in her ear as he comes to stand behind her.

Sakura absolutely doesn't shiver at the feel of his hands coming to rest for the briefest of moments on her hips.

"Have you ever known me to start a fight I couldn't finish?" She raises an eyebrow at him over her shoulder as she twists her hair up onto her head and out of his way.

"Well"—his fingers easily catch the zipper pull and he inches it down slowly, careful not to pull and tear the dress (it takes an age)—"there was that time at that shitty bar in Kumo."

"I was winning that."

"Is that what you call having a broken arm and two black eyes while you're near black-out drunk? All while fighting a guy three times your size?"

Sakura sniffs.

"I didn't want to humiliate him too badly."

"Mm," Kakashi hums, not quite in agreement.

The sound of it rumbles in her bones.

How long does it take to undo a zipper?

Finally, finally, the back of her dress gapes open and cool air rushes into the space between them. Kakashi stands back.

But not before letting a single finger draw a line up the length of her spine.

Sakura lets the dress slip down her body and steps out of it neatly, not letting the glittering fabric touch the ground.

"Hold this, won't you?" She hands the dress to Kakashi and he takes it, fumbling.

He's staring at anything that isn't Sakura's currently very black lace clad body.

She probably isn't wearing the best bra for a beat down.

Oh well, she'll make do.

Sakura stretches her hands up above her head and cricks her neck.

Behind her, Kakashi chokes.

She smirks.

Huh.

Later though, she has another man to bring to his knees first.

Sakura toes off her shoes and walks further into clearing at the centre of the training ground.

"C'mon, Sakura, you know I was just joking!" Genma has his hands in the air and he's starting to back away slowly.

If she lets him, Sakura knows he's going to bolt and her vengeance will have to be postponed until at least tomorrow afternoon.

Instead, she presses her heel into the ground and lets her chakra splinter the earth in a straight line between them, to open a small chasm right between Genma's feet.

And while he's trying to not stumble, she spins out a dainty little genjutsu and drops it somewhere useful, for later.

"Time to live up to that mouth of yours, Shiranui."

"Oh, baby, my mouth lives up to its reputation." Genma waggles his eyebrows, but his eyes don't dip away from her face.

While she appreciates his relative restraint, Sakura is still going to kick his ass.

"Alright then, sweetheart," Sakura croons, "let's hear you sing for me."

It's a lot of screaming after that.

Sakura doesn't even chip her nail polish.

When she's done, and Genma is a smoking wreck on the forest floor, Sakura skips back to Kakashi, takes her dress from his limp arm, and shimmies back into it.

The silver sequins shiver in the air, reflecting the light of the setting sun in a thousand colour and Sakura twists back and forth a few times, admiring the effect.

She loves this dress.

When she looks up from adjusting the fit of it and smoothing out the skirt, Kakashi is still staring at her, something shocked and soft that she doesn't know how to name in his eyes.

"Shit," Sakura says, still towelling her hair. "You aren't Ino."

She's standing at her front door in nothing but a pair of cotton boy shorts with cherries on the front and her rattiest bra.

"Not quite," Kakashi says. "Can I come in?"

His hands are in his pockets and he's wavering on her doorstep, his weight too far forward on his toes.

Sakura steps back, holding the door open for him.

His shoulder brushes along her as he passes by, and Sakura shivers.

"Do you need something?" Sakura asks.

She makes an effort to keep towelling her hair and to not cross her arms over her body.

It's nothing he hasn't seen before, it's just a body.

(Just flesh and blood and bone. Just a million nerve endings and her pulse skittering in her throat.)

"I'm—"

Kakashi pauses, runs his fingers through his hair.

When he looks up, looks at her, looks right through her, his pupils are blown wide enough for Sakura to fall into.

If she'd thought about sex with Kakashi—not that she has, of course, that would be ridiculous—but if she had…

She'd imagine that he'd be content to let her push him back on the bed, one hand on the middle of his chest until he was spread out before her like an offering. He'd keep his hands lightly on her hips as she took him in hand and let her sink slowly, slowly, slowly onto the length of his cock. He'd tense and hiss in a breath, but he wouldn't push, would let her take as long as she needed to get used to the almost painful stretch, until their hipbones were flush and she was panting with the need for more.

She'd imagine that he'd help her stay balanced as she fucked herself onto his cock, but no more. He'd look up at her with dark eyes and a clenched jaw, and let her slowly speed up, her thigh muscles screaming protest, until all they were was the smack of flesh echoing in the room and a tight coil of pleasure burning brighter every time Sakura let herself fall.

She'd imagine that when she was getting close—all high, breathy moans and yes! and please 'Kashi, just touch me touch me touch me—Kakashi would finally manage to pull one hand from where it was pressing bruises into her hip to thumb sloppy circles on her clit until she came undone. She'd fuck herself through it, until she couldn't stand it anymore, and she dropped onto his chest.

Only then, would she imagine Kakashi flipping them. Pining her hands above her head as he suckled bruises onto her throat and chest and breasts. He'd bite almost viciously at her nipples until she was moaning and writhing against him, asking for more. And then he'd hold her down and fuck her until the only thing she knew was his name.

If she were to imagine sex with Kakshi, that is. Which she doesn't, of course. That would be absurd.

They aren't like that, the two of them.

They're teammates and they're something like friends, but they aren't people who stand across from each other while Sakura is in nothing but underwear and devour each other with only their eyes.

"Fuck it," Kakashi breathes, "please don't punch me through a wall if I've read this the wrong way."

And then he's taking three steps, right up into her space, threading his fingers through her damp hair as the towel falls helplessly from her own.

And Sakura is reaching for him too, hands all over his shoulders, sneaking under the edge of his shirt to cling at his back.

And her legs are around his waist and her back is to a wall and Kakashi is kissing her and kissing her and kissing her, a crashing wave of teeth and tongue and lips and Sakura will drown happily in this abandon.

He's a lightning strike.

Sakura is more than happy to burn.

If she'd thought about it—sex with Kakashi—she'd have been right about the bruises on her throat and the way his name sounds when it's torn from her throat like the only word that matters.

"Ino is going to be pissed at you, by the way." Sakura's hair is a curtain around them, shielding them from the outside world.

Kakashi catches her hand and presses a quick kiss to the finger that was chasing circles on his chest. "Why's that?"

"Because her advice was to wear sexy underwear to get your attention. And, apparently, I've been buying the wrong underwear; you're into virginal cotton panties."

Kakashi snorts, and collapses into giggles.

Sakura has to lean down and drink the laughter from his mouth.

They spend long, lazy minutes consumed with one another before they settle back down into something softer.

Sakura is too tender still for anything more quite yet.

"It wasn't the cherries that did it for me," Kakashi says. "Don't you dare tell Ino that it was."

Sakura trails a finger down the scar bisecting his face. "Then what was it?"

Kakashi shrugs and smiles at her.

It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

"Just… it was you."

Sakura stares at him for a long moment, mouth dropping into a soft 'o' of surprise and awe.

Then she crashes down on him, incapable of not kisses those perfect, terrible words from his lips.

It turns out, she isn't too tender after all.

Chapter 36:

"Don't tell me what you should do, tell me what you want!"

Sakura is near tears, and she hates herself a little bit, because she'd promised herself—promised that girl she'd been once—that she would never again break over a man who can't bring himself to love her the way she needs to be loved.

She hates him more though; Kakashi was supposed to be different.

"Don't you understand, Sakura? I'm no good for you!"

In an absent corner of her mind, she wonders how they got here: screaming at each other in Sakura's too small living room, the walls echoing with too much they've left unsaid for so long, the remains of their take out scattered across her coffee table, wine glass mostly empty.

"You don't get to tell me that. This isn't about deserving. The only thing this is about is me and you and how we feel."

She feels like she's bargaining with the battered remains of her heart.

Sakura should have chosen another game; she has too much of her shishō in her.

And Kakashi is shaking his head, no no no, like he can shake her words off, like her heart isn't enough to pierce through to him.

She wonders if she got on her knees and begged for her life if he'd hear her instead of whatever story he's playing out in his head.

It feels like she's begging for her life.

"There's blood on my hands, Sakura. I'm a monster. I break everything I touch. I'm not risking that. I'm not risking you."

She'd cry for how his voice cracks through, but she's too busy crying for herself and all that he is letting fall to pieces at his feet.

"So? We're shinobi, Kakashi. You think you're the only one with blood on your hands?"

"You couldn't understand. You aren't like me, Sakura. You put things back together. You're not a monster like me."

Her breath catches in her lungs, catches like a knife in her lungs.

She's immolating.

She's crumbling.

She's ash and dust.

She'd thought—

Years now, they've been doing this dance.

Years.

Ever since Kakashi smiled at her after the war had ground down to something they dared call peace and told her to drop the "sensei".

Years of shared meals and training session and missions, of laughter and stories and quiet secrets.

She'd thought—

But even now, more than a decade out from Team 7, and he still thinks—

Sakura is shinobi.

And there has been so much blood spilt for that, for her to claim that title.

She'd thought he saw her. Saw her as she is, fault lines and all, but now—

The part of her that is small and petty and cruel wonders if this has all been a game or, worse maybe, all in her head.

She's done that before, after all, seen more than what was being offered, found love in the barest facsimile of courtesy.

"You think blood makes you monstrous?"

It's a cold ancient thing speaking through her, a creature in greyscale with dripping fangs: every rage and every slight honed wicked sharp, a death knell, Sakura at twelve and nothing she can do will matter in the face of the boys in front of her.

"You think I'm something that you have to deserve?"

i.

On a mission with Ino-Pig and Chōji and Shikamaru, Asuma-sensei a faint impression of amusement and smoke behind them, everything running smoothly, jokes and oblique references and hair tips, they'll be back in Konoha in a few more days, the mission over but for the return trip.

And then high-alert, hands on weapons, Shikamaru directing with hand signs in the quiet before the storm until it's quicksilver motion, Ino's hair spinning and shadows blooming and a choked curse from Chōji as he dodges a fireball, heat against her skin.

Kunai curled comfortably in her palms as as she moves, rainwater slick, counting heartbeats.

And there.

As easy as breathing.

All her training coming down on a single point.

Even rocks split seamlessly under her touch: ribs stand no chance.

iii.

Stumbling out of an operating room after six straight hours of surgery, the phantom taste of poison on her tongue, weariness in every line of her body.

Having to stumble through the explanation: "I'm sorry, there was nothing more we could do, the damage was just too bad. I'm sorry. The body will be available to you tomorrow. I'm sorry, I could do nothing more."

And the tears then, the lover beating at her chest, "But I love her, but I love her, but I love her," and no strength to pull her away, no heart to pull away.

Going home to sit in the bottom of the shower until the water has long turned cold. "We can't save them all, Sakura," and the pat to the head all as empty as the way sobs sound bouncing off the tiles.

xvii.

Eyes distant and all the more cold for the missing warmth. "I would send Shizune on this, but she's dealing with that outbreak on the border and this can't wait."

And she's never had a mission scroll with that seal but she knows what it means.

"You know what to do."

And she does.

Knives in the dark.

So easy to make a heart stop, just the brush of a palm, she knows the nerves so well.

xxii.

His hubris is a familiar choking weight on her chest, but she's shouldered heavier burdens.

So easy to look harmless, take a sword through the stomach, and smile.

She's long learned to look and find where creatures keep their hearts.

?.

"Last one into the base buys the team dinner!"

A snap, and she rides the body between her thighs down to the ground as it slumps.

Fierce porcelain grin, and she races, adrenaline bright in her veins.

"I'm not a prize. I'm not your absolution."

She's going to have scars on her cheeks from where the tears are burning as they fall.

"I never thought—"

"Get out."

He's pale, red blotches high on his cheeks and hair in disarray.

If she was something softer, she'd gentle them back down, pull them together on the couch, run her fingers through that hair, tell him she understands, that she forgives him, that she'll wait.

Sakura is not a soft thing.

She is a shattered thing, and she has too many edges for mercy.

"Sakura—"

"Get out."

He goes.

As she washes dishes in the sink, Sakura pretends to not notice the way she's scrubbing at the creases of her palms for something that is not there.

Sakura is tired of putting things back together.

It's so much easier to break.

Chapter 37: don't burn the witch

"Sakura…"

It's really just too early for Ino to sound so much like Sakura's mother when she was disappointed that her daughter had somehow managed to accidentally catch the drapery on fire. Again.

Sakura has the strongest urge to hide her blackened fingers behind her back.

And then she realizes what, exactly, is behind her back.

Or, rather, who.

Fuck.

"Hey, Ino." Sakura holds the greeting overly long, her voice peaking to crack off on the last syllable of Ino's name.

The figure pressed snug along her spine chuckles and the sound rumbles in her bones.

Sakura pinches him on the thigh.

"I was going to congratulate you on getting some," Ino continues, unperturbed by the interlude, "but I generally try to not encourage my friends when they start hooking up with Unseelie."

Sakura squawks in outrage, but Kakashi preempts her spluttered defence of her (relative) virtue.

"Not quite," he tells Ino.

She squints at him for a long moment. "I knew I didn't like you for a reason."

Sakura groans and tries to shove the hands that have crept around to span her hips away before Ino notices them. Knowing perfectly well, of course, that Ino has definitely already noticed, but appearances need to be kept.

"You don't like him because every time the two of you are in a room together, he manages to get a piece of jewellery off of you before you notice."

"She started it," Kakashi grumbles in her ear.

He knows exactly what he's doing—what with the air tracing the curve of her ear, causing every nerve edging up her neck to electrify—the bastard.

Sakura, very maturely, decides not to take a side in this century-spanning feud.

"Why are you here, Ino?" Anyone else, and it would be rude. But it's Ino, so Sakura doesn't feel guilty.

Ino rolls her eyes and shakes her hair so that it cascades once again perfectly down her back. "I'm here to make sure you haven't died; no one has seen you in two weeks, idiot."

Sakura frowns.

Really?

Oops.

"Huh."

"Huh? That's all you have to say for yourself?" Ino's voice is getting low and grating, like the slow rumble of roots grinding stones down to less than dust.

Rather than start a fight that's going to turn her small patch of front lawn (and most of the street) into just a lot of cracked earth and scorch marks, Sakura shoves Kakashi aside with an elbow and leads the way inside, making sure to leave the door open so that Ino doesn't just break it down.

And, hmm.

Looking at the number of books and the sheer amount of takeout detritus, Sakura is starting to recreate the picture of how she has apparently managed to lose two full weeks.

"Have you left the house in the past month?" Ino demands drily, a vague sneer of disgust twisting her face into something that fills Sakura with an enormous amount of guilt and the need to go leave offerings at her parents' graves.

"I have too," Sakura mutters, piling up containers to dispose of in her arms and opting to not mention that she's pretty sure it's only been once, and that was to go to her favourite apothecary to replenish her herb stocks.

Which reminds her, the small vegetable garden she keeps in her parody of a backyard is definitely now all dead or wild by now.

She's really not sure why she tries.

"I've been busy."

Ino looks around at the books and the frankly alarming number of partially started notebooks spread across every flat surface and most of the furniture. "I can see that. What, exactly, have you been busy with?"

Judging by her tone, Ino knows exactly what Sakura's been occupied by but, regardless, Sakura jerks a thumb in Kakashi's direction.

Who has gently set aside the piles of books there to lounge across the couch.

It's a mess of a sprawl, and yet he still manages to ooze aloof control.

Sakura wonders if all Not-Crows are born with effortless ease in their bones.

Judging by her best guesses for what her Not-Crow really is, she's pretty sure he was.

The bastard.

"So," Ino addresses Kakashi, "you're a long way from home."

He shrugs and looks right at Sakura. "I'd say I'm at home right here, actually."

Sakura flees to the kitchen to make tea.

(Apparently, at some point they've run out of everything but for a very weird watermelon flavoured monstrosity at the back of the cupboard that Sakura is mostly certain is Naruto's fault.

Kakashi and Sakura watch on with fascinated horror as Ino skulls a full pot on her own.

Sakura isn't actually certain that she does it completely out of schadenfreude. Ino might just be the kind of person who genuinely enjoys watermelon flavoured tea.)

"So, you don't want me to tell you what he is?" Ino asks, bemused.

And then, a few minutes later, "You swore a blood oath that you would figure it out yourself or not at all?!"

"In all fairness," Sakura muses over the rim of her teacup—apparently it gets better with time, or Sakura has just lost all of her tastebuds to the horror of it—"I'm pretty sure I hadn't slept in three days and you know how irrationally stubborn I can get when I'm tired."

Ino turns to glare at Kakashi. "You're the one who's supposed to be keeping her out of idiocy like this, not encouraging it!"

He shrugs and burrows his face deeper into Sakura's thigh.

She tightens her fingers in his hair.

"Her evocation spells are a lot harder to dodge when I don't have wings and I'm almost a hundred-fold heavier."

Ino lets out a sharp scream, throws her hands in the air, and stomps out to the backyard to try to salvage what remains of the garden.

Flowers bloom in her steps.

Sakura gets out a pair of shears.

Kakashi whines when his head bounces off the couch cushion.

"I could tell you, you know."

Sakura opens one eye.

Yes, Kakashi is definitely in bed with her.

She's mostly certain he wasn't when she went to sleep.

"You know, creeping into women's beds when they're unaware is invasive and creepy."

Kakashi blinks in the dark.

Sakura is suddenly very aware of the way what little light echoing in from the streetlights catches on the backs of his eyes.

"But you're Sakura."

And he is Kakashi.

She snuggles a little bit closer.

He's warmer and much easier to cuddle now than he ever was when he had two wings and a head full of feathers.

"Do you want to tell me though?" she asks.

He lets the question sink down through the weight of the night.

"I don't want you to know what I was before you. But I think you'll need to know."

Sakura considers the sharp lines of his face, the heavy regret etching the skin between his eyes.

"Do I need to know right this moment?"

Kakashi's mouth twists. And then he laughs, stunned and amazed and just a little sad. "No. Not right this moment."

"Good," Sakura grumps, and winds her arms around him, putting her ear to his ribcage. His heartbeat is faster than anything human. "Then it can wait. I'm going back to sleep."

And she does.

When she wakes, Kakashi hasn't moved, and the first thing she sees is impossible tenderness and something so old and terrible it makes her breath catch hidden in the depths of those dark eyes that haven't changed in all the decades she's known him.

She knows him.

That's enough for now.

Chapter 38

"Sensei," Kakashi murmurs as they watch Obito-baka flail around doing something that might be called an approximation of a Uchiha training kata, if one were a blind man on the moon, "is there a good reason that there's another genin team spying on us?"

Minato-sensei sighs and doesn't turn to look at the any of the three genin—or, well, Kakashi is hoping they're genin, or else that's just embarrassing (unless, they mean to be obvious?)—currently spread throughout the forest surrounding their training area.

"A good reason? No. But there is a reason, yes," Minato-sensei answers.

Behind his mask, Kakashi scowls.

Not helpful.

He waits, hoping that Minato-sensei will elaborate.

He doesn't.

"Are you going to share the reason, even if it isn't a good one?"

Kakashi takes a moment to consider how his speech has become even more labyrinth with his time under Minato-sensei. He wouldn't have thought it possible, before, and yet.

Minato-sensei considers the question, absurdly pensive.

Kakashi waits, and watches Rin wince as she dodges a particularly enthusiastic punch.

She really should at least pinch Obito when he leaves himself wide open like that; babying him helps no one.

Oh well. That's what Kakashi is for.

"I guess," Minato-sensei finally decides, "I should do my duty to the next generation and teach a lesson."

Then, quicker than lighting, faster than light, Minato-sensei is gone and back again, three shrieking genin in his hands.

"Good afternoon, Team 17," he says calmly.

Held in his grasp, a particularly excitable blond is squirming, trying to extract himself from the hand dangling him by his collar.

In the other hand, what can only be an Uchiha is attempting to stab Minato-sensei's wrist with a missing kunai.

And, perched on his shoulders and slumped dejectedly against his head, is a pink-haired girl looking alarmingly like a wet cat, minus the sopping fur.

"I told you he'd spot us," the girl says.

"Fucking damnit!" the blond yells. "We had you! I know we had you!"

"Naruto," Minato-sensei scolds, "watch your language." And he shakes Naruto a bit, to emphasize his point. "And, no, you didn't have me. You really need to work on your stealth, kiddo. I could hear you for miles. Also, Sasuke-kun, please stop trying to stab me."

"Good afternoon, Minato-san," the girl continues, ignoring her teammates.

Minato-sensei tilts his head a fraction, trying to smile up at the girl. "That was a nice bit of genjutsu, Sakura-chan. Just watch the initial input of chakra and try to smooth it out; I felt it spike. Otherwise, I don't think I would have noticed you."

Naruto howls in rage. Minato-sensei shakes him again.

"Now, you, tell your mother we have better ways of paying you an allowance than her paying for D-rank missions where you spy on me."

"Ha!" Naruto exclaims. "Wasn't a spying mission, so there!"

Minato-sensei drops the now limp Uchiha like he's a hot coal.

The Uchiha lands on his feet and stalks off a few feet to glare, all feline offence.

"If I let you down," Minato-sensei asks, "are you going to play nice with my team?"

Naruto sighs and crosses his arms. "Yeah."

"Promise of a lifetime?"

And the last bit of steel Kakashi hadn't even noticed slumps out of the boy. "Fine… Promise of a lifetime. No harem-no-jutsu."

Kakashi mouths "harem-no-jutsu" under his breath as Minato-sensei's will to live appears to leave his body.

""I'm going to kill Jiraiya-sensei," he mutters as he places Naruto down on the ground, eyes narrowed, watching for retaliation.

But Naruto follows through on his promise and bounces over to mock his Uchiha teammate for getting caught, despite having obviously gotten caught himself.

Finally, Minato-sensei swings the girl down from his shoulders.

Her hair arcs through the air like a swirl of flower petals, like blood in water.

Kakashi stares.

"Pretty."

And starts when he realizes that was him, the word punched right out of him.

Minato-sensei is talking to Team 17, something about their sensei and Kushina-san, but Kakashi isn't listening.

He's over on the other side of the clearing, running through hand signs and absolutely not trying to figure out the colour of Sakura's eyes.

Chapter 39

sakura makes a list.

they're all black scorch marks on her heart.

(she wonders how much longer she'll have to study, how much more she'll have to bleed, before she learns how to heal the matters of the heart. she's so sick of hurting.)

1. i'm too old for you.

2. i'm no good for you.

3. i'll only bring you pain.

4. i loved a girl once. (i think.) And i put my hand through her chest, burnt the heart right out of her. and oh, but you remind me so much of her, and ribcages are so fragile.

5. you deserve someone who can smile at you and not hate themselves for it.

6. you're too young.

7. you don't know what you want yet.

8. losing you wouldn't destroy me—i've lived long enough to know that—and i'm so sick and tired of living on with nothing but ghosts for company.

9. i'd trade so much for you to have a happier ending.

the worst though, is the one she wishes knows is a lie.

1. i don't love you.

she wonders which one of them kakashi is lying to.

she wonders which one of them he's trying to convince.

(she wonders if he's lying at all.)

Chapter 40

"—and please, please stay quiet! He can't know you're here."

Kakashi is very secure in his relationship (and his ability to sense chakra signatures). He knows that whoever or whatever Sakura is attempting to hide in the closet where he won't discover it, isn't a secret lover or something tawdry.

(Although, what if it's a time travelling version of himself from the future who can't risk Kakashi seeing him for fear of unravelling the integrity of spacetime? A daring, dangerous love triangle, where Kakashi is two points of the polygon…)

Kakashi shakes his head and clears his throat. "Sakura, I'm home and I brought the leftovers from that fancy luncheon thing with the Kazekage. Kankouro says hi, and Temari wants to know when you're paying up on your gambling debts." Kakashi pauses. "When did you rack up gambling debts, anyways? And since when do you lose?"

Sakura rolls her eyes and slips down the stairs to perch on the second to last one, almost eye level. She drapes her arms over his shoulders and Kakashi's hands fall naturally to her hips.

"I didn't lose. Temari is just a cheating cheater, and Ino was her accomplice. Also, they got Hinata too drunk to play referee."

That doesn't clarify much, but Kakashi decides that he's better off not knowing the details.

"Did Gaara shell out for that fancy sushi place again? Getting him hooked on their ankimo was a smart move."

Kakashi smirks.

He loves long cons.

"I know. I put a box of your favourite in the fridge."

Sakura smiles and tries to slip past him to the kitchen. Kakashi just tightens his hold on her hips and steps up on the stairs, bringing their chests flush.

"First, though, darling wife of mine. What's hiding in the closet?"

Sakura's eyes widen, her pink lashes fanning gently against her cheeks, mouth parting in an ripe moue: all confused and soft and delicate. "The closet?" she asks.

"Meow?" answers the closet.

Sakura swears, viciously.

Later, Sakura is wearing nothing but one of his old jōnin shirts with the sleeves rolled up, humming contently as she pops sashimi into her mouth with her fingers.

The heathen.

Kakashi glares at the purring kitten curled up on his chest.

"How did I agree to this?" he demands of the tiny black smudge.

The tiny black smudge purrs impossibly louder in response.

"You're an easy mark," Sakura mumbles out around a mouthful of food.

Kakashi scratches a little chin, and absolutely does not pout.

He is not.

Chapter 41

Rin pulls his gaze from where he's been aggressively not watching the dance floor back to her with the shock of a cool glass against the skin of his hand.

Kakashi doesn't think he startles obviously, but Rin is lifting an eyebrow at him anyways.

"Deep in thought?" she murmurs into his ear over the boom of the bass, only just loud enough to catch over the sound.

"Hmm," Kakashi hums and takes a sip from the offered drink. And winces.

Rin grins, all teeth.

"This is water," Kakashi says, dry enough to make a desert envious. "Why am I drinking water at a club?"

Rin shrugs and drops into the seat next to him, taking a long sip of her own fruity monstrosity through its even more monstrous bendy straw. "You get mopey when you drink too much, and you're being mopey enough as it is. So you get to stick with water. Because even if you insist on being miserable, it doesn't mean the rest of us want to be miserable, and you're a misery when you're moping."

Kakashi hunches his shoulders over his water and glares down at it. "I'm not moping."

He can practically hear Rin's eyebrows doing acrobatics beside him.

"Sure you're not. And that's not Sakura making out with a stranger on the dance floor."

Because he's a masochist, Kakashi's head whips up, trying to spot her.

And, because Rin's a sadist, Sakura is still being spun silly by Obito, the two of them clearing a wide space around them as they—honest to god—swing dance. (Kakashi has never gotten the story of why they both know how to swing dance. Or, well, he knows why Obito knows how to swing dance and has never mustered up the courage to ask Sakura how she knows, and no one else is willing to tell him.)

Instead of addressing the way that Rin is currently cackling into her drink, straw almost slipping up her nose, Kakashi asks, "Why don't you ever dance with Obito like that? And doesn't it make you uncomfortable?"

'Like that' being the way that Sakura is currently mostly wrapped around Obito as she slips down his body, the two of them flush and laughing.

"You're an idiot," Rin declares. "Also, the first and only time Obito tried to lift me, I reflexively threw him across the room and now he's too scared of me to try again."

"I'm not an idiot," Kakashi says.

Rin spins her stool so that her knees are pressed into his thigh. "Kakashi," she says, cupping his cheek with one hand, "I love you, but you are very, very dumb."

And then she taps his cheek, spins back to resting position, and returns to her drink.

The slurp of the straw draws a shudder down his spine.

They sit in silence.

Kakashi isn't an idiot.

He doesn't know what Rin is talking about.

Except. Well.

Except for the fact that Kakashi has been pining since the first time he finally met the infamous Haruno Sakura and she took some creepy med student to pieces with words sharper than a scalpel edge and left the boy with a pair of broken glass, a bloody nose, and the fear of ever saying anything disparaging about women in STEM ever again.

Except for the fact that Kakashi is a grown man and his dreams have been nothing but pink for four years and if he could bottle the way Sakura's laughter sounds he would and she loves dogs and she once drank the entire Akatsuki band under the table to win a poker game whose pot included Naruto's prize frog money purse because the blond has lost everything in his pockets plus his second-favourite shirt at a game the previous weekend and sometimes she smiles just because of him and—

Kakashi is in love with Sakura and hasn't done anything about it.

And Rin knows perfectly well how long he's been pining because, in addition to being the best ER nurse in Konoha and a black belt in multiple martial arts, Rin also reads minds.

(Or, well, because every time Kakashi gets too drunk, Rin drags him home so that he doesn't embarrass himself and lets him wax eloquently all over her shoulder about the colour of Sakura's hair or the particular way she kept up with Genma's pickup line competition that night or that Sakura also likes dogs, Rin, she's perfect, isn't she perfect? Imma marry her so that I can keep her forever.)

Kakashi almost spills his water when Sakura and Obito clatter back to the table, a smiling mess.

"Rin!" Obito cheers. "Did you see that last dip?"

Rin fondly brushes a curl of sweat-stained hair from Obito's forehead. "I did, babe. I really like the leg flourish you added. And it's Sakura, so I didn't worry that she'd drop you, regardless of how low she had you."

Sakura flexes. "Don't worry, Rin, I'd never damage your boy toy. Thanks for lending him to me!"

"Sakura-chan," Obito whines, "don't make it dirty! You promised to never make it dirty!"

"You don't want to be my boy toy?" Rin asks, stepping neatly in between what was sure to eventually devolve into an extremely childish pinching fight if not averted.

Obito sniffs. "I prefer 'lover'."

Sakura makes a face. "Ew."

Obito tries to elbow her but Sakura knocks his arm aside and follows it up with a flick to his nose.

"Children," Rin rolls her eyes, "don't make me separate you two."

Taking the high road, Sakura stomps over to slump into the chair on Kakashi's other side.

"I could take him," she mutters under her breath, almost lost to the music.

Kakashi smiles down at her, catching on the way the lights of the club reflect against her skin, turning her into wash of colours. "Of course you could. But it's Rin you'd have to worry about, and I believe in you, Sakura, but Rin scares me more."

Sakura considers that thought and then bounces upwards, slump disappearing from her shoulders. "You're right. If I did manage to win against Rin, it'd definitely require a lot of property damage, and then we wouldn't be allowed back here, and I like that we've finally found a club that doesn't yell at us for swing dancing on their dance floor."

Kakashi's smile widens at her rambling.

Then, "…Has there ever been a club that let you swing dance somewhere other than their dance floor?"

Sakura doesn't answer him. "Oh! Where is Obito going?"

Kakashi is… not sure that Sakura and Obito didn't once find a club that let them swing dance somewhere extremely unsafe and/or insane. Like the bar. Or the table tops.

"Obito said something about requesting a song?" Rin answers, watching Obito walk away and searching blindly for her straw. When she finally finds it, she goes to take a sip, frowning when the ice at the bottom rattles, her drink empty. "Damn. Sakura, do you want another drink?"

"I'm good, thanks though."

Rin shrugs and then walks off to replenish her drink.

Kakashi looks down at his empty glass of water. It wasn't empty before.

Sakura smiles impishly and wipes at the lipstick imprint on the glass, the colour the same as the one staining her lips.

"Rude."

She laughs. "Come dance with me."

Sakura is dragging him onto the dance floor before he can think to refuse.

(Not, of course, that he would. Not Sakura.)

Sakura leads them through the crowd, keeping Kakashi close, and he resists the urge to let the press of bodies press him closer.

But then Sakura is stopping, the crowd and the music and the lights are pulsating around them, his thigh is between both of hers and her hips are under his hands.

It's so easy to fall into it all.

So easy to let it fall away.

"You don't dance enough." Sakura's words kiss his ear, his jaw, her breath moist and warm.

It would be so easy to turn his head and taste them.

Instead, Kakashi tugs her closer still, buries his face in the curl of her shoulder, lets the music wash him away.

(His first memory is—

Sunlight slanting soft and pink through the kitchen blinds.

Rice cooking. The burble of boiling water.

Paws clattering.

Cool tile.

Radio static—pop crackle—as a woman croons.

The way tōchan's hands spanned kāchan's waist.

Floral print and cotton.

Spinning and spinning and spinning, kāchan's laughter spinning out as she spins, safe in tōchan's hands.

Small feet balanced on toes and she twirls him, the two of them waltzing, tōchan coaching them, "one, two, three".)

Sakura fingers twist in his hair and Kakashi follows her as she pulls him up, pulls him close, her eyes blurring together and her breath warm on his lips.

"Kakashi," she says, and he can't hear her, can only feel the echo of it in his ribcage from where they're plastered together.

He—

The music shifts, beat dropping away, and Kakashi is peripherally aware that they've slowed to a slow sway, but he doesn't care, Sakura's waist under his hands and her fingers in his hair.

"Kakashi," she says again, a rasp of sound that pierces that last wall he's been shoring up, years and years and years now.

"And how could anybody deny you."

"Kakashi," Sakura says a third time. Demands.

And Kakashi, helpless to do anything other than obey, kisses her.

It's spinning dizzy and Kakashi lets himself fall, content to know that Sakura knows exactly how to control a dip.

Chapter 42

In her hands, she holds strength enough to break the world.

But she touches him so softly, like he's something worth gentleness.

Kakashi doesn't know what to do with her — he never has.

She touches him softly, and with each touch the iron plates around the remnants of his heart rust away.

A healer, and every time she touches him it erodes all his defences, it stitches back together something that could never mend.

And he knows without knowing, exactly what she is.

He never asked.

He'd thanked the gods for the only gift they had every given him: that they'd not sent her to him.

She's an impossible thing.

She's a curse.

She's everything he's never wanted and he can't breathe sometimes for the way she is missing from rooms as he enters them.

If she were to touch him, really touch him, with purpose that was not casual affection or professional cool—

He has nothing left to him.

The blood in his veins and the shrivels of soul that remain are hers.

Kakashi hadn't known. Not at first. Not for a long time.

Because he was fourteen years too old. (Because he was twenty-two years too old and she could never have found him early enough for the scars not to have carved themselves into his soul.)

Kakashi hadn't known, because he was a monster, a murder in the shape of a man, and she was just a girl with a smile bright enough to make the sun jealous.

Except then he watched her fall and fail and bleed and bleed and bleed.

(And he did nothing. And he cried with her as she bled. And he did nothing. And he rejoiced as she walked out of the flames with all but the most secret corners of her heart burned away, no softness left to her but the kiss of her hair against her cheek and the way the syllables of his name are held in her mouth.)

Except then he watched a woman with hands enough to unmake the world, and knew that she wasn't a woman but a collapsing star barely held in the shape of a girl.

She touches him without intent, and he could weep for it because he would not withstand it if she touched him with anything else.

"Kakashi," Sakura says. And it is all rust and ashes and star fire in her mouth.

He devours it.

The blackhole at the heart of him is incapable of resisting.

"Kakashi," Sakura says. She touches his chest and he is crumbling, crumbling, the last walls keeping him intact crumbling away.

"Kakashi," Sakura says and she breathes it into his mouth and he weeps because it's the only thing in his lungs.

He is imploding.

Sakura kisses him.

Teeth tongue hands in her hair and she tastes like rust and sugar he could drown he is drowning he is drowned all is light and this is what it is to burn he wants to pull her into him their bodies one because he cannot be apart from her again he will not survive he has not survived her.

"But how will I know my soulmate, kāchan?" Sakura, five and brimming over with curiosity asks.

"You'll know," her mother promises.

It is a flimsy thing.

The books and the movies promise fireworks and flowers blooming.

She likes the sound of that much better.

Together, they burn.

And around them, all the world is alight.

Chapter 43

The only reason Sakura doesn't put him through a wall, into the hospital for the next three weeks is that she's pretty sure it's an accident. (Rin, Sakura knows, would forgive her for injuring a teammate and endeavour to make sure he lived in fear and without jello for the rest of his life.)

Anyone else, pretty much, and—falling on her so suddenly and spectacularly that neither of them manage to avoid it, their limbs a tangle and their lips inches apart—she would have been certain it was a ploy.

But it's Hatake Kakashi who manages to stumble so badly during a not-so-friendly spar. Hatake Kakashi, who would rather gnaw off his left arm than show an inch of clumsiness or touch her with a ten foot pole.

Sakura is pretty sure he was grown in a test tube, he's so perfect. Or, maybe, that he's an alien. But here he is, tripping over his own limbs after a sudden growth spurt.

(He's taller than her now. She hates him.)

If she weren't so furious about how she's blushing down to her toes from the way his fingers grazed her sides and the weight of his thigh pressed between her legs, she'd laugh at the sight he must have made, tripping so badly out of the blast radius of the earth jutsu she just set off.

Sakura doesn't particularly care that he's made a fool out of the both of them. She's used to Hatake making her look foolish.

Or, well, she wouldn't particularly care that she got caught up in this mess if it meant that, for once, Hatake got some pie smeared on his face too, if it weren't for the fact that Naruto is currently screaming from across the field.

"Hatake, you pervert! Stop groping Sakura-chan! She's too good for you! I'm going to kill you!"

With what air is left in her lungs given the way that Hatake is crushing them, Sakura sighs.

She is in no way looking forward to what is surely going to be a hellish series of missions involving Sai inquiring indelicately about her new relationship, Naruto yelling, and Sasuke-sensei doing absolutely nothing to stop any of his students from killing one another.

"This is all your fault," Hatake grumbles.

Sakura cannot be blamed for the fact that she throws him across the field and beats him into the ground.

Sakura wakes up at some time past midnight, the sky not yet bleeding to grey, her sheets tangled around her feet, every inch of her feverish and itchy, her mind still mired in fog and heat.

Instinctively, she rolls her hips against a weight that is not there, against a body that dissipates like so much morning mist.

"Fuck," she thinks, despairingly.

She does her best not to think about it when she wakes up again, unsatisfied after a night full of dreams.

"Why?" Sakura demands flatly of the universe.

"Shut up," Hatake hisses back, and crushes her further into the back wall of the closet.

Thank all the gods for chest armour.

"You're squishing me," Sakura tells him, her breath a ghost of a whisper along the shell of his ear.

Hatake crushes her further still.

"Shut. Up. You're going to get us caught."

In revenge for the way that he's hot and close and uncomfortable against her, his voice rumbling through her ribcage, Sakura hooks her hand tighter around the back of his neck and digs in with her fingernails.

Fury flares in his eyes and she grins triumphantly.

And then she gulps when he tightens his own hands around her hips, hard enough to bruise.

Asshole.

Sakura resists the urge to one-up him and lean forward to bite at the tendons of his neck: the only part of his body she could reach, pinned as she is.

"You're the one who got us trapped in this closet," she reminds him.

"You're the one who apparently can't get into a building without blowing it to pieces! Has your team never heard of stealth?"

Sakura bares her teeth.

But, well.

It's a fair question.

No, they haven't.

There's a reason Team 17 isn't usually allowed to participate in the kind of black scroll missions that never officially happened.

(And that reason is Naruto. Sakura has never unnecessarily blown out the wall of a building in her life. All of her infrastructure destabilization is deliberate and well thought out, thank you very much.)

"No one would have heard the explosion if you hadn't fucked up the seals on the walls!"

"Me?" Hatake spits, leaning even closer. "I was just following your useless instructions!"

Their lips, Sakura realizes very suddenly, are extremely close.

She can almost taste him.

He's filling up her lungs.

Hatake swallows and blinks.

It's a very slow blink.

Sakura can't look away form the way his eyelashes curl against his cheek.

It's unfair, really, that boys always have such nice eyelashes.

Sakura licks her lips and tastes cotton.

"Hatake," she starts to say.

"Are you planning on being in this closet when the building implodes?" Sai asks conversationally from the doorway.

Sakura barely catches herself from hitting the ground, ass first, when she suddenly finds herself without the weight of a boy bearing her against the wall.

Her hands are trembling.

"Shut up," she snarls at Sai as she stalks passed him, back out into the hallway.

Sai shuts his mouth.

About the sixth time someone catches Sakura in what looks like a compromising position with Hatake, it's the fault of a pet rabbit, a fruit vendor, the Hokage, and a team of genin, all of whom Sakura is now obligated to murder. For the sake of her pride.

She really wishes she'd managed to calmly explain the whole thing when Sasuke-sensei had come across Hatake with his face buried under her skirt, her legs wrapped around his head.

Instead, she'd gone beet-red, stumbled through several half-completed sentences, and then collapsed into a pile of nonsensical goo.

When Sasuke-sensei had turned abruptly on his heel and stalked off, his face had spoke of deep, deep shame.

(Sakura can't believe her beloved sensei now believes that she has forsaken their sacred feud with Team 7 and taken up with an idiot like Hatake.)

(Sakura is never going to get the memory of Hatake's fingers curled around her thighs or his dark, dark eyes burning up at her out of her head.)

"I'm not dating Hatake!" Sakura yells to the suddenly silent bar.

The bar blinks back.

"I didn't think you were, Forehead," Ino says, one eyebrow raised. "I just thought you two were fucking. But now, I think the lady doth protest too much."

Sakura downs the rest of her drink and drops her head to the slightly sticky table.

"That's not even how the quote goes," she moans.

Sakura is content to let him have his way as he laves suckling bites down her stomach, but then he blows at her bellybutton, making her giggle, and skips down to press kisses to her knee, and she has had enough.

Kakashi grins up at her, breathless, when she flips them, his eyes full as he drags his gaze along the length of her, a touch unto itself.

Sakura shudders, and then grinds herself down onto his cock in retaliation.

"Sakura," Kakashi gasps, his hands spanning her waist, thumbs dipping to trace circles in the hollows of her hips.

"Kakashi," Sakura answers, leaning down to tease, her hair dragging along his chest as it slips over her shoulder.

"I need you," Kakashi says.

Sakura smiles and takes his mouth and—

"I am going to murder you," Sakura tells the ANBU when she finally flings her window open.

He waves at her, all cheek, and disappears in a puff of smoke.

"Looks like your mission ended in its usual disaster, hey Haruno?" Hatake drawls out as she slumps through the gate.

Instead of lifting her head to look at him, where he's surely leaning casually against a wall or standing with his hands shoved into his pockets, all effortless ease and careless confidence, Sakura just turns in the direction of her apartment building and starts to trudge home.

She wants a shower and she wants to sleep.

Her hair is filled with mud and she can feel the blood still flaking off her palms.

"Hey," Hatake says, "Haruno."

He grabs her by the shoulder and Sakura whirls.

"Don't touch me!"

Her voice is piercing, too shrill, and Hatake takes a half-step back.

"Leave me alone."

Hatake blinks, and then he looks at her, all-seeing, and she hates him.

She hates that he looks at her and sees all her weaknesses, all her fault lines.

"Leave me alone," she repeats.

"Sakura—" He reaches out again in an abortive move to touch her.

She dodges.

She couldn't bear it if he touched her.

She runs.

He lets her.

When she collapses in her shower, tiles cold against her back, Sakura hates herself for crying for herself when there are so many other people she should be crying for.

"What do you want?" Sakura demands when she opens her front door.

She gets a face full of flowers instead of an answer.

She's caught spitting greenery out of her mouth as their deliverer flees.

Sakura pretends that she doesn't recognize the scent of ozone and liquorice that lingers.

She puts the eyebright in a vase to stare up at her, small and open-mouthed and wishing her cheer, and goes back to her laundry.

"Don't look at me like that," Hatake grumbles at her.

Sakura raises an eyebrow at him over the edge of her book. "Like what?"

He shifts in his chair and stares at the bookshelves over her shoulder. "Like you don't hate me, or something."

Sakura raises the other eyebrow to join the first.

"Why not?"

Hatake lets the question fall heavy into the silence of the small fūinjutsu library they're squished into.

Sakura sighs, and goes back to her books.

"I'm going to start thinking you like me, or something," Hatake finally mutters, several minutes later. "I don't think I can take it."

The spines of the priceless fūinjutsu books are pressing into her spine, but Sakura doesn't care as long as Kakashi keeps moving his fingers the way he's doing, thumb high on her clit.

"Kakashi," she moans, his name breaking in half in her mouth. "Please, just like that, don't stop."

"Do you have any idea," he mumbles into the crook of her neck, his teeth scraping the tendons there, "how long I've been dreaming of this?"

"Not as long as me," Sakura answers. "Now shut up and put up. I want you to fuck me. C'mon, please please please."

"Haven't you two been together a little bit too long to be having trysts in a library in the mid-afternoon, when anyone could walk in on you?" Tsunade-shishō demands just as Sakura takes a deep drink of water.

Sakura swallows primly and does not spit water all over herself. Not that it would make a difference, really, given the way she's currently drenched with sweat after getting beat up all afternoon by her shishō. But she cannot afford to show weakness. "Kakashi and I aren't seeing each other," Sakura says. "And I've no idea what you're talking about."

Tsunade-shishō just looks at her.

Sakura is envious of the amount of sardonic disbelief she manages to fit into a single look.

"Sure," Tsunade-shishō drawls. "You've no idea what I'm talking about."

And then she flicks Sakura on the stomach where her shirt has ridden up.

Sakura flinches.

Tsunade-shishō cackles. "No apprentice of mine should be incapable of healing her bruises, even if they are inflicted by Hatake's teeth. I think you're due for a rotation in the civilian ER. We've got to get you back up to snuff!"

"It's not—" Sakura starts to lie, but Tsunade-shishō is already gone, whistling a merry tune.

Sakura collapses back on the grass.

Oh well.

Worth it.

She closes her eyes to the sunlight filtering through the trees, and dreams of boys with dark eyes and hungry hands who hold her like she's precious and kiss her like she's unbreakable.

Chapter 44

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.

.

.

.

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.

.

.

.

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.

.

.

.

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.

.

.

.

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?

.

.

.

"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.

.

.

.

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.

As much as I love and adore KakaSaku, I feel like they're a bit more of a stretch to fit into a Rogue One AU? If only because I can't actually imagine a situation where either of them would be disillusioned enough to abandon the Cause (because, for me, that's a really integral part of both their characters: that despite everything, they're loyal to Team 7, they're loyal to Konoha in a way that Naruto and Sasuke aren't).

Although, I'm kind of enjoying the idea that Sakura steals medical supplies from the Empire and distributes them where they're needed. So not so much that she gave up on the Rebellion, but that she grew disillusioned with all of the hurt they cause in the name of defeating the Empire.

Kakashi has been fighting for the Rebellion since before there was a Rebellion, a child throwing rocks at Clone Troopers on a Republic-occupied world. Fighting the face of the Empire before Senator Palpatine unmasked himself for the snake that he is and gave himself a crown. He's General Danzō's most trusted officer, as quick with an empty smile as he is with a blaster.

Y4M-4T0 is Captain Kakashi Hatake's loyal droid, liberated during a mission when Kakashi was still a teenager.

An older Naruto and Sasuke are Guardians of the Whills, Sasuke trailing behind a Naruto who burns with the Force; rolling eyes his eyes, nothing left to him but doing his best to keep his partner out of harm's way.

Sai is an Imperial cargo-pilot who woke up one morning and realized that he could not live with passively supporting the Empire any longer, that he had to do something. Mebuki Haruno hands him a datachip with a message for Akasuna no Chiyo, for her daughter, and he takes it with the hope that he can do something greater with his life, that he can find repentance in a girl who he knows from only a mother's stories, who is more ghost than girl.

Chapter 45

"Who the fuck is this guy supposed to be?" the blond kid with lightning bolts on the sides of his shoes demands.

Ok, so, Sakura knows exactly who the kid is, because he was a Vine sensation while that was still a thing and, ok, Sakura might have a few compilations saved that contain the kid showboating. He was funnier in six second increments.

Also, the first thing he did was introduce himself and the second thing he did was ask her out on a date, so. Yeah.

What she doesn't know, is who the man who just slouched through the door of the meeting room they've been squished in for the last four hours is.

She doesn't care, really. Because she's going to murder him for leaving her trapped in here with these two morons as they fought over who has the biggest dick for the last four hours.

She'll be better off not knowing his name. She isn't one to take on any more guilt.

On the other side of the table, balanced on the back legs of his chair, even though Naruto has attempted to knock the chair out from under him no less than eight times so far, Sasuke sits up straight all of a sudden, chair thudding back down onto the ground.

Sakura snickers a bit, because Sasuke is the kind of asshole who deserves to be snickered at on the rare occasion where he lets emotions get the better of him. She'd never thought shock would look so foreign on another human face, but… Never mind, she can see it turning into a more familiar rage now. Shocking.

Still with one foot out the door, the man Sakura is going to murder sighs.

Yeah? This is just the beginning! Sakura has had to put up with Naruto and Sasuke, trapped together in a small enclosed space, for hours.

Four of them!

She'll put up with another four hours if that means this man has to suffer through it, too.

"I'm Kakashi Hatake, and I already hate all of you," he says.

"You're The Copy Cat," Sasuke accuses, "and if you try to touch me, I'll cut your hand off."

Hatake–aka the most dangerous Super on the continent–sighs again.

"And I'm your new squad leader," he tells them.

And then he slams Naruto onto the table with a hand in his shirt, plucking the kid right out of the air from where he's tried to zoom past him.

Sakura blinks.

She hadn't even seen Naruto move. That's the whole point; Naruto is a speedrunner. No one should be able to track him when he's moving that fast.

Sakura bites on the inside of her cheek.

Apparently, her ambitions of murder are going to need to be held in check, at least until she can figure out how to get away with it.

Well, her mentor always did say that it was good to have hobbies outside of the job!

Sakura has always been very good at taking advice to heart.

"So," That Asshole Hyūga says down his nose at her, "what exactly is your power, again?"

Maybe they get pulled into a disciplinary hearing, because the Association looks down on Supes beating up on each other when it's not sanctioned, but Sakura doesn't regret answering him with a punch to the face.

Enjoy seeing out of those fancy eyes with a broken nose and two black eyes, asshole.

The world suddenly goes dark.

Sakura startles, whipping the fabric that's been deposited on her off her head and finds…

There's a sweater in her hands.

Sakura turns to glare at Kakashi, but he is studiously not looking at her.

"What is this?" she demands, holding the sweater as far away from her as she can manage.

Kakashi isn't the kind of person to openly display emotions deeper than vague amusement or mild boredom, but Sakura can practically taste his need to hunch his shoulders and rock awkwardly; it's evident in the way his hands are shoved into his pockets and he won't quite look at her. "You looked… uncomfortable."

Sakura considers the sweater she's holding, and then the suit that she's wearing. The one she hates, that highlights all the soft squishy parts of herself that she wishes she could carve away with knives, all of her on display, like she's something to be consumed.

She pulls the sweater on.

It covers her to mid-thigh, and the sleeves slip down over her hands.

It smells faintly of the wind.

"Thanks," she manages.

Kakashi just nods, and walks away.

Sasuke doesn't like to talk about the time he let Naruto talk him into competing to see who could deadlift the most.

Naruto keeps bringing it up because he likes to watch Sasuke suffer and because he still can't believe that Sakura can lift so much.

Sakura doesn't get to wear "smug" very often, but she's pretty sure it's an excellent look.

"You're a fucking moron," Sakura cheerfully tells Kakashi as she stitches the gash on his inner thigh closed, "and if you die from blood loss, I'm going to murder you."

"You were already planning on murdering me," Kakashi points out.

Sakura ignores the fact that his breath is wheezing wetly in his lungs and that she can't see the colour of her gloves for the blood soaking through.

"I'm going to murder you even harder," she says. "And no I wasn't, you're obviously in shock and don't know what you're talking about. I've never planned your murder before."

Kakashi manages to open one eye to squint at her. "I found your notebook."

Sakura sucks on her teeth but doesn't stop bandaging. Damn. The notebook is pretty incriminating. Also, now she's going to have to start over from scratch because he'll be anticipating her.

"I'm being framed."

"I'm sure," Kakashi says. "You wouldn't hurt a fly."

He deserves it when Sakura tightens the bandages tightly enough that he passes out from the pain.

Sakura glares at Sasuke from where she's pinned to the wall under a layer of ice.

"If you light my hair on fire getting me down from here, I am going to marry your brother so that I can come to every single one of your family events and embarrass you so much you die of the shame."

Sasuke blinks at her. "Itachi doesn't usually date women."

"Excuse me," Sakura says primly, "but I am extremely attractive to all men, women, and other wise gendered individuals, of human, supernatural, and extraterrestrial nature. The person I choose to marry is going to get on their knees and give thanks to whatever higher power they believe in that I've deigned to spend time with them."

Sasuke blinks at her again.

She's going to superglue his eyes shut one of these days.

Sasuke dramatically looks over his shoulder at where Kakashi and Naruto are currently wrapping up with the ice-powered Supe. "What's Kakashi, then?"

Sakura's changed her mind.

She's going to marry Mikoto and become Sasuke's step-mother.

And she's going to cut his hair off in the middle of the night.

"Get me down from here," Sakura says, "so that I can beat your ass into the ground."

She really should have expected Sasuke to abandon her then.

At least, Sakura thinks as he throws himself at the mole-like creature that's just exploded out of the earth, distracting Naruto from his hold on the villain he was hand-cuffing, Sasuke has a sense of self-preservation.

She's so happy she's managed to beat some kind of sense into his head over the years.

"So," Naruto drawls as he examines the tube of violently purple liquid kept safe within a bullet-proof container and cushioned against any sudden jostling, "it's Sex Pollen?"

Behind her, Sakura hears Kakashi make a sound like he's dying.

Shizune gives Naruto a long, hard look.

"Is he always this dumb?" she asks Sakura.

Sakura sighs.

"Yes," Sasuke answers.

"Ah," Shizune says. "No, well, yes. But no. I would not recommend anyone trying it out. As best I can tell, it doesn't end pleasantly."

Naruto's eyebrows start wiggling, but Shizune cuts him off before he can say anything else.

"And if anyone tries to steal a sample to try out on another person, I will personally dose them with it and lock them in a room by themselves to die a slow and painful death."

The glee sloughs right off Naruto's face.

Yeah, Shizune is terrifying.

Sakura loves her.

"Although, if you're looking for an aphrodisiac for matchmaking any idiot friends you might have," Shizune continues, "I might have something. Not, of course, that we know anyone who needs any matchmaking."

And then she stares right at Sakura.

Naruto starts snickering and Sasuke stifles a snort.

Sakura hates all of them.

"I am going to cut him into small strips and feed them to him," Sakura hisses.

"Kinky," Ino says from behind her magazine. She isn't nearly engaged enough with Sakura' rage.

"I am going to shatter his bones one by one until he's a puddle, and then I'm going to pour him down the drain!"

"You know," Ino says conversationally, "you could just fuck him instead and it would require a lot less cover up. You know that I'll help you hide the body but, like, picking you up another box of condoms and some Gatorade so that you don't have to leave your room is less likely to ruin my nails."

Sakura considers them where they're tapping against the glossy cover of the magazine. "Oh! Those look really nice. Where did you go? And shut your face, I don't want to fuck Kakashi."

"That new place on 27th, it's nice but they could use another chair or two. And, yeah, I'm sure you don't, that's why you're eye-fucking him while he's shirtless."

"I," Sakura announces primly, "and figuring out the best angle to cut his heart out of his chest while he's still breathing."

"And that's not a metaphor at all, I'm sure," Ino mutters, and turns to the next page. "Oh! Look at these shoes!"

Sakura wonders what it says about the state of their souls that when they finish a battle: Naruto is windswept, Sasuke is ashen, Sakura is bloodstained, and Kakashi is spotless.

She wants to drag her bloodied hands all over him, trace red tears down his cheeks and across his lower lip, stain his suit. She wants to see him cracked open and raw and snarling.

As they peel themselves out of their suits in their shared changing room, hissing at blooming bruises and reopened cute, Sakura considers all the ways she could take him apart until she could see something real.

It wouldn't be the first time she's seen a man split open, and she wants to see all the ways Kakashi can bleed.

"No, really," Kiba says, "what is your power? It isn't even in your file, what the hell, Haruno?"

Sakura smiles around her straw, and takes another long sip.

"Maybe I don't have one," she says. "Maybe I'm just so bad ass the Association couldn't live without me."

Thankfully, the other side of the bar explodes into chaos as Lee and Naruto climb onto two tables and begin a dance off.

If Kiba turns back to press her for a real answer, all he'll find is Sakura's half-finished drink.

Ok, so, she'd totally fuck Kakashi if she thought for even a second he'd look at her with anything other than mild amusement.

She'll kill the both of them before she tells him that, though.

Sakura's running hard, winter-cold morning air catching in her lungs and freezing her, running from her nightmares and all the blood she's swam through, so she isn't exactly paying attention to where she's going.

It's a bit of a surprise when she collides suddenly with another body, enough to jolt her mostly out of her head.

Whoever it is catches her by the elbows and they stumble together for a moment before finding their balance.

"Shit," she says, "fucking damnit, I'm so sorry, I was running like an asshole and–"

"To be fair," says a familiar voice, "you do most things like an asshole."

Sakura's head comes up fast and she smashes the top of it against Kakashi's jaw, knocking his mouth closed and probably giving them both a wicked bruise.

Not one to be cowed by embarrassment, Sakura stabs her finger into his chest. "You're one to talk, asshole!"

"Ow," Kakashi whines, "why do you insist on doing me physical damage? Wasn't it enough to run into me?"

Sakura stabs him again out of spite.

He catches her hand in his own before she can do it again, the wool of his mittens scratchy and warm.

Sakura freezes.

Then she hears a small "woof" and something warm presses against her shins.

Sakura looks down.

"There is a dog sitting on my feet," she says.

Fuck off, she's had a rough morning.

It's a very cute dog.

"That's Pakkun," Kakashi says.

Sakura rolls that around in her head for a moment.

Kakashi has a dog.

"You have a dog?" she asks.

Kakashi's eyes soften and something almost a smile creases his mouth. "Yeah."

"Oh."

He's still holding her finger, and they're pressed up against each other.

Sakura takes a step backwards, and Pakkun grumbles as he's jostled.

Sakura crouches automatically to give him a pet.

It's easier than looking Kakashi in the face.

"Do you," Kakashi pauses, and then continues, "want to come get coffee and donuts with us?"

Pakkun leans into her hand and Sakura scritches him behind the ear.

"Yeah," she tells Pakkun, "I'd like that."

Sakura hears her name, all the fear and desperation and panic in the world compressed into three syllables, in the moment before the sword punches through her chest, skewering her heart.

Her eyes go wide and she chokes, iron in her mouth and oh God, she hurts so much, it hurts, her hands sliced on the blade and she can't breathe, her ribs are carved in and she wants to die.

Hateful brown eyes stare at her curiously, like she's a butterfly pinned to a wall.

Sakura wraps her hands around the sword in her chest.

It hurts.

She wants to die.

She will not.

Sakura tightens her grip, and pulls.

There's nothing left in her when she cuts the Puppet Master's head off with his own sword, not even satisfaction.

The steel rings harshly when she drops it to the ground.

Sakura spits out the blood in her mouth and looks down at the hole torn into her suit.

"They should have given me some fucking body armour," she rasps, "instead of this fucking lingerie."

The battlefield is silent and all the world is still.

Sakura turns on her heel.

She's going to need three showers, a new suit, and fourteen tubs of ice cream.

She's only part way through the fourth tub and whoever is knocking on her door is obviously not going to go away any time soon.

"What?" Sakura demands and she swings her front door open. "I'm busy."

Kakashi reaches for her before he stops himself, hands clenching at his sides, his eyes bright.

"Sakura," he manages, finally, and oh.

He sounds wrecked, ruinous, like he got a sword through his chest five hours ago and most of his ribs carved in.

He sounds taken apart and raw and Sakura aches with all the ways she wants to put him back together.

She doesn't want him here.

She's so glad he came.

"Sakura," Kakashi says again when she does nothing, spoon limp at her side, ice cream melting in its container.

She doesn't know what to do.

If she shifts, she's going to scream or collapse or cry or rage or take him by the chin and kiss him until he can't say her name like that anymore.

"You should be dead," Kakashi tells her.

"Yeah," she says, "I can't exactly do that."

He takes a step forward, and Sakura retreats instinctively, and she keeps retreating as Kakashi walks her backwards, until her back hits the wall.

His eyes are burning and all Sakura wants to do is burn.

"I thought I'd lost you."

Sakura chokes down a sob. "Don't worry," she lies, "it didn't even hurt."

He leaves without touching her.

Sakura might be glad.

He never will, she thinks, now that he knows what she is.

She knows better than to open her door to him again, but Sakura can't help it.

"Tell me to go, and I will," Kakashi says. "I'm a liar and a thief and I don't deserve you or any of it but God, Sakura, I know what it will cost you but I want to kiss you anyways."

She has her hands in his hair before she's even considered what this will make of them.

"You steal nothing that I don't give," she breathes in the breath before she kisses him. "I'm selfish enough to keep you."

He touches her and licks the ambrosia from her skin.

They burn together, and God, what a way to live forever.

"You're not the thief," Sakura whispers to him in the dark, her hands in his hair, "I am. I've stolen you from even Death now. You're mine to keep."

Chapter 46:

He doesn't know what he would trade to undo all his sins (but oh, yes he does, because Hatake Kakashi knows his worth and there is a Village full of lives he would give his own for), but he would not trade this.

Dawn creeps through the half-drawn shades, tracing lines across the bedspread, sunlight kissing his shoulder.

"Ugh," Sakura moans.

It vibrates in his ribcage.

"Make it go away." She buries her face further into his back, nose brushing lightly against his back, almost enough to tickle.

"Should I steal you the sun?" he asks, rolling over to face her.

Sakura whines, but subsides when he cradles her face in his palms, blocking out the spear of light lancing across the bridge of her nose.

"Mmm," she agrees. "But I'll settle for the moon."

Kakashi laughs. Sakura captures it with her mouth.

"Or maybe"–she trails kisses along his jaw, up to his ear–"I'll go steal it myself. I'm quite the thief, you know."

Then she bites at his earlobe.

Kakashi hisses out a breath, his hands pulling her hips into his own.

"Are you?" he finally manages, sweeping his thumbs over the soft curve of her stomach in retaliation.

"Mhmm." Sakura leans back to smile at him.

And oh, but there is dawn breaking, right across her face.

"I stole your heart, after all," she grins, and bites her lip at the cheesiness of the line.

"Yes," Kakashi agrees, serious, his chest aching. "You did."

Light spills through the half-open blinds, and they tumble into kisses and laughter and so much joy.

(It was worth it, the oceans he has waded through to get here. He would not trade her for the world.)

Chapter 47

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Chapter 48

As Sakura stares at Itachi's perfectly placid face, she thinks that if more people were present during the medical staff's biannual pub crawl, the medical profession as a whole would get significantly more respect from the rest of the shinobi corps.

Because, really, she doesn't know anyone else other than Itachi who could manage to pull off stone cold murder while wearing a feathered hat quite so covered in sequins. Or with such an…enthusiastic brim.

Groans echo around the table, and Shizune and Emi-kouhai grumble as they shove their chips in his direction.

Itachi carefully wraps his lips around his swirl of a straw and takes a long pull of whatever the terrible purple and gold concoction Ino ordered for the lot of them is called. It is slightly sour under the sweet, and if Sakura finds out what it's made out of then she's probably not going to want to keep drinking it, and that would be a shame, as Sakura is not drunk enough yet to stop drinking.

Sakura's been out of chips and the money to buy herself back in for almost an hour now, and it really isn't fair that they've banned cheating, because that would have been the only thing keeping Sakura in the game.

For all the things she is thankful to have learned from Tsunade-shishou and all the ways those things gave Sakura the tools to turn herself into the person she wanted to be, she really wishes that it hadn't come at the price of also inheriting Tsunade-shishou's terrible, terrible luck. Not that she would trade it, of course, but not getting completely decimated in every single game of cards or chance she ever plays would be nice.

Ino is dealing the next round, and Itachi turns to stare at Sakura.

It's only because she knows him so well (and, really, Sakura is never not going to find it funny how horrified Sasuke was and continues to be by the friendship that started Sakura's second week at the hospital) that Sakura can tell Itachi is completely drunk. It's something about his eyes, maybe, or the extra tension in his posture to keep himself upright.

"Sakura," Itachi says, his voice controlled to the point of almost monotone, "promise me."

Sakura purses her lips around a smile. "Mm? What am I promising now?"

"Sakura," Itachi continues, "you are my friend and I care for you very much, and I need you to promise me that when you marry Hatake-kun, you will invite me to be a part of your wedding party over Sasuke. Sasuke gives terrible speeches and Naruto-kun will be crying too hard to speak, and I want you to have the best speeches at your wedding."

He is impressively composed as he carefully enunciates his way through this impassioned declaration.

It's even more impressive the way he dodges out of the way of Sakura snorting her really-now-that-she-thinks-about-it-truly-terrible drink out of her nose and all over him, continuing without pause.

"Excuse me?" Sakura demands, pawing for the napkins that are scattered over the table, trying to mop up the mess she's made of herself.

Itachi nods gently, hat scattering light as his head moves. "I know, it might be too much. I know that your friendship with Sasuke goes back many more years than our own, though I like to think we have been friendly at least since we were introduced. Take as much time to think about it as you need to."

"Itachi!" Sakura manages to finally screech, voice skipping right over a few octaves to land somewhere a little too uncomfortable. "I am not going to marry Hatake Kakashi!"

And, because Sakura inherited her shishou's luck, she is left standing, red faced and horrified, as her declaration slices right through a lull in the bar, drawing all attention to her.

For a moment, everything is completely quiet.

"Mah, mah, Sakura-chan," drawls Sakura's least favourite voice in the world, "I know we're not friends, but you don't have to sound so insulted. Some people would consider me a real catch!"

Sakura's grip snaps shut, and her glass shatters, the last of her seriously-she-is-never-drinking-this-again-because-oh-gods-Ino-what-unholy-concoction-did-you-spawn-into-being drink splattering over her shirt and up her arm.

"You!" Sakura shrieks, spinning around, ready to— well, she hasn't really quite thought that through yet.

And then, because seriously people should stop underestimating medical shinobi in general and Itachi in particular, before she can quite manage to finish picking up her chair to throw it at That Asshole Hatake, Sakura comes to with a start, swinging wildly at the figure hanging over her with a blade she keeps strapped to her thigh.

The bar floor is sticky underneath her, and the room is empty but for the single, glittering man sitting cross-legged at her side.

"Really, Sakura," Itachi says from around his straw. "This is a perfect example for why you should pick me over Sasuke: he would just contribute to the guaranteed property damage. If I am part of the wedding party, it will just mean you have to pay less to apologize for the mess once every thing is said and done."

Sakura flinches as he moves and a particularly blinding ray of light reflects off his hat and hits her in the face. Then she sighs, and raises her hands in the air, making grabby hands.

Itachi tilts his drink down and Sakura catches the straw between her teeth.

Terrible.

She doesn't know why she bothers.

"Yeah," Sakura finally sighs, dropping her head to bounce off the sticky floor. "Sure. You get wedding party precedence."

Itachi smiles from around his straw and another beam of light blinds Sakura.

Whatever.

It'll never happen.

Sasuke will never have to know.