Title: Reliquary
Author: Kit Spooner
Pairing: Uzumaki Naruto and Haruno Sakura
Fandom: Naruto
Theme: # 23 – Candy
Rating: PG/K+ for mentions of sex? Hell, I can't rate stories for shit.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations portrayed in this story are the sole property of Kishimoto-sensei and the assorted corporate types who've bought the rights. I've merely borrowed them for a brief time.
Notes: Sakura is a creepy stalker! Whee! Actually, she's not, but something doesn't flow very well here. I really need to work on this one. I think that at least some bits convey tiny pieces of what I was trying to get across. The rest seems kind of . . . odd. This was written in Borders and in an airport. shrugs Whatever.
Sakura knows Naruto very, very well, even though they only became lovers a month ago. She knows how much he loves her; she knows how his mind works.
Naruto has a perfect, photographic memory – at least where Sakura's concerned. He remembers every haircut she's ever gotten. He could recite, from memory, the time and location of every date they've been on.
He always buys her the correct kind of shampoo when she sends him shopping.
Naruto's mind just sort of clicks into gear around her – not in any sort of intellectual way (Naruto will never be an intellectual), but in the way that children can just focus on something, though at 25 he's certainly not a child either.
It frightened her, when she was younger, the intensity with which Naruto adored her. He's always been handsome, but when she's around he just glows in a way that defies non-cliched description. Sakura is older now, and she enjoys the attention more, the loving appreciation for every detail of her being.
Naruto loves Sakura – always has and always will. It's always been a fairly simple equation for him.
Sakura is . . . different.
For much of her life, Naruto was a tousle-headed hanger-on, an annoying, slightly-younger brother to harass and henpeck and mother incessantly. She's loved him a long time – nearly as long as he – but she didn't want him until more recently. These days she wonders why the hell it took her over a decade to notice how beautiful he is.
These days –
Sakura's memory isn't eccentrically perfect the way Naruto's is. She never quite remembers the numerical details of their relationship, even as new as it is. She loves him deeply, but she just can't remember his shoe size or which brand of instant ramen he prefers. Her brain is already too cramped, too full of other names and numbers, like the details of chakra-enhanced metabolism, of the exact number of calories required to mold a single unit of chakra. And for all her love and capacious heart, Sakura knows the calories and the endocrinology are more important to Konoha.
Instead, Sakura requires tangible proof of things. She catalogues recipes with the same sort of stubborn, methodical determination that her medical exams took. Sakura organizes things: jewelry, gardening implements, bills, weaponry, everything.
She keeps her most precious memories tucked away in safe, quiet parts of her room. In the morning, she traces the fine golden hairs left on her pillow, sometimes with wondering fingers, sometimes only with her eyes, and sometimes even with her own soft breaths against the worn cotton percale of her pillowcase. Naruto may remember with perfect clarity every date, but Sakura has all the ticket stubs for each inane film they've suffered through, waiting for the right moment to tune out the movie and begin the make-out session. The stubs live in an old cigar box beneath her bed, gathering dust and time. Sakura's love is laid bare in every photograph taken of the pair, he all grinning, sheepish wistfulness, she all deliberately oblivious affection, touched with a hint of familial violence. Sakura could fill a book with snapshots of Naruto cheerfully accepting her fierce headlock. Behind her night-stand Sakura keeps the old wrappers from the weird little foil-wrapped chocolate candy that Naruto likes to eat in bed after they've made love. In fact, Sakura's a little afraid to move the night-stand, lest a waterfall of red and silver scraps of foil spill her secrets across her bedroom floor.
Sakura's true prize is tucked back behind a few pairs of old socks in her dresser drawer.
The night Naruto finally seduced Sakura was a brilliant, confusing time for them both. After a night of ecstatic fumbling and sweetly fulfilling near-misses, early morning brought about an abrupt interruption: loud knocking at Sakura's apartment door. In a rush they decided that it was a bit too soon to announce such a new and fragile relationship. So Naruto pulled his boxers and pants on, ran a hand through his completely rumpled hair, and jumped out of the second-storey window.
The person at the door turned out to be Ino, who knew, from the moment she stepped into the apartment, that Sakura had gotten lucky the night before.
"And all you got was that lousy t-shirt," Ino had joked, poking Naruto's abandoned, black shirt with her sandal-shot foot, nudging it out from under the bed.
Indeed, Sakura had kept the shirt, hidden in a drawer she was fairly certain Naruto would never explore, even if he decided that he needed to check out her underwear collection. Occasionally, particularly when Naruto is away on missions, she pulls the shirt out and holds it close, breathing in what lingered of Naruto and all he represented. That stupid, smelly scrap of fabric is all Sakura's dreams and faith made tangible. She needs such physical representations of ephemeral concepts in the way she needs light and air.
Sometimes the lingering smell of Naruto – his breath and mouth and hands and self – on her skin is enough to keep her drowsing in bed longer than usual in the mornings. The sun raises patterns in the dusty air as she lies there, nose pressed to the sweet-scented flesh of her arm. Naruto marks her in such a way, and he doesn't even realize it.
The scent of sex lingers on her skin until she finally creeps out of bed – generally long after Naruto has departed – and washes all traces of love from her skin, letting the shower return her to her pre-Naruto state.
Tabula rasa . . .
Then that evening, when Naruto returns home, bright face alight with emotions Sakura refused to acknowledge most of her life, he marks her with his memories and with his love, and Sakura begins the process all over again.
