The uploader and I had a fight, and I won. I just have strong feelings about the lack of formatting! Thank you to the last two reviewers for still caring about what happens in this monstrosity LOL
Unrelated note: I wrote some shameless SasuSaku smutty BS and published it yesterday, if you're interested. My friend literally convinced me to leave it up. It's called "Red." So that's there. Happy Monday!
Opening lyric is "Adrenaline" by Simple Creatures.
VII.
When I'm six feet underneath my misery —
Come on hit me with adrenaline
.
.
She meets him when she's 13. Precocious, placed in a school among famous names and social leviathans where no one quite knows her, she devours books and builds her dreams.
She meets him in the midst of an awakening: Learning all the ways boys say they love her and the ways men exert power, and the terror of becoming, of being seen.
He meets her when he's nearly 17. Idealistic, pacifistic but world-weary, he teeters on the edge of a cursed destiny he'll take into his own hands.
He meets her at his personal crossroads: Learning all the ways in which family evinces the truest darkness, unearthing the lies on which rests everything they've built.
She'll be the unraveling thread, and he'll be the undoing of her dream.
She awakens in the house of one man with the ghost of another lingering in her dreams.
In the dregs of fading sleep, as blanched white light seeps into the corners of her vision, peeling back her eyelids, she tastes his name on the tip of her tongue in a soft, overripe sweetness — old caramel, mottled fruit. Immiscible, then melting together at the close.
As if Sasuke can hear her vague and rimy thoughts, she blinks it all away and banishes it to the shadowy corners of her mind.
He's out on the fire escape, having left the window open behind him. She observes him taking in the sun, shirtless, signaling his end of satisfying sleep and hers as well. Though many nights, oh, it feels almost felicitous, blessed, the sex and the sleep. Better together.
Suddenly he's staring back, and a pulse tears through her bones as though she's just the conduit for something transcendent; whatever, exactly, she sees as she holds his gaze, those eyes. Dark and full of shadows, and even with the fear of so few hours ago rankling her mind, it all seems trivial in the whirlwind of her desire, the urge to paint him in brand new color.
Stepping down into the room, he comes to her with a careless sense of sovereignty and grace, the absolute ignorance of his own fuckability on full display as his hand takes her face with the same sort of gentle possessiveness as last night. While he frowns and thumbs something off her cheek, she imagines breaking his wrists in an impulsive coup to force those fingers where they should be.
"Glitter, still. Annoying."
"I'm guessing I wasn't in the state to manage a shower last night?"
A divot appears between his brows. "Do you remember coming here?"
Tapping jade fingernails on her chin, she thinks. Embarrassment creeping in as she remembers how she must have looked, sounded, pathetic and terrified; asking him to pick her up from a club, intoxicated, crouching in an alley like a stupid mess. Crying? Crying. She recalls it all with uncomfortable clarity and reflects grimly that the overpriced gimlets only had one job and they couldn't do the damn thing right.
"Any chance you'll just forget you ever saw me that way?" she asks, tears springing to her eyes. Lip trembling, she yanks up the collar of his shirt she's wearing and hides her face. Adds a weak, futile attempt at a cough.
"Something in my eye. Throat, too," she mumbles. He doesn't press.
Sakura realizes she has one of his shirts on again and groans.
"What did I tell you, Sasuke?"
Shrugging, he says, "I don't care what you've told me. You asked for help. You come and go however you want, and I won't stop you. I've said this."
"But — but — doesn't it upset you? That I do this? And you let me do this to you? Come into your life and mess everything up?"
Something angry contorts his expression, and he kneels on the mattress with his face too close to hers. It prompts flashbacks of childish arguments, with his brother, with Naruto, anyone who would deign to scuffle with him.
"Why is it difficult for you to ask for help?"
"Don't you do that," she hisses. Rising to the occasion, to the crackle of heat and the promise of friction. Each word hits with the ring of dropped valuables, reverberating: "Pot, kettle, black.
"I think you want a fight."
"And you think you want me. But you're wrong."
She skewers him with her gaze, eyes alight.
He fumes under her piercing expression, twisting under dual snakes of anger and fervor and why does love have all these muddled shades, running the gamut from tender to obsessive to violent to alien?
His hands land on either side of her without warning, and he's flush in her ear:
"I make —" he hisses, "— my own choices, Sakura." Her name drips from his hot, furious mouth, viscid basalt.
He pulls back, watching her lips twist and bright eyes flash in that way they do when she's about to take him to task, whether with her wit or with those hips. Petulant, she crosses her legs and arms and gives him a withering glare that could still put him in the ground in a way he'd thank her for.
"Fine. Then . . . then you deserve to know some things," she says softly. Relenting. Nodding to herself, willing the words to fall easy and open from her tongue.
Sasuke holds up a hand as if placing her on pause, leaving the room without further explanation. The sounds of ceramic on countertops, the gentle grainy shuffle of sugar; he returns extending a steaming mug cradling coffee the color of tropical sand.
She's never had someone care about a thing so trivial, the preciseness of what seems like an unimportant preference. Taking it gently, she nods to the open window and takes his hand to lead him out; a spark when they touch, his other hand steadying the mug of his own. He returns to his original place and she blinks in the soft morning light, eyes green and dazzling as she contemplates the urban jungle and he commits her to memory just like this: Hair bright and disheveled, the sun a backdrop to splaying ends, pink flowers on fire; the graceful bass clef curve of her spine with her elbows resting on the gutted, rusted black iron bar; long, long legs leading his eyes into the slope of her ankles.
Wondering how men possibly let her go.
The introduction is gentler this time, the wafting of a feather. Still with the tone of a story from a time before, the way she spoke on those train tracks.
"Like I've said," she begins, "I grew up in a small place. Everyone knew each other, and people were generally kind, insofar as your life never gets too interesting. People didn't keep secrets well.
"I was smart — very smart. I was embarrassed and even now, it feels sour and difficult to say. My mother was always one for humility. When the school realized what they were dealing with, I did everything I could to take the opportunity. They were happy a kid from a town like that, a girl like me, could make something of themselves."
Sakura pauses, takes a sip of coffee. Brushes a knuckle against her lip.
He watches from his corner.
"When you have something people want, or I guess, when you help them further their own needs, people want to use you. It's seen as mutually beneficial even if the motives are selfish. Even if you're just a little kid. Ino and I, we were friends before I made it into that school. For a girl who seemed larger than life — beautiful, fashionable, I was waiting for the day that friendship would wilt. We lived on opposite sides of metaphorical train tracks, an invisible line that separated us."
She smiles. "But Ino's good people. So I had at least one friend when I tested into the all-girl's private school. The best in the region. Me, a nobody. A doctor . . . that's what I always wanted to be. I was just a kid, commuting long hours and spending more time away from my bed than in it — but I never looked back. I told myself I'd do whatever it took to make something of myself and maybe, just maybe, make my mother proud."
There, a familiar and perhaps universal yearning, seeking approval that never seems to come. Sasuke knows this all too well. Perhaps it's something that transcends class and culture, the pathological neediness and the crushing disappointment when it's never given. He sets his mug down on the iron floor and props his chin on his folded hands. Full attention.
"So," and here she exhales shakily, "I start at this new school. It sounds dumb, I know, to be this nervous. But this was a completely different world. As far as I knew, these children were practically celebrities. For a long time I stayed away from people and things where I didn't belong. Studied all the time, singularly focused on my goal. But Ino explained I had to make friends, and there were types of friends you had. Real ones, useful ones, important ones. To me, it was overwhelming. I'd never thought of anything that way. And to her credit, she kept bullies off my back; she believed in me."
Her voice wavers and almost extinguishes in a whisper released from a mausoleum, a buried tomb.
"And then I met him."
A searing in his gut — Sasuke's expression stays stoic even as thoughts bubble and burst. Questions that of course are none of his business. But any fool can hear it, the implications of a gentleness like that.
"A series of cliches," she says, in a throaty, acerbic laugh. "A new student and an older tutor. I needed help, of course, in chemistry. One of the very few boys that was ever around an all-girls school, but he was also an intelligent, fantastic student, not to mention, per the whispers, an exceptional pedigree. But I knew none of those things the day I met him. Smart with books, stupid with boys."
It must be a cruel fatal twist that she turns to look at him, both hands clutching the mug like it will crumble in her fingers. It helps her hide the shakes. He sees terror in her eyes, uncertainty as she faces him bare.
"Have you ever had a moment that you knew, you just knew, that you irrevocably changed the course of your life?"
When I met you. It doesn't leave his lips, but it settles on her in the brilliant glitter in his dark eyes. Fire and brimstone.
"So you know," she says, rueful, "that it all runs away from you, and feels impossible to stop."
Staring askance, unable to look him in the eye. While he's beating the jealousy away, the ugly emotion solidifies in the middle of his chest in an unfathomably leaden weight.
"So, I meet him one day after school. He's tall, dark-haired, has this — this such easy grace, gentleness. But there's an edge somewhere, a shadow. And the feeling of a heavy burden, one he can't share. As you can see," and here her laugh catches him, snagging him as a fish on a hook, "my type is obvious. Predictable."
Indicating him with her coffee mug, she gives Sasuke a wobbly smile.
Despite his jealousy, the corner of his lips pull into a smirk.
"We get to know one another. Looking back, I was so stupid. He tells me things that I sensed were secrets, but as a young girl you think that's romantic — that he cares about you enough to let you in, that you're special. And that's it, you know? I felt out of place and insecure and he . . . made me feel special."
She approaches on her long, lovely legs, kneels in front of him, setting the mug on the iron with a sharp clang. Plucking at the shirt, shrinking in it further, she tucks her legs underneath her to sit and look him in the eyes.
"He tells me how his father never wanted him to spend time volunteering, that it was a waste, but his mother encouraged it. That they have a lot of problems, familial, business, or otherwise. How he had begun to hate his place in society, and felt that he was walking toward a fate he couldn't change. Sometimes we discussed chemistry. Sometimes, we talked about me. We entangled too deeply, and I didn't understand I was getting too close. But I felt like I knew him, understood him. And he doesn't stop it."
When the black car stops at the end of the street, every hair on her body stands on end. Like an unearthly summons, a compelling soundless song.
"Sorry, I have to—"
Ino snatches her wrist, yanking her close. Eyes like the ocean search her jade ones.
"What are you doing, Sakura?" Voice drops lower. "Are you scared of him?"
How can she, at fourteen, articulate this? That they're strung together by a series of unfortunate events, that she's poured so much of herself in and he in turn has done the same to her, and she's bound to him now? And somehow that it's not what everyone thinks it is?
Because of course that's how it will look.
That the real crux of her fear is she knows what he'll do, and she's unable to stop it?
"He's older," Ino hisses. "And he's an Uchiha."
When he says Sakura's name, and she turns to acknowledge him with a smile never quite shown to anyone else, Ino feels an innate and savage terror, the uncomfortable thrill and sense of danger.
Sasuke's hand holds her face again, bringing her to the surface. Hot against her skin — cradle and crush.
"S-sorry," she murmurs. Lips moving against his thumb, heated from the coffee.
Both dazed in the haze of the creeping light, two people perched on the metal skeleton of the emergency stairs that's cold against their bones, waiting for the other to turn the narrative's page.
"He tells me too much," she whispers.
Sasuke's eyes are black like pitch, and just as consuming.
"His parents find out."
And in spite of himself, he shifts closer as if twitched by strings. She doesn't stop him.
"He tried to fix it, and all it did was get worse."
The curiosity is secondary, a fleeting feeling subsumed by the anxiety and resentment over a boy from years and years ago that has no bearing on them, on this. No matter her protestations that it wasn't what he thinks, his heart splits and opens into a gaping pit, jealousy so familiar it's akin to all his years growing up, toddling and walking and running from point to point on an endless and blind timeline. Stepping in the footfalls of Uchiha boys and men before him, impelled on a path inset with tradition and piety and insanity.
But he and his brother both slipped on the rocks, wings clipped, trying to break the chain of madness and following it all again, de novo.
All the questions he can't ask and knows isn't his business, but he's angry and desperate and all of them seem worse than the one before — did you want him did you want to marry him did he want you like I do and did you love him, did you love him? Mind racing with thoughts he always swears she can hear, unearthly inference.
"He was in too much trouble. I never saw him again, or my family again, either. I stayed with Ino until I graduated, and then set off to never look back again."
And so like all the men before him, he fails with his boundaries and indulges his selfish impulses like a drowning man desperate, clinging to the shipwreck that's brought him the salt taste of something difficult to articulate. Following her off the cliff, hurtling toward the rocks.
Pressing his forehead against hers, hard, like he can slip under her skin and possess her for himself, he hisses: "Did you love him?"
He doesn't remember her knees on either side of one of his, or register her fingers clinging to his chest to pry his soul apart. She fits into the planes and shadows of him, souls seeking home. Finds his weakest point and shatters him as glass. Always with her siren song, a tsunami dragging detritus out to shore in its wake.
"No, Sasuke."
She kisses him first, a musical score sliding andante to the close. An admission from her lips she pours into his —
"Never the way I feel with you."
It's like she expects the way his hand leaves her face, sliding easily into the roots of her hair and grasps her to him, roughly, his. Loathes the way she lets him touch her like he's normal. Still she insists on leading, though, as she straddles his thigh and fuck her damp heat is perilous and he rises to the occasion flush against her leg. Lets out something of a growl as her nails rake across the back of his neck —
"I don't know how you do this," she says between touches of lips, "you make me so stupid."
She's ethereal, he's aphonic; all he manages is a coarse "Fuck."
"Indeed."
"We don't—"
"We don't what, Sasuke? Have to do this? You think I'm fragile? Are you afraid of me?" The end comes out in a hiss, eyes dancing with defiance. The roll of her hips rattles his breath into an angry stutter, and his fingers tighten her locks into a vice.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
"What happened last night—"
"Has nothing to do with this."
"I'm telling you—"
"Oh, you're telling me," she repeats, swallowing down a breath. Grasps his hip bone, thumb firm against the taut adonis muscle leading to familiar stomping grounds. "Go on, then."
She sees it, the way his eyes darken in color, nostrils flaring white, feels the coiling heat and intolerable atomic fission — a threat and promise all in one.
She so wants the consequences.
"I'll find him." In the shell of her ear, he affirms. "He won't touch you."
"Promises, hmm?"
Eyes black and wide as boundless space, angry with a savage glitter. Her oh! of surprise when his hand steals under the hem of her shirt, fingers splaying across the hot skin of her stomach and climbing with a vengeful, impatient pace.
"You," he hisses, "have a mouth on you."
"You would certainly kn—ah!" Stealing her next tart retort with a gesture just assertive enough to startle, force her into speechlessness. A pinch. She wishes he'd take her back inside; no, drag her in like conquered prey. And now her spine bends in a shape opposite of before, arching in the way of an untouched inlet or cove with all the rocks and crags as vertebrae, all the sharp edges of which he would endure to tear at and possess whatever's inside.
As his fingers coax another rock of her hips, the roll and swell of an ocean tide, she lets her eyes fall closed and struggles to keep the waver out of her spectral voice.
"You're good like this too. Aggressive," she purrs.
An irritated shut up fades into irrelevance as he spies the last soft curve of her rib in the cage, pressing the bridge of his nose in the muscle and plush skin just below it. She tenses and lets fly another gasp, every tendon and limb caught in tremolo — stomach, spine, thighs and all the molten wet heat in between.
"I want to see you," Sakura whispers, "when you take something you really want."
Sasuke prepares to do exactly that, except there's no way to kill this faster than his best friend's obnoxious voice.
"Are you both out there? You have a perfectly good balcony to sit on, weirdo," Naruto crows. Arms against the frame, leaning forward out the open window, he pauses to take in the state of them, frowns, and then locks eyes with Sakura.
She considers, as she stares at his sparkling eyes fading into keen and surprisingly quick understanding, that if the entire fixture came loose from the building, she'd welcome fate's timely intervention with open arms.
"Oh boy."
"Naruto—!"
"Are they both out there?"
Sakura grimaces as if she's had a tooth ripped out sans anesthesia. In a flash, she palms Naruto's entire face and shoves him back inside; the sound of his yelp upon cracking his head on the window feels deserved.
They untangle and pull apart, radiating heat. She trails her fingers from his collarbone in a languid, winding spoor toward his hips. When he jerks away, she hooks a finger in his waistband and yanks him closer to feel him hard against her.
"I'll herd them into the kitchen," she says. "Will let them know you need a minute; you're indisposed."
Placing a hand on the upper window, she begins to lower herself into his room.
Sasuke groans at all of it — his life, his friends, this girl. "'Them?'"
"The gang's all here!" Sticking out her tongue, she clambers over the sill. Her voice rings sharp as she shoos them away.
Sasuke stares at the tangled metal staircase beneath his feet, wondering if pitching himself off it would be easier than going inside and watching them drink all his good coffee.
Embarrassment abounds, but it still loses. As he locks up the window from the inside, he watches Sakura shove Ino out the bedroom door as she attempts to get a glimpse of Sasuke; she nearly breaks her neck when her head whips around to try.
One click sounds off the heels of another as they preserve their space. Sighing, she crosses to the closet and tosses open the doors in search of, presumably, her clothes; they're not in their usual pile on the floor. But something gives her pause, and her hands fall to her sides as she takes a small step in, almost wary.
Everything hung up on one side, grouped by type. She steps forward and plucks the sleeve of a blouse in her fingers, caressing the fabric. Eyes sweeping it from one end to the other, the carved out space for her belongings given freely, and she's almost sure she spies an outfit she effused over, admired, so wanted, but did not buy, a jumpsuit peeking among evenly racked hangers.
Before she can whirl around to protest, chastise, his arms snake around her in a persuasive embrace, the fingers of one hand draped on the hollow of her throat with the others splayed again across skin stippled with shifting glitter.
With his breath in her ear and the caffeine, her heartbeat again kicks out of control.
"You . . . can't do things like this."
"Well, they can't be on my floor. Messy."
"Sasuke," she sputters, "the gifts! Sharing your space? It's too . . . intimate."
He makes a sound that bursts as a dark, amused catch of air. Perhaps it's a laugh.
"Considering this," he says quietly, "that's rich."
"Sasuke." Tries to make it sound authoritative, but it's fruitless in the wake of this, of him — she, fitting so easily into the planes and bends of him. Separation would doom them both.
"Then tell me to stop, Sakura." And in boldness that surprises even himself, he takes her chin aggressively, holding her in place. The voice that emerges almost channels someone else, a portent ancient, seeping and damned. "Say the word."
Caught in him, calloused fingers on her lips and those of the other hand rough and resolute as they skirt her skin as a mere suggestion and touch her boldly, without warning, buckling her knees and tearing a moan from her throat. Everything slick and bright as his fingers continue and her skin is buzzing and her fingers yank his hair, scrape his scalp, and this time she might just let him take her apart piece by piece —
At the abrupt knock on the door and cascading, fulgent tones, their friends chattering as birds, Sasuke releases her. She curses. Separating, aiming to make themselves presentable, he keeps eyes on her as she pulls on clothing with an unreadable, neutral expression. He wonders if it was too much, that whatever he's loosened the chain on is something darker than he knows, sinister. It's difficult to know where this comes from, this compulsion and mania.
Sakura jumps to pull on her jeans, yanks the rest of her hair through the shirt's collar and shakes it out. Regards him for a few seconds that stretch in an endless, flat misery.
"Ah, you know what I wish?" She tucks pink hair behind her ear, watching him out of the corners of her green, bright eyes.
A sensation roils in his stomach — stupid, sick. "Sakura, I—"
"That our idiotic, well-meaning friends weren't here," she starts, closing the gap between them,
"so you could tear off every piece of clothing I just put on, and lay me everywhere,"
and now she's in his ear, singing of calamity and fire,
"fill me with all the things you were promising, and,"
these words are only for his ears, speaking supplications that he drinks with impunity and his heart gives out in the wake of her demands —
take me
fuck me
like I'm the only woman left on this earth
like I'm the only thing you love.
When she leaves the room, preventing further chaos in their wake, he'd say he's already long dead, if not for the fact that he's grasping the hard proof in his stupid, disloyal hand.
"First of all," Ino says as Sasuke walks in, damp and dressed, "do you know my father and Shikamaru's work together? Small world, huh?"
In comparison to his morning, everything else has the drab quality of watching paint primer dry. Supplying a grunt of faked interest, he goes directly to the kitchen and avoids the room's eyes and expressions of interest. Sakura's perched on the arm of the couch while Ino's sunken into the comfortable cushion next to her. Naruto's on a stool and Shikamaru occupies an armchair in typical languid repose, and Sasuke's not sure if it's less or more agonizing that no one says a thing.
"Oh, you're out." Naruto slurps his coffee as Sasuke shakes the empty airtight container, woefully emptied of beans.
Sharply hitting it against the counter, Sasuke closes his eyes.
"Try the cabinet to your right," Sakura suggests.
When he locates the new one — same roast, sealed and untouched — he remembers how she just left him and now he's staring at her across the room. Cursed, cursed, cursed.
Ino watches with a grin and flashes a look at Naruto, who returns it over the rim of his mug.
"Second," Ino continues, "Sakura, you said you were coming down tonight, right?"
Sakura blinks, crashing back to earth. "Oh, yeah?"
Ino taps her opposite wrist to indicate a nonexistent watch. "You said you would spend time with me before your event. Plus, you have to let me dress you up! I need to live vicariously through you."
"Then that's what we'll do." Grinning down at her, Sakura's rewarded with Ino's playful smile that wants to address the elephant in the room.
"Third," Shikamaru says, raising a halfhearted hand, "I warned them, for the record."
Naruto scoffs. "What's the use of an emergency key if I have to knock to use it? Emergencies aren't planned."
"Brilliant," Sasuke snaps. "Nobel Prize-winning logic."
Now Naruto frowns. "Shouldn't you be in, like, a way better mood?"
Shikamaru kicks him lazily with his heel, shaking his head. "Knock it off."
"Let me pack, then." Sliding from her perch onto her feet, Sakura heads into Sasuke's bedroom with Ino on her heels; the latter's smiling ear to ear, perhaps at the prospect of seeing his personal belongings, and clenches a triumphant fist.
Sasuke joins them and takes up Ino's vacated space. Naruto leans forward conspiratorially.
"Hey—"
"No."
"You don't even know what I'm about to say!"
"Don't care."
"I was just going to say don't steal all the spotlight at this thing! Shikamaru's woman is going to be there and everyone's always looking right at you at these things. Literally every party we ever went to," he adds to Shikamaru in an undertone, as if Sasuke isn't able to hear.
"Listen," Sasuke growls, "I don't steal shit. They don't leave me alone."
"Sure, but it's still annoying."
"Also, I don't even know who your girlfriend is."
"She's not my girlfriend." Shikamaru's eyes are closed, but he readies another heel kick at Naruto just in case.
"Oh, geez, you sound like Sasuke now. You're both bullshit." Naruto sits up straight and bounces his shoulders with a fox-like grin. "So our lazy resident smoker is seeing the sister of a famous oil tycoon."
"Ah, I can't have anything nice," Shikamaru sighs.
In a stage whisper, Naruto cups a hand over his mouth. "She couldn't bring him, and he's salty 'bout it."
"I didn't want to go. I mean, a night of people standing around talking about things they don't care about, pretending they're friendly. Then I have to dress up and be on point and, ugh, what a total hassle. Boring. No offense," he adds hastily as the women cross the threshold.
Sakura shrugs, setting her suitcase upright. "None taken."
"Sometimes we do the devil's work," Ino says dreamily. "If it involves fancy clothes, I'll bear it. Well, she will, and I'll wait for my gossip spoils."
"I wish you could come." Sakura frowns. "You're better at this."
Ino waves it away. "We should head downtown."
The group says goodbyes; Sakura touches Sasuke's shoulder and their eyes meet. He's sure his heart doesn't quite work properly anymore, and can't locate his voice to muster up a response when she says she'll see him tomorrow night.
Naruto rolls his eyes at the close of the apartment's door. "That's how you say goodbye to the love of your life? You really piss me off."
But Sasuke's lost in thought, and his eyes narrow as he steels himself to speak.
"Listen."
Perhaps it's his tone, low and dark. Naruto tilts his head and Shikamaru opens one eye.
"Something happened last night that bothered me. I want your help."
"What'd she do to you this time?" Naruto jokes.
Setting his chin on steepled fingers, Sasuke glowers at him.
"Kidding. Sort of."
"Someone is stalking her," he says through clenched teeth.
"Sakura, you mean?" Naruto jerks a thumb at the door they departed from. "What? She didn't say anything. What happened?"
"He called into her show; found her at a club. All I have to go on is what she told me so far." Shakes his head, turning it all over in his mind. "I want footage. I want traces."
Shikamaru sighs and pulls himself out of his sprawling slouch. Elbows on knees, he levels with Sasuke, mirroring physicality to level with him properly. "She's probably unsettled. And you want to help her, I get that. But don't you think, and hear me out, it might not be your business?"
"Shikamaru, this guy's a freak, obviously!"
"Right," he says, holding out a placating hand to Naruto's outburst. "But did she actually ask for your help?"
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying," he says, slow and in careful syllables, "that maybe we can start by just asking around. Questions. Quietly. We don't need to go scorched earth on something we don't know much about. Then you also don't seem . . ." He trails off.
Eyes charcoal, sparks on flint: Sasuke snaps at him. "Seem what?"
Shikamaru inhales, holds, and exhales for a long moment.
"Obsessive."
The following night, he finds himself staring into a garbage can housing a small bonfire of thick and full envelopes; Naruto claps his best friend on the shoulder and peers inside.
"You haven't looked at a single one?"
Sasuke shakes his head, flicking Naruto and an errant grey ash off his suit jacket.
"I'd be too curious. But I get it. We left all that behind, you know?"
Continuing his silence, Sasuke nods in response.
"You better be more charming than that tonight. Yeesh."
"You're going to smell like smoke," Shikamaru drawls, exhaling the wisps of his own cigarette. "Get out of here."
Bidding them goodbye without fanfare, a bag slung over his shoulder, he opts to walk a few blocks before subjecting himself to sitting in traffic in the back of a car. He clenches and unclenches his fingers — they've been intermittently numb for the last hour or so, and he's fairly sure he has heartburn. If this is love, he might succumb to it as a disease.
Time passes in jittery film frames. Quick-cut thoughts intrude his mind as he stares out the window. The driver navigates, he perseverates. Like shredding paper, they uncurl and pile and come to rest.
"You won't waste your time with that, Itachi."
Sasuke's eye watches through the space between the door and the frame.
His mother fixes his father with a kind but firm expression. "Fugaku. If he wants to help others, let him. It looks good on his transcripts, anyway. Don't be unreasonable."
For a moment, Sasuke thinks he'll yell at her, though he very rarely does. She's spared often, a mercy that his sons, especially him, don't receive.
Mikoto winks at Itachi, knowing she's succeeded, and Itachi sees his little brother watching.
A lurch, and the car comes to a hard stop that unsettles his gut, starts his intestines writhing. Swallowing, pushing off a strange cold sweat and feverish shiver all in one, he begins to dig in his pockets.
"Sorry, sir. Downtown, Friday night traffic."
"Fine," he responds. Brandishing several bills, he unhooks his seatbelt. "I'll walk the rest."
The driver takes them, watching him closely. "If you're sure. You all right?"
Without another word, Sasuke swings open the door and hits the sidewalk in a brisk stride.
He observes the skyline of hotels on the way to his own, bag slung over his back, dodging young couples and harried businessmen and work crowds. In a relative daze, he steps into the lobby with paying much mind to anything else.
He waits in line, but when he reaches the front desk the young girl seems starstruck, closing her mouth after it falls open before launching into babbling speech.
"Uchiha Sasuke, you said? Oh! You didn't have to wait, just let us know you're here. Ack! But of course, sir, you can do whatever you want—"
"It's fine," he says. "I'm waiting for someone."
"Ahh, are you?" A tinge of disappointment in her voice.
"Could you have this taken up? There'll be another bag as well."
"Of course. Can I get you anything while you wait? Would you like to sit at the bar, or in a dining room?"
"No thanks," he sighs. Laughable, a drink; god would it taste good, but sure wouldn't help the lack of feeling in his hands.
Instead he takes up a seat in a hushed area of the lobby. The murmurs of people on phones provides a warm idle — calls to loved ones, to business partners on the other side of the globe, the amalgam of languages and inflections at a soft rumble. Fireplace crackling merrily. Sasuke keeps his eyes on the front doors.
Someone in an armchair across from him makes a noise. A snicker, maybe. Grey messy hair and the bit of his face that's visible reveal only the finest lines, but he still has the gravitas of an older, seasoned man.
Distracted, Sasuke frowns at the mask he's wearing, and it sinks in more deeply as he catches the title. Rolling his eyes, he shifts his body away from him as if he'll catch the perversion evident by what he's chosen to read in public.
A flutter of activity draws Sasuke's eyes. The sound of suitcase wheels and a throng of people at the desk now, a flash of shiny blonde hair and there, a glimpse of pink.
Now this grey-haired man has twisted around in his seat. A bit taller, he can see over some of the heads. With a wistful sound, he says, "When did I get so old?"
"Excuse me?" Sasuke says it without thinking, a terse response.
Turns his book upside-down on his knee, spine facing up, pages spread. He chuckles, and Sasuke can swear he's heard it somewhere before. "It's a young person's game. The chase, the chaos. I'm too tired for women like this, but they still want to make even an old man jump out of his seat, stand to attention."
Sasuke, catching a glimpse of an arm and tiny wrist, pink locks, and a man trying to kindly relieve her of a suitcase she seems reluctant to give, shakes his head. "Shut up."
Sasuke's stopped listening, and his unwanted companion notices. Chuckling again, picking up his book to resume, he waves him away like an undesired gnat. "Go on, then, to your doom."
But Sasuke's already on his feet, still with those numb hands as he shoulders his way through what sounds like a newly-arrived group of tourists swarming the desk.
A hand still on the suitcase that the porter keeps trying to relieve her of, Ino with a sassy hand held up against the front desk girl's faltering prattle. Sakura pouts a little, lips pursed, wrapped up in a long belted coat. Sasuke's intent to intervene is sidetracked when his gaze snags on the curve of her calf melting into ankles hemmed in by black heels that the foolish part of him would abandon this entire social affair for if they could just be propped up on his shoulders —
"Mr. Uchiha?" Front desk girl looks relieved, and Sakura's so surprised that her grip relents on the suitcase; the porter whisks it away.
"Sasuke?"
He remembers his mother always telling him to lift his chin, face forward, be proud. Come take your place, Sasuke.
She remembers her mother always telling her to keep her eyes down, to not draw attention. It was Ino that gave her the ribbon to tie up her hair and face what came. Go take your place; you belong here, Forehead.
Another manager herds the tourists to a different desk, trying to settle the busy city evening din.
Why, when they greet one another after any stretch of time it feels fated? If they were unbridled, wild animals engaging on the plains, they'd be circling one another with locked eyes. Hers, bright and lucid, take in the fit of his suit, skirt the shape of his shoulders, his clear talent with a tie; always she has the way of beholding him that strips him down to white glossy bone.
When she smiles, his back feels straighter, his chin lifts higher. His world is only second to her reign.
"They'll take it up to our suite. I didn't mention it."
Now she beams. "I should've known. You're so very meticulous."
Ino's watching, and the front desk girl is too.
Raising a finger, Sakura asks, "Do we need to finish check-in, or—?"
"Taken care of. We can head there whenever you want."
"Excuse me, not without photos! Wait." Unzipping her coat, Ino shrugs out of it to reveal a deep plum jumpsuit with a plunging neckline. She tosses it into the arms of a new porter that seems to arrive from another dimension just for this task. "Hold this, please."
Sakura smirks at Ino. "He'll like that."
"Focus on your own night, take off that coat. Sasuke, fix your tie. And your hair. Your face is fine, of course."
Unbelting her jacket, he can swear Sakura winks at him.
"You are incredible," Ino says, clicking her tongue at Sasuke's ensemble. "Impeccable genetics. Don't make that face! I call it as I see it."
"Thank you," Sakura says to whomever takes her coat.
And now he receives his first full look at her, entranced as if she's shed an outer shell or skin. A hum in the universe matching the tone of his pulse, an empyrean premonition. Eyes and necks rivet in her direction, in passing, lingering as his do — the ivory glimmer of skin brushed and dusted with faint pink, the shy hint to the shade of her actual dress, rich and red and rust and lust. Fabric delicate and tensile over the devastating slope and camber from waist to hip, as if restraining some unruly divinity. Shoulders bare sans the bright curtain of hair she cascades over one of them, sleeves feathered and formed across her upper arms illusioning the opening of a flower, the splitting of an atom, the cracking of the earth.
The clandestine slit above one knee, just perilous enough on legs like these.
Lips painted in ochre, lashes dipped in ink. Skin as porcelain and ice.
The color of passion, royalty, luxury, blood. Depending on one's preferred history, it travels the world on a string with a narrative suited to each and all.
Go on, then, to your doom.
As always, have a good week, stay healthy and safe!