CW: Everyone is morally questionable, the usual.
Opening Lyrics: Tessellate by Alt-J (and/or covered by Ellie Goulding)
X.
Chunks of you will sink down to seals
blubber rich in mourning,
they'll nosh you up, yes, they'll nosh the love away but it's fair to say
you will still haunt me
.
.
.
Time is a fast and loose fugue state consisting only of two.
He doesn't know when he ended up with his back against the wall, palms damp and pressed to the kitchen floor. Blurry vision and furious, hysterical beats of the heart. Pink flits in and out of his vision, frolic and flourish, glimmering as the alien undulation of smooth muscle.
Some things Sasuke remembers:
The way his brother would come home later and later, twilight pressing on until the threat of dawn. Occasionally with his father, rarely accompanied by their mother, and most often alone.
The way his eyes would simmer as blackened coal, every time they'd bring up this girl. A girlfriend, he'd assumed, a crush he'd never be able to indulge in anyway because Uchiha marriages were transactions, not spectacles — arrangements of wealth, never fond affairs. Lingering as a sour taste, the expectations and jealousy: After all, most things came to him easily as first son.
"She's better off being brought into the fold than left on her own." Itachi's detached way of speaking, always lost in some wild pocket of his own universe, folding in on itself until he would fade around the edges. Lost even to Sasuke.
"We don't do it this way!" Why was his father so angry about it, though, really?
"She knows too much — what would you have me do? She's headstrong, just a girl."
Never privy to his parents' hushed conversations, often existing on the outside of their bubble, the glossy rounded edge of a buffer that burst upon their deaths.
"You truly are a gentle child. If you think that would make her happy, we can discuss it."
But Sasuke had flattened himself against the wall, young and wild-haired and often overlooked. Sure enough, his father's eyes slid over him easily, never seeing him when he growls to himself, but we're trying my way first.
Some things Sakura remembers:
Leather seats, the paranoia of eyes, and chemical equations wrought into real-world consequences.
How elegant their mother was, I did meet her, kind and taking her hands so gently and looking at Sakura as though she were real too. Valued. Beguiling as she asked through a smile, What exactly do you want with my son?
Trying to look a grown man in the eyes, but watching the sour corners of his downturned mouth instead, a tall stack of paper between them on a table of polished wood.
Girls have to be strong, she said, pulling her hands back from the beautiful woman, in order to survive.
And their mother regards her for a poignant moment, staring down at the contract between them.
"That they do, dear. That they do."
Cupboards clatter in impending doom, claps of thunder in his ears — though those could be from outside and the boundary is blurry.
"Here," Sakura breathes, wrapping her slim fingers around his clammy ones to force them around an object in his hand. To work life and heat back into them.
Glass. Cold.
His world sharpens in a manner so jarring it beckons vomit. She's kneeling and sopping wet with tears in her eyes, murmuring as she presses the frigid glass to his lips and tips, tips the clear spirits down his throat —
Singeing, sputtering, but he follows the warmth inside to the ends of his fingers, wishing errantly to melt into the soft burn in his own chest.
When he finally lifts his eyes to her, she drains her glass and winces, sheepish.
"I hope you don't mind . . . my head's spinning from all this."
Even in the haze, the odd sense of float, a base urge to swipe a thumb under her eyes to touch the glitter and sloe mess. Exactly like him, to be drawn to wreckage.
"I knew there was someone."
Sasuke's low voice tears her from the past and ties her to the present.
He notes the liquor in his glass with a flat mundanity; a measured pour, a medicinal amount.
"An outsider, something that muddled him up, made my father furious. I was fine with it — Itachi acting like a normal person, with a dumb crush." His burning chest has less to do with inebriant and so much to do with envy. "It made me a little less jealous, that he wasn't so perfect."
"I was dumb," she says, voice harsh. "You don't understand how much of this I caused."
Sasuke blinks, long and slow. Still not feeling quite tethered to reality. "We're the same age, Sakura. He should've known better—"
"Tell me about the man you knew." Fingers feather his hair, tentative, tender. "Tell me about him through your eyes, the person who was your brother."
"I want to know who he was to you." His tone cuts to the quick, steel on flint.
She exhales his name in a quiet breath, a flutter with a reedy edge. Twilight tones. "I didn't quite know before, and now I'm only certain I knew even less."
Sitting with that careful distance from one another in loving orbit, like that first morning, treading in fateful fjords with the surreality and prickling sense of déjà vu.
As he takes a preparatory sip, relishing the sting, he wonders how exactly she knows he's prone to being a scattered mess that loses his charm and intelligence when the drink takes him and shakes him by the lapels of his soul. She's never seen those stumbles or fights. It occurs to him she has the uncanny, terrifying intuition reminiscent of his mother — a minim above baseline perception.
His tongue, it stings. He swallows down the tastes of her lipstick and lime, tartness from hours and days prior that doesn't make sense here, not now.
"I thought Itachi had it all the moment he was born." Knowing he sounds petulant at best, he shifts his gaze and focuses on something invisible far past her pink, damp hair. "The first son, set to inherit the family business. When you check all the right boxes for a pious, intelligent, desired heir, the second son gets to slip by, unnoticed. I didn't have to be anything."
Sakura's eyes feel like pity, and he continues staring into the past.
"When we were children, before things changed, he was a great brother, objectively. I aspired to be like him — everything seemed easy for him, but he never condescended or denied me time. Him and I often felt we only had one another. Our parents were always occupied with other things."
A gleam of green. Sasuke doesn't notice her reaction.
"He reached the age where he went to the boys' school, like all Uchiha and children of our group. Hyuuga Neji was there, and so was Naruto despite his thickheadedness." A pause. "Our parents all knew one another, doing business in the same circles. This insular, strange club of the wealthy and connected. Still," and for a moment their eyes meet, but he breaks it so fast so fast because the spark is acute as a splinter lodged in the chest, "a lot of us, at that age, don't know exactly what it all means. Money you can't see."
"You were young. I'm guessing none of you were told particulars."
Sasuke doesn't ask for the reasoning behind her surety, figuring it will come in due time.
"At some point, Naruto's parents and mine had a falling out. It meant nothing to us, boys, beating each other up one day and best friends again the next. To this day, I don't know all of it, and before they—" Sasuke swallows, hard, " —they were killed, we never heard the story."
Sakura's rigid, if she could be more so than she already was while listening. "You're saying Naruto's parents—"
"He'll tell you they died in a freak accident. Records show it, anyway, that they intervened in a mugging. But the further I get away from all of these memories . . ." he trails off, throat desiccated, drained. Taking a restrained sip from his glass, he lets the implication dissipate. She sees the haunting afterimages in the air, microfilms of things unsaid.
[On the other side of the door, Shikamaru's skin reflects the color of the bald and garish lights above — robs him of life and leaves him as withered parchment.
He motions to the other two, and when Naruto doesn't notice nor rouse from his reverie it falls on Ino to grasp him desperately by the sleeve and tug, to reconnect him with reality.]
"Around the same time, Itachi's never home. It had been happening for a while, him traveling with my parents, particularly my father, on what I assumed were some sort of business trips, training, familiarizing him with our operations or whatever was involved. Always vague details: Refineries, financials, hospitality in this country, consulting in another. I was young, it seemed boring, but it was hard to feel ignored. I was angry, resentful, childish."
Another sip.
"Family members come around more often, some I haven't seen for awhile. If they were involved in business, they were indistinguishable from blood. Complicated relationships and traditions my parents understood, a rite of passage to be included in. I always remember one of them. Older than me." Sasuke tries to meet her eyes again, but the intensity of her frozen gaze gleams as glass, fracturing his own vision. "He was an orphan, no parents to speak of. I didn't even know if he was actually related to me, but he was . . . an oddly happy person. For one of us, I mean."
A skittering giggle, nervous, bubbles from Sakura's chest and leaves her lips.
"Of course, he had an accident at some point. It changed him. It's a curse," he spits, tipping the glass back again. The swallow doesn't touch the dread, doesn't even leave an imprint in the hollow hate. "Uchiha men never seem to make it out whole."
A silence stretches. In the intervening pause, rain lashes at the windows accompanied by the rolling cascade of thunder, a background arpeggio.
She waits for him to resurface; the irony of her own waterlogged state, having already clutched the shore and fought the current.
"I heard about a girl, that I now know was you. It just sounded like a thing I could tease him about, try to make him open up. By that time, he felt so far away and I would have done anything for his attention. My mother thought it was sweet. My father hated it, like he seemed to hate everything."
"Tell me about her, Itachi. What does she look like — like mom?" His haughty voice, swinging between its impending metamorphosis and crackling high pitch, the embarrassing markers of adolescence. It comes out in sing-song: "You gonna marry her?"
Itachi's lined face always appears older than it should look, forever strained but somehow finespun. The soft upturn of the lips he attempts stretches more like a grimace.
"She doesn't deserve that."
Twisted, that it later ends up being his suggestion to stitch the rift she's opened, to sew closed the aperture of his mistakes.
Sakura bites her lip, blanching it white.
"He loved you, didn't he?" It escapes before he can cage it, regretting how it sounds like an accusation.
Where does she get the grace not to take it as one? He hates and loves her fingers worrying the seam of his shirt, though still she doesn't meet his gaze.
"I've been wrong on a lot of things, Sasuke . . . but I don't think he loves quite like normal people."
"But he spent all his time with you. He told you secrets."
"He was . . . odd. Always like he was alone in his own mind. And everyone does that, right? We have a safe place that we can retreat to, but if you look closely enough, you can see it in someone's eyes."
"It wasn't just tutoring, was it?"
Stricken, she digs her fingernail in to place pressure on the woven seam. Her throat's dry, tempting urges for another draft. She says, "I dug too deeply, wanted to feel special. I wanted his gaze to be clear when he looked at me."
Bringing his glass to his mouth, Sasuke realizes there's nothing left. He startles as her fingers intertwine with those of his free hand, latching in a way that epitomizes reckless requests of forgiveness.
Searing, their pitiless kinetic heat.
"For the first weeks, he hardly ever spoke to me. I always stayed late, there, or the library. Everyone thought I was always studying — for the love of science." The punctuating laugh is something melancholy. "When the truth was, since no one could ever pick me up, I had to take the last bus out of town. Every night."
Sasuke always forgets those cheerless details, the missing pieces of her childhood she doesn't say aloud.
"He'd correct work without comment on the board, here and there, but watched in silence. You know, I'm sure, his mannerisms. The way he was. He'd never come close to me, an invisible, repelling force between us. A careful thing."
Sasuke's dark eyes memorize the lines between the tiles, fingers still laced in hers. Longing to dive into them, the spaces in between, a sojourn in endless nullity.
"One day he gives me an equation, a difficult one. Impossible, really; it seemed like a test. He had papers with him. Said it was something even adults had trouble with. I remember resenting it, pouting; a sure way to fail."
She watches his pale hands write the equation across the board; he never does it for her. Fading eventide catches his rings, scatters light. Unsure of what she's feeling, foreboding, butterflies or a stomachache.
"I'm frustrated, really pissed, actually. I curse about it, but after a couple hours, I figured it out. When you solve something you've been struggling over, that sense of triumph . . . like you're in the right groove again. I tossed the marker down, feeling so smug — I remember it so clearly. We were the last people there." She laughs again, fragile, a winter branch splintering in the cold.
Sasuke understands, especially when it comes to Itachi. The desire to put a crack in his constant veneer, but also to vie for his approval however slight.
"He stares at the board for what seems like forever. Honestly, I was just hoping for a reaction, anything." But she deftly edits the part
when he pokes her forehead and she flushes, because she hates her forehead and he's so adult and it makes her feel dumb but also warm, like perhaps he could look at her as more than a girl he tutors
and he doesn't say if she gets it right, but he's offering her coat and saying, "You're too young to be taking the bus so far. My driver will take you."
In this car too nice for her, with these textured seats that make soft noises against a mausoleum's sealed silence, just the two of them, he's ignoring her all over again, ringed hands folded in his lap.
"You're rude!"
She's red, embarrassingly so, the flush from her face heating the entire space. But she doesn't stop.
"Why would you give me something so difficult if I was just going to fail? It's just mean."
"You didn't get it wrong," he says lightly, without looking at her.
Days slide into weeks — of him presenting increasingly complicated work, of Ino asking her where she always is, of hours in a classroom with his eyes on her in a way that feels like twine poised to snap.
"Whatever it was, I got it right. It got more and more difficult, and I realized most of it had nothing to do with my classwork. Not that it mattered, because school was easy in comparison. We talked about me wanting to be a doctor. I hope you can understand," she says, squeezing Sasuke's fingers, "I had no one else to tell. No one else understood. Ino was suspicious, I didn't have a ton of real friends. If I hadn't been so stupid—"
"What did your parents say?"
But he regrets the question the moment it leaves his mouth; after all, where had his always been?
His scalp crawls — did they know?
"We really didn't understand one another. My dad accepted it the best he could, that this school was for the best. But my mother . . ."
The flat tone almost disguises the wavering, the vibrato functioning as her voice.
"She barely believed I was her own daughter. Everything was a fight. Brushing her off was easiest."
Sasuke knows a large part of the family business had to do with refineries. Boring, nothing he's ever taken an interest in. There was an accident one year, the press plastering it into public prominence, touting it as an unusual incident considering the preeminent track record of most Uchiha-owned ventures.
The remnants of liquor in Sasuke's throat rot into acrid dregs.
"Itachi wanted you to work for the family." He says it as fact. "Our father would have said no; he hated uncontrolled variables."
Sakura's crushing his fingers, her strength alien and paralyzing. "I don't think it became a real option until I was in too deep. You didn't know then, but I bet you know now."
Sasuke nods, stony. He's had time to process it by now, all the things that came to light during the case in which Itachi admits guilt without a fight, concedes he's guilty of parricide, there's no ugly public trial or televised spectacle, just more money changing hands to solve problems that regular processes never do. He ran, but admitted it in the end. The family assets come to him, and he's not so ignorant to know he wants out, out of all the business and mess and he doesn't care that it's less money in the end because it's still obscene and stained.
Sasuke returns only for the verdict and buyout, flees again shortly after — never visits the old estate or the prison, his newly-orphaned best friend always at his side.
"Show me."
Itachi's mouth is a thin, grim line. "You're a mere girl."
"I'm not dumb. These are clearly not legitimate businesses."
He doesn't expect her to say it out loud. It's futile to deny it, yet that's his first mistake.
And then he makes so many more, a million unraveling strings. Her naïve and strong sense of justice; the way she throws his papers at him in the car that fateful night on the way to take her home, disbelieving and panicked; the darkness that steals his sleep, sinking the lines into his face; the way she begs him to please, do the right thing, to take that unthinkable nuclear option; the way he slips up with her, poking her forehead and fuck he's an idiot, brushing the hair off her face when she cries and he'd never tell her that she's too bright for him to look at head-on while everything she says is the bitter truth, family curses handed down divine —
"The people you hurt with this, those are people like my Mom and Dad." Lip trembles as she crushes herself into the smallest corner of the car, against the door. "Normal, average people. Who work hard their whole life, and don't get many choices."
"But do you know what it's like, when a neighbor confronts your mom at the only market in town about why the good girl comes home late in a nice car with a man?"
The tears come fast, welling up and cutting salty tributaries through smudged remains under her eyes. She continues.
"Do you know what it's like when someone thinks they can buy everything with money — your silence, your knowledge, your life?"
But that was his life, he reflects. Wealth and power always present, smoothing over the uncomfortable and inconvenient cracks.
"Tell me," Sasuke says, "did you take what was offered?"
"Which offer? See," and here her eyes are foreboding, hard, sea-glass polished by sand, "your father first wanted me to sign a contract where I took the money and made myself scarce. Dangled false security in front of me, for my parents too. I could be a doctor and they would pay for it, fulfill my dream, as long as I went somewhere else, and never came into contact with any of you again."
Dark, stone, frigid. Sasuke doesn't move, doesn't breathe.
"Or," she hisses, "Itachi had the stupid idea of trying to marry me in."
"What?"
"Planned for when I was of age, but still a contract. He knew that I was soft for him. Unorthodox," she snorts, twisting a lock of her own hair, "but you keep the secrets closer. It's a smart play for control."
Sasuke yanks her by the hand, faces close as he abandons all fear for the indulgence of wanton, unbridled anger.
"You were a girl," he hisses.
"So Uchiha men seem to always remind me," she retorts, haughty. "A girl playing an adult's game."
"It's—"
"Don't you all have arranged marriages anyway?"
"Don't you fucking tell me," he growls, "that you considered it."
"See, that's what you don't get." There's an edge of irritation, a weary patience. "You were kept from a lot of these awful things because of Itachi. He didn't want you to know how dark it all was, how deep this went. And me, well," she laughs without a stitch of humor, lips curling as if she's trying not to laugh, trying not to cry, "I was in a bad position. I'm sure you know by now that somewhere between the chemistry tutoring and the murder, I became a liability. So what's a girl to do — a girl with no means, trying to fly too close to the sun and instead crawling in the dark?"
"It wasn't your fault."
"All I knew is that your family held all the cards." She pauses, sighs. "But I said no. I rejected every offer. I didn't threaten to reveal anything. I just wanted to be left alone, pretend I'd never met him. Compartmentalize that unfortunate incident into a tiny box in the corner of my mind, lose the key."
But Sasuke knows just as well as he knows he's grown in her soil, absorbed her eerie light, that all those things cling as webs and rarely, if ever, leave.
The silence between them stretches, allowing the thunder's rumbling a chance to be heard.
"Why did he do it?"
"Which part of it, Sasuke?" She sounds tired, faint.
"The ridiculous contracts." If he lets go of her hand she'll sink through the floor, and he'll dissipate as dust. "The proposal of—" He growls instead, unable to finish the sentence. "Choosing you in the first place for his plans, his fucking mess?"
She has no answers. Her hand shakes in his.
"Why did he kill them, Sakura?"
"Are you wondering if he did it for me? Gods, Sasuke . . . I pushed him to blow the whistle, but only that. Not murder. After carrying around the pain that I'd, even indirectly, caused the refinery accident, you think I'd want more blood on my hands?"
"They're still dead, and I need more answers."
"So start with the letters! He's been sending you them, and you haven't read a single one?"
Words skirting the precipice: When he invades her space in the most wonderful way, eyes glittering and searching for the skeletons of her buried demons, the urge to drown's becoming less and less of a choice.
"I've waited years! I've been laboring under false impressions and half-told tales and whispers of the family I left. It's not enough. I need the truth. I want — I need —"
I need to know if I'm insane too.
It's nothing he has to speak aloud: She knows.
Sasuke changes tack in an almost manic shift. "Have you ever flown anywhere?"
"What, like on an airplane?" She says a quiet tuh! under her breath and fingers the ends of her damp hair. Stares at the tiled floor. "Like I'm some bumpkin."
He abruptly gets to his feet, registering just the ragged edge of a buzz that's bleeding away faster than he can ache for it back. He leaves wordlessly and returns with a towel, crouching in front of her.
She watches him with a wary expression.
"Once," she murmurs.
He's mulling over how to say the next words but he's not moving fast enough.
"No, Sasuke. Why would you even think of doing it?"
But he doesn't answer, instead tossing the towel over her head and squeezing it around locks of her hair, trying to soak up the remainder of the rain. Much easier not to look her in the eyes as her protests mount.
"Write him back! Call him, even; that's who's been calling, right? Confronting him, sitting across from him in a cold room — what's the use of that?"
"Answers. I deserve them, and so do you."
Now her hands flail, trying to yank the fabric off her head to glower at him. "I've settled it, okay? It's why I ran. Things were lost, and I accepted it and never looked back."
He settles on his haunches, all hard edges and ominous energy. "This is the path I walk. I won't make you. Obviously, no one's quite able to make you do anything you don't want. But if you're scared of him, if you don't want to reopen this — I understand that."
Lips thin, she feathers him apart with her sharp eyes and brushes the cold and dark something she's wanted and feared since the moment she met his eyes across a bar, across a book, across the abstruse knots of fate and destiny.
"Do you do this a lot?" she whispers. "Eschew the things that make sense and take the long and winding road?"
"Only, it seems, since I met you."
A tinge of discomfort in his admission; he resumes toweling her hair to mask his embarrassment.
"You said you'd follow me anywhere. You said it that first night." Again, his shift in topic, seeking some unspoken answer.
"That was stupid of me." A beat. Sakura's voice is almost inaudible as she continues, "I've also said I don't stay."
"Once this is over — once I figure this out, I'll go where you need me. It will only be us."
I'm yours.
"Sasuke—"
"Sakura." Grasping the ends of the towel that's slid around her neck and shoulders, he pulls her close, speaking against her temple. Silencing any protests as he says,
"I'm awake."
It's another agonizing minute before she responds.
"You're an idiot, then."
"Ah. Perhaps."
(But we're just wreckage, are you and I.)
Later, on the floor, on the rug dappled with the glitter of nights and trysts before, they lie in a helter-skelter nest of haphazard bedding and fragile love.
"He never wanted this for you, you know."
Her whispers reach him unearthly and clear amid thunder rumblings and the gentle lilting of the radio's twilight programming, whispers in hushed rooms just out of the mind's grasp.
Green eyes following the electrical fractures in the sky, fingers intertwined in his. There's something about her, in the flickering half-light, that has Sasuke wondering at the ideas of destiny and doom.
"Itachi was . . . crumbling under the weight of what he was about to inherit. What he learned. It became something he couldn't keep holding onto."
The radio is quiet, murmurs gnawing at the ragged edges of shared insomnia. Beckoning from a void.
"But no matter what, I think he always loved you."
Sasuke knows if he articulates the thoughts on his mind she'll find him insane at worst, unhinged at best — the room spinning and them clinging to one another in the semidarkness because letting her leave his life could bring something worse, a calamity to which he's unable to bring coherence.
Lying in coils and knots woven by paths chosen long before them.
Lying on the floor as lovers and strangers, souls dipped in endless gold.
.
.
.
Only in the simmering ruby dawn when Sakura's padding around the kitchen to wake up the day with caffeine, intent on packing her suitcase does she realize
(red sky at morning, sailors take warning — is that how the mariner's ode goes?)
one of those photos is of her, would have been taken many days ago before even meeting Hinata Hyuuga, and she touches the corner of it with her finger which sends a shiver of terror skittering down the spine
(the goddess is playing, with whom no man can fight)
as the utter unlikelihood of the snapshot being included settles heavy in the marrow of her bones since it doesn't make much sense, none at all
and it begs the question of who really sent her the evidence.
Sakura stares at herself in the photo, an image of her loitering near the radio station after a shift, painted in wan grey against an ink-stained night —
— and the darkness watches her back.
I always appreciate any response for any chapter I've written, particularly because I'm not quite so fast at updating. I had some serious symptoms that I thought were covid and needless to say that ate up all my mental energy until I tested negative and then tried to figure out what WAS going on! So we're all good here, I hope it's all well for ya'll.
Thank you Guest, Sara, and SailingNotSelling for reviews, and also SasuSakuKawaii because that was a long and awesome and super kind review! I appreciate reading things like that and getting to hear about how it made you FEEL because that's the goal you know?! I think I'd call this, like, a remix - I wanted them to not be exactly like canon but not so far off from the characters we know; plus I don't often read stories where Sasuke is chasing Sakura, and it's a huge part of the reason I wrote this in the first place.
See you next time!