Opening lyrics: She's a God - Neck Deep
Please note the first of of this chapter veers into a more Mature situation so please if that is not your jam please skip over it, especially if sexual dynamics and such make you squicky. I just like to cover my bases, you never know, TY TY
XIV.
I'm her chosen one
She's my deity, and
She's saving me
.
Dawn splits the sky as a sudden bruise.
Meandering next to her on unsteady feet, Sasuke presses his mouth to her collarbone and earns the note that slides from a moan to a giggle and back again, as colorful and chaotic as the streets. Heading in the general direction of their hotel at a lackadaisical pace, arms linked, Sakura waves at women in wedding dresses and feathered dancers alike while he focuses, in his mild haze, on keeping a tight grip on the suitcase in his hand.
"So pretty," she drawls, myriad dancing lights reflected in her glassy eyes.
A man bends into a question mark shape, retches, vomits in spectacular fashion on the sidewalk.
"That's you."
"Hm, Sasuke?"
He shakes his head with gusto, as if wiping his dumb words out of existence.
"Oh, I promised Nardo I'd take pics," she sighs. Pats her chest, hips, finally digs into a small purse and rummages only a few seconds before giving up. "Phone's dead anyway, I bet."
"Tomorrow, then."
Skin smoky, smelling of baked sun. The walk back stretches endlessly, abrasive desert sun casting light on the city's immortal party. Carnival for the damned.
Lofty goals of disappearing, melting as wax to take on new, flexible, improved dimensional forms. Slipping among space. They know even in their shipwrecked state the true impossibility of being anonymous, of thinning under the city's rough and stained fingers to disintegrate fully, fibers worn.
"There's a safe in the room, right?" Sakura shakes her head, more alert now, perhaps trying to focus just enough to pull herself out of the buzz.
Sasuke's response is only the torpid drop of his chin, then his head nodding up and down as a drinking bird, motions out of his control.
The sleeves of his dress shirt began the night crisp. She clutches it now, pausing in their trek toward the hotel and swinging his loose and tipsy body in an arc to eventually pull him in close.
Like flying, for a moment, eyes slow to follow the fuzzy anarchic lights of the strip, the backdrop to her bright, clean outline. Cut out of the murk.
Somehow she manages to kiss him like the first time, every time, tongue laden with lovely poison, lips of liquor and ardor and oh, of course he's going mad; insanity, to Sasuke, becomes less grim and terrifying if it'll always come like this.
Zoom out: A photo taken in plush desert color, time clutching at the shutter close. Pixels in digital clouds, the latest wave and method of stalking.
Adoration, supplication, mutual ideé fixe.
Though there's no way for her to hear, to know of his existence, but in a crosshatched viewfinder his target pulls back, still hanging onto the lapels of her lover, lips puffy and pink.
Her eyes pinpoint his exact location in the shadows, except there's simply no way she can see him, just a coincidence.
And yet.
The stranger's hit with an unearthly chill down to the silver of the heavy ring on his thumb.
.
.
.
Upon entering their suite (her initial comments including, but not limited to, 'unnecessary, lavish, ah, but damn this jacuzzi!'), a second wind manifests, their energy rebounding with electricity: Addled and heady on the drink, the gambling, sweet vice. Sasuke lets her ease the suitcase from his grip with a kiss for good measure, and in his haze hooks the do not disturb sign on the outside of the door, distracted by the fleeting, blink-and-you'd-miss-it glint of her dress zipper.
She's kneeling in front of the safe, which seems designed for the eyes to gloss over, recessed as it is and blending easily into the closet. Stowing the suitcase with her winnings inside, she shuts it with a satisfying, heavy sound and twists the dial this way and that with an air of performing a comforting ritual.
"Tell me," he says in a low voice, "have you beaten the house before?"
Sakura turns her head, watches him in profile. "What makes you ask that?"
Sasuke snorts, though not unkindly. "You were a shark at that table. And I could see it in your eyes — your mind working. The thrill of it."
Sakura smiles, beguiling, impish. Still kneeling on the floor. "Those of us without, learn. Cheat, if we have to." She shifts her curtain of hair, pulls her fingernails lightly across the back of her neck. "How do you think the other half lives?"
"'Other half?"
"People who don't spend half their life in front of cameras, ferried by a family name alone. Those who work in the less respectable professions doing questionable things because they have to, usually bound to serving others?"
Those who don't have choices.
Sasuke has the feeling he's treading on something sensitive. Her nostrils flare in the half-light of the suite, curtains drawn against the outside, murky mountain sunrise struggling to actualize.
"Sakura." He says it quietly, like an apology.
"Sorry," she says hastily, getting to her feet, turning to face him. "I'm . . . so used to being defensive. Hiding little details that don't mean anything, because I'm terrified they do."
"Do you trust me?"
And what is time — the interval between coffee and champagne, sunrise and twilight? Her silence lasts for long, drawn heartbeats.
Crossing the room to the kitchenette, she doesn't respond. Instead unearths a chilled bottle from the fridge, a firm and searing rhythm in her movements, beginning in the way her heels hit the carpet and continuing, unbroken, in each deliberate action of her fingers. The glass notes of champagne flutes set on marble. Holding the bottle at an angle, loosening the muselet.
"Could you help me?" she asks, now with her back to him.
Sasuke first sheds his jacket, leaves it on the bed. His fingers cup her elbow, but she shakes her head against his nose seeking refuge in the slope of her neck.
"Not with this." A light laugh. A hiss and satisfying pop! when she dislodges the cork and begins to pour. She shrugs her shoulders against his chest. "The zip. Just a little."
Something shifts between them when he takes the zipper between his fingers, one of those moments in which he believes she's alien wrought divine. Small metal teeth splitting as a flower in bloom, revealing each corresponding shadow and step of the bones of her spine. He knows, without asking, to stop halfway down, enough for her to be able to keep the dress on or remove at her leisure.
Bending to a force he didn't notice before stumbling into it.
"Tell me now," she breathes. "If you'll be uncomfortable."
But he knows he won't stop her, won't resist.
"Back up, then." Sakura's voice slides into a commanding edge, honed like a knife. "Be good."
On his retreat, he loosens the topmost button before turning around to face her. Already needing air. He's backed up against the bed's footboard; she's pressed against the counter of the kitchenette, champagne flute in hand.
"Might as well do the rest," she says softly. It's not a request.
Sasuke muffles his sharp inhale, struggling to project an unruffled facade. But the way her free fingers tap the marble in a countdown rhythm — pinky, ring, middle, index — over and over as she watches him, an errant drop of champagne lingering on her bottom lip she reclaims with her top one, the hungry eyes, tells him he's already lost.
The only person on earth it feels so good to lose to.
His fingers move deftly but with weight. There's heat in his face, his cock. An anticipatory clamminess in his palms. Each undone button makes the air thicker, makes him harder, sends his imagination off the wire.
"Why did you listen to my show?"
His fingers slip; his response is stupid. "What?"
"I said," she rasps, and there's her staticky, throaty twilight voice, the question answering itself, "why did you listen to my show?"
"The first time?"
"And every night after."
He swallows hard, the lump in his throat interfering with human speech.
"Insomnia." He pauses in his work to tackle the tie that's so suddenly snug, too snug, around his neck. "I spent a lot of time in quiet, alone. Working nights. Radios remind me of the rest of the world existing, a window into everything else."
It doesn't answer her question, though, as she keeps her gaze level and sips from the glass. He manages to loosen the fabric, breathe a bit easier, and under her eyes he resumes dealing with his buttons.
She follows his movements, chewing her bottom lip, nibbling 'til it swells. Thinks of those lips on him, velvet and hot and at once he's in his bedroom mired in memory, the times before her and the times after their fated collision, the sleepless hours spinning under duress of her radio voice, the way he'd touch himself with hands that didn't feel like his own to the sounds of a stranger and then more recent forays, stratum film, the somehow gentle and pliable way in which he'd fucked her mouth and fell apart and she still, always, managed to lead from her knees.
"Tell me the truth, Sasuke." The crack of a whip, feeling her reprimand burn his skin. All this and he's wild, hard and aching, desperate. "Do you trust me?"
Green fabric of her dress sagging, crumpling, revealing flushed skin.
Pausing in his unbuttoning, he pulls an endless strand of hair from his shirt, viewing it in the odd, underwater light of the suite. Pink, resolute, bright against the dim.
He lets it twist and float to the carpet, and resumes.
"Yes," he says. "More than I should."
She sips again, doesn't respond.
"I couldn't shake you, once I'd heard you," he continues. Sweat beading in the small of his back, an ache in his chest. "I couldn't get you out of my head. Then you acknowledged me — left me space."
Finishes off the buttons, immediately at a loss as to what to do with his hands. He wants them on her, badly, they buzz with impertinence and lust, but she's not ready to let him. She drains the glass flute and sets it down with a sharp sound, another reminder that in this round, his leash is short. Even the bare column of her neck sparks arousal, and he can't stop a soft groan from vibrating in his throat.
"You heard me," he says, each rich syllable a slow ministration, "even when I couldn't speak."
And for a moment she's stunned, lips parting but robbed of a retort. The blaze in her eyes smolders a little, irises smudged and softened edges. Then:
"You can undress."
So softly spoken he doesn't move at first, her whisper buoyant as it reaches him, lingers in the shell of his ear. Hands moving before his mind does, humming and hungry as it is; sheds his dress shirt, softened from its earlier crisp, shoes and socks —
"So many people call into my show," she begins, unprompted. "And only in the very dead of night are they able to reveal the things that plague them, overturn their dark stones."
She pauses, holding up a single finger to halt him in the task of shedding his tie.
An exhale, shakier than he'd like, escapes.
"I never thought a soul could bare itself in radio silence."
A twitch here, a shift there, and the glittering green fabric slides to the carpet with a muted sound and the ease of something shedding its troublesome, primitive skin.
"But I realized I was drawn to you, too," she says, eyes tracing the muscled lowlands of Sasuke's chest as he blinks dumbly in response, processing that she'd had absolutely nothing on underneath her dress all night and now she's bereft of clothing all but those shoes, those new intimidating and expensive shoes he'd picked up for her simply at the flicker of her beautiful eyes because really nothing was enough, he'd fly her to the moon for the inexpensive cost of remaining in her orbit.
"I never actually thought I'd meet you, this weird guy calling every other night, mute, listening to an open line of static."
Truthfully she could call him any name at this point, whatever she'd like; he stares at the single bead of sweat? champagne? cutting a liquid path down her neck. A taste, that's all, for a parched throat and soul.
"We've unearthed something we can't put back — knocked the universe out of alignment."
He defies her, and their game, for a moment; says, "I thought you didn't believe in these things."
Sakura accepts his misbehavior, this once. "I don't quite know anymore."
Could he press the philosophical point at this juncture, with an urgent erection and teetering on the edge of fucking her with abandon against a marble kitchenette counter? Likely not.
Instead he yanks the loose tie away from the burning skin of his neck, as if it's still done up to the collar, feeling suffocated.
"It's killing you, isn't it?" Voice close and yet far away, that ragged quality that keeps him obsessed. Always threatening to disappear.
Please, he thinks, though he's sure she heard, and her endlessly tapping fingers playing her silent song now run across her collarbone, raising gooseflesh in its wake. Drift lower, drawing his dark eyes.
"You're so good, you know."
Something he never knew he wanted to hear, until the first time it fell from her lips.
"Your self-control is impressive," she continues, fingers circling her nipple. "But can you pace yourself?"
But he's already unbuttoning himself at breakneck speed, the footboard cutting into the backs of his legs from pressing, leaning, support to his slightly shaking knees, less from weakness than from grounding himself in discipline and pain wards off the vivid hallucinations, all the ways in which he bends her and takes her and all the surfaces that'd support it but too soon, not yet,
and she pinches it gently, rolling it to hardness and her knees, he doesn't miss how they grind against each other, free hand on her thigh razing softly across the skin, the soft moan it brings —
"Sakura—"
"No."
"I want—"
"I'm not sure I care, right now, what you want."
"Fuck," he groans. "Just let me touch you."
"Yourself first." Somehow coaxing, spun through with deific mandate. Dragging the backs of her fingernails over the slow cant of each rib and then her stomach, straying low, so low: "Go on, then. Do what I ask."
A sharp, skittering exhale when he takes himself into his hand, a sound of simultaneous fever and relief. Already leaking from the tip, small mercy and scant lubricant for his ache. She steps with purpose, heels of her shoes punctuating the carpet, following invisible astronomic spacelines as a stormy, bewitching planet on the move.
Circling.
"Did you do this, before you met me?" she asks, tone light. "Imagine me, take my voice to bed?"
Sasuke doesn't answer, struggling with too many emotional inputs at once, This buildup, this climb, suppressing curses and the urge to grab her, he could easily, toss her down, fuck her senseless; the way her fingers wander idly across her own skin, run through her hair, her vaguely threatening circuitous route, closer now; his unfamiliar aspiration to please.
She receives no answer, just a forceful, angry exhale, then another, a single, barely-restrained moan —
"Not on the phone, I'd hope. I think you're too shy for that," she murmurs, running her fingernails over the bedspread with a scratchy sound. Close enough to feel her heat, radiating with impunity. Tiny hairs on the back of his neck standing on end, a strange shiver threatening to throw him off rhythm.
She wanders out of his line of sight. He tries to say her name and it thickens in his throat, comes out as a growl like nothing human.
Oh, she says so quiet as to be unvoiced, I'm so wet.
His breath catches as the bed dips behind him with her weight, and when she yanks him back against her by the tie around his neck, hair shimmering and slipping like silk over his shoulder, the sound he makes is one he'd pay a million in hush money for no other being to hear.
She whispers in his ear,
"Keep being good for me."
His hips stutter, approaching a dangerous point.
"Let me fuck you," he hisses, baring his teeth.
Heat, emanating from the places her nails drag across his chest, the brushburn of fabric on his neck, coming in waves from her skin.
"I'm — close—!"
"And I'm so proud," she whispers, limbs and hair draped over him as she's clinging to his back, skin ablaze and glossy with sweat. He knows she's primed, eager, but still praising him into a beautiful stupor, fiddling with the chinks in his armor, prying him apart. "So obedient; you've done so well, darling."
"Let me." His free fingers find her hair and tug, pulling her face flush against his. Bunting, cheek to cheek, from his continued efforts toward release. He never quite manages the word without a break in his voice: Please.
"So handsome, so polite." Another light laugh in his ear, but she's already shifting, pulling away and the cold air hits his back and the marks on his skin. The spell dissipates and he swears he can feel it unhand him as a physical thing. Lets go of his cock, halts his turbulent, frenzied motions, wary of the tipping point that's too close for comfort and he'll be damned if he makes that mistake.
He turns around on the bed.
Sweeps damp hair off his forehead and holds it there in his fist, breathing even harder still at the way she's seated with legs bent back, splayed on either side and the flush in her skin and her grip, fingers twisted up in the bedspread and clinging. Pupils wide, sparkling in the way of twinkling, otherplanetary stars.
"Tell me how you want me."
She tenses but he doesn't leap as she expects. Portentous, measured movements in the way he comes closer to her on his knees —
— and takes her firmly by the chin.
Tender, to be sure, but his grip holds dominance.
He directs, nudging, bringing her up to kneel. Eye-level. Her stomach flips, and she swallows down the moan escaping from her lips. Not that she can hide the shiver, the way everything absolutely drips.
Sasuke kisses her, instructing in a voice quiet like passing secrets.
On my lap, and he grips the back of her thigh for good measure, dragging her close, I want to look at you.
She's on him quickly, straddling him and dropping kisses on his hair, ears, neck, pressing her soaked entrance against him and his ready cock but he's not obliging, not yet; he presses her breastbone lightly with the tips of his fingers, balancing her on his legs.
Please, Sasuke —
"All your teasing, none for me?" And he dips in one finger, then another up to his knuckles, thumb rubbing idle circles on her swollen clit, reaching for her waist when she groans, threatens to upset their careful balance. "You're soaked, though. Can't be helped."
Voice deliberate, firm in a way that'll rip an orgasm from her right then and there, he removes them, brushes the tang of her own fluid across her lips, and says,
"Now get on me."
And she does, taking him to the hilt as he grips her as clinging to shipwreck and debris, groaning, the sounds mingling with the crack and crumble of her voice, a cry from some entombed chamber of the soul, and another, pleasure pitching occasionally over his low, rich voice leading her through each swell and wave of their hips, the rhythm agonizing in its steady pace and terrifyingly sublime.
Kisses on her collarbone and sternum, punctuations to his steady stream of praise,
beautiful; words painting heat and flush on her skin; we're going slow, I've got you, I've got you, unending and intimate with her legs wrapped around him in relentless grip, the roil and roll to bring her close, closer, ease her into the pleasurable dimension she deserves, he could've come ages go but not yet, not with her still writhing like this and clawing at him and dropping pieces of his name like gold through grasping fingers —
Sweet girl — between his sharp breaths and she clings as he moves inside of her — good girl —
She comes —
in a syncopated, erratic loss of control, in the bruising straightjacket clench of her thighs and a sharp cry, shaking, riding it on through.
Another second or two and the powerful shifts of her muscles clench him, carry him through in tandem.
And those fragments tumbling from her swollen lips in aftershock could be siren songs or mantras against pestilence and strife — but he's not sure he can process what he's hearing,
the shards of his name and something resembling I love you.
Pastel hair piled on top of her head. Haphazard elegance.
He watches her stare at the opposite end of the bath, sunken in up to just under chin and lost in thought.
Turning over stones in her mind as talismans, examining disparate dross piece by piece.
A hastily-signed name, more of an afterthought than an identifier. Tobi.
Shadows and stalks: Sasori. The caller. The club. Taking photos. Maybe even the man at the hotel bar.
Naruto's parents' deaths . . . not what they seem.
Itachi's tattoo—
The plink of glass on blue, smooth, cold tile, and she's startled out of her reverie by a fresh champagne and Sasuke's soft sloe eyes.
"You all right?"
A brief self-assessment: Sore, in the best way. A suitcase stuffed with winnings. Head spinning from the bath, the heat, her slip of the tongue, and all the clues piling up alongside.
"Better than," she says with a smile, flicking water at him. "Just tired. Won't you join me?"
Fluttering her eyelashes, she pulls a face, not that he needs much convincing.
Sasuke curses as he slides into the bath. "Hot enough for you?"
"Yes, you are."
He pouts; she smiles into her sip.
"Our phones are charging," he says, wincing. The top layer of his skin's likely melting off. "Hope you're ready for the interrogation."
"Ino should be used to it from me, but I'll never hear the end of it." She sighs, running her fingernail across the tile. She pauses, for the mention of her best friend brings the worrying pit in her stomach back to her thoughts. "Can I . . . ask you something?"
Sasuke nods.
"What do you think happened to Naruto's parents? Were they involved in whatever yours were?"
He seems to slip away for a second, leaving his body. She regrets asking immediately, taking him back to something destabilizing and dark.
"I don't think the police report was entirely true." His tone's robotic, careful, far away. "But I don't think they were like mine — mired in legal, and illegal, shit."
"Do you know what Shikamaru's dad does? Works in the same department as Ino's?"
"Hm?"
"Officially they're 'analysts,' but I do wonder . . . if the Uchiha family were involved in things like this, wouldn't they be watched? Activities tracked?" Sakura takes a thoughtful sip. "Files on them, you know?"
Underwater, Sasuke's hand finds her foot pressed up against his thigh. "What do you mean?"
"Why wouldn't the government keep an eye on that?"
"Officials were cozy with us," Sasuke says, in an almost petulant tone. "They benefited just as much from those relationships."
"'Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,'" she recites, wiggling her toes against him. "If Itachi can't be more forthcoming with what we know he knows, can we go a different route?"
His fingers grip her ankle.
"If people are after you, I'll handle it."
"It's not 'if,' they are. Someone is. The photographs, the club. I can sense eyes on me, I know they're following close behind."
"Even here? Even now?"
Her answer is a hard swallow, eyes flitting away from him to smolder under his hard gaze. The burn.
"Let me take care of it."
"Oh, you're sweet. But you're not a criminal, Sasuke."
"You don't deserve this."
"Perhaps." It's noncommittal; she shrugs as adornment to indifference. "It's still a cold, hard fact of my life — being followed. The reason I run, always glancing over shoulders but afraid of looking fully. Looking back."
Sasuke thinks of Naruto, of Itachi, of his family name, of revenge. Of a pact made in pain and friendship with his light side of the moon. He wonders if he could've uprooted everything and ran, started over, without him.
Sakura relents to her mollifying sleepy buzz, thinking of clouds painted over mountains against blue skies, rendered in shoddy tattoos.
"I don't know how to stay."
Itachi's bad moods are about the same as his good ones: Confounding, murky, difficult to read.
Kisame would consider himself the closest thing to a friend and even still, his powers of deduction are the equivalent of his dart skills at best. Once in a while, his aim might be true.
The former leans in the shade of the prison's walls and scant eaves, twisting his ring 'round and 'round, every once in a while staring at the sooty tattoo beneath. Standing with him in silence, the latter waits for tidbits to lead him in the right direction as to his temperament today.
"He thinks he has a hold on all of them," Itachi says abruptly. "That they're his flock because of a few lines of ink and a weak sense of mission."
Kisame stares down at the top of his head.
"You haven't talked for," and he consults an invisible watch, "an hour. And that's how you break our silence? Not even an inquiry into my boring day?"
Ignoring him, Itachi continues undaunted. "How much loyalty does a band of criminals possess? They're all here for selfish reasons, I'm sure; money, women, weapons." A pause. "Easily swayed."
"I don't follow."
Pressing off the wall, Itachi winces in the bright daylight of the prison yard. He only lets his hand, acting as shield for his eyes, fall when Kisame moves between him and the sun.
They stroll, as delicate and droll as two criminals can.
"If I reshape them for my cause, I can usurp weak allegiance. Harbor loyalty to me under the Akatsuki banners. Wear his colors," and here he pauses, eyes glittering, "but manipulate his men."
"You want to turn the turncoats, and control his merry band of murderers?" Kisame scoffs, shaking his head. "Why do you need men falling in line? You've already refused to be his errand boy, so you're out, right? Just tell 'im to fuck off."
His friend's silence balloons as they walk, flat vinyl shoes scraping occasionally on the blacktop. Safe, laceless, prison-issued.
Kisame answers his own question. "This has to do with the girl. Your brother, too."
The lack of response indicates he's hit the mark.
"Why do you care? Your brother's free and you're here, just like you wanted. Stirring up a family feud seems like it'll cause more trouble for Sasuke and his girl with the candy-hair."
Itachi's exhale conveys immense annoyance simply by the way it whistles through his nose.
"I mean, it is an obnoxious color," Kisame defends. "I've never seen it on anyone else."
Itachi holds up a hand to his prattle, and his companion follows the flicker and refocus of his dark eyes to see one of their usual escorts standing in the doorway entrance to the yard, arms folded.
The guard waves his fingers in a come here motion, and Kisame frowns, the lines around his eyes, often speculated to be someone's brutal attempt at carving him gills, flexing with his expression.
He bares his canines in amusement and mirth.
"Only you," he says, "would look him dead the eye before fucking all his underlings."
Review thank you's to summerspringss, busephalus, and Guest! It's been a while between chapters I knowww, I wrote some other things, also going through graduate school admissions (first gen, I dunno how to do shit lol), but I always always appreciate ya'll