prompt: galaxy
summary: what do those look like to you, fish or stars? they can be anything you want them to be. we can be anything we want to be.
"Do you like aquariums, Itachi?" Sakura hums as she spins in the large glass tunnel, eyes facing skyward at the sharks and rays that swim above them.
Itachi follows her gaze and sees just that: sharks and rays. "I don't dislike them," he says. She leans against the railing and just stares—at those fish that more or less look the same, share the same biological structure, do the same thing every moment of every day—to be honest, Itachi finds aquariums a touch boring and terribly redundant. Fish are fish. You can learn about them in textbooks. "But they're better than zoos," he amends, as an afterthought. "Because they don't smell."
Sakura laughs, never once taking her eyes off of the endless blue around them. "I like aquariums," she remarks.
"I know. You told me."
"They're just—I don't know, calming. I feel like I can breathe here." Which is ironic, considering they're underneath hundreds and thousands of tons of water that they can't even drink. "I love the way the fish swim, in circles as if they're never bored." Because they have terribly short memory spans. "You can watch them forever but nothing will ever be exactly the same as this very moment right now. It's like…an endless galaxy, stars and nebulas and supernovas that shine and glimmer and then go out in the blink of an eye."
When Itachi looks at the fish, all he can see is fish. To him, there are no stars or nebulas or supernovas, no hidden beauty beyond the glass.
"What do you think of fish, Itachi?"
He tries to find something nice to say, something that won't wipe the smile right off her face. "They make easy pets," he finally manages, and she laughs again, and he supposes that is good.
"Goldfish, you mean," she corrects him. "And koi. And betta, and guppies, and tetras. But not rockfish or manta rays or sand sharks."
"No," he agrees. "Those would be troublesome."
"You'd keep them in your bathtub." She grins impishly, and tucks her hair behind her ear, the pink faded and pale in the soft light of the ocean surrounding them. "You'd hide them from your family."
Sakura has a knack for that: speaking nonsensical words when she is, in reality, capable of reciting thesauruses out by heart. That's boring, she says. Words on paper are static and stagnant, you flip the page and there it all is, laid out for you to only look at, but not discover.
Itachi doesn't understand. Itachi's never understood. But he's learned to predict, learned to read—he's just learned Sakura, from head to toe, even though she's always twirling and dancing and leaping, always moving, always changing. She's a current all her own, and he's caught up in it, the helpless little guppy who doesn't know how to escape.
But then again, such is life. You never do quite get to choose where you end up, or who you end up with.
"Keeping them in my bathtub would probably be animal abuse," he says, smiling wryly. "Even I'm not that cruel."
"Really?" she asks, half rhetorical. "I think you are."
"You slay me, Sakura."
"You slay me, Itachi. I can't believe you let me pay for your entrance ticket to this place when you're not even remotely interested." But there is kindness in her eyes, a look she saves just for him, although he has yet to decipher that part of her.
(A quiet declaration of 'I love you', something he's always had an inkling of. No, he thinks. The galaxy is not out there, in the rocks and sea salt and silver schools of fish. The galaxy is right here, burning in your eyes.)
"Then all you have to do is interest me," he says, a simple solution to a complicated problem.
Sakura exhales, a slow breath through soft lips. And then: "Okay." Her eyes glitter like a hidden treasure at the bottom of the ocean, the rich green of kelp, the distant echo of a love story long forgotten. She grabs his hand and tugs him along, out of the tunnel and to the next display. "Come on, you're holding us up."
He lets her pull him past the information boards and to the actual fish, as if he's the dead weight and not her. But that's alright, Itachi supposes. Things are always alright with Sakura. He can't see the point of fish, but he can definitely see the point of her.
A/N: A very quick update because this week is going to suck for me (meaning increased workload which actually means I'm going to write more to hide from it, but not post anything out of guilt). Also because you guys are inspiring! I love your prompts, so starting next chapter, I'll be posting those.
Just a note to an anonymous reviewer last chapter, a non-massacre pregnancy drabble happened in chapter 45. :)
Please keep the prompts coming, if you can!