She woke up three hours early and lay in bed for four, watching an industrious spider spin a web across her ceiling. Sakura considered catching it and setting it outside, but couldn't muster the energy to move.
She'd begged off training and work for the day by telling Tsunade that she was having a birthday party. She had nowhere to be and no one to see but Kakashi, and he would be late anyway. There was time. It was fine.
Her alarm blared. Sakura hit the snooze button. Thirty minutes until she got to see if Kakashi lived through the week. The thought gave her the energy to roll out of bed and into the shower.
Sakura leaned against cheap, ugly tiles, and closed her eyes. The mildew in her bathroom had grown again, stretching spindly black fingers across the walls. She should clean it.
The water was lukewarm at best, cold at worst. Sakura shivered as it turned from best to worst, and rested her head against the tile. Her bones ached.
The alarm went off again and Sakura shut off the water. She didn't bother with a towel, just squeezed the water out of her hair and combed it with her fingers until her neighbour yelled at her through the wall. Sakura blinked, then wandered into the other room to turn off the alarm with her toes.
All her clothes were dirty, Sakura realized. She bit her lip and sat on her bed. She still hadn't washed the sheets.
The water on her skin dripped down, leaving cold lines and goosebumps. Sakura grabbed her cleanest looking shirt and yanked it over her head. She had four minutes before she would be late and no eggplant. She grimaced and grabbed a pair of pants at random.
Sakura pulled her wallet from her laundry pile and counted her money. She had twenty ryou, enough to buy Kakashi lunch, at least. Not enough for herself, too, but that's what the juice boxes were for.
"Hey, Sakura," Kakashi said. He pushed away from the wall and slouched toward her.
Sakura stretched her lips in a smile and held up a grocery bag filled with four eggplants and a couple of juice boxes. She had a folded coat hanger, a container of olive oil she'd snuck out of her mother's kitchen, and salt and pepper packets from a poorly guarded restaurant in her pockets. "You're here," Sakura commented. A wave of relief filled her and she clutched at the emotion with only a hint of desperation.
"Happy Birthday," Kakashi said. He eyed the bag with a hint of amusement. "You're cooking?"
"We are," Sakura corrected him. "Come on, let's go." She set out toward Team Seven's old training grounds.
"I'm a terrible cook," Kakashi pointed out. He fell in step beside her, and Sakura felt a rush of something she couldn't name. It was good, though.
"So am I," she told him, ignoring his nod of agreement. "That's why we're going to cut them up, skewer them, and cook them over a fire. That's at least fifty percent ninja stuff, so we can't possibly screw it up too much."
Kakashi hummed thoughtfully. "Do you think that will help?"
"If not, I brought juice boxes," Sakura replied, feeling oddly fine with the thought of failure. She smiled.
"The training grounds?" Kakashi asked, obviously cluing in to where they were headed. There was a bit of tension in his voice.
Sakura refused to hesitate at the hint of disapproval. "It's my birthday, and I'll wallow in nostalgia if I want to. And you have to come with me because I blew my grocery money on these and I don't even like eggplant."
"You didn't have to get them," Kakashi said uncomfortably. "I mean, you could have gone out with your friends. I'm wasn't—I'm not going to..."
Sakura bit her lip to keep from saying something nasty and settled for the truth, "If you hadn't come to my apartment last week, I would have spent today stitching up idiots, healing bigger idiots, and trying not to strangle civilians."
Kakashi was giving her a look. "Ah, civilians?" he prompted her.
"Oh dear me, how sweet of you to volunteer at the hospital. Do you know when the doctor will see me?" Sakura said in a high pitched whine. "Miss? Will you get me a drink? And lunch? And a sponge bath heh heh heh?"
Kakashi made a choked noise. Sakura suspected he was trying not to laugh.
"Or my favourite, 'Why are you pretending to be a ninja, sweetie? It's such a nasty profession,'" Sakura finished. "Of course, that last one was my grandmother, so maybe it doesn't count," she said, rolling her eyes.
"Your family doesn't support you being a ninja?" Kakashi asked in surprise. His elbow bumped into her shoulder in a very discrete show of support.
Sakura snorted. "No. They really, really don't. It got so bad that I moved out. It was better than fighting with them every night." Probably, she added silently. Her apartment's only saving grace was that it didn't pitch a screaming fit every time she came home.
"That's too bad," Kakashi said. He stopped suddenly.
Sakura blinked and realized that they were in front of the posts he'd tied Team Seven to almost three years ago. There were three posts, but she was the only one there. It didn't feel right, but she was getting used to that, sort of. "Okay, great. You get to start the fire, because I didn't actually think that far ahead when I left this morning. I'll...chop these up," she said, looking around for a handy rock to use as a chopping block.
Kakashi disappeared into the trees, presumably to find some firewood.
Sakura found a boulder with a relatively flat top and started slicing the eggplants into thin strips.
The firewood crunched when Kakashi dropped it beside her. "So other than working in the hospital, are you enjoying being Tsunade's apprentice?" he asked. Sakura nearly giggled, because subtle that was not.
"Meh. It's okay," Sakura said. She pulled the coat hanger out of her pocket and unfolded it. "I mean..." Her hands shook for a second and Sakura closed her eyes. "I hate the hospital. Right now I keep telling myself that as soon as I get full accreditation I can quit working there and go back in the field."
Kakashi's hand brushed over her shoulder. "Are you close to full accreditation?" he sounded impressed, Sakura realized with a faint twinge of pride.
"Another four months," Sakura said. She'll be the youngest medic in Konoha when she finishes. "I'll have finished in two years instead of five," she told him, just in case he didn't know.
"That's impressive," Kakashi said.
It made the last two years feel worth it for the first time in months, so Sakura dropped her knife and gave Kakashi an impulsive hug. "Thanks," she muttered into his shirt, quiet enough that he wouldn't really be able to hear it.
He put his hands on her shoulders like he wasn't quite sure how to hug her back. Sakura squeezed him carefully, then let go. "Okay, you can stab the eggplant slices with this," she told Kakashi, handing him the coat hanger. "Then coat them in oil and salt and pepper."
Kakashi straightened the coat hanger. "Will this work?" he asked, testing the point of the wire with his finger. It wasn't very sharp.
Sakura shrugged. "I have no idea. I couldn't think of anything else to do with eggplant." She gave the vegetables a dubious look.
"It's good in soup," Kakashi said, threading the coat hanger through a slice of eggplant.
Sakura cracked open the container of oil and dipped her fingers into it. "All I have for cooking is a microwave, and it only works if I put in the time in intervals shorter than twenty seconds. We're stuck with open flames."
Kakashi laughed. "You've been eating out a lot?"
"Hospital cafeteria," Sakura admitted sheepishly. "It's free."
He shuddered. "That's disgusting. You eat that crap willingly?" He held out the eggplant on a stick so Sakura could coat it in oil.
"Formless masses of grey gruel," Sakura said, wrinkling her nose. She had gotten used to the food and slightly addicted to red jello, but that didn't make it any more appealing. "Hey, if I hold the stick, can you get the salt and pepper packets open? My hands are oily."
Kakashi handed her the coat hanger and ripped the edges off the paper packets. "You know, when you said party, I pictured funny hats and music."
"If it bothers you that much, you can hum," Sakura told him. "And as for hats..." She fished a pair of somewhat squished sparkly party hats out of her back pocket. "I found these in a storage room in the hospital."
"At the hospital?" Kakashi asked, giving them a side long glance. He dusted the eggplant skewer with salt and pepper, then sent a tiny fireball toward the pile of firewood.
"Yeah, I don't know either." Sakura leaned over and hooked the rubber band under Kakashi's chin and settled the hat in his bird's nest hair. It looked idiotic on him and she snickered evilly before putting on her own. "There. It's party town, now."
"I feel the fun." Sakura had no idea if he was joking. He sounded completely serious.
"Do you want a juice box? I've got fake berry and fruit punch," Sakura asked, oiling the rest of the eggplant slices.
"Fake berry would be nice, thank you." Kakashi held the coat hanger over the flames, just high enough to keep the eggplant from lighting in fire.
She grabbed a luridly bright blue juice box from her bag and handed it to him. "Hey, Kakashi..." Sakura said, uncertain if she really wanted to ask. Today was going weirdly well for once and she didn't want to ruin it.
"Yeah?" His eye crinkled up in a smile, and she felt okay, like everything was okay.
"Why...why did you stop?" Sakura asked quickly before she lost her nerve.
Kakashi twisted the eggplant skewer a few times before he answered. "I guess...I was ready. I had everything set up. My will was updated, I had a mission briefing the next day so someone would look for me, I'd debated and re-debated the merits of putting down a tarp... I was so prepared," he said.
He pulled the eggplant back from the fire and looked at it carefully. "And then I—I tried, but I couldn't make myself cut deep enough. It hurt, and I couldn't...I don't know. It made dying not seem worth it, either."
Sakura shivered. "Why didn't you try again? Or just let yourself bleed out? If you hadn't put those stitches in, you would have been dead within hours."
"I don't know." Kakashi said. He hadn't looked at since she'd asked him why. He adjusted the angle of his hitai-ate, mumbling something she couldn't hear, then spoke up, "I don't know why I wanted to die, and I don't know why I wanted to live."
Sakura hugged him because she didn't know what else to do. "I don't want you to die," she told him, hoping that would mean something to him. "And I think the eggplant is done, but the important thing is that I don't want you to die."
Kakashi wrapped an arm around her and held her head against his chest, knocking her party hat askew. She heard fabric rustling and realized that he had pulled his mask down. "It's delicious," he said. His voice cracked.
"Really?" Sakura asked. "I was expecting charcoal-like slime." She didn't move. There were tears in her eyes, and she didn't want Kakashi to see them.
"Do you want some?" Kakashi asked.
"Yeah." She twisted enough to nibble at the eggplant. "It is good," Sakura decided. Very savoury and just a bit chewy. Much better than hospital food. She relaxed her grip on Kakashi, and shuffled back.
"I got you a birthday present," Kakashi said suddenly, like he'd just remembered. He passed her the eggplant skewer and pulled a plastic box out of his belt pouch.
"Oh? You didn't have to," Sakura said happily. No one had gotten her a present in ages. She pealed the lid off and grinned, amused. "Thanks."
"You asked if I liked cake, so I figured that maybe you did," Kakashi said quietly, looking away. He looked a little flushed.
"I do," Sakura told him, lifting the squished vanilla cupcake out of the box. It was her favourite flavour.