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constellations
(winter)
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He walks along the marshes, the reeds crumpling beneath his measured steps. The air is opaque, all fog and dusk, and it is here that an old woman accosts him. She's wearing chains of gold around the sagging skin of her neck; rings on her skinny fingers glint in the orange light.
"You there," she calls, a command and a croak.
Sasuke, even after all these years, recalls his mother's strict warnings about speaking with strangers, but he is grown and his mother is dead and there is something about the manner in which this old woman speaks to him that makes him stop.
He does not bother to turn around. "Yes?"
She hobbles towards him. "I have a gift for you."
He looks down at the mud beneath his sandals. "You don't know me."
"Boy, I have your future."
He turns. She fixes her beady eyes on him, wrinkles sagging over her eyelids. Her gray hair wafts like steam out of its careful bun.
"Give me your hand," she instructs, holding her palm out. Her fingers tremble, unsteady from the years that press down upon her. He reaches out, but before they can make contact, she pulls away, hand drawn to her chest, clutching at the chains. Her words flow. "There are many roads. You have the opportunity to take them all, and then some. You've done a great deal already, but you keep searching. Something is missing-"
"What?" Sasuke's eyes widen a fraction.
"—and whatever it is, you cannot move forward until you have it." She gasps a breath, eyes glinting in the setting sun.
His hand drops to his side. "You didn't read my palm."
She shook her head. "I can see it. I don't need your hand. It's in your eyes." Her hands snap towards him suddenly, gripping his forearms tighter than he'd anticipated for a small, elderly woman. Her short nails drag at his cotton sleeves.
Annoyed, he shakes her off and turns his back to her. "You're a fraud."
Her last words are earnest; they glide in the wind. "There can be no life, Sasuke, without love. Surely you must know that."
He turns around swiftly, and his vision is red. He is poised to grab a shuriken from his weapons pouch, but by then she is already gone. Only her footsteps, still pressed into the muddy earth, are evidence that she was real.
—
He's charming.
He's been nattering on about his sister for the past few minutes, the miso in front of him growing tepid. The scallions have slowed to a lazy swirl in the bowl. His hands are animated, and she can see the carefully clipped nails, the soft skin of the pads of his fingers. The hands of a man who'd kept himself tucked away within the white walls of the operating room. "And she really admires you, you know, Sakura. Says you're her hero. I promised I'd get an autograph for her."
She blinks, eyes refocusing on him. His lashes are long, the same dark brown as his hair. "You got a pen?" she replies after a long moment, smile tipping onto her face.
He blinks. "Oh. No."
There's a beat of silence, and then he begins to laugh, and after a few seconds she joins him. He's nice, she thinks. He is kind, and he is normal. "When the check comes, I'll write something on the back of the receipt," she promises between giggles.
She spoons the last of her miso into her mouth, watching the waiters flit from table to table.
"I really like you." He says this so earnestly that when her head snaps to him, her cheeks are already burning. He is smiling, and his neck is red, and he looks like he's on the verge of recanting.
"Oh," she manages. Her fingers close on the edge of the table.
"I'm sorry," he rushes. "I just—"
"No," she interrupts, reaching across the table to place her hand on his. She ignores the dull throb in her chest. "No, it's okay. I just wasn't expecting that. It's very sweet. You're very sweet."
Her throat dries when, just behind him, she sees Ino walking past the restaurant. Her blonde hair is swept over her shoulder, and they lock eyes. Ino's gaze is sharp as it connects with their hands, and Sakura draws back, heart thumping.
There is something in her best friend's face that speaks of scorn.
"I'm glad you think so."
Sakura swallows, and she tries so hard to do him justice, but her thoughts are wild. His hands are too soft—not roughened from years of hard labor. His smile is too trusting for someone he barely knows. He may have been a genin at some point, but he's not meant for her lifestyle. She closes her eyes and she sees the blur of the war, feel the tingle of her burning shoulder.
He wouldn't have lasted ten seconds.
"I…need to go to the bathroom. Excuse me," she breathes, and stands quickly. As she walks, her blood rushes in her ears, tears sting in her eyes, and all she can think is Sasuke, Sasuke, Sasuke.
—
The port city is damp. The monsoons have only begun in Lightning, and already the ground is saturated. The sky grumbles, and it takes only a scant few seconds for the drops to tap on his cloaked shoulders.
He ducks into a bar on the side of the road, the dim lighting and noisy clink of glasses promising both warmth and a place to forget. He does not recall sitting or ordering, but soon a drink is across from him, and it is the honeyed color of reprieve. It is automatic when he swallows the first glass, the amber liquor cool on his tongue. The burn barely registers, and he unfastens the cloak from around him, throwing it over the back of the barstool.
"Traveling somewhere?" the barkeep asks, mixing something pink in front of him (the color of Sakura's blush, he thinks distantly) for the woman two seats down. She keeps looking at him.
He grunts. "Another." He licks his lips, leaning heavily on his elbows on the counter—cherry wood, he recognizes belatedly. It has been weeks since he has felt so relaxed. The warmth fills his limbs, and he doesn't know how much time passes, but soon the barkeep is giving him a glass of water.
"Take it slow, man. You don't want to forget a woman like this."
Sasuke's thoughts, slow and staggered, come in spurts. "Wh…I didn't tell you what it's about."
The man shrugs, scratching his scraggly beard. "I can tell." He's polishing glasses now, laying them out in rows.
"You and that fucking old lady…" Sasuke snarls, anger bubbling like fizz. His jaw clenches, and he squeezes his eyes shut.
The man raises his hands up, one clutching a white rag. "All right, all right. If you don't want to talk, some of my regulars like to deal a different way."
Sasuke cracks an eye open. "How?"
The barkeep nods his chin at the woman, still sitting, still staring, just next to him. He turns to look. She isn't bad looking—dark brown hair in waves, curvy enough. As soon as he makes eye contact with her, she slides off the stool, walking toward him. Her fingers curl around his bicep, and she leans close to his face. Her breath smells like mint and alcohol.
"Hi," she says, lips brushing his ear. He can feel the lip gloss that rubbed off there, and when her hand drops from his arm to his thigh, he tenses. Her breasts are pressed against his side, and if he's honest with himself, he can see himself fucking her.
He knows it would be good.
She's quick to press kisses to his neck, but they're all in the wrong places. "I can be good to you, you know," she croons. Her hand strokes up to his hip, and he closes his eyes, remembering that Sakura's hands are different from this.
The room becomes dizzyingly clear, and then he is pushing her off. He is too rough, and she stumbles backward, elbow and ribs colliding with the structural column behind them.
He stands, grabs his cloak, and tosses money on the counter, coins clattering in sharp contrast to the hum of conversations and the patter of rain against the roof. "I don't want this," he says, and he's not sure who he's talking to, but it's all he repeats as he walks out the door and down the street to the docks.
He is soaking wet by the time he gets there, the waves splashing up on the wood to finish the job that the rain didn't. He rents a boat without too much fuss. "I don't want this; I don't want this; I don't want this."
He leaves for Snow.
—
Sakura is nervous when she opens the doors to the Academy. The floors are the same scuff-marked linoleum of her memories, but the paint on the walls is new. There are bulletin boards with art where there used to be notices, and the old desks are coupled with new chairs.
The Academy is still a place of comfort, a place for growth. She is not nervous because she is here. No, she is nervous because of whom she will see.
Every year, the Hokage goes to talk to the new students, but because Kakashi is living within a prison of paperwork and because she is all too eager to take up tasks that will keep herself occupied, she volunteered. Naruto did as well.
It will be the first time she has seen him since their last fight in her kitchen.
Naruto tosses his arm around her shoulder without warning, tugging her to his side. She hadn't heard him approach, and she mentally berates herself for not being more vigilant. "Sakura-chan! Are you ready? Are you pumped?"
It is impossible, even with a broken cup and a month of terse conversations between them, for her to not return his infectious smile. She laughs, the top of her head knocking his chin. He smells like lavender soap—the kind that Hinata uses. "I'm not sure I'm at your level of enthusiasm, but I'm happy."
He stares at her face, the small smile glowing across her cheeks, and kisses the top of her head. "Good. I'm glad."
They walk into the classroom together, and Sakura wonders why she had ever kept anything secret from him to begin with. Shame? Hurt?
But as Naruto is high-fiving kids and talking about the beginnings of the Fourth War, the beginnings of his life, she remembers.
It is because she loves him too much, and she doesn't want to disappoint him.
She stares at her beige sandals, forgetting for a second that she is supposed to be presenting the importance of teamwork, and Naruto nudges her side. She glances at him, and he nods encouragingly. "Naruto is the kind of teammate that I know you can all find inside of you," she starts, thinking of twinkling blue eyes and his promises of a lifetime.
Her lips tremble, eyebrows drawing together as she struggles to contain the surge of emotion. He is such a good friend.
"Naruto is the person that will pick you up when you're down, love you when you push him away, and never let go. And I know each and every one can find part of him inside you because that drive is within all of us. It is the Will of Fire."
They dismiss for target practice, and then she is grabbing Naruto's hand and dragging him outside with the class, laughing about how she was always better with shuriken than he was. They toss blades easily at too-close targets, bantering, and soon the school day is over.
The two of them remain, seated underneath a large tree. "I'm sorry," Sakura blurts, and the admission feels like the first breath of fresh air she's had in weeks. "I was afraid of what you would think, but I should have known better than that."
He cracks open an eye. "Mm."
Everything comes to the surface at once. "I left Lightning because I was too proud, but…I still love him, Naruto," she speaks slowly, throat getting tight. "I love him so much that it aches. I try to erase him, to move forward, but he's been part of me for so long that I can't. I love him, but I don't know that he'll ever come home."
Naruto sighs, a tanned hand tousling his hair. He has a scab on his wrist. "Sakura-chan, you have always known more about love than me. You have lived by it your whole life. Wouldn't you say that it's worth it?"
She picks at some weeds by her hip. "Are you asking me if I regret it? You already know the answer to that."
He shrugs. "So why give that up now? Why run away from love when it's gotten you this far?"
She leans to the left, her head falling onto his shoulder. "I don't know."
—
It takes a month for mud to dry into dirt, and for dirt to burst into soft bentgrass. Snow country is not the same as it was before. The remnants of the season have melted into the summertime, and the air is temperate.
Scarlet roofs dot the countryside, and the wind rushes past him, its touch a reminder of what once was. The bluff is quiet. His feet shift in the grass, eyes set in the distance.
Snow is objectively one of the more beautiful places he's seen. The air is crisp, the smell of pine soft in the breeze, but there is something empty about the land. His fingers grow cold, and he tucks his hand back inside his coat.
The city stretches out below him, the sky is empty of clouds, and his lone hand closes around the letters in his pocket. The wind ruffles his hair again, the ghost of her touch, and goosebumps prickle on his neck in response.
The paper is soft from age, and he doesn't need to take them out to remember the words. It is one of the ones from other people that comes to him first. Mourning doves coo from the trees, and the words wrap around him, constricting.
Naoya, a man he has never met, whispers to him. I spent my last moments thinking only of you. I spend all my moments getting lost in you.
And then: I want nothing more than for you to be happy.
And then: Please come home to me.
And then: I love you.
He rocks back on his heels, back hunching as this land brings back all the things he'd left behind. Her touch, her faith. If he closes his eyes for long enough, he can still see her shorter hair from behind, the snowfall, the feel of her pressed against him.
His hand in hers.
So soft, so soft.
He waits.
—
Sakura is waiting in the flower shop, fingering the petals of a lilting calla lily when the door chimes and Ino walks in, hands on her hips. "So you've finally crawled back here, huh?" she scowls, arms cradling bags of groceries.
"Ino," Sakura implores. "Do you need help with—"
"No." Ino's voice is clipped. "I am quite fine with handling things on my own. Something I learned best from you this past month. You had it quite under control, as do I. Now if you'll excuse me," she bites pointedly, "you are in between me and the kitchen."
Sakura snatches a bag of groceries before Ino can protest, placing them on the counter gingerly. She places the fruit in the crystal bowl on the countertop, the packages of seeds in the woven basket by the window, and the cuts of fish in the freezer.
"I'm sorry," Sakura's voice cracks, and when Ino finally looks at Sakura, her green eyes are brimming with tears. "I don't know what I'm doing. I just…I didn't want to talk about it because I thought I could handle it, and I thought if I ignored it for long enough, it would just go away. That I could erase him. But I can't, and I hurt you by avoiding you, and everything is a mess. And I miss you. I miss my best friend."
Ino sighs heavily, crossing her arms.
"I don't know what to do. I'm in love with a man who thinks he needs to search the world for his heart when it's already inside of him."
Ino's gaze softens, and she wraps her arms around Sakura. Warm tears slide down her neck and soak in her shirt. "It hurts," Sakura whispers, voice clogged with loss. "It hurts so fucking bad because he's out there and I'm here and I can't fix it. I don't know that it can be fixed."
They leave the rest of the groceries in the paper bags on the counter, and Ino ushers Sakura up the stairs to the bed that the spent their childhood making forts and dreams out of. The start of summer rain begins to patter against the window.
The two of them curl up side by side, blankets pulled up to their chins, and Sakura tells her everything. Tells her of the exchanged letters, the days in Snow, the traveling. The painting of the mountains, the painting of Sasuke. His arm around her waist, his breath against her lips. The letters. The despair. The month that passed, the date, and Naruto.
"I love him," Sakura says quietly, tears slipping from the corner of her eyes. She hastily wipes them away, looking determinedly out the window at the darkening sky.
Ino brushes her slim fingers through Sakura's hair. "Well," Ino says, "you know what to do."
Sakura, eyes puffy and bloodshot, turns to stare at her in bewilderment. "No, I don't."
"Yes, you do," Ino insists. "Forehead, you don't need me to tell you how to fix this. You aren't the girl with the ribbon anymore. You haven't been for a long time."
Sakura is quiet, sniffling intermittently. Outside, the wind rustles the trees and the rain picks up, and the clouds drape the world in shadows.
Ino laces her fingers through Sakura's, squeezing. "Do what you've always done. Follow your heart."
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notes: DUN DUN DUN DUN
we're getting close to the end. I can hardly stand it!