Somebody
By. Misery's-Toll
Chapter Twenty: Mend Me
But someone,
They could have warned you
When things start splitting at the seams and now
The whole thing's tumbling down
Things start splitting at the seams and now
If things start splitting at the seams and now,
It's tumbling down
Hard.
- "No One's Gonna Love You" by Band of Horses
Somehow Sakura manages to convince Ino to allow her to tell Kurenai of the situation. She accompanies the two girls to Ino's first but late prenatal appointment.
During their time in the waiting room, Kurenai goes to the restroom, leaving Sakura and Ino alone.
"I don't hate you, you know," Ino says, stretching her legs, "I just don't really care about you. I don't really care who you hang out with either. I'm not gonna lie: I'm jealous as hell of you and I'm generally angry at you. But you shouldn't put any credit into the things I say. I'm surprised you've still hung around me this long when you've got a posse now."
Sakura looks at her, somehow not at all surprised.
How could you be? After all she's done to you?
"I know you're a liar. And it took me awhile, but I know now that you're not who you used to be, before you were admitted to that hospital. I know you don't care about me. It's okay."
"Thanks for coming with me," Ino says, looking at the ceiling, "You didn't have to."
She still loves you, somewhere in there.
Sakura gives her a meaningless smile, feeling quite empty and unable to think through the mud in her brain, "I'm your sister."
Kurenai returns and sits between them once again.
The girls arrive to school a little after lunch. Karin walks up to Sakura, punches her in the cheek, sending the pink-haired girl sprawling on the floor, and then she walks away.
Normality is strange, isn't it?
Two days pass.
Sakura sits with her friends at lunch, like she used to, and Gaara begins to show up to school regularly again. No one has heard anything from Sasuke since he called Sakura, and both Naruto and she are worried that he just might not intend on returning, after being gone for more than two weeks.
Come-
Sakura and Hinata become office aides during the hours they customarily would have had Biology, to escape the stresses of everything.
-back.
After school, Sakura watches as Ino examines her stomach with the mirror on the back of her door.
"Can I...feel?" Sakura motions to Ino's nearly unnoticeably rounded stomach, fidgeting nervously.
Ino sighs, putting her hands on her hips, "Go ahead. But you're not going to feel anything, stupid."
Untouchable.
Sakura gets down on her knees and puts both palms of her hands against the skin of Ino's abdomen, and marvels at the lack of difference between this stomach and her own.
"It's amazing, isn't it? You and I are probably wearing close to the same size pants right now, and you don't feel any different than me, yet you have some living being inside of you. How can you not love her?" Sakura wonders aloud, backing away from the unborn child, but keeping a smile of fondness.
She's inside you, breathing whispers out your nose and mouth. Can you hear them? She's a girl, she's a girl, she's a girl...
The blonde-haired girl scoffs and rolls her tank-top back down, "Yeah, right. Amazing. Who gave you permission to decide whether it's a boy or girl?"
Sakura's smile fades a little, "She tells me so. She whispered in my mind and I believed her."
Ino rolls her eyes and walks away, calling over her shoulder, "Whatever, Sakura. You're crazy."
You are crazy.
The doorbell rings.
"Sakura, you get it! I'm gonna take a shower!"
Sakura tentatively approaches the door. The only two people who know where she lives that would bother ringing the bell are Hinata and Sasuke, and everyone else would be there for Ino, back before she had suddenly quit her activities for the sake of her baby if nothing else. Hinata probably would have called first, Sakura thinks, and Sasuke is gone. She suddenly feels unsure of herself, approaching the door, as she's always heard tales of people being snatched from their own front porches, but she opens the door anyway.
It takes her a minute of staring to comprehend who it is.
"You're back," Sakura suddenly breathes out, and rushes him into a tight hug that he gently eases out of.
He isn't yours, no matter how much you may want him to be.
"I didn't do it," he whispers, "I tried to, but I couldn't do it. You screamed for me and I drank your blood in my dreams and then I couldn't do it anymore."
He lays a hand on her shoulder and slowly moves it up until he is cupping her cheek, and he smoothes his thumb over her lips, before stopping short.
Though maybe, somehow, he's yours in more ways than you think.
"What happened to your face?" He asks gently brushing his hand over the discoloration of her skin.
Sakura wants nothing more than to live within his touch, and she wishes she could remember screaming his name and him drinking her blood as he is able to, to coax his memories inside her, but instead she settles for giving him a half-smile and a half-truth, "I got myself into trouble."
Sakura hears the patting of feet behind her, and she hears her sister's voice, "Hey, Sasuke. What's up? Nice to see you again. Guess what? I'm pregnant."
Sakura turns her head, Sasuke immediately removing his hand from her face, just in time to see Ino in a bathrobe walking towards her bedroom.
She's finally cracking, losing every layer of her mask and every layer of her sanity.
When she turns back to Sasuke, he seems to have completely ignored what Ino said, and he says, "Would you like to see them?"
"Your..." she whispers, "Wings?"
He's silent for a few moments before nodding, and barely breathing out a confirmation, "Yes."
Sakura smiles slightly, "Follow me."
She takes his hand and guides him to her bedroom, past the scattered beer cans and long-past burned-out candles and porn magazines and Ino's make-up, and she closes the door behind them.
Shutting yourselves off from something that is no longer really home.
"Your house didn't used to look like this," Sasuke says, walking to the window and putting a hand against the glass.
Sakura shakes her head, though he cannot see it from the direction he is facing, "No. I think that maybe, my father loved my mother more than anyone else. And now that she is gone, maybe he can't feel love anymore. And I know that at one point, maybe a long time ago, my father was completely made of love. So now he has nothing but beer and TV."
Because beer and TV mean more to him than his own children.
Sasuke turns around quickly, startling Sakura, and he brushes her over-grown bangs out of her face, an urgent expression on his face, "I can't protect you, like I wanted to."
Sakura's sad smile returns again.
"That's alright."
"Do you want to see them?" he asks, changing the subject again, "Do you want to see my...wings?"
Don't look back. This is it.
Sakura hugs him again, hoping that this time he won't push her away, and he doesn't. So she just basks in his smell of smoke that isn't mixed with bad air freshener or alcohol, but is just mixed with a smell of completely Sasuke and she feels his chest against her face and she inexplicably wants to cry, and she whispers, "I don't want to see them...yet. You aren't ready. But may I...feel them?"
I don't think he's the coward.
Nothing surprises her more than when he puts an arm around her, squeezing her tightly against him and he whispers back, "Yes."
Sakura freely lets her tears spill down her face and can't even bring herself to feel embarrassed when they begin to spot Sasuke's blue shirt.
Dark blue. Dark blue. She's drowning in it. So she has to let go.
-=Sasuke=-
She steps away and wipes her tears on her sleeve and goes to her bed and pulls out a scarf from beneath her white-lace covered pillow, and wraps it around her eyes, tying it behind her head.
"I'm ready," she says, a smile gleaming on her face. And Sasuke can feel that smile, filling him inside, and it gives him the courage to go through with this.
He walks toward her and puts his hands just below her shoulders and guides her to the bed, laying her down on it from the knees up. He can feel a flush on the back of his neck as he removes his jacket, and then his shirt. Then he goes to the bed himself, putting his knees on either side of hers, his hands resting on either side of her head, "I'm ready."
She gropes blindly, finding one of his muscular arms that he can feel a slight amount of pride for, and she uses that as a guide as she finds a shoulder, and she uses another hand to do the same on the other side. He bites his tongue as her hands slide down his back, getting less than half-way down before reaching the base of his wings.
Seeing her flushed face and her heavily breathing beneath him, her frail arms wrapped around him, it is reminiscent of his dream, and he readies himself for her scream. But it doesn't come. And it is nothing less than intimate when her small, frail hands trail across the feathers of his wings and she lets out a slight giggle, a wide smile forming on her face, and Sasuke joins in with her, letting out a chuckle that gives such a foreign but amazing feeling.
"I feel alive," Sasuke says, his voice reverberating throughout his entire body.
"Yes," Sakura agrees.
And they do.
-=Ino=-
Ino lays on the floor of the hallway, clad in nothing but her slightly-damp robe, her wet hair fanned out on the carpet as she listens to her sister and her love-interest in the girl's bedroom. At first, she had feared that Sakura was about to make the same mistakes as she once had (getting involved, losing her virginity to a man too young, falling in love and screwing it up), but the longer she listens, the more she realizes that Sakura isn't anything like her. Sakura is still a child. She isn't innocent, and she isn't immature, but she's beautifully still a child.
For once, Ino doesn't feel the familiar pang of jealousy festering within her. Instead, emptiness flows all throughout her and she begins to feel the first traces of appreciation for the child within her. For giving her back her sanity (taking it away so that lonely nights no longer consumed her).
She lays there a few minutes longer before pure exhaustion seems to settle within her, and she falls asleep.
She wakes up again when Sakura's door comes open, and she and Sasuke stand over her, looking down at her. He looks kinder than Ino thinks she's ever seen him, while Sakura looks the happiest she has been in a long, long time.
"Ino," Sasuke says, startling her, always having been ignored by him in the past, "Sakura and I are going to a restaurant. Would you like to come?"
He offers a hand to her, which she takes, and he helps her up. Her loose robe droops over the edge of her shoulder, and she doesn't really feel the need to recover herself, not out of lack of modesty or flirtatiousness, but out of suddenly feeling that Sasuke doesn't care, and appreciating that fact very much.
"I would."
Ino throws on a pair of jeans and a ruffled tank-top and some flip-flops and leaves her hair down, though it has dried lopsidedly wavy from her position on the floor. Then she and Sakura and Sasuke head out.
They end up at a vegan restaurant decorated with monochromatic paintings in different shades of blue, mostly caricatures and pictures of musical instruments, and everything is somehow completely un-awkward. Ino notices that Sasuke watches Sakura to make sure she finishes every bite of her vegetable wrap and every slice of orange and downs her complete glass of water before he is satisfied, and it is because of this that Ino notices for once how completely thin and breakable the girl looks. Sakura is pallid and bony and looks very similar to a younger Ino, as she had looked shortly before her hospitalization. And regret suddenly fills her.
"Sakura?"
Sakura pauses mid-giggle from something Sasuke must have said or done, intentionally or not, and looks up at Ino with wide, laughter-filled eyes, and Ino can't bring herself to voice her thoughts. So instead she says, "Do you think maybe we could go for ice cream after this?"
And Sakura nearly beams with happiness.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or the song. This is a fan-made fic.
A/N: Random update. But today's the first day of summer for me and I'm going to be quite busy for the next couple of days, so today is the last opportunity I'll get to update before I go to California. So hopefully you'll hear from me in a week and a half!
By the way, someone asked me in an anonymous review if the reason why Sakura freaked out with the foetal pigs was because she was pregnant at some point, and the answer is no. Sakura has never been pregnant. She is just very empathetic and has a strong sense of morals, and with her mental state and her family problems, she's a little unstable.
Thank you all for your wonderful support! Please review, and don't forget to check out the poll on my profile if you haven't already!
-MT