Chapter Ten
What Married People Do
"I could die right now." Kakashi panted out through strained lungs.
His eyes were captive of the woman straddling him, pink strands of hair stuck to her glistering forehead, chest heaving in fast breaths.
"Don't talk."
"I could. I'm not saying I will, but I could."
"Shut up, Kakashi-sensei."
"Don't call me that." He wheezed as he watched the light catch on the pink of her lashes, brilliant green, almost as green as her eyes.
"There are much worse ways to go." His hands lifted an inch before he let them fall down as a weak pat to her thighs, his thumb rubbing sluggish circles on the soft skin. "In fact, I don't think there's a better way to die than with you straddling my lap."
"Shut the fuck up, Kakashi. Just shut up!" Sakura growled, but she never lifted her eyes, furrowed in focus, from her own hands. "Getting you to talk on a normal day is a struggle and now that you have a hole in your chest is when I can't get you to keep your fucking mouth shut."
Her green chakra, casting eerie light and shadows, carved the desperate anger in her face more deeply. Even through the spots in his vision, Kakashi could see the red of her eyes, precarious drops just at the edge of her waterline.
"I never wanted to make you cry, Sakura."
"I'm not crying." She grunted out and that twist of anger in her expression made the tears spill down her cheeks.
He went silent as she healed him, because he really didn't want to make her cry and because each word seemed to take more of his energy to shape, dry lips falling open to let out wet rasps that didn't fill his lungs.
Even stringing a coherent thought together was unbearable to his fading mind, but always at the centre of it was Sakura, a beacon, a touchstone, a wave of consolation at the frosting touch of death spreading through his veins.
"Sakura." Her name was a gurgle in his throat. "Sakura."
"What." She snapped, eyes flickering up to his.
Of course she was angry, but he didn't mind. Kakashi liked seeing her angry, just as all those everyday moments of when he teased her, back in Konoha where they were safe, just as yesterday across the warm glow of the bonfire before they knew they would end up like this.
Kakashi only smiled at her. It hadn't been a call. He simply relished in saying her name, for some reason it felt perfect in his lips.
"Sakura…" Kakashi whispered once more, simply to feel the taste of it again.
He wanted to die with her name in his tongue.
"Kiss me."
"What?" This time there was less anger and more mortification in her voice, her red eyes wide in the haziness in his own sight.
That wasn't supposed to have come out of his mouth, but the strings that connected his mind to his body were cut, a lone thin thread remaining, each thought, each emotion, each sensation only a faint whisper in the growing cold darkness.
Kakashi might as well go out with a bang.
"It would make me very happy if you kissed me. No mask." It was a bargain, she had always wanted to see his face.
"Pervert." Sakura grumbled but then her eyes were sadder when she looked at him, her voice soft, "When we get back to Konoha."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
A frail smile turned the corners of his lips up as he settled down. "You know how to keep a man alive."
He watched Sakura as he fought the drag of death and the darkening of his vision, just so he could watch her more, just so he wouldn't make her cry.
"Sakura."
The glass of the window was cold against her forehead. Sakura's face crumpled in a grimace, teeth biting down on her lips to stop a dry sob from tumbling up her throat. Each of her strained breaths fogged the image of the hospital's courtyard below, bustling with life.
A pair of nurses that she knew just from passing were giggling with each other, warm beverages from the coffee shop across the street in their hands. Another pushed the wheelchair of a little boy with a broken leg, a genin that had injured himself during training, his fingers shaping into hand seals and showing them off to the nurse. An old patient sat on the bench, throwing crumbs towards the little sparrows, coming and going from their nests in the leafless trees.
They were all smiling under the sky, clear, almost white and without a single cloud to cover the light of the sun, relishing in the gentle weather after a week of heavy rains and grey days.
It was as if that blurred image ran on the screen of a cinema. Its colours unreal, the motions of people's lives farfetched in their thoughtless ease, their lightness.
Even nature looked uncanny, the signs of the harshness of winter muted against the glow of the sun, warming her cheeks even through the window.
How could it ever seem normal – real – when inside her the world seemed to be crumbling down towards its end, a crater stretching across the middle of it?
It mocked her. It revealed all its good things as a background to all the bad things of her life, forming deeper, darker shadows into that hospital room. It opened a cleft between them, Sakura and Kakashi, and all that existed outside and apart from them.
It wasn't the first time it happened and it wasn't the first time it was one of the most painful things in her life, but somehow it hurt more than any other before.
There was also a sense of unreality fallen over her, even with how piercingly felt her anguish was, because Sakura couldn't quite believe how her heart made up even more pain to carry.
It had all crashed with a single glimpse of his silver hair.
Sakura had been walking down a corridor of the hospital, eyes fixed on the chart of one of her patients, as any other day, when a stretcher rushed past her.
Her head had wiped back without thought, trying to catch another glance of the shinobi bleeding out, surrounded by nurses and medics, and piece together the full image of it.
Kakashi, unmoving, his skin like ash and red blood soaking into the white sheets beneath him, this time without the whines and the dry silly comments that exasperated some staff and made others giggle behind their hands. It was always bad when he surrendered to the invasive touch of medics without a single gesture of complaint.
She had rushed for him, healing chakra already imbibed into her hands, when a nurse stopped her from leaning over him. Sakura couldn't treat her own husband. She would have brought the entire building down with one fist if Shizune hadn't been there, yanking her shoulder away from Kakashi's stretcher, with sympathetic eyes even in their demand, and taking over.
Now Sakura could understand why Kakashi hated hospitals, it wasn't just because healing made his body clamp up in discomfort. It was the helplessness, it was the eternal hours of doing nothing behind a closed cold door.
The simple shape of it could build in their thoughts the worst of scenarios, could eat their minds away and whither their hearts into void, while on the other side of it someone's life was teetering away. The hospital was where Sakura had built up her purpose, her value in Konoha and a single closed door had ripped it away from her.
She tore herself away from the window, the sight below even more piercing than of the man lying on the bed.
Her steps were silent on the vinyl floor. She didn't make a sound. It was silly, irrational, Kakashi wouldn't be dragged back from his unconsciousness because of it, and still she moved as if any of her sounds would disturb him.
There was also nothing rational about the grief in her heart even when he was there, alive, had been for the past two days.
Naruto, Sai and Ino, Guy, maybe Tenzou, they had all come in and passed around her as ghosts, her eyes too tired and mind too full to take in any one of them, offering only a practiced smile of reassurance. There were words, comfort, worry, a hug, Sakura seemed to remember warmth around her back and the squeeze of two arms, but everything had only been a whisper against the screaming sight of Kakashi.
She sat once more at his bedside, her hand slid inside his cool slack one. In a gentle hold, Sakura pressed the back of it to her cheek. His skin was still a grey pale and yet the lines around his eyes were smooth. Somehow, he looked as he always did when he was sleeping.
If it weren't for the beeps of the machines and the tubes in his arm or the blue shade of the pillow his head rested on, it could have been as those mornings when she rose earlier than him, hurrying to get dress, only to suddenly stop at the sight of him on their bed, peaceful, in the place where he belonged.
She missed his eyes the most, the endless grey of them speckled with lighter streaks each time the sun glinted in them. How they softened as he smiled, crinkled with a grin, thin lines pressed down into their corners. How they burned paths down her skin and could steal her breath away with one single glimpse.
"You really scared me this time, Kakashi." Sakura whispered, her lips brushing over his knuckles. "And I know it's not your fault, but… sometimes I wish things weren't this way, sometimes I wish this wasn't our lives…"
Her fingertips brushed over his forehead, dragged the longer strands of his hair away from his skin, baring his entire face to her.
It was a gesture she never allowed herself in those early moments of the day, but now it held a different weight, a different meaning. The heavy circumstances excused it, made it uncompromising.
"But you wouldn't be you without being a shinobi, now would you? And that would be an even bigger tragedy." Sakura's voice wavered through the bittersweet smile, finger tracing around the side of the scar under his eye. "I wouldn't be me without it too. And we wouldn't be here, like this…" With a quiet whisper, almost a sigh, she added, "whatever this is."
But her shattering heart didn't lie, there was no avoiding it when it had scorched her, been scorching her for the past days. The feeling of him slipping away from his place in her, spelling out the void that would be left behind, had marked it into her with a clarity, a certainty that nothing else could.
Kakashi was the most important person in her life.
There had always been most important people, but never one single person. First there had been her parents and her grandmother. Later Ino, Sasuke – always Sasuke still, even when he was no longer there –, Naruto, Kakashi-sensei, Tsunade and Sai.
Then he hadn't been her Kakashi, laying on this bed and her confused heart mourning for him even when she could hear the steady beat echoing through the room and see the rise and fall of his chest.
Then he had been the goofy and lame sensei, the lazy and perverted sensei, the shinobi she admired most, the person that taught her what it meant to wrap her hitai-ate around her head every morning, that taught her teamwork and the purpose of never letting her comrades die.
Kakashi was still Kakashi-sensei, even if Sakura had stopped seeing him as a teacher years ago. The person he had been to her then lingered still in the person he was to her now, rested in its foundations and weaved everything that made him Kakashi – all the confusing, amalgamated, infinite things.
Her taichou.
Her best friend.
His role and the cord that tied them together in an entirely different weave from the one with Naruto and Ino.
Ino was the girl that had first looked at Sakura and found something worthwhile, pointed at it with a rough loud finger and helped her see that it was there too. She was her first best friend, together they had learnt how to be in the world and shared in the same romantic frilly delusions until the day they were the same thing to bring them apart.
Now she was the one Sakura came to, even if Ino had a tendency to let slip out what wasn't hers to tell.
The weave of their bond was complicated, multi-coloured, but with a flexibility after being mended where it had torn that defied anything that could try to cut it apart again.
Naruto's was an unbreakable bond, thick and bright, tangled from a lifetime of sharing and living through too much together, pains, fears, uncertainties and joys. He was a brother that Sakura never had, a relationship that asked for nothing and gave everything, silent and always there simply because it was there.
Kakashi's was the less obvious one. He had slotted himself into it after the war, their companionship built over bonfires while out on missions, sharing in a complicity when there was only the grit of the battlefield and the trust of surrendering each other's lives in their hands, and that always stretched deeper and farther than the battlefield.
Them versus the world.
What had already been there only deepened and entrenched when they started living together. The safety and comfort of his presence in the field, in her life, now overflowed and built up the one of home.
Her husband…
The words still stumbled through her chest, caught somewhere in the crevasses of it. A mere shadow, immaterial and unrevealed, and still so achingly heavy and piercing, so achingly real.
Her fingertips traced the veins in Kakashi's hand, the raise of his knuckles and the long stretch of his fingers. Even when he laid helplessly in a hospital bed, his near death still hanging over him, his hands continued to look strong, protective, gentle.
They were peppered in scar tissue from the raikiri, a reminder of all the people he had killed, of the blood that was crusted into their hands, a sacrifice made of love.
Loving.
They were the most loving and loyal hands she knew.
They were cold now but hers were colder. She blew a breath into the pocket of their hands, wishing she could be warm for him, she could be everything that he needed her to be.
Most of all he was Kakashi, just another human being thrown helplessly into the world and trying to do the best with what he had. And there was no denying that a large part of it now was her, Sakura and this thing, this marriage.
The most important person in her life.
As she looked at him and picked apart his place in her heart, a question that always loomed in the back of her burst uninhibited to the front of her mind.
Who was Sakura to him?
"Sakura…"
The green of her chakra cast a blaze of light between them and it branded into her own body the shape of his fading heartbeat and the mangled ruin of his body, a crater of twisted flesh opened in his torso. Sasuke shouldn't be conscious – alive, her own chakra spelled out, - let alone be able to speak.
Their entire relationship culminated in this one point, the essence of it crystallised in this one ultimate moment. Her life poured into him, stretching out and searching for him, but never good, strong, loving enough to touch him, to mend him, heal him.
Sasuke's trembling fingers lifted from the ground, lips slack between wet rasps. Sakura saw in his eyes what he wanted, she saw it because they were the same eyes as all her other dying patients.
She leaned in closer, her tears falling onto his chin now, ear near his mouth.
"I could have loved you."
Her eyes widened at Sasuke's whispered words and she pulled back to watch him, to search for the true meaning of them in his own eyes.
His skin was porcelain white, speckled with red drops of blood, blue lips parted into the shape of his final sigh. His dark night eyes were glazed with the blank stare of death.
Sasuke was dead.
Their entire relationship culminated and ended in this one moment.
The smooth lines of his face looked back at her with icy beauty, cruel and mocking. A marble statue, forever silent, forever restful, forever cold.
Sasuke looked the most serene she had ever seen him, for the first time peace rooting deep into him, while a new war tore Sakura apart.
With a start, she was yanked back into the hospital room and away from the memory brought back to life in her dreams.
It wasn't anything new, but somehow the horror and the grief always rushed back into her with the same desolating and ruthless intensity.
Always that moment that haunted her, always those words, always Sasuke.
How had she ever come back from the hole carved into her ribs and the heart ripped away from her chest? Somehow she had, not whole, some days as now, Sakura felt the entire scope of her shattered pieces and the blood still running from her gaping wound, never to scar, never to heal.
The touch of his viscous warm blood was forever stuck to the creases of her hands. The uselessness of them marked down as it dried.
Some days she felt forever ruined.
She watched Kakashi, the blue light of the moon glinting on his pale skin, with the rest of unconsciousness and not of death. There he was, all him and him alone. He was nothing like Sasuke, his place in her life was nothing like Sasuke's had been, and still she could see the ghost of him hovering, tainting.
Sakura had tried to keep him away from this, but he always surged through as now, overlapped every sight of her eyes and infected every motion of her heart.
It felt as if she was tying Kakashi down to the same curse that caged her in, the haunting vision of Sasuke that had always moulded her, since that first glimpse through her silly childish eyes, so naïve, almost endearing, in their illusion. That first glimpse – a boy with a pretty face and cool dark gaze – built a fantasy that paved the steps of her life and carved down the shape of her.
Something vicious burned through Sakura now, the body attacking a wild corrosive growth of itself and feeling powerless against it. Never until that moment had Sakura burned to be free of him as much as she did now, no longer the despair of a hurting woman, but of a dying one.
It was no longer just her drowning, it was no longer just her ruin, now there was also Kakashi.
Her pain and her joy for Kakashi should be for him and him alone.
Kakashi should be free to be Kakashi.
"They didn't let me touch you." Sakura told him, anger lacing her voice and right now its only target was him.
"I hope not, I'm not a fan of being molested when unconscious." But Kakashi's quip fell flatly in the room, not even lifting one of the corners of Sakura's mouth.
"Because I'm your wife they didn't let me treat you." She explained matter-of-factly, needlessly, because they both knew Kakashi had understood the meaning of her words the first time she said them. "Luckily Shizune was here."
It wasn't Kakashi that was lucky, it was the hospital, maybe even its personnel. There were three people Sakura trusted with her teammates, Shizune, Tsunade and herself.
It wasn't the first time Kakashi had arrived in Konoha more dead than alive and it most likely wouldn't be the last one. So perhaps her not being the one to heal him was what had unbalanced her so much that the moment he had come back from unconsciousness, Sakura's name a croak in his dry throat, there had only been a downturn to her mouth, two creases marked deep into the skin there.
Sakura hadn't even looked him in the eyes yet and the thirst in him for them scared him, as if only the sight of her green eyes could confirm that he was alive, he was home.
All the other times he had had a close call, Sakura had greeted him with either an explosive burst of anger or a bright and fake twist of her lips that was meant to reassure him, meant to hide from him all that clashed through her.
Now Sakura bore her pain in her face. Kakashi should be glad, he had asked it of her, but a part of him couldn't bear it, even when it was his role. To bear it and not deny it, not wish it was hidden once again under her fake smile, so perfected that those who didn't know her well couldn't see the sheen of a mask. His role was to lift the sadness from her.
Sakura sprung up to her feet and let her hands rest over his chest.
"I thought you weren't supposed to do this, wife." Kakashi teased, another attempt, he would keep trying to make her smile, real and true, until she did.
"No one's here and you're awake." The last part was spoken with the tiniest hint of a cheeky glint. It was a beginning.
Her green chakra glowed between them and its familiar soothing touch helped his muscles sink into the mattress, his breaths soak into his lungs more easily, his heart lighter in his chest.
Kakashi opened his eyes to watch her and, instead of the focussed expression of every time she worked or the relief of feeling for herself that he was there, alive, it had slumped down in misery, her bottom lip quivering before she clamped it between her teeth.
"I thought you'd stopped being an idiot." Sakura breathed out, something wet in her voice, as her chakra receded, green light fading away into nothing.
His hand rose to cover her own in something Kakashi hoped was comforting. "I'm okay. I'm here."
Her fingers wrapped in his tunic, face crumpled and head slumping down so her hair fell as a cover. He couldn't be certain if it was anger or anguish. Most likely it was both, in Sakura the two usually existed together.
"Sakura." Kakashi called, voice soft and light, cooing her like one would a dog. "Sakura."
Her eyes finally lifted to meet his, a slight glaze in them, but there were no tears, Kakashi hadn't seen Sakura cry in years. He watched as she tried to push down everything that was threatening to rise back to the surface, but at least this time there wasn't that dreadful fake smile that hid away all that she was feeling.
She watched him with attentive searching eyes, deliberating. Her hand loosened around his shirt and simply rested there, his own still draped over it, where he couldn't hide how the intensity in her gaze made his heart speed away.
Her fingers slipped away from his and rose to his face, their path slow and marked, giving him enough time to stop her. Kakashi didn't. Sakura curled her fingers around the edge of the medical mask, the back of them burning against his cheek, and dragged it down to bare his face.
It was the first time Sakura did it out of her own free initiative and Kakashi's skin tingled with vulnerability, not smothering now, not like a stiffening weight. It was freeing to let himself be.
Everything was slow. The beeping of machines beside them, the rustle of the wind against the leaves outside them, her whispered breaths in the air between them.
The slow, tentative path as Sakura leaned down into him.
Her scent settled deep in his lungs drowning out the smell of disinfectant, making him forget he was even in the hospital, bedridden, the cold edge of death still trembling in his veins.
Kakashi felt everything in piercingly detail, he was suspended under the overwhelming flow of it. The brush of her pink strands on his chest, the gentle curve of her calloused hand around his nape, the whisper of her breath against his naked skin.
His eyes closed, letting himself drown in her, powerless to do anything more than that.
Then her lips were on his. Only for a moment, only for a soft warm brush, and yet it seemed to stretch time into something eternal in how it overflowed with all it carried.
Sakura tasted of home. She tasted of a memory, absent and yet already branded into him, waiting to be lived, and that only now was consummated.
She pulled back from him and his mouth followed hers, never wanting to break apart again.
"It's a little late but a promise is a promise." Sakura whispered, still close enough that her breath fanned across his face.
Kakashi halted, eyes opening to watch her, wide and confused.
A red blush blazed from the edge of her hairline down to her chest and under her shirt where he could no longer trace it.
Sakura jerked back, hand pressed to her mouth, eyes wide with mortification. "Oh fuck, you don't remember, do you? It just—"
"I do!" Kakashi sprung, his hand reaching out to mark his words and sending a stab of pain through his healing wounds.
The last thing he wanted was for Sakura to be too embarrassed to ever kiss him again. Especially when he would never be the one to take the step.
He had also been dying then, but he did remember it, even if the matter had been left unnamed after their return to Konoha. It shouldn't have surprised him that it had, Sakura had been together with Raidou at that time.
"I do remember," He added a little less frantically, trying to be the perfect image of the cool nonchalant shinobi elite that never let anything get under his skin. "but I just didn't expect you to actually fulfil it once I was in Konoha," His tone slowed in a tease, "and definitely not two years later."
"Well, I just… I thought— I—you…"
While he spent a better part of his time trying to make her fumble with her words, and with the familiarity of living together it had become an increasingly rare occurrence that he should be cherishing, Kakashi still decided to spare her.
The corner of his mouth lifted in a cheeky smirk. "If you do that every time I come home, I'll be much more eager to come back alive."
"Pervert." Sakura slapped his arm without any true spite behind it, mirroring her own words from that time, before their marriage, where that had been her go-to comeback to any little thing he did or said that left her flustered.
Her lips curled in a small smile.
The beautiful sight of it fluttered in his heart and shed away the weight in his shoulders. Kakashi sank into his pillow with a long relieved sigh. Finally there was a glint of joy that replaced the sadness carved in Sakura's face.
"But okay." There was still a lingering blush in her skin, this time more of shyness than embarrassment, gaze running away from his. "If it helps you not be an idiot." Sakura sat back on the chair and shrugged. "Besides that's what married people usually do, isn't it?"
"If we're talking about what married people do…"
Her eyes narrowed at him. "Don't push it. But… if we're really talking about it."
His heart stopped at the unmistakable tone in his voice, the seductive glint in her eyes, and if he hadn't lost too much blood just a few days ago, his cock would certainly be twitching in his pants.
Sakura whipped something into his line of vision and it spoke to the state of his mind that it took him too long moments of blinking to recognise the familiar orange cover of Icha Icha.
"You're a cruel woman." He grumbled.
Sakura laughed, the wonderful sound of it twirling in his own chest. "So you don't want it?"
He took it away from his grasp with the pout of a humbled boy. "I never said that."
"How can you read that now?" She finally asked him.
His fingers tightened around the book protectively, it wouldn't be the first time Sakura ripped it off him claiming that he should be resting his mind and eyes instead.
"Nothing could stop my endurance for Icha Icha, not even a headache."
"Not that… isn't it cruel to you when… You almost died, Kakashi."
Kakashi shrugged. "I know what they are. Fictions, sappy, smutty ones. I don't compare my life to them, that would defeat the purpose of them entertaining and comforting me."
His words didn't satisfy Sakura, her teeth worrying her bottom lip and thoughtful eyes pinned on the book as if it could offer proof for them. How she could think of anything besides that they had kissed was beyond him, which was why he desperately needed his book to keep him grounded.
"You take it too seriously." Kakashi commented, remembering the conversation they had had about soap-operas months ago. "They're conductive to our shinobi life because they're apart from it, even when they are about it. I don't let them consume me."
Sakura was even less convinced, head falling to the side with a disbelieving glance. "You're always reading them, Kakashi."
"Yes, but I've learned not to let them take away from real life."
His hand patted the bed at his side.
Her answer to his proposition was a deadpanned "You're very injured."
"All the more reason to be tucked against you, always so soft and warm." He couldn't stop himself from smirking when Sakura blushed at his words. "This way we can both read."
"That's not the least tempting."
"Wife."
"Kakashi."
His lips jutted out with the pout of a boy, expression mirroring the puppy eyes his ninken threw at her when they wanted pets or food, most times both, and that always seemed to work. Kakashi unfortunately wasn't as lucky, Sakura remained unmovable.
"Please." He said instead, a genuine request.
She softened. "Okay."
Of course the simplest and truest of gestures would be the one to work.
A sparkle peeked from the pink strands of her hair and made a small smile rise to his mouth – his mouth that Sakura kissed, still tingling with it, still needing more of it – as she climbed onto the bed.
How hadn't he noticed them before?
Kakashi reached for her ear, tucking her hair behind it to bare the small dangling gemstone, the same vivid sea green as her eyes. Sakura shivered at the brush of his fingers down the shell of her ear and his smile stretched into a full grin.
They were the earrings that he had left on her jewellery box because he had felt the ice-cream a lacking gift, especially when it seemed that she had been the one gifting him as she shared something meaningful to her.
On that day at the market, Kakashi hadn't missed the sparkle of her eyes as Sakura caught sight of them on a stand and the disappointed pout as she noticed the price tag that was attached.
It was slightly indulgent and he had battled with himself for a few weeks, wondering if it was too much, while the earrings remained hidden in his boxer drawer. It was definitely toned down from the misstep of gifting Sakura his clan home, but it was the type of gift men gave their partners and that could be a dangerous boundary to break.
Kakashi had also wanted them as a token of that day. He would never have expected it to completely turn around and become one of his favourite days.
But Sakura had that power, she had had it for a long time, the power of making his days better.
She raised her own fingers to her ear, cheeks pink. "I never said anything because I thought you didn't want me to."
She wasn't far from the mark, leaving them on her jewellery box for her to find had been a cowardly move. Kakashi had always been awkward with gifts, especially for a woman. Perhaps because he had given them so few times in his life, and, as he always said, training was the secret to a great shinobi. Now he had all of his life to train with Sakura and, while before it had been a standard gesture and obligation because it was expected of him, he wanted to.
As he watched her timid blush and the vivid colour of the earrings against her pale skin, Kakashi wondered if she had been wearing them while he was away on the mission. It surprised him how much he relished in that image, when it seemed such a simple thing.
Was this how men were supposed to feel when they gifted jewellery? He had only once given a bracelet to a woman and hadn't felt anything close to the flurries happening in his chest now.
Perhaps they were an effect of the sense of elation their kiss had painted over everything and that wanted to set an undying smile on his face.
"Thank you, Kakashi." Sakura said, pulling him away from his contemplation. Her fingers wrapped around his hand. "And most of all… thank you for noticing, noticing me."
But Kakashi couldn't not notice, not pay attention to Sakura. She had become a permanent all-encompassing presence in his mind, in his awareness, his heart, even when she wasn't there.
His thumb brushed the side of her cheek, the feather-light gesture not enough to express the overwhelming sense of gratitude that surged through him.
It was something familiar after feeling the dark touch of death. Sometimes it happened right as he opened his eyes, others only days later, a moment when the wind rustled against his cheeks and lashes and Kakashi was suddenly seeing the true deep colours of the sky, there for his living eyes to relish in. Others never at all.
This time his gratitude for being alive rose in him alongside the one of seeing Sakura one more time.
All that had filled his thoughts during those heavy painful steps towards Konoha, the forest ground like tar under his feet, was Sakura. She was what had simmered in his veins, what had made him move forward through the numbness, what had thumped in a steady rhythm inside his ribs. The image of her green eyes inflaming life like her chakra, the sound of her voice a lighthouse home.
And now Sakura was here and Kakashi with her, alive, piercingly and wonderfully alive.
More, it wasn't simply a gratitude for the present, for the familiar instinctual drag of his heart, it was for the future, unknown and entirely disconcerting but also gleaming with a hope.
Kakashi was given another chance to continue down this path they were now sharing, this new amazing and terrifying thing blooming between them with the certainty that at the end of their small steps was something good, was an old buried dream, something that he had spent all of his lonely life waiting for and not knowing what it was that was missing.
His gaze flickered down to her lips. He wanted to kiss her again, one where he wasn't too dumbfounded to respond, one where nothing held him back from pouring in it all the things he felt for her.
"What is it, Kakashi?" She asked with worry in her voice. He had been staring at her for some time.
Kakashi gave her a smile, an expression of his words. "Just glad I'm alive."
Her face relaxed with relief, more than was warranted, as if there was a sliver of doubt in her that he might not want to live.
That dark shadow over him had disappeared years ago. He still had his bad days but, while before he had believed they would always endure, unchanged and eternal, almost intrinsic, now Kakashi knew they passed, knew they were only the flaring ache of an old scarred wound.
"You can talk to me." Sakura said.
"I know."
"Were you scared?"
"I was." Kakashi admitted. "And furious that in all the moments it could have happened, it would happen at the worst of times."
Her hand reached for his, fingers tight. "But it didn't."
"No, it didn't." He repeated softly before his voice tilted in a lighter teasing tone. "I knew you'd be pissed off it I didn't make it in time for dinner."
Sakura followed it without reservation, lips stretching in a smile, voice rushing out with light-hearted anger. "You're damn right I was pissed off. You're lucky you're injured." She quieted, eyes sad and grave. "And lucky that I don't mind you being late if it means you come at all."
Sakura adjusted him with strong gentle hands and laid on her side, where none of her body would be pressing over his. It was a pity, but he could understand her reasoning. Her arm came to rest on his chest, palm over his heartbeat, and his hand rose to hold hers.
They were silent for a long time, sharing in each other's warmth and the weight of admitting to something that only happened when they were unconscious, shoved into the isolated and uncompromising realm of sleep, never starting it when awake.
Kakashi hummed as his head slanted towards hers, nose brushing over her hairline. His eyes were heavy with exhaustion and even the high amount of drugs in his bloodstream couldn't shed away a constant buzz of pain in his body.
He was tired, but it was different from the one of death and injury, it was the peaceful one of arriving home and feeling free to let himself be dragged and lulled by the soft weightlessness of rest.
"Isn't this nice?" He murmured, voice rough with sleep, against her skin before brushing small kiss to the diamond in her forehead. He had wanted to do that too many times before and now he didn't feel those vines pulling him back from it. Death had always had a way of loosening them from around him.
Sakura pressed her own lips to his shoulder, voice strained. "It is."
"We should do it every night."
"We should."
The click of a door closing pulled him from sleep. He found the chair beside his bed empty and the woman that entered his room not to be Sakura.
Kakashi frowned. "Where's Sakura?"
"You sure know how to make a girl feel special." Tsunade let out as she pushed his shoulder back down into the mattress without any gentleness, prickling chakra already shoving through his body.
"Sorry if I prefer my wife to my boss and, worse, my medic."
"Sakura's also your medic."
Kakashi's answer was to turn his head away from the woman and towards the window, where he could at least watch the night sky and not those accusing amber eyes. Perhaps if her chakra didn't feel like needles and she was a little gentler with him, he would have been more accommodating to her skills.
But even then Kakashi doubted it, there was only one Sakura.
"I sent her home to shower and actually sleep in a bed." Tsunade explained. "And why am I still your boss, Kakashi? I've given you plenty of time because I know you needed it, but I think now it's the moment for you to step forward."
The shape of the craters in the moon were definitely the most interesting sight Kakashi had laid eyes upon, like the fur of a spotted grey dog, with its dark oceans and brighter glinting parts. And if he focussed hard enough, he could even trace the rounded shadow of the earth that hid away its full form.
A painful tug of his earlobe ripped him away from his examination.
"I know you're not happy on the field."
"You took me away from my own team." He grumbled. "Probably on purpose so that you can go around philandering and robbing innocent hard-working loan sharks of their money."
Tsunade's chakra ceased and Kakashi would rather die than admit even to himself that it had helped sooth some of the ache in his body.
"You brat! Don't sulk like a spoiled child! You still take plenty of missions with them."
Kakashi turned his head to glare at her. Not with the one person that mattered most, the one that with him made up a team inside a team.
"You understand why."
"Our relationship didn't change because of a piece of paper."
Tsunade simply stared at him with strangely stilled eyes.
Her head fell back with a burst of loud affected laughs, shoulders shaking, arm grabbing onto her stomach. She even wiped her eyes from the tears as she calmed herself and looked down towards him.
Kakashi looked back with his best unimpressed-teenage-boy stare that he had stolen out of Sasuke.
"Oh shit, you actually believe that." Her eyes softened then, if that was even something they had the ability to do. "All those other times when you came home half-dead did Sakura stay at your bedside 24/7? No, she did not. I've not seen her take vacation days out of her own volition in years and she did now just so she could stay right here with you and not one single floor up in her office where she could stop by any time she wanted, like before."
Her eyebrow lifted, willing him to contradict her words, but even through the smugness in her expression, Tsunade was also being merciful, because it wasn't only the time at his side that had changed, it was also the manner of her presence, even with how she tried to hide it.
Sakura had been miserable and Kakashi had been the one to make her miserable.
If she felt even a sliver of what he felt for her, he couldn't bear the thought of what his death would mean to her.
"Whether you two want to admit it or not, you are married."
With a pat to his shoulder, Tsunade left the room. She lingered by the door, head peeking inside.
"This wouldn't happen, you know, if you were Hokage."
And with those ruthless cunning words, Tsunade closed the door.
Poor Kakashi… his luck during missions hasn't been the best for the past two chapters…
Aaaaand…. they kissed. It wasn't the mind-blowing sexy thing to satisfy all the building tension, but it was somewhat sweet, no…?
Let me know what you think, please!
And as always, thank you for reading!