Heyy, lovely people! A reader sent me a message telling me that they couldn't access this chapter, I tried it outside my account and had the same problem, so I decided to reupload it. If you can read this, then everything should be working fine now. If the problems persist, I'm also posting it on ao3 under the same name and username.
Chapter Eleven
We Sat Grown Quiet at the Name of Love
There was no guilt in him anymore. Kakashi had been relishing in watching Sakura simply exist for too long.
His shoulder came to rest against the frame of the kitchen door as he followed her nimble steps towards the bookshelf. Her fingers traced down the spine of a book and his skin burned with the need to feel that same feathery touch on the ridges of his own body.
Sakura rose to her toes as she dragged a textbook back into its slot. Her back arched into the perfect and irresistible curve, strands of pink hair falling down her nape, a slip of her taut pale stomach bared under the loose hem of her shirt.
Kakashi wished it was him making her body arch into his, legs twitching with the impulse of moulding the front of his body to her back, fingers pressing down on his arms, a feeble replacement for the feel of her soft hips under them.
Each single one of these moments made his skin catch fire, made another fissure crack away at his sanity.
He let out a tired sigh and glanced back towards the kettle, willing it to boil their tea faster.
Before he had simply found a woman and replaced the need. It had worked, not perfectly, but enough to make it manageable. Now the thought of being with another woman that wasn't Sakura was even more unbearable than of a life of celibacy right at the reach of whom he wanted.
They were married, they had fallen in too deep. To move and take the wrong step meant sacrificing something that Kakashi wasn't willing to give up on, too dear for him to risk it. It meant losing the most important thing in his life.
His shoulders jerked with the whistle of the kettle and he moved inside the kitchen, preparing their cups.
"Oh good you're just in time." Sakura smiled from where she was stretched out on the sofa, her hand extended to take the tea.
His fingers wrapped around her ankles to lift them and open up a space on the cushion where he could sit. Long gone were the evenings where he would be the one taking over the sofa and lounging down to watch his soap-opera.
Kakashi should never have encouraged Sakura to join him, the process had been something akin to feeding a proud stray cat until they finally relented and decided they were now the owner of the home.
First she had done so sitting at the corner of the couch, a medical book in her lap, as her eyes glanced up to the television from time to time, lacking the stealth that should be natural to a shinobi; next she had started leaning her cheek on her curled hand, eyes glued to the screen, the book opened but forgotten; and finally she had come with no book and stretched her graceful body over the cushions barely sparing an inch for his own ass.
Kakashi couldn't bring himself to regret it, as his hands rested on her slender ankles and his eyes traced the long length of her legs to the slip of uncovered skin and defined abs where her shirt had rolled up, and then the content glint in Sakura's face.
These moments were also becoming a constant, where a warm sense of calmness came to rest over him, bursting in his chest with something almost euphoric, the quiet and rooted joy of a safe place where he belonged, he belonged with her.
He turned his eyes to his own cup of tea before Sakura found him ogling. "Nothing interesting happened, I'm guessing."
Her gaze didn't stray from the screen. "Mina and Hiroto had a fight about how he still doesn't have the courage of presenting her to his clan, the same as usual…"
"The girl is an idiot, she should just break up with him already." Kakashi shared his wisdom before lifting the rim of the cup to his lips and blowing on the hot liquid.
"But they're in love, Hiroto just needs time to handle clan affairs and fall onto the good graces of his uncle."
"If he's ashamed of her that's not love."
Sakura snorted. "It's more complicated than that, Kakashi."
Somehow they always ended up disagreeing on this. They agreed that almost all characters were complete idiots that didn't seem capable of a rational string of thoughts and whose life force was rooted in intrigue and conflict, but Sakura had a soft spot for this one couple that he still couldn't understand.
Hiroto was just a broody noble heir terrified of failing his family, Mina was a lower classed maiden whose whole personality revolved around being soft and kind and in love.
The hand holding her tea reached for him in a silent request for Kakashi to lay it on the coffee table. As he took it, her green eyes narrowed at him.
"And what do you even know about love?" She let the word roll through her tongue in a swoony, silly intonation just to mortify him.
His gaze held her vivid green eyes that flickered with the light of the television before turning away to mumble into his cup. "More than Hiroto apparently."
"Really? I don't think I've ever seen you with someone." Sakura's voice drawled out in a tease, lidded eyes watching him. "Oh no, actually… wasn't there a woman sometime before we married? What was her name…?" She trailed off, trying to remember, but suddenly perked up with victory shining in her expression. "And you also never introduced her to us even when we asked you to!"
"It wasn't about shame."
"Then what was it?"
"It wasn't serious."
"And yet you were together for almost half a year, Kakashi. You barely endure your lifetime friends, you must have liked her a lot to endure her."
He shrugged. "Don't you want to watch the show?"
"Come on, Kakashi…" Sakura nudged her foot against his thigh and he could feel her puppy eyes on his profile. "I'm obviously curious, if things had worked out with her we wouldn't be here right now."
He clenched his teeth at her words, hitting him with a pang at just how accurate they were and how entirely oblivious Sakura was to it. He had only dated her and allowed the relationship to last for half a year in an attempt to make her his wife instead of Sakura, in a time when he had realised his own complete powerlessness against the Council's decision.
The cushions sank beside him as she wiggled closer and leaned her chin on his shoulder.
"Tell me… please?" Her warm breath fanned across his cheek, smelling of camomile tea, the whispered beg dripping right beside his ear. All Kakashi could do was lock his breath inside his ribs and hope she couldn't hear his racing heartbeat pounding.
Had it been anyone else, he would never have caved, this was something he didn't want to talk about, much less with Sakura, and somehow the words were already falling from his mouth. The woman had him wrapped around her little finger and sometimes he was certain that she knew it.
"We were looking for different things. That wasn't fair to either of us."
He glanced at Sakura and found her insatiable and expectant - irresistible and beautiful - green eyes locked on him, the true question in them unavoidable. He looked away, into the window in front of him.
"No, I never fell in love with her."
"But you liked her."
Kakashi had liked how she touched him, had liked how she made him feel needed, wanted, and there were times when he had enjoyed the softness of her body against his, had thought that maybe he could endure it for the rest of his life if it meant sparing Sakura this prison of an order.
But not once had she abated the loneliness forever creeping in his chest, not once had she entrenched deeper than the surface of his heart.
"I guess... she's a likable person."
"So why didn't you fall in love with her?"
"I just… couldn't…"
He had wondered if maybe he could have, had his heart had the space.
"I get it." Sakura whispered, the gravity of her voice suddenly cutting through the air. "Sometimes our hearts just don't seem to want to work with us."
Kakashi could say nothing more to the heavy words and Sakura didn't seem to want to add anything else, her curiosity apparently satisfied.
They watched the show, like any other evening, except she never returned to her spot, her cheek still on his shoulder, the soft rhythm of her breathing right in his ear, and the heat of her body burning through his clothes.
For the entire hour, Sakura sat unusually quiet and unusually close and Kakashi tried to reign in the flutters in his stomach, the impulse of slithering his arm free to wrap it around her waist and pull her even closer to him, to feel her melt into his chest as he held her in his arms. The scenes passed by and all his being could linger on was Sakura.
When the episode ended and a commercial for some weird contraption no one could possibly use in their day-to-day life started, she still didn't move.
"Bed?" Kakashi asked.
Her forehead brushed his shoulder in a nod, but as he moved to stand up her arm held tighter around his own and kept him down.
"I don't think I'll ever stop loving Sasuke."
Her voice was so quiet and small, vulnerable, a hint of shame lacing it, as if it had taken all her courage to voice it.
"I've tried, I've tried kidding myself that I didn't love him, but every time I think of him I…"
A small choke cut her words, her hand rubbing at the centre of her chest.
"Can it even be love if I think I hate him too?"
Kakashi turned his face to press his lips to her forehead in a small gesture of comfort. He knew his hands were powerless in face of the grief trembling through her tone, he wished only a single word, a single gesture from him could wash away all the pain gnawing at her heart. They were scarred and bloodied, ragged and rough, without the healing power of Sakura's own.
"I never told this to anyone but… when I went to heal him…" Her gaze was turned down and away from his to where her fingers rolled the fabric of his shirt. "Do you know what Sasuke said to me?"
Kakashi waited with a stilled breath as once again she gathered the courage to spell it into the open world and out of the secrecy of her heart. She had kept it hidden from everyone, now Sakura had chosen him - him of all people - to share it with and he felt so very lacking.
"'I could have loved you'."
The shock of it so unlike anything that he could have imagined shuddered in his chest. From the anguish in her voice, he had expected ice, venom, a mask, from what Kakashi had known of him, he had waited for a mirror of all the mocking insults and rejections he had spat out at Sakura when they were young.
But Sasuke had given her the closest to what such a broken shattered boy could ever come to a confession.
"It's like he knew how to destroy me." Sakura hissed out harshly.
Kakashi tried to see in the top of her head, the curve of her forehead, the only parts of her face bared to him, for any sign of the deeper meaning of it.
Perhaps it was like Obito's gift of the sharingan, which had destroyed him and built him anew. Perhaps it was the barrage of what-ifs that could come forth with only those five words.
The trust she laid in him was a gift and he didn't want to fail her, he didn't want to ruin her.
He begged the silence to reveal the whole of what moved in her and pieced it together in something he could understand. But Kakash was still completely lost, useless.
"And somehow I can't stop loving him… I'm so stupid, I never grew out of that stupid little girl." Her voice left her lips with the bitterness of a sneer, hurt turned into rancour.
"It's not stupidity, Sakura. It's your amazing heart that loves unconditionally."
The first time he had met her, Kakashi had believed her crush for Sasuke to be a silly infatuation, only to see it deepen and bloom into selfless love, the kind of love that he had never been able to nurture in himself.
Sakura lifted her head to watch him, eyes stark against his. "You said it yourself, Kakashi, Mina's an idiot."
Was that why she had that soft spot? Because she felt it mirrored her and Sasuke?
His hand rested on her leg, trying to mark his words into her. "I said it about fictional characters on a show in entirely different situations, not real life people, not you, Sakura. It's completely different."
She shook her head and yanked herself away from him. "You always thought I was an idiot."
A frown crumpled his expression. "What?"
Her eyes were pinned in front of her as she explained, not a hint of resentment in her voice. "In Team 7, you always thought I was a shallow teenage girl, useless as a ninja, good for nothing. It's why you never taught me anything."
The words pierced through his chest, split its walls with thin long connecting cracks of guilt. Kakashi had been dreading how he could ruin her now and blinded himself to all the other times he had already failed her. Since the beginning, when they were only sensei and student, even when it should have been simple, he hadn't done right by her.
"Sakura…"
She buried her face in her hands and groaned into them before springing up from the couch. "Fuck, why am I even bringing this up?"
"That's not true, I never thought you were—"
"It doesn't matter. I didn't mean to say it."
"But you did say—"
Familiar sharp taps against glass cut through his words. They snapped their eyes to the small bird knocking his beak against the window. That little thing could have the worst timings.
"Shit, that's the hospital." Sakura breathed out.
In an instant it was as if she had forgotten that they were even talking, that Kakashi was even in the room, sitting on the sofa with a shattering guilty heart as she rushed out the window without looking back.
A startle jolted through her shoulders and racked her languid heart against her ribs. It was only a soft rasp of knuckles against the door, but in the heavy silence of her office it almost broke the fragile glass of her composure.
Sakura stayed absolutely still, hands tucked into her chest as she pretended to melt into the cushions of the sofa with sleep. She already knew who it was, as the knob turned slowly with a metal squeak, that familiar carefulness with her was Kakashi's alone.
Her stomach gave a nauseous twist at the smell of the food he brought, the back of her throat soaked in burning bile. He rested it on her desk and the silent cadence of his steps whispered closer to her.
Only years of training stopped her from jerking at the sudden touch on her back. His warm large hand slid the blanket up her shoulder and patted it gently over the slope of her frame.
Kakashi was tucking her in, as he had gotten used to doing every time he slipped inside or outside the covers of their bed and messed up her perfect cocoon. At home, it tugged a sigh from her at the warm comfort of the duvet and the caring touch of his hands. Now there was a smothering lump in her throat, it prickled up her eyes, something tight that wanted to break out. She didn't even know what it was that waited at the edge, ready to burst.
When Sakura thought she couldn't hold together any longer, Kakashi stopped.
It was done and now he would leave. She wanted to be alone in her misery, to let the failure and the useless settled into her and ravage without anyone to witness the breaking of her always fragile pieces. Sakura always forgot how much it hurt when she allowed a patient to die.
Against her silent wishes, he crouched down, hand still resting on her arm. She felt him hesitate, a small sway forward and back, before he returned and leaned into her completely. But what made the lump in her throat tumble up into a small sob and her fingers curl the blanket under her chin in a desperate grasp, was the press of his soft lips to her temple.
They lingered and they seared her. Sakura didn't move, moving could shatter whatever hold she still had on her pieces.
Kakashi pulled back and brushed a hand down her hair before straightening.
His expression opened with the same surprise she felt when Sakura realised her hand was now wrapped around his wrist.
"Stay with me." Her lips shaped the request, foreign to them and unwanted, but somehow it had stumbled from her drained mind.
Kakashi's answer was a smile, almost of relief, the gentle curve of a wish fulfilled.
Somehow the two of them managed to squeeze into the small sofa of her office.
The skin of her temple burned and she kept her air stuck in her ribs until she knew it would leave as a steady breath. Sakura was exhausted, too exhausted for whatever was warring in her heart, too exhausted to keep herself together any longer.
What would happen if she just let go?
It didn't matter, the crushing fingers around her throat eased with the warmth of him all around her, the cadence of his brushes on her back, the rise and fall of her ribs mimicking his, her heart falling into the same slow and steady rhythm of his own.
Sakura allowed herself a small straining exhale. It was always the first breath that was more difficult, that could fate if she would shatter or hold on strong, and this time Kakashi held on for her.
Sakura woke up to the everyday image of Kakashi's sleeping face.
She was infinitely glad things hadn't worked out between him and that woman.
That flashing thought exploded in her quiet office, piercingly open and materialised. Later she would let it settle fully, Sakura told herself, so late she would forget there was even a reason to worry and anything to worry about.
Her eyes were heavy, carrying too much that seemed only to build up and never fade, and the weariness was still stuck to her muscles, her soul. But it could have been worse. It was better than what usually awaited her the next day, the wound no longer raw, her pieces safe in their hold.
She couldn't run from the reason for it, when she was facing him head on.
Kakashi really was the most handsome of men.
Still, something trembled her in her, screamed at her to run away before his eyes opened to meet hers.
What was she scared of? Last night had been full of vulnerable moments but Kakashi hadn't given her any reason to feel ashamed for them, any reason for her to hesitate now.
Her fingers uncurled around each other, stiff and aching from being closed too tightly. They rose to his face, halting before they could touch the curve of his jaw, only a sliver of space between them, soaked with the warmth of his skin.
Sakura had never let herself indulge in him under the soft light of morning, curled around her and so close that to touch him seemed only natural.
Her fingertips rested on his jaw, the short layer of his silver stubble prickling. She liked that roughness, masculine, and the back of her hand traced it up to the edge of his cheek, soft there, smooth.
They were so close that his breaths tingled her face and if she drew only a few inches closer their lips would press together.
The need for it rose up to her flesh with the ruthlessness of fire.
These moments when raw want shuddered through her were becoming a constant. Sakura could no longer pass them as a simple flukes of attraction for an attractive man.
She wanted him.
She wanted him always, not as a circumstantial and sporadic pull brought up by the sight of him licking a spoon, by a trace of his eyes over her legs, of a long overlooked memory tugged back to life of the muscles of his back rippling as he thrust into some woman.
It was expected, they were teammates that had laid their lives in each other's hands for years and now they slept every day in the same bed, some nights waking up to the other's warm body moulded into their own.
It was the constant tremble of his chakra tingling her skin, or the weight of his hand over the dip of her waist, his masculine scent imbibed into their sheets as she buried her nose into his pillow.
It was the constant exposure, the familiarity of his body. She was only a woman – a needy woman – it would have been less expected for her not to learn how to crave him. It had become a fact of her body, a part of it, long before, but only now was Sakura letting it fall open in her mind, a long time coming realisation.
There was no need to overthink it.
Sakura wanted him. Always. She wanted him as she had never wanted anyone before, a hunger that seemed to make up the tissue of her.
But as she relished in him, her fingers combing the wild strands of his hair, away from his closed eyes, watching the peaceful softness of his expression, what ruled in her was ache.
It was the feeling of grains of sand slithering away between the gaps of her fingers, impossible to keep them safe in her hold even as she clutched them closed, nails biting into her palm.
What was it that was falling? What was it that felt doomed to shatter?
As her thumb brushed over the shallow raise of his beauty spot, the corner of his mouth creased under her touch with the beginnings of a smile.
Kakashi let out a hoarse hum that rumbled through her body, his eyes still closed and lips turned in a sleepy lopsided smile. Her own cheeks hurt with a silly grin that she couldn't force down.
Kakashi was too handsome, too irresistible.
He dragged her closer to him, calloused fingertips slipping inside her shirt with another sluggish purr. Shivers followed the path he traced up the valley of her spine, his touch burning down into her naked skin.
Her lips parted in a silent gasp as Kakashi pulled her flush against him, arms tight around her, the hot and hard feel of him pressed to her lower belly. His face buried in her throat, breaths puffing against her shivering skin, the lips she had needed to taste with her own branding it as he nuzzled closer to her.
Her thighs pressed together in impulse, the ache flaring with the movement, thoughts melting under Kakashi's unexpected ambush of caresses.
"What are you doing?" Sakura finally asked, voice strained against his collarbone.
She could feel his body tense against her for a few seconds. His hand pulled away from under her shirt completely, but he continued to hide against her throat.
"Waking up." He answered, and the gravel sound of his voice right beside her ear sent a stab of heat through her stomach.
Kakashi dragged himself away into a loose embrace. The tantalising touch of his hard length broke away, but he let his legs remain tangled in her own.
"Sorry about that." He whispered, the apology practiced. After months of sleeping in the same bed, waking up to his erection snuggled against her wasn't anything new, and Kakashi had learned not to make it into a tragedy every time it happened.
What was entirely unexpected were the exploring touches over her naked skin and the nuzzling against her neck that could almost pass as sloppy kisses.
"Don't be." Not when her fingers tingled still with the need to touch him, to wrap around him, and Sakura was relishing too much in that, in the throbbing ache Kakashi had caused and lingered still.
A death like groan tore through his throat as he tried to stretch in the small sofa, rolling onto his back and forcing her to lay half on top of him so they could both fit.
"I'm too old for this."
A smirk played at the corner of her mouth. "Never took you for a man too old for odd positions."
His gaze, lowered on the circles her fingers made over his chest, quickly snapped back up to find in the green of her eyes the exact tilt he had heard in her words. They narrowed, the expression more cute than teasing when it was made through the lingering red puffiness of sleep.
Sakura didn't hide it, it had been quite some time since she had let herself openly flirt with Kakashi, a time when there wasn't a signed piece of paper tangling the straightforward thread that had connected them.
Why shouldn't she? She was exhausted of overthinking every little thing between them, she was exhausted of giving too much weight to every of her touches or every of his words when before things had flowed between them unhindered, unstrained.
She would let them flow again, naturally and unplanned, like a river carving through the rock for the sea.
His fingers held onto a strand of her bangs and brushed it away from her face, in a gesture that was too full of care. Kakashi looked at her through unnerving and languid dark eyes, comfortable eyes, apparently content in simply watching her.
Sakura was infinitely aware that this was new, this was fragile.
Cuddling had become a routine between them, but this shared moment of waking up, as lovers would after a night of passion together, was new.
There was a wary turn of her voice as she asked, "What?"
"You're beautiful. I don't think I say it enough."
Sakura didn't think that a few hours of sleep squeezed into a sofa, chakra exhaustion and the grief of losing a patient were a particularly fitting look for her. She never would have guessed Kakashi to be the type to fall into flattery.
"If you were some random guy at a bar, I'd think you were trying to seduce me."
"Maybe I am." His fingers tucked the strand behind her ear, the back of them brushing the side of her face. "Do you want me to seduce you, Sakura?"
There was the edge of a tease in his voice, but his dark eyes gave her nothing as she searched in them for the full meaning, the full weight of his question.
"Would you? If we weren't married?"
It was the wrong thing to say, the wrong thing to acknowledge when she was laying on top of him and his thumb was tracing circles over the corner of her jaw.
Guilt flashed for an instant at the back of his eyes and Kakashi let his hand drop away from her face.
Whatever was happening between them, whatever would happen only came into being because of an inhumane order from the Council.
The piercing reality of it wrenched at her heart, a new cruelty from this order making itself known.
Sakura felt that something was stolen from them all over again. Felt that the reality of them was demeaned, the truth they were learning to share and be in with each other belittled.
"Maa, now that's a tricky question." His lip curled in a smirk but it felt empty. "But you can't really use my own tricks against me, asking hard questions to get away from answering your own."
Her gaze lowered to the movement of her fingers as they picked at the fabric of his shirt. A sadness twisted her mouth in a soft dejected smile, a misplaced sense of rejection catching up to her.
"I know you wouldn't. You never tried to seduce me before."
"Did you want me to?"
She didn't want to have this conversation, she wanted to pretend that they would have started the path to here out of their own desire. She wanted to pretend that Kakashi wanted her freely, wholeheartedly, for herself, and not because of outside hands pushing, crushing, shaping them into one piece together.
Her smile turned into a smirk, cocky, as Sakura looked at him through her lashes. "What makes you think I'd ever tell you?"
Kakashi let himself be dragged in the light-hearted nudge to their conversation and he chuckled. The rumbles of it trembled through her body and Sakura sank into the warmth of him.
But as the quietness settled once again between them that fear of before persisted. She couldn't shove it down into a forgotten crevasse of her, she couldn't not feel fingers sinking into her still wounded heart, a ribbed cage that seared frost through the fragile and tender muscle.
And when Kakashi hugged her closer and kissed the side of her head, it was as being ripped apart.
Sakura pressed her face to his throat, the teasing faltering from her whisper, "You're a very dangerous man."
There was only silence and she counted the beats of his heart as it thudded right under her ear. Five, the daunting sound of distant thunder.
"You have all the control here." Kakashi answered, words measured. "You know that, don't you, Sakura?"
It had been a long time since she had felt this out of control, strings yanking at her like a powerless, limp marionette. And she was scared. All the time.
"Not like that." She shook her head. "I want this to go both ways."
His fingers glided up and down her back and she traced patterns over his chest as they continued to lay there, neither of them wanting to break apart from each other even when it was them, their past and their future, their stumbling steps through it that weighed now.
How was it that they could find comfort in each other from the discomfort of themselves?
And then Sakura made another mistake, even if an involuntary one – her stomach growled.
A yelp jolted from her lungs as Kakashi heaved himself up without warning, dragging her along with him and manhandling her to flop back on the sofa, seated now.
Kakashi chuckled, the bastard always having a sick enjoyment in her embarrassment. "You need to eat."
"You're a show off." She glared up at him.
He grabbed the take-out bags from last night and dropped them on her knees.
"And you've grown too comfortable in your coddling." Sakura commented with narrowed eyes as she, nonetheless, worked on serving herself.
He smirked at her. "I started to understand why you've always enjoyed it so much."
"It was not so much about enjoyment and more about you boys being hopeless in your self-neglect. But now Sai has Ino, Naruto Hinata and you have—"
Her lips sealed together on impulse as Sakura realised she was putting her own thing with Kakashi on the same level as long lasting relationships. Her gaze fled to the side as she cleared her throat, trying to free the words. Not saying it was giving them too much weight, too much power.
"You have me."
Sakura twirled her chopsticks over her food, the food Kakashi had brought, a mirrored image of so many other times for the past months when he had brought her lunch during her break.
It filled her only with a burning sense of impotence, inadequacy.
"But honestly…" A self-deprecating chuckle slipped from her. "The way things are going, it's more just me who has you."
She wanted to give and seemed only capable of taking.
Her eyes were still locked on the movement of her chopsticks, too much of a coward to look up to him.
"I have you, Sakura." Kakashi answered with aching simplicity.
He always spoke of these things as if they were obvious, certain, but they were never that to her. Sakura's place in their relationship was the least certain thing of her life.
Her skin prickled with his heavy probing gaze.
"About yesterday…" His voice was equal parts firm and hesitant. She already knew what he would say. "It wasn't your fault, if you couldn't heal him then no one else could have, you know that, right?"
That was the problem. She had obsessed over every possibility, played back every single one of her movements and decisions. Not one had been misplaced, there was not one thing she could have done differently to save her comrade.
The problem wasn't in what she had done, it was in what she could do and what she could do was not enough.
Maybe that was why everything seemed to pierce through her too deeply, to fester too painfully that day. All her failures seemed to be amalgamated into one large vicious ball of failure, rooted, growing and adding to it. If one piece of it hurt, all the other ones hurt with it.
"Yes, I know the spiel, not your fault, nothing you could have done, don't bring it home. I'm tired of hearing it, of saying it to myself. It never fucking works."
Her eyes clenched closed in a wince when the acid tone of her voice lingered through the silence. Sakura leaned onto her elbows and brushed her hands through her face roughly. Was this how she thanked him for his infinite kindness? Spatting his comforting words back at him?
"I'm sorry, Kakashi, I didn't mean to be taking it out on you."
"Why not?" He shrugged and leaned back on the couch, arms crossed. "Go ahead, take everything out on me, Sakura."
Kakashi had pinned her with that stare of his that was more than steady, it ruled and dominated, the shade of his grey exuded power and control. It was his battlefield stare. He had done this before with her, after particularly difficult missions, and she had pulled him right back into a ruthless spar.
Her eyes lowered to his lips.
Instead of the fire simmering in her fists, begging to shatter everything in her way, her skin was feverish with the impulse of grabbing the collar of his shirt and hauling him to her. The impulse of seeing those relentless eyes look down as he pounded into her, seeing his face creased in pleasure, fingers denting into her hips as she let herself crash into him, and at the end a gentle kiss on her temple.
No. No kissing, it wasn't about kissing.
"I know what it's like… to feel like a failure, like we're not enough." His eyes were lost somewhere in front of him and away from her. "And the truth is you'll always have patients die and I'll always let my comrades die. We'll never be enough."
The grave intonation of his words seemed to have the pretention of clearing all the burdens with the power of his wisdom.
"Shittiest pep-talk I've ever heard."
Kakashi glared at her with a pout and she couldn't stop the laugh that rose up her chest. It didn't take long for him to follow her with his delicious low chuckles.
It was a little like Tsunade as she had stated firmly, with no hint of tenderness behind her eyes, unlike Kakashi who was all softness today, 'You're not a god' and decided not to elaborate it to a shattered insecure teenage girl whose hands were tainted with her first dead patient. Her pep-talks had always been the same as her trainings, ruthless hits and the expectation that she would learn how to skirt or block or lose a limb trying.
The gentler shishou was the direr things were. Her gentlest after Sasuke's death. It was why that afternoon months ago, where she had told her of her new life-long mission to Konoha, Sakura had know it was inevitable, it was wrong.
And now here she was, hearing one of the worst motivational speeches offered to her by her lovely husband.
How could she not break out into a laugh?
"You didn't let me finish." Kakashi drawled, patiently waiting for her to ease down. "All we can do is give our best and learn to live with knowing that sometimes we're not enough, that we'll always fail, learn to appreciate everything we do and are despite that."
"Ah, that's a lot better, I suppose." Sakura sighed, head leaning back on the couch, and let her lips stretched in a grin. "Long gone is the Kakashi-sensei that would just reassure me everything would be alright."
She much preferred this Kakashi that didn't have the need to sugar-coat things, the one that didn't treat her like a girl made of glass that would break at the softest hint of pain.
It was why there was no need to bring up things that belonged in past and had no need to come muddle whatever was happening now, as she had stupidly done yesterday. Even when they still ached in a corner of her heart.
That insecure little girl would forever be stuck to her because deep down, no matter how much she tried to run from it, Sakura knew she was her.
It was why she couldn't stop loving Sasuke even if it was only destructive, it was why she felt her hands, her chakra, her entire self was worthless after letting a comrade's life drip through her fingers, why there was dread at the thought of another person trusting her to heal them again.
Sakura loathed her, she loathed how she wedged herself between her crevasses and creeped in every moment in her life.
But while she might remain in her, Kakashi was different.
"I learned from my mistakes."
Her eyebrow rose. "Mistakes? From the always perfect shinobi-san?"
Kakashi rolled his eyes. "Yes, it may be earthshattering, considering everything you know about me, but I do those too, just almost never. Honestly, perfection sounds like a pain in the ass."
"Does it?" Sakura asked in a quiet voice, as she rolled her head on the back of the couch to watch the ceiling. "I've always been half in love with perfection."
It was so simple to see it looking back, all the silliness of her made-up dreams growing up, those visions of Sasuke-kun, handsome and talented and flawless, they were simply the mindless need for perfection, what a shallow child thought of perfection. Later it morphed into medicine, chakra control, duty, loving with every fibre of her being and healing a boy that was unamendable. The clinic and a village where children couldn't hurt and break, where they couldn't be doomed.
Maybe it was a good thing that this was her marriage.
There were no expectations, were there?
No expectations for the perfect love she had always craved, the perfect children, the perfect father and mother, the perfect husband, the perfect home where there would be no loneliness in her heart and everything was where it belonged.
"It's a pain in the ass because it will always be unrequited."
The corner of her lip lifted in a sardonic smile. "And I've also always been doomed to those."
Kakashi was silent but she could feel the weight of his gaze on her. When she mustered the courage to meet his eyes, there was sadness and something else in the grey shade of them, almost longing, but with a blink, it was gone.
"Thank you, Kakashi, for being here. It… you helped. A lot." There was only disbelief in him and Sakura added, "You did, you always have." Her finger poked his cheek. "Even with all those shitty pep-talks."
Her words were enough to freeze the poor man into a statue. Sakura would give him time to work through them and hopefully let them settled in him.
Kakashi never asked anything from her and a part of her, that little girl shunned away in her own team, trembled at the thought that he didn't ask because he didn't think her capable of giving him what he wanted, what he needed.
There were no expectations because he didn't expect anything from her.
She had expected freedom from it, even if with a sad glint to it, but all she felt was pain.
She stretched her arms up to the ceiling before packing the spoils of their meal to open space on her desk. "They freed my shifts for this morning after last night, so I was thinking of staying here and working on the clinic."
"I'll help you."
Sakura startled at his words, throwing him a dumbfounded look over her shoulder.
"What? I'm sure there's some boring logistical matters I can take off your hands."
There were but her issue wasn't with Kakashi's lack of capabilities, it was that she liked doing things on her own, liked having everything under the reach of her hands and mind. Even delegating tasks to Ino required some effort on her part.
Sakura worried her lip, swapping between glances to the folders on her desk and to Kakashi as he lounged back on the sofa, a nonchalant arm draped over the back of it, annoyingly amused at her indecision.
She grabbed one of the folders and thumped his head with it. Before he could take it, Sakura pulled it away almost on instinct. She never let Naruto get less than three metres close to her work.
"You seem like a very possessive woman, Sakura. Should I be worried?"
Fuck her folder. Sakura hit his head harder with it, the smack vibrating through the office. "You should, but not because of that."
She let the sheets drop to his lap.
"Thank you, wife." Kakashi beamed through the violence with the most infuriating and delectable smile.
They spent the morning fighting to see who could work the fastest. Even without the sharingan to read a piece of paper in a peep, he still worked impressively fast, to the point her pride was taking it in as a personal offense.
Once he had caught her narrowed eyes at him, he smirked, something that definitely was too cocky and needed to be wiped away from his face, preferably with her own lips, but without that then with her victory. Seeing the challenge in her eyes, he had narrowed his own back, and their fight began.
His hand reached to grab another pile as his third task was finished, getting too comfortable in what was her working territory, and she slapped it before he could touch it.
"You're sick."
"You're starting to sound like Ino." Sakura answered. "Just ask me for what you want and I'll give it to you."
"Oh?" Kakashi let out with a dangerous edge in his eyes, leaning in closer to her. "If only I'd known it would be that simple."
Sakura wouldn't let herself be daunted, her fingers slipping under the desk to rest on his thigh. "And what do you want, Kakashi?"
He neared her until his cheek brushed her own and his lips a sliver away from her ear, only the warmth of his breath touching her, as he whispered, "The budget for the cleaning expenses."
His low seductive voice had a straight link to the spot between her thighs, her toes curling against her sandals. It was slightly pathetic considering the content of his words.
"You definitely know what to say to a woman."
Their legs would bump together from time to time and when it happened they shared a thrown glance through their lashes. When one was showing the other something on their sheets, they would lean closer than they needed to and retreat to the safe proper space of their work station.
Until the moment Kakashi held the arm of her chair and dragged her to his side with the pretense of her explaining something to him and she never returned to her place, her knee pressed to his thigh, arm brushing his when their pens moved across the papers, fingers tapping the other's hand softly to call their attention.
Even with the constant burning awareness of his body right beside her and her body right beside his, they worked with surprising efficiency.
"Gods, you'd make a much better Hokage than Shishou." Sakura breathed out as she slumped back on her chair.
"What?"
Sakura flicked his forehead with the tip of her pen.
"Don't look so surprised. You're a great leader, even better than shishou. You're practical, you're stubborn but not too stubborn and actually listen to what people have to say, great at problem solving, and one thousand times more efficient, especially now that I think Shishou spends most of the day looking out the window, wondering if it would be so bad if she just threw herself out of it."
"Do you really think that?"
"I'm obviously exaggerating but she really is fed up with being Hokage. Besides if she did kill herself I doubt she'd go down that way. Probably surrounded with sake and money, in one last glorious bout of excess, not a pancake on the ground."
"No, Sakura, about me."
Her eyes focussed back on his face after losing herself in her own rant, disbelief clouding it.
"Of course, you idiot." She told him softly with a smile in her lips. "Since Tsunade was in a coma and they were thinking of appointing you, I thought you'd make a great Hokage."
Her green eyes dropped with sadness, chest simmering with a vicious ache. Before their marriage, Sakura had only seen small glimpses of his self-doubt, never attentive enough to look underneath the underneath into how deeply it entrenched, how it was the root of his refusal to become Hokage.
She had thought it was a reason out of many, as his love for the field, his comfort in their team and their missions, his laziness and aversion to filling out reports, to cajoling diplomats and Head of Clans, but not the basis and cause of it.
Kakashi didn't want to be Hokage because he believed he wouldn't be a good one.
Her pen swirled over his expression. "What is it? It's not like it's the first time I'm saying this, Kakashi. But I'll bet it's probably the first time you're actually listening to it."
He didn't reply, his eyes still pinned to her as if he was trying to peel away the façade in her words and expose the lie behind them.
She leaned back onto the papers opened in front of them. "Now, about the budget."
As they finished working through it, Kakashi said, "Thank you, Sakura," Her head lifted to look at him. "for your faith in me."
Sakura smiled, her hand finding his and squeezing. "Always."
Kakashi looked boyish in his vulnerability, fragile.
Sakura had never thought of him as fragile, but now the word brought a new light to all of his strength and his steadiness, not withering them, but swelling them with worth - him with worth.
The dark shade of his eyes drew her into them, the raw wound in her heart still lingering from his almost death made the skin of his arm especially warm, irresistibly strong and alive under her fingers.
Sakura couldn't be sure who had leaned in first, but they were closer, so close she could feel his cool exhales on her heated cheeks. Her eyes closed as her stomach twirled, it would be so easy to close that final gap between them and press her mouth to those pink lips that had captivated her eyes since the first moment Kakashi finally bared them to her.
To kiss him and finally quench the longing tingling through her since the night of their wedding, maybe since years before that, since that night on a mission when Kakashi first became a man to her.
They weren't drunk on sake and on grief this time, there was no sensible reason to stop the natural and slow motion of their leaning heads, no reason for their timings to be mismatched.
His warm breath fanned across her face, a hint of coffee in his scent that shot down her spine in a shiver, reigniting the dull ache between her thighs.
Kakashi pulled back, slowly, a mere turn of his head and of his eyes back to the papers between them, slow enough that they could pretend she hadn't felt his breath and wondered what he tasted like, slow enough that they could pretend they hadn't been an inch from each other's lips.
Just as they pretended there was a real marriage tying them together.
It pierced through her with a ruthlessness Sakura hadn't been ready for, her heart caving inside her ribs. With the fragility of yesterday, her skin had turned into a thin cracking cast of glass and this one moment became a final blow.
This was why she had skirted away from rejection for years, the crushing ravaging pain in her heart, an old wound ripped open once again.
Sakura should have known, she shouldn't have let herself hope that things were different with him, and most of all with her.
"It's been some time, hm?" He asked as he looked down at the familiar shape of the cenotaph.
The last time Kakashi had come there had been after his wedding to tell them of it, as he could no longer show Obito the world through their shared eye.
Sakura and Kakashi were at the point of no return. The same disquietment of standing over that cliff during missions whirled through him now, and while there he knew how to calculate the best step, here Kakashi was entirely lost.
While Guy had always thought too highly of him, Obito had been more balanced in his constant waver between thinking too highly and too lowly of him. "Except during the war. You were an asshole then." He said into the empty air.
The moment he saw that uncanny blankness in her expression after Kakashi pulled away from their almost kiss, he knew he had fucked up.
But somehow he couldn't bring himself to regret it, not when her own words had been the thing to freeze him.
Her breath fluttering against his waiting lips had spelled them once again, 'Would you? If we weren't married?'
They had tolled with the reality of their situation. They wouldn't here like this without being forced into this marriage. That lack of freedom at their beginning would always underlie her place in this relationship, the chains running deeper and longer.
Whatever Sakura gave him, it wouldn't be given freely.
His fingertips traced the shape of Obito's name, the lines of it so familiar after decades of feeling their relief on the onyx stone that it was as if they were branded into Kakashi's pads, along the burn of the raikiri. They lowered to Rin's name, another one that was etched into his flesh.
Another set of shattering words from Sakura that hadn't stopped ringing in his mind, 'You're a very dangerous man'.
It wasn't the first time he heard them from a woman, always through an enticing tone, a seduction of its own, a whispered consent to all that he wanted to do with them.
In Sakura there was hesitation, guardedness. Wariness. They were a token of her way of being in this marriage.
"You know more than anyone how dangerous I can be, don't you, Rin?"
His lip curled in something bitter as his heart prickled with the unfamiliar twinge of resentment. Kakashi had never resented Rin's devastating decision but now he cared more that the scarred burns from that one raikiri had made his hands forever rough, forever inadequate.
Had Rin doomed him, and Sakura along with him?
He dropped his hand and it fell limply to his side.
She hadn't, he was being weak, a coward. His faults were his own and Sakura was laying them bare for him to see with a clarity, a bitterness, he hadn't felt in a long time.
He voiced to Obito the same question he had asked Guy long ago, "Do you think I'll ruin her too?"
There were too many wounds, they festered too deeply, he had failed her too much and in a time when Sakura had needed him most perhaps.
Their relationship from before they were married could ignore it, could endure through the prickling silence of leaving them unnamed, but not anymore. They could no longer pretend it wasn't one of the many shapes and colours of the thread that connected them.
The naïve well-meaning teenage girl and the careless selfish sensei.
Kakashi didn't know how to make it right, he didn't know how not fall into the same and transformed thing.
But something felt different. There was a madness in him that wanted to be better with such an overwhelming force that he was beginning to believe nothing could stand in his way to it, not even himself.
"Sakura asked me what I even know about love."
A small sardonic smile curled under his mask and he looked up, unseeing, towards the line of the dark sky above the canopy of trees.
"You're probably laughing your ass off, Obito, while Rin looks down at me with pity."
His fame preceded him. Kakashi had never been good at relationships.
His lack of experience was certainly showing now, with her. Most likely her opinion of him was that he had never even been in love.
Perhaps that was what kept Sakura back, she didn't think he was capable of loving her.
He was equally uncertain.
Kakashi knew of love but he had never learnt how to materialise it into action, into something tangible and real, something fruitful. It had always remained silent and overflowing only inside the sealed shape of his heart.
Could it be love if it remained only in him? As Hiroto, too terrified to share it with others and make it exist open in the world. As Sasuke, too broken to make it present and not potential.
Maybe he should- but no, that was madness, that would break the comfortable dynamics between them now. Yet if not now when? When it was too late?
And what were words, only empty vessels, when his gestures weren't enough to show?
"What do you say, Obito?"
He changed his weight to his left hip as he waited for a sudden blinding epiphany.
There was only silence.
Heyy!
This one definitely took longer than usual to come out! I'm so sorry! September was the first month of the semester, and I'm in the process of writing my master thesis and working. Aaaand I wish that this was the only excuse, but I just wasn't feeling this chapter, and couldn't simply toss it out because I needed some things to happen and be established before the next one…
I'll try to keep my updates consistent, with the past frequency of a chapter per two/three weeks, but I can't make any promises!
Also, the title of this chapter is taken from Yeats poem "Adam's Curse". I highly recommend it for anyone interested in poetry.
As always, thank you for reading!