Chapter Sixteen
What to Expect When You're Not Expecting
"You're looking very suspicious of me."
Her eyes had fluttered open to find the last thing that her heart expected after last night.
Instead of empty sheets, hard like the surface of a stone bench, Sakura met Kakashi's half-lidded eyes and the ghost of tingling fingertips on the edge of her jaw.
She fought against the fog of sleep. The sight of him, temple propped up on his fist, linen gliding down his naked side, and messy hair cut from the warm morning light, teetered between a mirage and the certain brutality of reality.
He seemed unreal and unfit against the emptiness that she had been waiting for.
The corner of his mouth twisted, only an instant flash of hurt as Kakashi read the meaning behind her bewilderment.
Her hand reached for him, trying to placate what hid behind that bittersweet smile, but he only answered, "What else could you expect from me?"
Sakura had hardened her heart against her certainty that he would slip away from her fingers. Her own unfairness pierced through her, expecting the worst of him from only a glimpse of guilt that had quickly washed away at the sound of her words.
She held his jaw before Kakashi could turn away from her, thumb tracing the corner of his mouth as if to erase the sign, no longer there, of how she had hurt him.
"To kiss me."
Kakashi didn't hesitate. His fingers brushed her cheek, combing away tousled pink strands to bare her face. He leaned down, a flutter of disbelief still in his eyes, the same that moved in her chest, as he neared her, before closing them.
Their lips moved together languidly. The rough feel of his stubble rubbed against her chin, it hadn't been there last night. She felt it with her own fingers, masculine and irresistible, head shifting against the softness of the pillow to deepen the kiss. He hummed at the touch of her tongue against his lips, parting up for her.
Only as it happened now, was Sakura realising how she had been dreaming of the moment when they would finally wake up like this. She had never allowed that wish – of their naked bodies on tangled sheets and exchanges of morning kisses and caresses – to hold any strength in her mind, any power over her.
Kakashi's hand moved down her side, fingers sinking into her hip as he rolled on top of her. Her hand brushed up and down the ripples of his back, hard with tension as he held his weight away from her. Sakura guided him down to press him to her, hard and heavy.
Kakashi was there, resisting the shape and border of her figure, an entirely different body of his own, separated and unbreakable, unknowable.
Her mouth broke away from his, "So you don't regret it?"
His lips curved in a bashful smile, before dipping back to press that same shape to her own with a few pecks. "No."
"And guilt? I saw it…"
Kakashi shaped his words along with kisses down her jawline, "Guilt isn't the same as regret."
"But it was there." At her words, his forehead slumped against hers in a sigh, the muscle of his bicep tensing in her hold. He didn't want to talk, she knew. "I need you to be sure of this before we can move forward."
His arm propped him up from and a shiver of cold rushed down her body as his heat washed away from her skin.
"I am sure, I was sure yesterday."
"But." Sakura voiced the word she was seeing in his eyes.
"I don't want to lie to you, Sakura, I can't stop feeling like I took something from you that shouldn't be mine."
"Why?" Her hands cupped his cheeks. "I understand that you feel like this marriage is your fault and you're chaining me to you, but it isn't. We're here because the Council ordered it, you played no part in it. None, Kakashi."
Kakashi's brow crumpled at her words, only a harsher and more vicious wave of guilt gnawing through the lines of his face.
Sakura brushed back the falling strands of his bangs, not letting an inch of his expression to escape from her. Through the touch of her hands on his face, she tried to mark her words into him.
"I'm an adult woman, everything I did last night, I'm doing now, it's because I want to."
Dark circles were marked down under his eyes, her fingertips brushed down the scar that cut his eye and out towards the thin creases at its corner, all while his lips parted to speak and closed once again.
Had Kakashi spent the night warring inside that stubborn and so very broken heart of his, while Sakura had been sleeping away, unfairly hardening her own against him?
"Do you want me to…" His words fell into silence with a small hitched breath. "love you?"
Sakura's eyes widened on the sight of her fingers on his skin. Her heartbeat hammered against ribs, each jerk of it painful with a latent hidden ache, until all she could hear was the sound of it and the repeating echo of his impossible words.
Of everything that could have left his mouth, still reddened from kissing her, she could never have expected that.
Never. Not that word, not Kakashi the one to voice it, the one to point at the unnamed and lacking thing in their relationship.
"I'm not asking for something that you can't give me, Kakashi."
Sakura looked into his eyes, wanting to learn what moved behind them, but all she could find was her own distant reflection in the speckled hues of grey.
The same feeling of last night tore through her again, sharp fingers sinking into the soft flesh of her chest to rip her heart out into the open, as it hardened into stone against the prying. A reflex – the same as lifting a kunai at the elusive glint of metal in the air.
No one could know how much Sakura needed it – love – no one, least of all herself. She had renounced the place for it in her life and this order then had only fortified that absence, her own comfort in it.
"But if I could give you love, would you want it from me?"
'I could have loved you'
There were stains of red suddenly soaking her hands, the blood of a carved out chest, Sakura yanked them away from him. Kakashi needed to remain untouched and only himself, she wanted him free of Sasuke, free like Sakura wasn't.
Kakashi couldn't have known about the what-ifs concerning love that had drowned her chest for so long and still she felt taunted with. Too many of them staggered now along the edge of her mind, avid to overwhelm it. A what-if of a wife he loved and that loved him.
A what-if of an earlier beginning, free and unrestrained, a kiss in front of a bonfire as they returned home from a mission and that flowed right up to this same bed, straightforward and natural, no guilt and no fear.
A what-if without this order where she would live her life without knowing the true shape of the cords that tied her to Konoha, a village puppet. The same one where there wasn't this painful and wonderful mess that was their marriage, the same one where she would live her life never knowing how Kakashi felt in the morning pressed around her and in the night, soft breaths tingling her ear.
Sakura pushed up from the bed, air frosted in lungs.
"I can't think about what-ifs."
She curled into herself, arms wrapped around her knees. As long as she didn't think them, they couldn't touch her, their heavy and impossible reality wouldn't crumble her and their relationship.
"This should be simple, Kakashi, shouldn't it?" Sakura whispered against her knees. "And I'm not even thinking about what the Council wants of this."
A child – her mind screamed.
"I'm thinking about us. We want to be together. Right?"
Kakashi sat up as well, his warm hand rested on the curve of her spine, naked skin under is rough callouses. It made her entirely aware that they were both nude and unbothered with it.
"Yes, Sakura."
"Then why can't we make it simple?"
It was easy for her to be naked in front of him, for him to be naked in front of her. Why couldn't that sense of naturalness extend to everything else, to deeper than the surface of their skin? Or just become the same, their flesh and their hearts reflecting and overlapping each other?
"I'm always wondering," Kakashi started and Sakura leaned her cheek on her crossed arms to watch him. "always scared that our beginning doomed the rest of our relationship." He looked down at his hands, finger curling and uncurling. "I feel like we can't escape them, the cuffs the Council put around us."
His dark eyes lifted to hers, a plea in them.
"Can there even be love if there isn't freedom, Sakura?"
Kakashi's voice broke for a single instant and still that tragic sound would forever remain in her, unknown in the timbre of his voice, unexpected, and still painfully real, painfully his.
"Am I waiting for something that can never be?"
"An order can have no power over what's happening between us, don't you think, Kakashi?"
"And what's happening between us?"
Her stomach jerked at his question, straightforward and unrelenting, entirely startling in his voice. Sakura turned her head away from him.
This may have started as an order but neither of them could deny that it had grown into something else. She could feel imbibed it into the air around them with the same reality of their bodies, there and tangible. Her fingers had brushed through it last night but she hadn't let herself hold on, hadn't let her tongue taste it and name it in Kakashi's skin.
"I can't put it into words, not yet…" Or maybe she didn't want to.
There was no clarity in her and that terrified her. Just a year ago everything in her life had been certain, muted under the calculated safety of each of her own steps and now Sakura could barely move, too many things ripped out of her control, too many things warring and blooming in her heart.
She felt paralysed under all of them, under the possibility of a false shattering step, of ruin.
Was she the one not making it simple for them?
"Last night…" Sakura breathed out. "it made me realise that I also have reservations."
Sakura had thought it was different with Kakashi, he felt different in everything, but she was falling into the same as she always did in her past relationships. That deep-rooted inability to let her heart be free and unguarded in his hands.
Last night, she hadn't allowed herself see underneath her own urgency and fear, desperately trying to beckon him to her, to pin him down with her touch and her mouth. The moment he first gave in, Kakashi was there, surrendered, fully trusting of her jagged and unprepared hands.
Sakura had been the elusive one, rushing, guarding herself against the moment he would draw away, never letting herself sink beyond the lust.
Not once had she trusted him not to hurt her, not once had she trusted him not to break her heart.
The emptiness, as the silence had settled over them, had been made out of her own fault.
"You can annul it still. You can always be free from me."
Her head snapped up to look at him. Kakashi had turned his face away, looking out through the window. Nothing passed behind the steel of his eyes and the marble of his skin, pale under the light, carved down with scars, spelling of a thousand different wounds, some decades old, from a time he should have still been a child.
Sakura crawled closer to him, careful with how the sheets still looped around their bodies, a saddened smile in her lips.
"Not those kinds of reservations, Kakashi."
His head dropped, eyes cast down to the rumpled linen between them. "But don't you want a little more time to see if this makes sense, Sakura? It hasn't been a year still."
Had Kakashi noticed her hesitation last night, just as this morning he read it on her? Had it pained him in the same way Sakura had desperately tried not to be hurt herself?
Her fingers rose to his shoulder, tracing circles down the strong slope of it, over the red ink of his ANBU tattoo and back up.
"No, Kakashi, I don't. Do you?"
"No, Sakura." He lifted his gaze to hers. "I want this."
"Then why annulment? Who's even going to prove if we've fucked or haven't fucked?" She gave a small chuckle, mouth lifting in a lopsided smile, fingers tugging at the hairs of his nape. "No one will believe we have this much self-control, we're literally naked on our bed and not the slightest bit close to fucking. It's downright absurd."
His eyes wandered down her body, the weight of them over her skin sending tingles down her spine. They burned a path back up and lingered on her naked breasts, nipples hardening under his dark attentive stare.
"We've been further away." His voice left in a drawled sensual murmur.
Her hand launched out to grab a pillow and swing it against him, each muffled thud sounding in time with her words.
"You don't get to be all flirty, if you refuse to act on it!"
Kakashi held the useless weapon halfway through her tirade, his delicious low chuckles rumbling in the air. They struggled against each other to gain control over it. Because this man existed to infuriate her, he won, collapsing on top of her and stretching his long arm above her head and out of her reach.
"And it's just cold." Sakura grumbled before trying to blow a strand of hair away from her eyes.
He brushed it out the way for her, fingertips teasing the skin of her forehead, a cocky smirk tugging the corner of his mouth up.
"Maybe they won't believe you, with your habit of destroying training fields at the drop of a hat, but I'm the paradigm of self-control."
The proof of it was pressed to the inside of her thigh, burning into her skin and coiling low in her belly, while Kakashi appeared completely unbothered.
"You're very annoying, you know…" Sakura whispered, fingertips brushing down the valley of his spine, Kakashi's eyes fluttered closed with a sigh at the caress.
"We can act on it… just… not everything, not yet."
There was shyness in his voice as he said it, so different from the smooth flirt of seconds before.
Kakashi rolled to the side, the mattress jiggling with the weight of his back. Sakura turned as well, head cushioned under her arm to watch his profile as he spoke, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling above them.
"I thought I could before, on the red bridge, on our wedding day, even later, but I can't. I can't consummate our marriage based on an order for a breeding program, not until we're both free, we're both even."
Sakura was beginning to understand. Perhaps. Kakashi still hadn't come to terms with the clear separation between the formal marriage thing and their true relationship.
She no longer felt that this order demeaned the reality of them, belittled the truth they were in with each other. Nothing felt stolen, nothing felt meddled with outside of their hands.
"Our marriage," Kakashi breathed out. "you… we deserve more. I want more for us than that."
"And how long will that take? How long until you feel like we're there?"
There was always her fear that he could be dragging things out for reasons older and more rooted than their relationship, just a symptom of a lifelong burden of guilt and trauma, entirely unrelated to their actually circumstances.
Kakashi's head slumped to the side to meet her eyes. "Do you feel like we're there?"
"I feel that you're giving too much weight to this idea of consummation."
The corner of his mouth lifted in a humourless curl. "You've grown very proficient at not answering any of the questions I make."
"I've learnt from the best." She spat out.
"You did." Kakashi agreed softly, not the least defensive about her accusing reply.
Unlike him, Sakura didn't think she needed for them to be there. Against everything that her heart demanded, she couldn't need everything to be perfect, or else she could never learn to sink in and enjoy what was already here. As now, the sight of Kakashi laying on their bed under the morning sun.
His grey eyes were clear as he watched her, a streak of light drawn over his scarred lid, catching on silver lashes, and curving around the angles of his face. Sakura's gaze followed the length of his neck to the rise and fall of his chest, and down, all slick strong lines carved into marble skin.
The white sheet, almost the same colour as him, twisted around his thighs and draped precariously low over his hips, baring the tantalising path of silver hairs under his navel and leading to the veiled outline of his lingering half-hard erection.
The anticipation to touch and kiss it again, feel it hardening fully inside her mouth, pricked in her skin, but most of all Sakura could simply stay like this, relishing in him and his beauty as he came to rest in her eyes, forever.
There wasn't that violence, that urgency demanding that she take everything she could from his body, from this moment, before it could dissolve. Sakura let them be in stilled rest, simply here.
"This is also very nice." She whispered, shaping different words to mean the same thing, a promise to wait for him and enjoy it while she did, no bitterness of rejection or resentment slither in between them.
Kakashi's expression opened in a wide smile and Sakura swooned at the beauty of his delight. More than anything, she wanted him happy and comfortable, cherished in her hands.
"You're so beautiful."
It was a mirror of her thoughts, but the words hadn't come out of her own mouth. Her eyes lifted for his, a tenderness in him so intense Kakashi looked almost pained.
Her fingers reached to twirl circles over the stubble on his chin, rough against her touch, touching his beauty mark, and dragging down the curve of his jaw and to the soft thin skin of his throat, bobbing under the whisper of her fingertips as Kakashi swallowed.
"I…" His hand held her own where it lay over his chest, fast heartbeat fluttering up into her palm. "you know that I'm grateful that you're in my life, Sakura, like this?"
"I know. Most times at least. And I also like hearing it." She smiled, the shape of it reflecting her shyness. "So why this need for annulment then? Divorce is also a thing, you know."
"It'd stay as a mark in your life."
"Kakashi…" Sakura breathed out as she neared him. "do you think I'd want to pretend this never happened? This has been good…" Her voice trembled in the last syllable, uncertainty and so much burning insecurity holding it back. "don't you think so?"
"Yes," He answered, breathless and strained, as if it hurt him to admit it, eyes turned down and away from her. "of course it has, but—"
"No but," Her hand reached for his cheek. "there's no but needed. This has been good. It has been good to me."
Sakura guided his face to look up and his fugitive eyes to meet her own, hold impossibly gentle, expression naturally loving, because their marriage had helped her understand that even through his unshakable strength, Kakashi was so very fragile.
"You are good to me, Kakashi."
She leaned into him, her lips peppering kisses on his forehead. Kakashi reached to hold to her waist again, palm moulding around the curve of her body. It should belong there and somehow he could never believe it, even when she showed and told him that it did.
For all the healing light of her chakra, Sakura had always failed at showing people the good.
"You are."
Kakashi had never understood marriage, why people saw in it something sacred.
The only bonds that had ever seemed to hold any hint of the sacred to him were between comrades. If any connection between human beings held a speckle of transcendence and bloomed from further than the shape of their human nature it was that, bonds made from shed blood and intertwined with the cold vines of death and thorns of violence.
People married out of fickle passion and loneliness, out of a thoughtless decision to do simply what adult people were supposed to do, out of a thirst for power and the need to maintain it inside their own little circle.
Everything about marriage had always seemed too human and too petty.
He still thought the same the moment he drank sake from the same cup as Sakura.
There had been nothing sacred about Konoha's decision to restore its lost power by making puppets out of them.
Then one morning he had brought Sakura a cup of tea to where she was leaning over their balcony, breathing in the early scent of Konoha, heavy with dew. Their fingers had brushed together as she took the cup from him and Sakura had given him a smile.
Kakashi had lived through that exact routine dozens of times before, had relished in the content turn of her lips and the green colour of her eyes, the warmth of her arm pressed to his as they watched the waking village together.
But only then had he felt has if everything in his life, in the universe, was sustain by that single shared moment. Only then did he see the eternity that Sakura carried in her eyes, in her lips.
It had been as if the pieces had finally fallen into their rightful place.
Their marriage had become the mid-point of his entire life, building up his future, and forming back his past. Kakashi could no longer imagine himself without Sakura, could no longer imagine it not leading him to here and him not being led forward from here.
That same feeling of the sacred happened when he watched Sakura come around his fingers on their kitchen counter, lidded eyes fighting the pull of the pleasure he gave her. When she took him to the back of her throat, green eyes on his, making him wholly hers. When he tried to wash away the scar on her stomach with his mouth and erase the never-to-be-fulfilled possibility of them not being there, together, Sakura so wonderfully alive, flushed warm skin, heaving breaths, pulsing heartbeat, her life thriving and demanding to be lived.
When he watched her sleep, her naked body pressed to his equally naked one, and entirely oblivious and unprepared to the infinity named love moving in his heart for her.
'It's a different thing', Asuma had confessed once about being with Kurenai and now Kakashi finally understood. He had known he wanted Sakura as he had never wanted anyone else but only in that quietness after their night together did he realise what it truly meant to have her.
They weren't even. It would feel like a lie to sleep with her, each of his touches heavy and overflowing in meaning while she wanted to be given something else, and Kakashi was taking from her more than Sakura was willing to give him.
But how could he tell her that when there was the risk of ruining their relationship? Kakashi was terrified of the possibility that Sakura didn't want to be loved by him, just as she seemed to believe him incapable of that love.
Looking back at his life, at their relationship – what he regretted most was allowing his guilt and fear to stand above his care and abandoning her on that training field – it was the common-sense conclusion. Even Kakashi constantly doubted his ability to love her as love should be – action – and not a feeling hidden in his heart.
"And what do you even know about love?" Sakura had asked him months ago, the words carrying only a tease to her, but they settled in his chest as a mock, a bruise. Kakashi had looked into her green eyes, the words in his mind tempting his lips to shape them, 'Not as much as I want, but enough to know that I love you, Sakura, desperately, sacredly.'
And now, that same feeling spread out from him and into the world again – the same and entirely different, this time rising from his anguish – as Kakashi watched Sakura cave in their target's face with her fists.
Again and again, without chakra, her strength coming from the hatred that distorted the lines of her face into something feral, the grunts more of heartbreak than effort.
His hand held her shoulder to stop the drive of the next punch. Sakura glanced back at him, lip curled over her teeth in a loathing threat.
"Don't touch me."
He took the blunt of it with stout eyes.
When his hand didn't lift, Sakura shoved him across the room.
"We want him alive." Kakashi said.
"I can heal him back."
From the small inflection of Sakura's bicep, he knew that she was readying another punch. Kakashi rushed for her again, arms around her body, pressing her back to his chest.
"This type of scum doesn't deserve mercy." Sakura growled her words out in time with her thrashing. It was more of a request than an actual attempt, her strength could easily break his grasp.
"I'm not stopping you for him." Kakashi whispered against her ear, voice soft. "It's enough, Sakura."
The force fighting against his hold waned and Sakura's body slumped down in defeat, hair falling as a veil around her face. "It doesn't feel like it is."
"And it never will." He admitted with honesty.
His eyes dropped to her hands, fisted over her thighs. Under the red of the target's blood, he could see her ragged and swollen flesh because Sakura wanted it to break her as well. It was the same hand he had seen before their wedding, a training ground destroyed around them.
"It never will…" Kakashi whispered once again.
He threw a final glance at the pulp that was left of the man's face, more of a bloody and deformed thing than something recognisably human. It fit him perfectly.
"Don't bother healing him."
Kakashi stood, tugging her up with him, she let herself be guided.
Red streaks of blood from the target had speckled over her pale face and Kakashi wanted to wipe them away before Sakura returned to where Sai was waiting with the rescued children.
Their large scared eyes had seen and suffered enough for a lifetime. Kakashi's own eyes still stung from the putrid smell of their cage. It would be imprinted into his nostrils forever, along with the heart-breaking sight of their horrified wide stares, the flinches and screams that racked through them as they cowered away into the corner of their cage like scared little animals.
Where would they be now, the youngest only two years old and the oldest barely thirteen, if no one had come to find them?
At the weight of his fingers on Sakura's jaw, a flinch startled through her body, the edge of the battlefield and the violence still simmering in her.
With a clean cloth soaked in the water of his canteen, Kakashi rubbed softly against the stains on her skin, cleaning away the filth of that scum's blood. Sakura's fingers lifted to wrap around his wrist, warm and ragged around his naked skin. Her neck slumped back in surrender, muscles easing and expression softening under the gentleness of his touches.
He let the cloth brush over her lips, dabbing away the blood spattered at the corner of her mouth, a surrogate for his own mouth, burning to kiss her.
"This is going to break me." She whispered, her eyes turned away from him in a confession, a hint of shame in the turn of her mouth.
"Then break."
Sakura's gaze rushed for his, wide with surprise, watching him as if trying to piece together the simple meaning of his words.
It wasn't a thing a team leader could say to his subordinate, in his three decades on the field, Kakashi had never said it once.
'Hold it together until Konoha. Complete your task. Break later.' Those were the right things to say, that was his duty, to not let his shinobi crumble while the mission still depended on them.
They no longer fit in his mouth, not when it had kissed her, learnt the touch of her body and the taste of her soaking folds, not when for so long it instead had been secretly carrying the words 'I love you'.
Sakura's eyes clenched closed and lip trembled as if she was right at the edge of crying, as if all she had needed to let everything rush and crumble was permission, acceptance.
With a shuddering sigh, her expression smoothed, and she looked up at him with tenderness and a soft glint of sadness.
She never cried now, not since the war. For her it was a weakness, while Kakashi had only ever seen in it strength, the ability and freedom to express her pain to others, to herself, her heart still gentle and unhardened even against the cruelty of their world.
"Maybe later." She said with a small smile. "I think I should look harmless enough by now."
Kakashi didn't want it to end, but he pulled the cloth from her face. Sakura held his hand before it would get far and pressed her lips to the bared tips of his fingers.
"Thank you, Kakashi."
In the face of all this doubts, there were moments like this when Sakura looked at him, touched and kissed him, and he hoped.
It was a reckless thing to let hope take hold of his heart, the sweetness concealed its imminent devastating power. Hope wasn't daunting anymore, he had realised with astonishment. He now welcomed it with opened arms, even when he knew that it could always destroy him.
Sakura was his most precious thing and Kakashi was lucky that there was someone in his life that could wholly break his heart apart.
He had never felt it this way, the complete vulnerability not a curse, but a blessing.
On the other side of the room, Tenzou was still cuffing the other scumbag, with a face temptingly intact. His little kohai had been doing it for too many minutes now, a thorough job that definitely had nothing to do with the clear difference of his and Sakura's interactions on this mission.
It was their first one while married and only because there was no one better suited than Sakura to care for the traumatised children that they had hoped they would find. Kakashi was realising that perhaps the village was right in their caution over not sending them together on missions.
This between them – her – it held the whole of him in its grasp, more sacred and encompassing than any possible bond with a teammate.
The waning sunlight glinted still over the tiny village and its roof tiles, one of the few affected by the kidnappings. Kakashi leaned his head back against the wall, the murmur of Sakura's gentle voice coming from inside the house as she talked with the children and their parents.
A mother and daughter slipped out the door and he bowed in acknowledgement at the woman's earnest gratitude. The little girl hid herself against her mother's legs, hands clasped to the fabric of the yukata as if otherwise she would fall. Perhaps she would.
The mother whispered something in the girl's ear and with a gentle hand on her head guided her towards Kakashi.
The little girl extended her hand, a bouquet of wild flowers – white, pink, blue – encased in her small fingers. His heart twisted.
She had brilliant green eyes and in them all Kakashi could see was Sakura.
Without thought, he tugged his mask down to his chin so she could see his grateful smile. Once the flowers were out of her hand, the girl fled to hide behind her mother's legs, who bowed once more before taking her little hand and leaving him to stare at their fading backs.
It wasn't Sakura, he realised now, whom Kakashi had seen in the little girl's eyes.
It was someone that nurtured out of her, a glimpse, a ghost, a small seed in his dried out heart.
It was as she had said on their first conversation when this entire thing, their marriage, started.
He opened his Icha Icha and saved the wild flowers between the pages.
For the first time, Kakashi was seeing their eventual child.
It was only Sakura and Kakashi and the forest again. It had been almost a year since their last campsite together and they had decided not to rush home, relishing in the small throwback from a time, a relationship before the marriage.
Sai and Tenzou had left that first day with the criminals for Konoha while they stayed to offer accompaniment to the children and their guardians. It was only a sliver of what they needed, but the village needed her back to care for their own.
Sakura had learned already – Sasuke her first and unceasing teacher – but somehow she still hoped it would change, somehow she still hoped that one day it would feel enough.
She curled her side closer into Kakashi's front, as she sat between his legs and before the bonfire. His familiar presence was like the warmth of the first rays of the sun over her cheeks, shedding away some of the cold festering deep in her. She could only hope to give him a small sliver of it back.
Kakashi steadied her, he made everything easier.
Maybe they should have gotten around to being like this before.
It made sense to her now that they could have started a relationship then. Perhaps in a tiny corner of her mind it already had, but Sakura would never have allowed it to grow. Kakashi had always felt out of reach for her, just at the edge of her fingertips but always elusive in the moment of touch.
How could she pin down someone like him?
Did she even want to pin him down? Did she even want him to be hers?
She shouldn't be thinking about these things, not when her heart was already weighed down by the mission, souring and darkening everything that touched it.
This was their world, a world where people chose to rip children from their parents and force them to live in their own filth for a few quick ryo.
A world where a baby was bounded to the ruthless beast that had killed his own parents and whose entire village ostracised him for it, where a child lost all that he had known in a single night and found on the other side of the killing weapon the foreign face of his own beloved brother. A world where a little boy stumbled across the one person he cherished in his life, dead on the floor of their shared home.
"We have that appointment in a month." She whispered into his throat, hiding her face against it.
She couldn't even spell out the word 'fertility'.
Kakashi's fingers, where they combed through her strands in a soothing rhythm, faltered. They could no longer run from the purpose of their marriage, not when it was there, ordered for them to fulfilled it.
And yet, that future didn't hold any reality to Sakura. It was terrifying, but not quite physical, not quite touchable, terrifying perhaps because of it.
She could feel him trying to find and measure the right words, discovering only that none quite fit. How could they? How could any words slot themselves into the absurd circumstances Konoha had ordered them to bear?
He chose silence instead, Kakashi was never one for wasted words.
"This mission… it—" Sakura began, but again her tongue was lead when trying to express what moved in her. "How aren't Hinata and Naruto terrified? Even I am terrified for them. One more month and there's going to be a little person of his own thrown into the world."
The shinobi world, where children were sent into the battlefield and friends were ordered to procreate together for the sake of making more soldiers that would die for their village.
"Doesn't it scare you, Kakashi?"
"Of course it does, but most of all I have a lot of hope, especially when those two are the parents and you the favourite aunt—"
Sakura tilted her head back to give him an unimpressed glance. "The kid isn't even born yet."
"But if he has common sense and good taste you'll be." Kakashi said with his most charming smile, tucking a few stray strands of pink hair behind her ear. "I should know. You're my favourite person."
The soft touch and his words fluttered in her chest. They reminded her of that night before their wedding, when she had told him to say that same exact thing and he did. This time he gave them freely and spontaneously, this time Sakura didn't doubt that it was true.
"And I'm also dying of excitement to meet him, see him with my own eyes."
Who was this man, so different from the silly, slightly terrifying sensei, who had seemed to want nothing to do with three teenagers with big eyes and bigger dreams?
Who was this man, so different from the taichou with a heavy burden of responsibility and unending courage on a battlefield against gods when they were only two little speckles made of humanity?
So different from the friend in an eternal cycle of guilt for failing his precious people and seeing them die while he stood powerless, a friend with a heart closer to death than to life, never allowing it to open fully again and flower into hope?
So entirely different and still the same Kakashi, Sakura had always known and would continue to learn and know for the rest of her life.
Her hand lifted to his face, fingers resting on his jaw in a gentle hold. "You'll also be his favourite uncle."
It was like a flash, a sudden bright light, showing something new and foreign, but at the same time, something that fit so perfectly it was as if it had always been there, latent, waiting to be revealed.
Kakashi would be a great father.
Not once had Sakura ever thought of him inside that one shape. Before their marriage it would have been a laughable comment, something the team would throw onto the table with the single purpose of bursting amusement in everyone for the absurdity of it.
Now what seemed absurd was to think of him as anything less, was to not see it in the quiet boundless love that burned in his heart for all of his dearest people.
"And I should know. You're my favourite person."
A small flinch of surprise flashed through Kakashi's face, almost confusion as if her words couldn't have been what he had thought they were. Still he couldn't quite manage to control the happy lift of his mouth as he realised she had truly spoken them.
"Considering the dressing-down you gave me just before this mission for ruining that shirt in the laundry, I doubt it."
"You should know by now that aggression is how I express affection."
Kakashi cocked an eyebrow at her, his hand rising to touch the back of hers where it cupped his jaw. "How should I read this then?"
"A clear sign of annoyance, my dear."
"Ah." He let out before leaned into her touch, and turn his head to press his lips to her palm.
Who was this man, so painfully tender and caring and unlike anything Sakura ever thought he would be in a relationship? The late insight was bittersweet in her tongue.
"I don't want a child to be the result of an order."
Our child, Sakura also couldn't name that yet.
She had learned to accept that that was the nature of their marriage but she could never submit to being a mother, to carry and nurture a life, out of obedience to an order, just as she obeyed when the village ordered her to kill.
Never would she accept that stained beginning for their child.
"It won't be. That is the one thing in this entire marriage that I can promise you, Sakura."
"And if the Coun—"
"I'll raze Konoha to the ground."
Kakashi's eyes cut with the same harshness of the battlefield, the one that she had first seen on their mission in the Land of Waves. Their grey was the edge of a kunai, solid and sharp, violence trembling under the surface, flickering with the flaming red of the bonfire.
Never in her life and all that she knew of him would Sakura have expected that merciless gaze, where death loomed, to cut not for but against Konoha.
"I wouldn't let you do it."
His head slumped forward, forehead resting against hers. He breathed out, "I know."
"And you'd probably get killed before you could even reach a third of it." She joked.
Kakashi gave a small chuckle. "They're considering me for Hokage, at least give me half."
Her mouth curled up in a smile of amusement. "Not to talk about how Naruto would talk you out of it with the power of friendship or whatever magic words he always used."
"Obviously I'd do it while he was away, I'm not an idiot."
A small chuckle burst from her mouth and he grinned happily at her, not a lingering sign of the ferocity of before. With his thumb, Kakashi followed the crease that had formed at the corner of her lips.
"I missed your smile. Your true one."
Her eyes rolled at the corny line, but she couldn't stop her lips from turning with a hint of satisfaction.
"Do you want to hear another funny thing?" Kakashi seemed a little too eager and she gave him a small nod with slight suspicion. "You know my name."
"Yes?"
"Not very certain for someone that's married to me."
Sakura rolled her eyes again. "Just tell the story, husband."
"Pakkun was with me because I thought the kids might like the idea of a talking little dog. They did, they were fascinated. Anyway, I told them my name and one of them started saying I was magical, asking if I had a face under my mask. I thought maybe the mask was scaring them so I lowered it to show them my kind and gorgeous face. But no, turns out the girl thought I was a magical scarecrow that could talk."
The beginnings of a smile lifted her expression. Now that Sakura thought of it, the girl's presumption was entirely understandable, there was something of a scarecrow in him beyond his name. His mask and hair, the lidded shape of his eyes that didn't show what swam behind them. It was downright surprising that more children in Konoha hadn't fallen into the same idea, especially when his ninken had henohenomoheji printed into their clothes.
His lip jutted out in a pout. "You're not laughing."
"No, it's funny, it's hilarious, but really not in a laugh out loud type of way. Well, Naruto would have been rolling on the ground laughing."
It had the opposite effect of reassuring him, instead Kakashi gave her only an offended stare. "Naruto laughs every time someone says fart."
A chuckle bubbled up her chest at the word.
"Not you too, wife, that really puts a damper on my respect for you."
With the hand still cupping his jaw, Sakura shoved his face back. "Shut it."
"The girl also thought my hair was made of straw."
Now that ripped a hearty laugh from her, seeping from deep in her stomach and bursting up to shake through her shoulders. Kakashi only looked miserable.
"My hair's not that bad."
"No, it isn't," She agreed, even if a few chuckles still stumbled through her throat. To show for it, her fingers sank into the strands above his ears, stroking them back, nails gliding along his scalp. "but it's funny."
Kakashi's eyes closed at her caresses. "I suppose I'm okay paying for your laugh at the cost of my self-worth."
His throat rumbled in a little purr, the lines of his face, also carved down from the weight of this mission, softened into a languid expression of pure contentment. He looked so unguarded, mask down and wilted around his neck, surrendering to her hands, to her gentle and most of all affectionate touches.
It was strange how now the sight of him masked had become less familiar than of his bare face and the conscious realisation of it made her heart twist, a lump of emotion tightened around her throat.
"My magical scarecrow." Sakura whispered.
Her magical scarecrow who had bewitched her.
His eyes opened, suddenly intent on her, the red of the fire flickering in their dark shade.
"Yours?" His word was more of a breath, the familiar scent of him winding in her belly.
"I don't know." Sakura answered honestly.
Kakashi's face leaned in closer to hers, the hand on her arm gliding down to drape around her hip. "Do you want me to be?"
Their mouths were close, his breath waving against her dry lips, and at the touch of his nose against hers, Sakura ended the distance between them. It started as a slow brush of lips, movements tentative and soft, the tenderness of it underlined with the sadness still dominating their hearts.
Even as Kakashi kissed her, all tenderness and softness, like a whisper, his tongue swiping across her lips, her mouth opening to taste him, it was also soaked in uncertainty, in restraint.
She pulled back, covering his mouth with her fingers.
"I do."
Kakashi was careful as he guided her to lay down against the ground, soft with moss and wild grass, holding her as if the roughness of it would break her.
The warmth of the bonfire warmed their sides as they kissed, unhurried and tender. Sakura could barely spare the energy for more. When before her anguish had always demanded the smothering cover of violence and urgency, now it seemed to want Kakashi's softness and its pain.
What always broke her was that gentleness in his touch, it slithered through forgotten fissures in her, shattering through Sakura as the violence of passion never could. Her eyes prickled with something she almost couldn't remember, something wet and foreign.
She didn't allow any thoughts to rise to her mind, any surprise or any appreciation for his sudden unabashed initiative, all that belonged there was the touch of his hands and his lips on her. Perhaps he needed to drown in it after mission, just as much as Sakura needed it, perhaps he felt that that made them even, matched.
Slowly the flames began do die down, unattended.
Kakashi released the belt tight around her waist and lifted the flap of her dress. Lips pressed to her throat, his fingertips fluttered over her heated centre through the fabric of her shorts. Her fingers tightened in his hair, a whine trapped in her mouth at the shock of pleasure, as her teeth sank down into her lower lip. She let her body rule, legs spreading open, and his hand slipped inside her shorts and panties.
More than his fingers inside her, what her body craved was his weight, sinking into her, all of his warmth and his tingling chakra branding into her flesh and deep inside.
So deep inside to that silent and crying part of her for the cruelty of this world and for herself, always and forever breaking behind the surface.
It was finally forgotten under the mindless pleasure of her body from every curl of his fingers and the overwhelming fullness of his name in her lips, her heart.
"Kakashi."
This was one what-if that had been stolen from them.
A relationship beginning in the giving and taking of solace and with endless possibilities spreading out for them to be free to choose.
In that moment, Sakura wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything in her life and she hated herself for it.
Once more, Kakashi spied Sakura through his lashes, cheek propped on her opened palm across their dining table, eyes gliding back and forth over the pages of a medical book.
Guruko, cozied in her lap and head resting on the edge of the table where she scratched circles over his fur, had stopped sending him questioning wiggles of his snout and dismissed the frantic glances and nervousness in Kakashi's smell as another bout of his contractor's eccentricity, never worth the trouble.
"I'm going to be Hokage." He finally voiced.
All Sakura did was turn a page of her book. "We know."
The reaction was a little disheartening.
"I mean…"
Kakashi cleared his throat, stomach knotting itself at the two overlapping steps that this one question entailed for his life, their life – becoming the leader of an entire shinobi village and making an important decision concerning his future together with Sakura, as married people did.
It was fascinating how one day he had woken up with the certainty of his decision, after warring over it for almost eight years. One single night had suddenly made the path to follow clear and certain, as if it had always been there for him to walk it.
Most likely it had, Kakashi just hadn't wanted to see it, veiled behind the sight of a boy's gory body from a rasengan, imprinted over a girl's holed chest from a raikiri, and all the other dead bodies scattered behind in his life.
"I can start around now… if you're okay with it."
Her head snapped up to look at him with rounded green eyes.
"As a Konoha citizen, friend and…" Kakashi repeated the same questions he had asked her months ago, voice leaving with a slight shake as he added, "wife?"
This time he wasn't hiding away from the weight of this moment in their relationship and hopefully what met him at the end of it wouldn't be a joke.
Sakura picked his ninken up, green eyes never leaving Kakashi's, and lowered him to the ground – the spoiled little traitor had the audacity to whine while his beloved contractor's heart was ready to combust in his ribs. She walked around the table towards him, fingers gliding over the wooden top, a tender majesty in each of her steps.
He stilled as she cradled his face, thumbs brushing over his cheeks, a loving smile in her lips. "All three of them at the same time."
The breath stuck in his throat released in a lengthy sigh, alongside the giddiness churning in his chest.
"Maa," Kakashi could barely control the wide grin stretching through his face. "I really can't say no to all three."
Her lips curled with something devious. "It's about damn time."
Sakura stepped closer, the inside of her legs brushing over his, the sound of each of her feet landing on either side of the chair shuddering in his spine. Her body lowered with tantalising slowness until she was straddling him, weight perfect on his thighs. Kakashi shivered at the warm touch of her lips in his ears.
"Rokudaime-sama."
The flurry low in his belly and the twitch in his pants at the sound of the honorific in her voice was a terrible omen for his sanity.
Kakashi stepped outside the Hokage Tower with a sigh, breathing in the scent of a warm summer afternoon and closing his lids to let the pink touch of the sun wash over the skin of his face.
There were days when everything tasted sweeter.
He had a date with Sakura tonight, in some new restaurant that apparently Ino hadn't stopped raving about. It had become a regular thing for them, Sakura being the main instigator, having recently learnt to use the trump card that was their relationship to have company for whatever plans or activities she wanted to do.
Even staring at blobs of paint and scratches that were supposed to be art had been a delight to Kakashi when named 'date with Sakura'. Especially because he could play the game of breaking her composure into violence or laughs at his entirely serious and not at all mocking appreciation of the pieces, and then join in the judging looks from all the art-connoisseurs around them, just to drag on that blush of embarrassment and fury from her.
A twinkling sound pulled his attention to the street below him, finding a group of kids as they ran, dodging people and shouting at each other in some kind of play of their own. His eyes followed them until they disappeared around the corner of the crossing.
He thudded Icha Icha's binding against his chin while admiring the stretch of the village and completely avoiding the five stone faces glaring into his back.
Kakashi had exactly five months to enjoy Konoha before he was Hokage.
All because, just as he was ready to disappear from his mission briefing in a cloud of smoke, Tsunade had thrown at him the familiar "It's been almost a year and the Council is starting to grow impatient about many things.", which meant only two, his reluctance to become Hokage and his lack of progeny.
It followed with one of her familiar little monologues as she threw questions at him while he never gave her anything back. Perhaps it was slightly concerning on how over the years Tsunade had become proficient in reading the small inflections of his blank stares and easily realised that he was ready to take up the robes.
It had made her so staggeringly pleased that Kakashi had even managed to demand that she convince the Council to drop any fertility consultations.
Kakashi sauntered towards their apartment, staring down at the pages of his book, steps fast, electrified with the excitement of telling Sakura the news. Maybe this time her lips would call him 'Hokage-sama'.
A little thing bumped against his leg, another child. The girl snapped her head up in alarm, quickly taking a step back to bow her apologies. Before Kakashi could reassure her that he hadn't taken any offense, she had already scurried away, lost between the other strolling people.
Were there children everywhere? How had Kakashi never noticed just how many little monsters existed around Konoha? Or had they all simply materialised themselves into being, beckoned by his revelation on that mission a few weeks ago?
That seemed a theory a little too egotistical, even for him, and Kakashi went with the frequency illusion one, like when he learned the meaning of a new word and suddenly it was sprinkled everywhere in his life.
Children should be slightly more noticeable on a daily basis than fatuous, but the change seemed to prove that, to Kakashi, they had been equally overlooked in the things that imbedded his routine.
His feet stopped out of their own volition when he was suddenly faced with a playground swarming with kids.
He wouldn't linger, Kakashi was a grown man looking out into a children's park and his reputation as a porn-reading pervert could only lead people to make nasty assumptions.
Still, a part of him was willing to risk it so he could study their way of being. His years as a child were so distant to him that they didn't seem his own, it didn't seem that he had been the one to live them.
Like the kids he was watching now, at the dismissing call of his sensei, Kakashi had also run for the park and stayed until twilight, when his father seemed to rise out of the orange light to take him home.
In a time when Hatake Sakumo had been the measure of his life. In a time when life had been goodness, their small family of two a place where he belonged and was loved with a certainty that made him entirely oblivious to it. It had also been small hints of sorrow, a loss in his father's eyes for his mother that mirrored an emptiness in Kakashi's own heart that he could never quite understand.
His father had come back to haunt Kakashi the moment the possibility of a marriage to Sakura appeared, in a sweeter shape this time, the loving single father. It was an echo of what he had done in his childhood, building his own future through the image of his father, always so large, holding the entire world in it.
Parents were doomed to break their children's worlds because they were the ones to make it and they made it with flawed loving hands. Even the ones that hadn't died, the ones that had seemed to be everything parents needed to be for their child.
Kakashi had seen Sakura lower the phone into the receiver after calls with her mother and linger there, watching it with saddened eyes. He had thought their presence at their wedding had been the first step to mend the relationship, but today all Sakura shared were those few scattered calls that never left the surface of what was happening in their lives.
After one of those calls, Kakashi had asked if she wanted to visit them and Sakura had dismissed the question. Was this the fate of children growing old – distance, disillusion?
The only children that had held any place of affection in his adult heart had been his three genin pests that some people had liked to call students. They were hardly children now, it would be slightly concerning if so, seeing as one would have a kid of his own in a few weeks and he was married to the other.
The third was bones under the earth a few kilometres away from where he stood.
Kakashi let out a long dejected sigh.
Children.
Why the fuck did he want one of this?
There was no longer any doubt that that moment on the mission had been not been a misguided flash of delusion, a flickering of some instinctive fatherly protectiveness at seeing children treated worse than cattle. Not when watching them play made him yearn for memories made into dreams of calling a green-eyed kid and watching them stumble towards his arms so he could take them home.
"This type of things, they aren't for me." He had confessed to Sakura on their red bridge, almost a year before.
Kakashi hadn't lied then, because he would never have expected to be here now, with this flowery wreath blooming in his heart.
Minato-sensei had always had a fatherly air to him and it was with a sense of inevitability that Kakashi had learnt Kushina was pregnant.
But Hatake Sakumo, the White Fang, was different, even if Kakashi had only ever known him as a father more than anything else. Only now, as he was older, could he recognise the traces that connected them, as weathered shinobi and weapons, their edges sharp, their hands unprepared.
Had Kakashi's mother – his father's love for her – also been the one to place the seed in his dried heart? Had his father also been blindsided as Kakashi was now when the dream of fatherhood grew with vicious warm veins in him? As dumbfounded? As terrified?
Why did Kakashi's fear only seem to urge his yearning on? Why did he still dream of it when his mouth was coated in the bitter taste of guilt from knowing he was doomed to fail his eventual child?
At the centre of all his doubts and questions was one thing alone.
Sakura.
The woman he loved and the woman he had cursed. His wife. The woman that he dreamed would be the mother of his children.
Because it wasn't just his eventual child he had seen then and he was seeing now.
It was their eventual child.
And while he was buried deep in the currents of his own heart, the sight of a kid falling head first towards the ground yanked him back into the playground. Joining the children wouldn't benefit his reputation but it still seemed better than watching a child break her neck.
In an instant, he was leaning against the slide, a hand grabbing the back of the girl's shirt. He let her levitate a few inches from the spot where she would have splatted herself, a good teaching moment about the dangers of precarious elevated spaces.
Instead, when her clenched eyes opened, the girl stretched her arms and legs and let out a shout of triumph, not the least unsettled with her near demise. The other children seemed to be equally unconcerned.
Kakashi flung her to her feet. "You're hopeless."
Their attention diverted from the previously floating body to the suddenly materialised saviour.
"It's the Copy-ninja!"
With that, a dozen of rabid kids threw themselves at him, their hands pawing at his clothes and eager shrill voices trying to scream the loudest to make him hear their questions first.
"Do you know Naruto?"
"Can I see your sharingan?"
"Be my sensei, please!"
"How many people did you kill?"
There was even a little kid whose question apparently made perfect sense to him, while Kakashi could barely understand a single word that slurred out of his mouth. Surprisingly cute, even when there was a drop of snot coated in dirt and hanging out of his nostril, cute and disgusting at the same time, somewhat like his ninken or a drunk Naruto.
When the raucous greeting calmed, he found himself sat down while they hovered around with curious eyes as if watching a foreign object. He had never realised he had become this popular among the newer generations of Konoha.
Another boy had gotten hold of Kakashi's ear, tugging it so he could better hear his shouted questions.
Kakashi plucked the kid away through his clothes. "You're pretty rude, aren't you?"
He gave him his most cheerful and toothless grin. "Iruka-sensei says the same!"
Another hopeless one, it seemed. Kakashi put him back on the ground an arm's length away.
"Where's your sharingan?" One of the girls asked.
"Gone."
They all gasped and looked at him as if Kakashi had just told them all the puppies in the world had died. They demanded that he tell the story – he might have tweaked a few details to seem less pitiable – while two girls had invited themselves into braiding his hair, saying that it looked a bit messy.
"Why do you wear the mask?" The child that was climbing up his back asked, tugging at his hair for balance, why he needed to do that to ask a question was beyond Kakashi's reasonable mind.
"Why do you think I wear the mask?"
A few attempts were cliché, most of them insulting, and he rather liked when a girl said it was because he was a kami-sama sent from heaven that couldn't be seen directly by mere mortals, which sounded suspiciously like the plot of a film he and Sakura had watched a few nights ago.
"Show us your face, please!"
The picture of them trying to convince people that they had seen Hatake Kakashi's face and having their words dismissed as childish imaginings looked tempting enough.
His fingers plucked the seam of his mask and lowered it slowly, watching their enthralled gazes follow the movement. Then it was down, looped around his neck.
Their big eyes blinked up at him.
"Huh?"
They were just star struck, their little brains trying to calculate the enormity of what they were seeing.
"It's just a face."
"Don't get it."
"It's the mole?"
"Kinda boring too."
Kakashi pulled it back up with a snap, ego completely shattered by a group of little kids. Sakura's reaction had been much better.
His eyes narrowed at them. "You kids have no aesthetic sensibility."
"As—astictac? What's that?"
Kakashi rubbed his chin as he tried to come up with a simple enough explanation. "It's when you see if a thing is beautiful or not."
"We can do that!"
They decided to illustrate their aesthetic sensibility by listing a number of things they found beautiful, which only showed that they were very much of the same mind. Flowers, the sunset, blond hair – said with a bashful glance to a girl standing beside him –, the colour blue, puppies.
"Haruno-sensei! She's very pretty."
Kakashi frowned, a jolt shaking through his heart, and for a moment wondered if the kami-sama were trying to mess with him. They had mostly been saying common pretty things or the ones they saw now, so why would the little girl suddenly bring up Sakura if not working as a puppet for the cruel enjoyment of the universe?
Perhaps she had a distant connection to the Yamanaka and could read the one person that consumed his thoughts.
"She is, but why would you ever—"
"Kakashi?"
His head turned to the side to find Sakura on the street as she looked into the playground with a dumbfounded expression.
Ah, that explained it. He wasn't that important that the universe would mock him over his romantic life and the girl, barely seven and with a dark complexion, was no Yamanaka, even if deeply perceptive. Sakura was definitely the most beautiful person, his own speeding heart said as much.
"What are you doing here?"
Now that was exactly the type of question he wouldn't answer.
"And there, kids, it's my wife. I'm pretty lucky, hmm?"
"Haruno-sensei!" The children greeted, some of them standing to run towards her.
An old man like him couldn't compete with her charm. She was as Minato-sensei had been to him, made to nurture, her tenderness and fierceness made into one, as overflowing, unconditional love.
"I guess it's time to go home." He murmured to himself, now completely abandoned when before they had looked at him like their favourite toy.
Kakashi was left to relish in the sight of her gentle smiles and words as the children demanded her attention. After promises of visiting them at the Academy with sweets, Sakura was finally let free.
"You should have showered by now, you know." Her shoulder pushed against his as they walked, no true reprehension in her voice. Most of all there was a glint of curiosity as she looked up at his profile. "If you told me you were late because you were out entertaining children at the park, I'd think it was another one of your ludicrous excuses."
Sakura's eyes softened as she continued to watch him. Her expression slowly morphed into a conflicted one, teeth clamping down on her lip. His eyebrow raised at her and she turned to look down to where they stepped instead.
"What was that? Some kind of training regimen for Naruto's kid?"
"Something like that." He murmured. "How do they know you? Are all these kids receiving treatment?" If so, Konoha had a larger problem than what he had assumed.
"No, not all of them. But me and another doctor usually go to the Academy once a month to talk with the kids. I've been speaking with Iruka-sensei about having someone always at there, not just for trauma cases, but also more everyday issues. Learning problems, bullying, problematic home lives, anything really."
As she finished, Sakura grinned up at him.
"How did I not know this?"
She shrugged. "I guess it never came up."
His hand reached for her face without thought, his fingers lowering his mask while Kakashi leaned down to kiss her. It was short and didn't come close to manifesting all the consuming love he carried in his heart for Sakura, but for now it was enough.
She was especially pretty when she blushed. A smirk curled his lips, from the joy of seeing it and the smugness of being the one to make it.
"What was that for?"
Kakashi was happy, possibly the happiest he had been in his entire life. A sense of peacefulness and meaning rested over him, bubbling in his chest until he couldn't keep them there, hidden away from her, from the world.
"No reason."
Her eyes narrowed, a wariness in them at the cheerful, almost twinkling tone in his voice.
"You always do things for a reason, Kakashi."
"You're doing so much good, Sakura. If we'd had you as children… maybe it would have spared us a lot of suffering."
Sakura turned down to watch the road instead, her hand lifting to rub at her chest. "Yes…"
One thing Kakashi had learnt before they were married was that Sakura always rubbed above her sternum whenever she thought of Sasuke.
How could he have delusional dreams of a child when Kakashi hadn't cared for three students? He wanted that same obliviousness of being loved for his children, for Sakura, that his father had given him, blooming from a rooted and always there presence, left unnoticed because of its certainty. Could he love the way demanded of him?
He didn't know… but somehow there was a madness in his heart that whispered that he could, with Sakura beside him, he could.
"Hikari." Sakura whispered as she entered the hospital room and her eyes immediately found the bundle of blankets in Hinata's arms
Her hand searched for Kakashi's, whose hold back was just as tight, a new wave of nervous anticipation rushing in her stomach.
She leaned down to press a kiss to Hinata's cheek first. "How are you doing?"
Hinata offered her a tired serene smile, a mother's smile, fingers adjusting the layers around Hikari to bare his face to them. "I can hardly say. Most of all happy."
Sakura peaked down at the baby in Hinata's arms. Big eyes looked up beyond her, grey still but below peaked a familiar sky blue and at the top of his head was a tuff of blond strands, almost white.
Her fingers smoothed down the soft hair, it was like touching clouds, and watched his little scrunched up face, tiny lips opening and closing. He was the most beautiful thing Sakura had ever seen, her heart burning with an entirely new and different shade of love from any other she had ever felt.
"He's beautiful…" She whispered, voice trembling against the lump in her throat.
"You can hold him, Sakura." Hinata offered.
With careful hands, she lifted Hikari from his mother's hold, tucking him into the safe spot in her arms. He was so very small and so fragile, a miracle made flesh. Sakura leaned in to breathe in his wonderful baby scent, brushing her lips softly over his head.
This was the flurry of hope that Kakashi had talked about. Her trepidation of before melted away with the baby in her arms, before them all Sakura could see was brightness.
Her head lifted as she felt Kakashi's silent presence near her. His dark eyes met her own with a smile before lowering to Naruto's son. He wiggled the plushie Kurama that they had brought in front of Hikari's gaze, who didn't seem particularly interested in it.
Then his hesitant finger reached for the blankets over his belly, wiggling it in a soft caress, almost as if he were poking a weird thing that had suddenly fallen into his path. As he pulled back, Hikari's little sneaky hand clamped around his finger, stilling him there.
"Oh." Kakashi let out, entirely dumbfounded by the creature in Sakura's hands and everything he did. "He's pretty strong actually."
"Yeah!" Naruto let out in excitement, tousled blond locks and dark circles under his eyes, and still he glowed, eyes bluer and shinier than the sky, his mouth wide in a blissful grin. "It's a newborn thing, the nurse said it's the palming reflex—"
"Palmar grasp reflex." Sakura corrected.
"Like he can hang just by his hands, like a monkey. I wanted to try it, but Hinata-chan doesn't let me."
Sakura chanced a glance at the new mother, who was already looking back at her with the same unimpressed eyes, before they shared an eye-roll.
In the lines of Naruto's face lingered still the signs of the goofy kind boy, the troublemaker that had only been searching for someone that would look at him and see him, love him. He had always been so painfully lonely and now here he was, his life full with a family of his own.
Naruto was a father.
It seemed impossible that she could be even more happy and proud of him now than during his wedding, but that threshold apparently always rising.
Kakashi tried to wiggle himself out of Hikari's hold but he kept him there. "I guess I'm stuck like this forever." He grumbled, but his peaceful tender eyes told her that he didn't particularly trouble him.
"I wouldn't mind it." Sakura muttered, bringing the baby closer to her in an embrace, her lips falling into a pout. "Can't we take him home with us?"
"You want him now because he's quiet, but just an hour ago he wouldn't stop crying." Hinata said.
"We can handle the crying." To Sakura's surprise the words had fallen from Kakashi's mouth, her eyes wide as she watched him lean into her arms to whisper a faint, "Welcome to the world, Hikari-chan."
They looked like rats curled into pink and blue blankets, for the past half an hour they had yawned and they had slept and they had cried.
Half an hour of nothing. There wasn't even an excuse of him being stranded there by an emotional connection to one of the things, Naruto's child was still with his mother, and yet Kakashi seemed to be entirely content in simply contemplating them.
Even the nurses on the other side of the glass, who dedicated their careers and their lives to caring for newborns, had given him a few hostile glares.
Another hitch to his reputation.
"This is the last place I ever thought I'd find you."
"Same." He agreed, glancing down at Sakura with a smile as she tucked herself into the place beside him, arm curling around his. "The kid looks a lot like Naruto. Like Minato-sensei. The Namikaze genes win once again, Hyuga Hiashi must be really bummed down about that."
"I don't think he cares. He's too in love with Hikari. And I bet you could also say the same thing about the Hatake genes."
As the fuller meaning of her words and their place in their lives made itself present, Sakura blushed a bright red and turned away to watch the babies. The comment opened up what was underlying this moment where they watched their friends become parents and together admired newborns across a glass.
They were supposed to make one of these together. A full human being, so tiny and vulnerable, little burritos wrapped in blankets thrown into the world, a vicious cruel world with so much beauty and good too.
"You could definitely say that. My mother had dark hair and light eyes. I didn't get anything from her. Or maybe I did, one of the few things my father shared about her was that I had her smile."
He could feel Sakura's gaze on his profile, watching him tenderly.
"He was sad when I started wearing the mask at the Academy, I was a lot younger than the other kids and I didn't want to look childish, I didn't want to look soft."
Kakashi could understand his father now. He wanted their possible child to at least have Sakura's eyes and if she d—the thought was too unbearable for him to let it rise fully in his mind – he would want to preserve everything of her in them.
"Maybe it's one of the reasons I started wearing it all the time after he died. Out of spite."
Sakura laid a kiss to his shoulder before letting her head rest on it. From the corner of his eye, Kakashi could the downturn of the corner of her lips.
What a selfish idiot, making this about him and his trauma and completely ruining her joy.
"Hey now, this is a happy day."
"I am happy. I can be happy and sad at the same time." Sakura looked up at him, her cheek still leaning on his shoulder. "And I agree with your father. I love your smile. The real one. I'm lucky I get to see it every day."
"Every day?" His eyebrow lifted, Kakashi didn't think of himself as a person that easily gave out smiles.
Sakura nodded. "You always smile for me in the morning or when I come home. It's beautiful. You're beautiful, Kakashi."
Kakashi was highly aware of Sakura, her shaped presence like a tender mark in him.
Sakura – Sakura his former student that he failed, Sakura that still loved her dead teammate, Sakura his wife forced into a marriage with him, Sakura the woman of his dreams, the woman he wanted to be the mother of his dreamed eventual child, the woman that opened his heart to the dream of being a father and a husband.
Sakura who didn't know what he hid inside his heart, heavy and destructive, who didn't know how he had let his selfishness and fear drag them to a point where it could crumble everything they had built until now.
The first person to know him and say he was beautiful. Not handsome, not attractive, nor cute. Beautiful.
Her brilliant green eyes looked up at him, pulling him into her, where he could crash and break knowing he was safe. He leaned down towards her, lips brushing over her forehead and down, along her temple and warmed cheekbone, but instead of meeting him halfway, Sakura turned her head away.
She always scurried away, back into her shell, when the physical intimacy carried too much emotional weight, one not easily dismissed, not when on the other side of this mirror was their future, their reason for being together.
What scared her in them, when for her jumping into bed together was simple, straightforward? The fear of loving him and being loved by him?
"Do you also want to know something sad?" She asked, her voice a small drawled whisper and eyes on the newborns. "I used to come here a lot during my apprenticeship and swoon at these little things. Imagining what it would be like to have one of my own in one of those cradles."
"That's not sad…?" Kakashi asked tentatively, because he was learning that the ideas that had captivated teenage Sakura only seemed to make the current one sneer.
"I always saw dark hair and dark eyes." A bitter chuckle gnawed up her chest. "After the war it… And Sasuke's words…"
'I could have loved you.', whose meaning to Sakura was locked away in a box of her heart that he couldn't reach and know.
"It was too painful in the beginning and then it was too shameful. And the saddest part, I hated myself for all those rose coloured scenarios and dreams, they stopped making sense… not just the dark hair and dark eyes, but the idea of a baby of my own, of me as a mother. I became so ashamed of it I avoided this place like the plague."
He remembered still her words at the beginning, on that red bridge, before they were even married. Kakashi had apologised for ruining her dreams of a family and Sakura, to his surprise and his pain, had said there was nothing left to ruin, with the naturalness of someone without a care for it.
"Are you still ashamed?"
"More embarrassed I think. I was a fool, a fool in love and later a fool with a broken, grieving heart."
Sakura took a step until she was standing right against the glass, her fingers tapping softly to coo at all the babies on the other side, a smile on her lips, warm and sad.
"And I'm sure I'm not any less foolish now."