Duck and dodge, Kaka baby.
- Ultimatum -
Sakura bounces in and out of consciousness like a rubber ball tossed down a long hallways. When she finally wakes up, it is to find herself in the hospital. Her thoughts are vague, gauze like wisps of memory. She feels like she is missing something, but her head spins wild from so many dreams. She can't tell what is real and what is fantasy.
Dreams of a meadow full of orange trees, every single branch full of starlike blooms.
Dreams of fighting against her Sensei, of her body dissolving into mist as she becomes a wraith.
Dreams of being kissed by Yume-Kakashi, of tasting his mouth in celebratory ecstasy. The feel of his lips against her forehead, then peppering her face with kiss after kiss. His tongue stroking hers the way he has a dozen times before, only this time it's better. So, so much better…
And then, all at once, she is lucid. Wait no, she is uncomfortable. It feels like she's laying on a pile of rocks and her nose aches like a sonofabitch. Both of these details are the least of her concerns though, because apparently there's a battle axe cleaving her head in two.
Finally blinking open her eyes, Sakura takes in the familiar walls of what is apparently her own private hospital room. Her eyes roam over the familiar dated wallpaper with it's familiar floral print. Her sheets are the usual scratchy cotton and her pillows the standard hospital blue. Kakashi was right, these beds really were lumpy…
But what on earth was she doing here?
She lifts up an arm to feel for her temple, only her hand is already tangled in something. An IV drip?
"Don't move, you're okay." Chisue says reassuringly from her side. She fusses with a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. "You gave us all quite a fright, you know."
"What…happened?" Sakura asks. Chisue has never once been tender with her, (The Charge Nurse isn't exactly known for her warm beside demeanor.) but tonight her rough touch is practically affectionate.
"Kakashi brought you in; he was scared to death. You scared the rest of us too when we first saw all that blood. Then we got a good look at you. You would think a seasoned ninja like Hatake would be able to recognize a bloody nose and excessive chakra depletion. But honestly, it was like he thought you were dying. I might have let him suffer thinking you were…payback for being such a difficult patient."
Sakura looks over to where the summer breeze is playing with the curtains over her hospital window. It's standard policy to keep them closed at night, and she wonders briefly why it's open…
"Kakashi. Where is he?"
"It's after visiting hours so I kicked him out. Honestly, he was being a real menace. He would jump and press the call button every time you shifted in your sleep. None of the nurses could get any work done."
Sakura has to suppress a low blush at hearing this. Kakashi had been worried about her? He'd willingly stayed in the hospital to sit by her bedside?
"He told me to tell you he's sorry. I told him I wasn't his goddamn messenger, and he could say it to you himself. Good riddance, honestly. I don't know how such a cantankerous grouch like him raised a young lady such as yourself."
"Being his student wasn't all bad. Sometimes, it was even good." Sakura says, slowly sitting up in bed as Chisue removes the blood pressure cuff. Everything still shifts like she's riding on a tilt-a-whirl, but it's getting better by the minute.
There, again. She has the distinct impression that she's missed something critical and very, very important. That's when she realizes three things in rapid succession:
Tucked into her left hand is a folded up note written on the back of an in-patient form.
The handwriting is absolutely Kakashi's, she would know it anywhere.
Something is jingling quietly near her legs, hidden amidst the folds of her blankets.
Focusing on the first of the three, Sakura opens up the folded note. She's not sure what she's expecting when she does, but four hastily scrawled words is certainly not it.
I'm sorry, Sakura. Goodbye.
Chisue chatters on quietly to herself, fussing around Sakura's room. Sakura doesn't hear a word of it. She just keeps rereading the same words, over and over.
I'm sorry. Goodbye.
I'm sorry. Goodbye.
The jingling sound is still coming from somewhere amidst her sheets. She starts pawing at the fabric, trying to locate it.
And there, tucked against the side of her leg, Sakura finally finds the source of the noise. A small, perfect, uncrushed silver bell.
Not just a bell. His bell.
The one she'd snapped from Kakashi's hip while he'd been devastating her mouth with a hurricane kiss…
Oh god. Oh God.
Because suddenly the thing she'd felt she was missing isn't missing anymore. Memories from earlier come flooding back, each one amplifying the next. Her brain is a cacophony of panic and elation.
She'd kissed him. He'd kissed her back. It hadn't been a dream.
no no no No No NO NO-
Oh God, she'd kissed him! It hadn't been a dream. And now there was a note in her hands saying I'm sorry. Goodbye.
"Chisue?" Sakura asks, absolutely stunned when her voice is placid serenity. "Do you think I could have some water?"
"Of course. I'll be right back."
Sakura proudly waits until Chisue's footsteps are halfway down the hall before she descends into her panic attack. She waits until the sound of footsteps have completely disappeared before carefully ripping out her IV and throwing the blankets off her legs. She's thankfully still in her clothes from earlier. Her shoes hang from a plastic bag at the foot of her bed.
She keeps an ear on the hallway and an eye on the door as she gathers herself in record time. She decides to pull a reckless Kakashi move and hurdle herself out the open window, grateful that her room is only on the second level.
She still lands hard with a jolt through her knees. She has to roll through her landing to disperse the impact. Shit, she's definitely a little woozy.
The edges of her vision blurs-
Okay, she's a lot woozy. But there is no time to wait for her head to clear. She needs to find Kakashi and explain. She needs to do some damage control.
She…. She needed to figure out exactly what her plan is and how she's going to fix this mess.
She stuffs Kakashi's bell into her hip pouch before taking off at the best run she can manage. She starts cutting through central park, making her way to Kakashi's apartment. If she was lucky, he would be at home.
How late was it? How long had she slept? How long since he'd slipped that note into her palms, determined to avoid having to face her
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
She rounds the corner into the central courtyard, listing other places he could be. But then she sees his back hurrying away from her. His silver hair is ruffled by the summer breeze, and she would know that patch on his flak jacket anywhere.
She doesn't know what else to do. He's very nearly out of the park. Even with her fractured pace, she's horribly winded and out of breath. She's so dizzy she's scared she might pass out onto the pavement…
She does the only thing she knows to do to keep him from leaving her behind.
"Kakashi!"
He spins around with such a force it displaces his flak jacket into a wrinkled mess. His eyes fly up and his footsteps stagger. Her Sensei looks at her with wild eyes that carve themselves out of the dark. One grey iris reflects back light, dangerous and iridescent with a wolf like shine. She wonders if its just a trick of the light, or if maybe she's still hallucinating.
Either way, her cry has worked. Kakashi is rooted to the spot. She staggers over to him at a desperate jog.
Except…he's anything but happy to see her. There is no love for her in his eyes. He's numb and distant, completely detached.
Sakura has seen this look before. The man before her is not Kakashi, dog lover and sentimental friend. This man is her Mission leader, dangerously focused. His posture is different; Taller, more rigid.
But she will not let him escape her, internally or externally.
With balls she did not know she had, she steps directly into his personal space. This is a game of chicken and she isn't going to lose. Closer, closer now….
There's an edge of glory to her thrill when she wins their staring contest. When she steps beyond the line where she probably should have stopped, forcing his cold facade to break. He startles, retreating from her demand for intimacy. Her invasion of his personal bubble has successfully brought him back. He is her Sensei once again, not the deadly Anbu hound.
Kakashi looks away, running a hand through his hair. He's obviously uncomfortable having her this close. And yet, she stands as close as she always has. Proximity is not the thing different between them now.
So why…why doesn't this feel good? Fuck. She's fucked everything up. She'd kissed him, and now there was no going back to what ever they had been before. Belatedly, she remembers this had been her plan all along; to get out of limbo and move on with her life.
This just wasn't exactly the way she'd wanted to confess six years worth of feelings to him. She hadn't expected to be fresh from the hospital with bags under her eyes and dried blood on her clothes. Never the less, there was no going back. It was time to be brave. It was time to dare…
"What are you doing out here, Sakura." Kakashi asks. His voice cracks under the weight of her stare.
In response, she holds up his folded note. I'm sorry. Goodbye.
He averts his eyes with an expression of guilt, and maybe a little bit of shame too.
"I need to talk to you about the kiss. I…I can explain." Sakura starts, but Kakashi cuts her off.
"We can talk when I get back. Right now, you need to rest."
"I'll be fine, I…wait. Get back? What do you mean, where are you going?" She'd thought goodbye meant he would be pulling away from her. She didn't think he was actually saying goodbye…
"I'm not allowed to say. Tsunade's orders."
"So when will you be back?" She asks.
"I'm not allowed to say that either."
"…You were just going to leave? Just like that?"
"Orders are orders, Sakura." He says, but she knows that voice. She knows what he's really doing. He's running away from her. Again.
This detail, overlaid with the fact that she's had an unbelievably stressful day (Week? Month?) tips Sakura into inner territory she hasn't visited in a very long time. She reaches down into the back pocket of her emotions and finds the heated temper that had once ruled her childhood. With trembling hands, she dusts off the lid and, for better or worse, opens pandora's box.
"Since when?" She demands. There's a hardness to her voice that she's never dared used with him. "You're the King of doing whatever you want, regardless of what anyone around you says." She expects him to lean into her temper, to dig down deep and give her another fight.
But his eyes are resignation, not rebellion. "Since now." He whispers, turning away from her.
She knows she's about to lose him. Her anger turns at once to panic.
"Look, I'm here to say I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. Please, don't go yet. Can we just talk?"
This is apparently the wrong thing to say, because Kakashi rounds on her with a snarl. "What could you possibly have to be sorry for?"
She hates that he's making her say it out loud, but she forces herself say it anyway. "The kiss." She says quietly.
For a second, his gaze holds longing that makes her yearn and makes her hurt. But the look lasts only a moment before Kakashi retreats further into himself. "That… was not your fault, Sakura. I'm the one who kissed you. It was beyond inappropriate. I promise it won't happen again."
His face withdraws to darker places. "I didn't realize until afterwards, but you weren't even fully awake. I'll never forgive myself for that."
What? He?…He had kissed…Her?
No, that couldn't be right. Her memories were foggy at best, but she was the one who had grabbed his shirt. She'd been the one to pulled him in…
She was the one who had feelings for him, not the other way around. He was… he was Kakashi. The Kakashi. The man who could have anyone and yet continually chose no one. The only reason he would kiss her first was…if…
The world stops spinning on it's axis. The sounds of foot traffic vanish into the summer nighttime air. Nothing exists beyond her peripheral vision. There is only herself, her swimming head and her madly beating heart.
Despite how determined she'd been to let go of her feelings for him after today... she has a moment of weakness. A moment of hope.
Her chest thrums with the smallest flicker of hope. Was it possible that this complicated man who has haunted her every thought for years could actually want her in return?
But Sakura had also learned a lot about herself from dogging the heels of a dark haired boy who would never come to love her back. If Sasuke had taught her anything, it was that she often saw more in a person's heart than there really was. That she could take the smallest seed of attention and bloom it into a false love.
She might be stubborn, and she might love Kakashi... but she wasn't going to do that anymore. If he was about to disappear, she had to be very, very sure where they stood before he left. Even if that meant finally taking her double or nothing bet.
"What did our kiss mean to you?" She wills herself to ask aloud.
"Sakura. Don't."
But Sakura is stubborn, so Sakura does.
"I need to know, Kakashi. Otherwise, while you're gone…I'm going to do nothing but think about it. I'll think and I'll overthink and I'll spend every second wondering if it meant to you what it meant to me. I don't want to wait around for a dream that's never going to come true, so…please, just be honest with me. What did it mean?"
The air in her lungs turns thin, then non existent. She hangs on the edge of a held breath, and prays she doesn't die before he answers.
"It means that I care about you." He finally says. "More than I probably should."
And with that, Sakura is flying. She is mania and ecstatic joy. She is sunlight reflecting on crystal water. She's going to scream. She 's going to pass out…
Except…Kakashi isn't happy. Why isn't he happy?
And that's when she realizes that he feels very differently about this piece of information than she does. There is more to his answer. Something underneath the underneath.
"What else does it mean?" she asks.
This time when he looks at her, the hope in her chest goes out for good. "It means… that I need to be gone for a while so I can figure out how not to hate myself for it."
Gone. He was going to leave. Somehow, she had won her double or nothing bet, but was still going to walk away empty handed.
"Is it because of my age?" She dares to ask. She at least wants to know why, after all this time, she still isn't good enough for him.
"That's…part of it." Kakashi replies. "But I'm also your team leader. Before you were…this to me, you were something very different. And you were that thing for a long time before my feelings for you started to change. I've played several roles in your life, Sakura. Some of those roles should never coexist."
Sakura's temper wants to scream that this is bullshit. She wants to tell him that she hasn't been his student for years. That he'd stopped being her teacher once Sasuke left and team 7 broke apart. She wants to point to the scars on his ribs, to the burns along his shoulders and arms; All permanent reminders that he's put his life in her hands more times than she ever did his.
She wants to tell him that, while he might be a decade older than her, this world had not let her have a childhood. She might be strong, but she was also a soldier. Only the gods knew if she would even have a complete adulthood.
But to a man like Kakashi, it all came down to time.
When Sakura had first been his student, her Sensei's disregard for the importance of time had irked her to no end. Then, as she had gotten older, she'd begun to understand him better.
On the surface, Kakashi was a God. He laughed at danger and spat at death like the end of days would never come for him. But underneath the underneath... time was an immortal enemy that stole the only things he had. Days. Years. Lives. Loved ones. Time was the only thing he truly respected.
But instead of saying all this, she has the beginnings of an epiphany. She realizes something that would have taken her decades to figure out if she hadn't kissed him otherwise. Her idolization of him parts like a cloudy sky, and she is finally able to see him for who he truly is.
Because he was wrong.
"What is the use in obeying time when we inherently have so little of it?" She asks. When he looks at her, she knows she's hit a nerve.
"It's not that simple." He finally says.
And maybe she's still a little out of it, but it feels like she'd thinking clearly for the first time in years. Moving slow is an act of bravery, but with that bravery she plucks his bell from it's nest in her back pocket. She rolls it around between her fingers, unable to take her eyes off it.
This was the tiny thing on which she'd hung all of her enormous, foolish hopes. But maybe the enormity of them hadn't been the foolish part…Maybe she'd hung the wrong hopes, and that was where they'd gotten lost.
Looking up, she holds the bell between them, making sure he can see it now.
"It doesn't matter that I've love you for years. It doesn't matter that I won today. It wouldn't have mattered if I'd pummeled you into the dirt and taken your headband in the first five minutes. You were never going to see me as your equal… and you were never going to love me back. Were you."
It's a relief to finally be able to say the words. She hears Kakashi's breath catch twice: Once, when she finally confesses to him, and once when she accuses him. He looks away, ashamed. She knows she's hitting him where it hurts.
"I will always love you." He says in a quiet voice. It hurts even more because she wants to believe him.
"I think that you want to love me. It's not the same thing."
Kakashi stays quiet, but it's okay. Maybe she isn't even talking to him. Maybe she's just talking to herself. Even though this wasn't the outcome she'd hoped for, she was determined to see this conversation through.
"You'll never know what we could be together because you won't event try." She tells him.
Her words hang in the air, suspended in time. And then finally...
"No. I won't."
His voice isn't cold and and it isn't cruel. This was just a boundary he'd drawn within himself long before she'd even come into the picture. For years, she'd seen him with the occasional woman, but never for longer than a single night. Once, she'd been jealous of those women and the piece of him she could never have. But in hind sight, she'd never seen him happy with any of them. That was what this all came down to really.
"I'm not just talking about us romantically. I'm also talking about us. Team 7."
Kakashi takes a step back as if she's struck him. She knows she's walking on hallowed ground, but she's got eight years worth of demons pent up from this one sided love affair. With a breath, she does what she does best. She puts up her hands in the face of overwhelming odds and decides to go for broke.
"I've loved you for such a long time, even back before I loved you like this. For years I tried to show you that I was worthy of your recognition, even though I wasn't powerful like Sasuke or overflowing with potential like Naruto. I know I wasn't your favorite student, but I still wanted your attention. But no matter how hard I worked, you were always content to protect me while you taught them to protect themselves."
And for so many years, she'd thought that that was love…
"Sakura-" He says, his voice a wound. But she's on a roll now and she refuses to be silenced.
"You say that you care about me, and maybe you even think you do. But you sure as hell don't act like it. If you did, you wouldn't be using our kiss as an excuse to run away again. You wouldn't keep throwing yourself into dangerous situations without back up. OYou wouldn't make me worry if you're coming home alive this time. If you care about me, then start acting like you care about yourself. And if you actually love me like you say you do, then don't keep treating me like that helpless student from your past. I left her behind a long time ago. You should too."
Oh god, were her eyes tearing up? She had to get through this next part without crying. "You know, I didn't need you to get to where I am today…but it would have been nice if I hadn't had to do it on my own."
Kakashi is silent for a long time. Neither of them can look at the other. Sakura presses on, because what else can she do. She speaks her fear into the open, trying to take away its power.
"I've been alone, without a real team for the last four years. And for what it's worth, I think you've been alone too." The pain in her voice is real, but it's nothing compared to the pain on Kakashi's face.
"You changed when Sasuke left. I kept hoping that, with him gone, you might lean on me and Naruto more. That you might finally let us in. But instead you gave Naruto away to Jiraiya and you only sought me out to patch you back together. Naruto and I… we want to get Sasuke back. But we wanted to do that with you as a team."
"That's not fair and you know it." His low growl reverberates through the night.
And then, she reaches the end of her epiphany. She thinks of Shikamaru, of all that time they spent orbiting each other. How they spent years living their lives without getting too close. She thinks of how she denied herself love because she was too scared to end up with nothing at all.
"I know you think you're protecting me, but I think you're just protecting yourself. Trust me, if anyone understands that, I do. But I haven't seen the old you since Sasuke left, and I…I really miss him. So…You don't have to love me back, Kakashi. But just...love somebody."
And with that, all her words are used up. She's said what needed to be said. She know's she's probably overstepped, that there's a good chance he hasn't heard a single word of her monologue. The sting of a rejected love is nothing compared to an old wound reopened, but he needed to know she would fight for him. But first, he needed to fight for himself.
So she looks up into the void of his face, because really there was no where left to look. The world around her drifts back into focus the way it does after a bomb has been dropped. There would be time to deal with the fallout after. For now, she just wants to look at him, to memorialize the love she might have had before the ashes of it are blown away for good.
'Oh. This is grief.'
Unlike her panic attack in Suna, she's surprisingly not spiraling this time. But this temporary calm doesn't mean she's okay either. This is the special kind of numb that hits after a big shock, the kind that exists to help you prepare. It was giving her time to brace for the unbearable pain of losing him.
Because once again, her great I love you was turning into a goodbye. They were always saying goodbye to each other...
Kakashi doesn't look much better. His glazed eyes stare at her, unfocused. It's like he's not looking at her but beyond her. No….no.
Kakashi is looking behind her.
Then, Sakura turns around to where Shikamaru stands, umber eyes unreadable.