Chapter Eighteen | To Make Things Simple
There was a time when Kakashi thought he would never know happiness with the same shaping intensity as he knew anguish.
In a time when he had believed his heart a vestigial organ, the remains of what he could have been without the touch of death's cold fingers sinking into it too many times. In a time when a hollowed chest was unwavering obedience and undeterred skill, a hollowed chest was perfection.
Yet the heart had lingered. Kakashi had hated himself for it, because it had blunted his hands – his worth had been his sharpness. He had hated himself for it because, even stunted, it had made new names on gravestones hell on earth.
He was glad for it now, because it meant that, even if his heart felt childish still, unlearned, after so many years under lacquered white and half-wishing for the sharpness of a blade, it could beat now in a tender rhythm, full of joy.
He was glad for it, because in his heart he could preserve the fleeting sight that filled his eyes now - Naruto's unrelenting bliss and Hinata's more reserved delight as they twirled around the dancefloor, bride and groom on the first day of their life together.
Kakashi wanted to carry it in him forever, he wanted to carry it alongside another sight, a more selfish and secretive one.
Once more, his eyes searched the guests dancing before him for another glimpse of her. Not finding her there, he wandered through the reception, squeezing between groups of people talking and skirting around shoulders and arms.
But he couldn't find her anywhere. His eyes, more frantic this time, jumped between the people that she had been with for most of the evening. She wasn't near Tsunade, drinking herself into a frenzy, neither with Raidou on the dancefloor, now part of a circle of men talking, nor Sai and Ino hovering the deserts, Shikamaru or Chouji, not even the group of clan heads, perfectly positioned to be persuaded into investing in the hospital.
The cold grasp of panic tightened around his lungs and each of his breaths was a small rasp in his throat. It felt too close to the desperation of when the quietness of a battle's end settled on the field and, for a breathless instant, he searched and he prayed that he would find his teammates alive. That same quietness that had covered his two students as they pulled away from each other, before Sasuke, with a cocky curl to his mouth and a caved in rib cage, stumbled back.
But he wasn't on the battlefield, Kakashi knew it, just as he knew that this panic was entirely misplaced and overblown. Yet, without his gloves, the sweat gathering in his palms felt like blood, and his nose seemed to fill with the phantom stench of guts soaking the earth.
At a glimpse of pink, the breath stuck to his lungs left in a shuddering sigh.
There Sakura was, perfectly alive and leaning against the trunk of a tree, looking towards the newlyweds with a small tender smile.
Still, the hammering beat of his heart never ceased, even if it thudded in an entirely different way. It was the same staggering feeling of when he had first seen Sakura in her flowing green dress and pinned up hair earlier today.
Green was Sakura's colour now. He would never again watch the leaves that made up Konoha and not see in them the dress draping down her body, the straps curling over the rise of her collarbone, its neckline resting on the pale and soft curve of her breasts.
Tenzou had caught Kakashi's little slip in the form of an 'oh shit' under his breath, as he first saw her. His friend had laughed, offering him a few mocking pats on the shoulder and the words, 'Don't look so astonished, Senpai, Sakura's been a pretty woman for a while now.'.
He was a few years too late with his reassurance. Kakashi had already realised it and learnt to come to terms with his own awareness of just how beautiful Sakura was, to come to terms with his own admiration for it.
Before he could even think, Kakashi was already moving towards her. Those annoying flutters in his stomach only made him too aware of every of his movements, the strange swing of his arms, too eager and broad against his sides, which, once corrected, only made them feel stiff. So, instead, he decided to shove his hands down his pockets and worry about not falling face first on the grass.
There was something disconcerting about this newfound shyness, which had never troubled him concerning women. But he knew why it was here.
This was Sakura, his teammate, his former student – he had already passed through the lows of shame because of it and came out free of them –, his friend, with whom he had lived through violence, pain, death, and also so much good and joy.
This new thing stemmed from a place that was already an entrenched part of his heart, even before this little fascination, as Kakashi had decided to name it. It was more important, more consequential than any other he had felt before. And so the novelty and uncertainty around its new shape had unfolded into shyness, and into the impulse of keeping it locked and unknown – unmaterialized –behind the cage of his ribs.
Catching Kakashi out of the corner of her eyes, Sakura turned to him. A smile on her lips, she watched him near her.
One of the perks of having a mask was that people didn't know just how pathetic Kakashi really was. The simple sight of Sakura smiling at him had stamped an uncontrollable grin to his face. Clamping his lips shut was fruitless, so he dipped his head down, bangs falling to cover his expression, and fixed his eyes on his steps.
"Hi." Sakura greeted him with a happy sound. "Came to keep me company?"
The twist of her hair was looser, more pink strands falling to brush across her reddened cheeks, and her eyes, even in the low light of the moon, were still the same translucent green of leaves overlapping the sun.
"You're stealing my part," Kakashi leaned against the tree beside her. "all dark and mysterious, watching from the side."
She snorted. "I'm not nearly broody enough for that."
That was true. Even in her sadness, Sakura had always been cheerful.
"Then what are you doing here, all by yourself," Kakashi pushed his shoulder lightly against hers with his words, and let it remain there, just the brush of a touch between them. "and not dancing yourself silly?"
"Making sure that I'll carry this in my heart forever."
Kakashi looked down at her to find that the expression in her eyes mirrored the ache in her words, as she watched Naruto and Hinata dancing. He didn't look away, he couldn't.
He had first noticed this urge to always look at her on one of their many missions, when, after the ruthless violence of a battle, the quietness around their bonfire had felt different. The sounds of sizzling wood and rustling animals were the same, but what had changed was how the shades of red and orange came to flicker against her features and reflect on the green of her eyes.
Only later did Kakashi recognise that change as a fault of his own eyes.
Sakura was entirely oblivious to it. Even he was mostly oblivious to the name of what moved in him for her. For the past months, he had named it many things but it had never quite fit into any of those forms.
"Adrenaline-induced moment of madness" had been the first. When it lingered, his skin suddenly sensitive in a wholly different way to how her fingers brushed him when she healed him, the name had changed to 'the consequences of his enduring dry-spell'.
Later, when a broken streak forced him to realise that it hadn't miraculously vanished – in fact, Kakashi had only become a little too captivated with the sound of her voice, with how her hair curled at the back of her head and a few strands touched the pale curve of her nape –, he changed it to 'appreciation'. And then 'admiration' – the throb in his heart for it deeper than simple gratitude, almost painful –, when Sakura rescued a chunin under his command from the depths of despair, after he felt the blown up flesh pieces of his dead teammate against the skin of his face.
Kakashi had finally settled on 'this little fascination', when he realised that Sakura had been a constant presence of his desires, his thoughts, his dreams. And he realised that he was truly doomed when, instead of going home, he almost skipped to the hospital, side bleeding profusely over the streets of Konoha, because Izumo had told him that Sakura was the medic on call for returning shinobi.
But even this one name had long ago felt inadequate, no matter how much Kakashi tried to shove his feelings down to fit inside of it.
It seemed that the more he tried to keep this in the safe boundaries of his hands, the more it overflowed through the gaps between his fingers. The more he tried to quiet the thunder of his heart to everything Sakura did and was, the more it hammered for her, like a small caged bird, against his ribs.
"Sorry?" Kakashi blurted, once he realised that she was talking, had been for at least a few sentences.
Sakura glared at him. And this glare - this known glare -, known like the scarred creases of his palm, tugged forth an old realisation, as if it was happening for the first time. Sakura was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.
Kakashi sighed and lifted the glass full of sake to his lips, but he didn't look away.
"I was saying" She ground out. "that you should hurry up, Sensei. Your student is getting hitched before you."
He let out a small chuckle. "Is it before if I never get married?"
Sakura pushed his shoulder with hers. "Just wait until some woman sweeps you off your feet, then you won't look so disgruntled at that idea."
Her interest in playing his personal match-maker had vanished some time ago, but he supposed that a wedding's mood always left people more inclined to be romantic, always poked at that shadow of loneliness, and made their hearts vessels of pining.
And from how he wanted, just at the warmth of Sakura's arm against his own, he knew he wasn't above it.
Kakashi had always known that he would never marry. Years ago, he had accepted that there was something lacking in him when it came to romantic relationships, a missing piece that had crumbled and been lost somewhere on a battlefield long ago, during that time when his heart had been a stunted broken thing. No one could ever change what was marked into his very being, or restore what had been cut off from him, like a dead limb, when he first found his father in a pool of his own blood.
Its absence had never bothered him too much, not when whatever family he could start would be tainted with the blood in his hands. If there were ever any woman that Kakashi loved enough to give himself to her, fully and forever, he would never allow himself to mutilate her with the rough skin of his palms, a map of hardened calluses, blown-out chakra-points, and burn scars from his raikiri.
Besides, the woman that had ever been close to sweeping him off his feet was currently trying to marry him off to someone else.
"I'll race you to it, what do you say, Sakura? Hundred bucks, I'll marry first."
Her lip jutted out in a small pout. "That's not fair, you're setting me up for a loss."
"What?" He asked, genuine confusion in his voice.
"You'll be Hokage soon enough, and then all you'll have to do is pick a woman from the crowd and she'll throw herself at your feet." Sakura tilted her head back to meet his eyes. "It's the hat, you know, works like a charm."
He was definitely very far from replacing Tsunade and Sakura was worryingly oblivious to her own enticement.
"Don't act like you don't have the same power." He said, and Sakura lifted an eyebrow, willing him to prove his point. "It's the doctor's coat, works like a charm," Kakashi leaned in, close enough where he could hear each of her breaths, and whispered, each syllable slipping through his lips in a low murmur, "Haruno-sensei."
Sakura huffed, it made her breath flutter against his skin, a hint of sake in it. His stomach clenched. Then, she turned away from him, crossing her arms tightly and cheeks turning even redder with a blush.
"Choose any man. I promise one look and they're smitten."
At his words, Sakura's eyes turned to the guests in front of them, moving from person to person, as she actually accessed the crowd. A cold weight settled at the bottom of his stomach when he caught how she lingered on Raidou. More acquaintances than friends, they had danced together more than anyone could expect, but Kakashi had dismissed it as the innocent overlap between a woman that liked to dance and a man that was good at it.
What had been meant as an attempt to nurse Sakura's self-esteem twisted into a curse.
Then, she turned her head to look at Kakashi, attentive eyes boring into his own, as if they were trying to peel the layers of grey until they reached his underneath the underneath.
His heart thumped in his throat. Kakashi could feel it: he stood, unsteady feet and a quivering heart, right at the edge of an insight.
He raised his eyebrow in a question at her sudden attentiveness to him.
"You."
His eyes widened. That simple word had enough power to petrify every other muscle in him and make all thoughts in his mind vanish under the sound of it.
The air shattered with a laugh.
"Damn," Sakura let out between the rocks of her laughs, hand clamping around his forearm to find purchase on it. Every dent of her fingers on his skin burned. "you don't have to look so mortified, Kakashi. I'm just kidding."
It was a joke. Nothing more. Nothing more.
And still his heart sped inside his chest, and his hands felt faint with the shock of it. He laughed too, the sound slightly frayed at the edges. What else was there for him to do?
"You're too easy to mess with, Kakashi." Her laughs waned and Sakura slumped once again against the trunk of the tree, but this time, her temple came to rest against his arm. "Your poor future wife."
For all the time that he had put into understanding what stirred in him, Kakashi had never thought about the possibility of doing something other than simply letting himself fever in it. They were merely feelings, meant to be felt in the secrecy of his own ribcage, but never to be acted on.
"Naruto…" Sakura whispered, his name a stifled rasp. "He deserves this so much."
"He deserves it the most." Kakashi added.
She lifted her hand to her chest and rubbed against her sternum, a gesture that long ago Kakashi had learnt was meant for Sasuke alone. He had remained unnamed today, but the ghost of his absence had loomed through all of them, giving their happiness a slight bitter twinge.
Kakashi's fingers tingled with the need to drape his arm around her shoulders and bring her even closer, but touch had never come naturally to him, unlike Sakura, whose hands were made to cradle, to heal, to sooth.
"It's what all of us want, isn't it?" Sakura asked, voice soft, laced with a sad almost imperceptible tremble.
Her eyes flickered up to him and when she found him watching her, they fled back to the crowd.
"To be loved and to love."
How simple it was. Like a blade of grass at the shore of a stream, all he needed was a stronger gust of wind to make him sway fully over the reflected surface of the water and see what rushed deep in him.
What had been a war in him, his heart a battlefield, had become strangely quiet, only one sound soaring in it. All the things Kakashi felt for her untangled into one simple word, and simple because it was known, named: love.
It was the exact shape of what moved in his heart for Sakura.
Kakashi loved her.
He was in love with Sakura.
"It is." He breathed out, his words stuck around his throat.
Sakura glanced up at him once more, a hint of surprise in her expression. Could she see? Did his eyes betray him? Did their colour also spelled the word love, just as his heart did?
Her eyes didn't linger, they dropped to her drink. She lifted the sake to her mouth and took a long, audible gulp.
"I don't think I'm good at any of them." After her words settled into silence, Sakura whispered out a curse and a bitter chuckle, before lifting her glass as if to inspect it. "Definitely had too many of these."
Without a glance back at him, Sakura slithered away from the place against his side.
"Wait, Sakura."
Before he could think, Kakashi had already moved. She looked down at where his naked fingers held her elbow and only then did she look up at him, expectant. But Kakashi's tongue melted in his mouth under her eyes, the lanterns hanging around them flickering in their green.
There was a mad impulse battling to win over his will. The impulse of tugging her towards him, hand cupping her cheek to feel the red heat against his palm, and finally leaning down to kiss her.
"Let's make it 300 ryo." He said instead. Sakura never gave him any sign that their care for each other overlapped.
"Don't tell me someone actually caught your eye, Sensei." She narrowed her eyes at him, before saying, "Fine, 300." With a wave, she spun around. "Thanks for hearing my drunk ramblings, Kakashi."
He watched walk away, until she vanished between guests.
One look and they would be smitten. He had walked right into that one.
It couldn't be helped, really, Kakashi just hadn't seen it sooner.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and let his head drop back to look at the night sky.
Loving Sakura was inevitable.
Mebuki watched the glint of her new ceramic pot as it stood on the kitchen table. It was the exact green of her daughter's eyes and that was why she had chosen it.
It was always nice to have the home all to herself, even if her routine was hardly changed. With her husband out on his business excursions, Mebuki was left alone to enjoy the quietness and freedom, before her heart would catch up to the absence.
Humming a little tune, she turned to reach for the Japanese anemone that she had plucked out of the corner flowerbed of the backyard.
The shadowed silhouette of a person loomed on the threshold of her kitchen.
Mebuki jolted back, her side hit the table and the pot clanked against the wood as it tried to find its balance. Before it could fall to the ground and shatter, the shadow moved and caught it in her hands.
Her fingers grasped the fabric above her pounding chest. "Are you trying to give your poor mother a heart attack, Sakura?"
The lines of Sakura's face were carved down in pain, Mebuki realised when the shock eased away from her veins.
"What is it, Sakura? Did something happen?"
Sakura didn't lift her eyes from where they were pinned, unseeing, to the vase still in her hands. "Kakashi, he…"
Mebuki's hand pressed to her mouth, but a sound of denial still whispered out from the gaps between her fingers.
"No." Sakura rushed out. "He's alive. It's just…" Her daughter's eyes finally lifted to her own, eyebrows turned into a plea. "he loves me, Kaa-san, has loved me since before we married."
"For heaven's sake, Sakura, don't scare a woman like this!" She barked, offering a small smack to her daughter's arm. "And what kind of person looks like death warmed over because her own husband loves her?"
Her gaze fled once more to the vase in her hands. "I don't know…" She whispered. "I don't know…"
With gentle hands around her daughter's shoulders, Mebuki guided her to a seat around the table. She left to make tea for them and to allow Sakura to gather herself after what Mebuki assumed – sweat gathering in her daughter's hairline – had been a sprint from Konoha all the way to Otaru in Northern Fire.
When Mebuki rested the steaming mug in front of Sakura's fingers, she reached for it, hand cupping around the porcelain, rough shinobi palms unbothered with its heat. She never lifted it to her lips, her green gaze staring into the table's woodgrain, still blind.
So Mebuki waited, as they sat next to each other, taking small sips of her own camomile tea. It reminded her of old days back in Konoha, before their village had made a genin of Sakura, before she and Kizashi realised that their little girl was slipping away from the safe hold of their hands.
Every day, she thought of her daughter with a heavy and longing heart. The few letters and phone calls that they had exchanged throughout the year were not enough to abate the missing, not enough to reach any depth or profundity into what Sakura hid inside her own heart. Every day Mebuki wondered if she had found her place in the marriage, if she and Kakashi had learned to love each other as husband and wife. She also wondered if she was unhappy, if her duty to Konoha felt like the cage that Mebuki had always thought it was.
But there was a simple thing that never failed to tug an appeased smile from Mebuki during those calls, even if they never went deeper than the routine things in her daughter's life: the way Sakura said his name.
"Kaa-san, at the wedding, when you said Kakashi came to talk to you… and you told me he said he loved me…" Her big green eyes looked up at her own, so much like the little child she had been once. "did he really?"
"If you're asking if he said it openly, he didn't, but Kakashi said it with everything else, his eyes, his care for you, even his words."
At the time, Sakura had read in Mebuki's words the kind of love between teammates and friends. She hadn't corrected her daughter, even if her tongue had burned for it, for her to know that she was loved. It could never be Mebuki's place to bare that truth.
"Kakashi told you, didn't he?"
Sakura gave an almost imperceptible nod.
One whole year and only now had the man confessed. It seemed that the infamous shinobi Hatake Kakashi was a coward in matters of love.
Since the beginning of Sakura's journey as a genin, he had always appeared too stoic, too careless, all his edges a little too cutting. Hearing that her daughter was forced to marry him had filled Mebuki with horror.
Then, against all her own expectations, Kakashi had come to them. He had come to them – people with whom he had shared at most a few cordial sentences of obligation, years before – unmasked. That gesture would have been enough reassurance, and still he continued, apologising, speaking of all the ways he could stop it if Sakura asked him to, promising to give everything to their daughter even if it wouldn't be enough.
Mebuki had seen a terrified guilt-ridden man, with too many unhealed wounds, just as her daughter, looking so young and unsure of himself, with nothing left of the infallible hero of Konoha. And most of all she had seen a man full of love and not knowing how to concretise it, how to share it with the world, with the one person he was in love with.
"Was this why you came to the wedding?" Sakura asked, expression as harsh as her voice. "Gods, Kaa-san… I thought you were there because you love me. Because you wanted to share something important with me even if you didn't understand it or support it… But no… you were only at the wedding because suddenly it was just like one of your books!"
Mebuki accepted the anger and the accusation, knowing it was only an outlet for the turmoil raging in her.
"We were at the wedding to support you. It wasn't just Kakashi, it was time that helped us realise what was important to us, and you are the only thing important, Sakura. He gave me the hope that your marriage could turn into something good, because he was devoted to be good for you."
In a mirror of her own father, just as quickly as Sakura's anger burst, it deflated. But the marble mask that fell onto her profile was entirely her own.
As a girl, she had thrown herself into her mother's arms to share all that weighed her down and Mebuki had held her close to her heart. Slowly, secretly through the years, Sakura began retreating away from her while her burdens only grew. Even now, she didn't know if it had been a natural growth from child to teenager, and later an adult. Or if it had been because it was how the shinobi life moulded her to be, furtive and unreachable. Or, what had always trembled through her the most, because Sakura's hurt was so horrifying that she didn't dare share it with her parents.
Sakura buried her face in her hands. "Why couldn't he just tell me sooner? He should have told me sooner."
But that her daughter had come now to them was a sign that the mask around her had started chipping away.
"Yes, he should have, but he didn't." Mebuki's hand squeezed her daughter's arm. "Talk to me, sweetheart."
"I…" Sakura began, hand dropping down to rub against her chest. "A part of me is furious that he didn't tell me. Another one still doesn't believe him. And another is… is glad, relieved, as if those were the exact words I always wanted to hear from him…"
"Do you love him, Sakura?"
"I don't know…"
Two lines of sadness carved down the sides of Mebuki's mouth. On the day Sasuke died, a cleft had crumbled open between the Sakura with a candid heart, not scared or ashamed of saying her love wholeheartedly, even in face of rejection, and Sakura now, who had been forced to retreat into a little shell, where she hid from the outside and the inside of her. Safe, yes, but also reduced, also unfulfilled.
"What's keeping you back?" Mebuki asked.
"Love always made me a fool, it made me a terrible person."
She frowned, between confusion and pain. Her fingers reached for the strands that covered Sakura's profile and tucked them behind her ear. "Where did you get this from, Sakura?"
Her daughter sprang up from the chair and turned her back to her mother, arms curling around herself. "All of my biggest mistakes, my biggest faults were because of it."
"No," Mebuki stated firmly, standing up as well. "your faults and mistakes were because you were only a teenager in the middle of a war."
She would never forgive Konoha for what they had demanded of her daughter, but most of all she would never forget herself and her own blindness on that first day when they, Sakura's own parents, allowed her to enrol in the Academy. It should have been their duty to see the entirety of what that path meant.
"You don't understand." Sakura whispered.
Sometimes her daughter became too caught up in all the regrets, all the guilt that she carried. Things that Mebuki didn't know what they were but could see that they were there, a film over her green eyes, distorting the reflection Sakura saw in the mirror.
"Sakura… We all make mistakes. Don't let that blind you to everything you do and are." Her hands held onto Sakura's face, but she still tried to flee away from her touch, from her own mother's eyes. "What's keeping you back?"
"It hurts… so much…"
A bittersweet smile curled Mebuki's lips. It did, each crack in Sakura carved down an abyss into her and Kizashi's hearts. Feeling their daughter slip between their hands no matter how hard they fought to keep her there, seeing her lose a little of herself each time she returned from the battlefield, all for something they never understood, had made her and Kizashi flee.
During Pain's attack on Konoha, they had felt in their own flesh the ruin of the battlefield, and to know it, to know what hid behind Sakura's rehearsed smiles and words of reassurance had been too much to endure.
In their weakness, they had abandoned her, only a child – their child –, when Sakura had needed them the most.
It took them years to see the full extent of that destructive choice, only during Sakura's wedding, when once again they were confronted with all of it. Now they lived with that regret, the walls of their home cracking from it, every day.
It was a failure of their love and it made up the wounds that arrested Sakura's vision of her own.
"It does. It's the thing that hurts the most in the world."
But there had never been weakness in how Sakura loved. Sasuke was only an unfolding branch of it. Because more than for that boy, Mebuki had seen it for Konoha, her love unconditional, a love until the end and beyond.
"And somehow," Mebuki continued. "just to mess with us, love is also the thing that brings the most happiness, the most good."
Her hurt daughter seemed to have tried to forget it, but something lingered behind the green of her eyes, a remembrance wanting to break free.
With a cheeky smile, Mebuki combed away the hair that had fallen over Sakura's profile again. "If you wanted to break it off, would Kakashi let you go?"
Her green eyes rushed up to meet Mebuki, always so eager to defend her husband. "Of course, in the same instant."
"Then why do you stay?"
Her eyes widened, shock trembling behind them, as if the straightforward question had never spurred through her own mind. Sakura turned down to watch the movement of her fingers, twisting and untwisting, teeth clamping on her lips as she worried the flesh until it was red.
"Because I want to." Sakura whispered, a shy secret confession surrendered into the open.
"It's always simple, isn't it?"
Sakura twisted the phone's cord around her finger, gaze flickering through every little thing that moved outside the window, as the button waited for her to press it. Such an easy movement, and yet she was terrified, when taking the blow of an attack knowing it would hurt like a motherfucker was a thoughtless and certain gesture.
With a hissed out curse and a fast jerk, she hit the call button. The ringing in her ear was like the shrill clash of metal against metal on a battlefield, looming with ruin. It lasted only two seconds and that it had ended seemed less merciful than the sound of it.
"Hello?"
Sakura's eyes clenched shut at the familiar timbre of Kakashi's voice.
"Hi…"
"Sakura." He breathed out, the sound of her name soft with relief. It rested in her chest with pain.
"I'm at my parents, just wanted to let you know that." Her fingers twirled the cord around her hand. "I had to leave. I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I… it was a big thing to burden you with."
"No, it's not a burden, Kakashi, of course it's not a burden." If there was something that Sakura was certain about it was that. "I just need a little time to gather myself and think about us, my life, everything really…" She finished with a gurgle, something close enough to a chuckle.
"Yes, of course. Take your time, Sakura, and your space."
Sakura knew the hurt of being on the other side of an unanswered confession, the silence carrying a deceptive cruelty with it. But her answer hadn't been just silence, it had been fury. She accused him, when he finally laid the truth bare between them, of lying. Then she had run away like a scared child. And Kakashi wasn't demanding anything of her.
Her forehead leaned on the receiver, voice rough against her throat as she whispered, "Don't be so good to me."
"I don't think I'm good enough most times. This time."
The man that took so long to voice his love for her, the man who refused to consummate their marriage was the same man that, on that night when he returned home with blood in his hands and his clothes, had pleaded her not to touch him gently, had asked her if there was any good in him.
"You are." It was another thing that she was certain of. There were marks of them in between the muddle and confusion in her own heart and this was one of them.
Her ear buzzed with the weighted silence that settled between them. She could hear Kakashi's parting lips, as he opened them, only to let them fall closed once again, no words leaving him.
"Sakura, you're free from m—"
"Don't say that. Please, Kakashi, don't say it again. I know, I've known that since the beginning."
The words had pierced through her just last night and their ruthless edge hadn't blunted now, if anything they only seemed to hurt more. Only now could Sakura understand why they hurt, even when they were gentle, a gesture of Kakashi's love for her.
"It wouldn't be freedom to me." She confessed and it untangled a knot around her heart.
Sakura had burned for those what-ifs, a life where they would have stumbled into each other along the path of their missions, where he would have confessed before the Council's order and Sakura's heart would have felt free to love. But now she found that they no longer held the same weight over her, not when to have them, meant that the past year would vanish into nothing.
They would have made things simple but not better, not when every moment of their unconventional marriage had settled in her heart to make part of it.
Sakura would never wish to give up on it, she could never regret it.
Her eyes closed, trying to make him close to her, as on her lids she drew Kakashi leaning against the kitchen counter, legs stretched and crossed in front of him, an arm draped over his stomach, as he always was when talking on the phone, head turned to the side to watch what moved through the window.
"The ninken?" She asked, searching for anything to keep his voice sounding on the other side of the line. Before there had only been dread at the thought of this call and now Sakura didn't want to hang up, she couldn't bear the thought of the abyss that could settle between them, half a country away.
"Perfectly fine." After a few moments and the distant rustle of movement, he said, "Say hi to Sakura, guys."
The telephone buzzed with the barks of several dogs, Sakura making out the individual tones of some of them. Longing burned in her chest like an amber, a longing to be there with him, with them, there in their home where she belonged.
"Will you wait for me?" Her voice was hesitant, trembling at the end. The question was too vague, and even Sakura herself wasn't quite sure of its full meaning, but it felt like the only thing that could encompass all.
Kakashi understood, his voice achingly tender as he answered, "Always."
Loving, the right word was loving and only now was it evident to her.
There was a long moment of silence, humming with the static from the phone and the quiet sounds of their breathing.
"I don't know what else to say." She whispered.
"Then don't say anything." He answered.
"But I don't want to hang up."
"Then don't hang up."
Their words waned, spent, and still they wanted to hold on to the sliver of the other, there in the quiet, there in the simple presence of the static of a live call.
"Could we visit you sometime?" Sakura asked, her mother beside her on her knees, as the two spread out a mound of soil over the flowerbed. "Kakashi will probably be all awkward, but I think he'd like it, I'd like it."
With the courage to finally look up at her mother, Sakura found in her eyes, not hesitation or distaste, but only a trembling well of emotion. "We'd love that, honey."
Sakura never thought that they could be here like this again. The wound of seeing her parents cut themselves away from her life lingered still, of seeing how loving her had only brought them pain, but now she had hope that they could close the abyss that had cracked open between them.
The back of her hand wiped the speckles of sweat from her forehead, brushing the loose strands of her bangs back and away from her eyes.
"I miss gardening." She murmured, plucking some of the weeds hiding in the flowerbed.
It was one of the few moments, along with cleaning, where she was thoughtless, her mind only a few distant wisps of smoke when immersed in the physical task.
"Buy a house with a backyard, I'm sure that between the two of you you can afford it." Her mum met her eyes with a bold glint, and yet there was no resentment as she joked, "That's probably the only saving grace of being a jonin, it pays well."
"We already have one."
"You moved?"
Sakura shook her head. "The Hatake manor. We visited it in the beginning. Kakashi made sure it was restored and ready to move in."
With a dry chuckle, she shook her head, piercing the shovel down on the dark humid soil.
"Kakashi said it was mine. I thought… I thought it was just words, you know, Kaa-san. But one day I found the papers of the new deed for me to become co-owner. All that was missing was my signature."
"His clan home?" Her mother let out, tone high with astonishment. "My god, Sakura, how didn't you realise that the man loves you?"
"Because he's Kakashi." She said, plunging the metal edge into the ground once more. "It could very well be him feeling guilty and lacking, wanting to make it up by completely overcompensating."
"But it wasn't."
"Well I know that now, Kaa-san." Her words held a hint of a snarl, angry only with herself.
A long trembling sigh pushed past her lips, as Sakura sat back on her heels, eyes intent on her stained nails, curling into the fabric of her pants.
"Maybe I knew it then, but didn't want to see it. Maybe it was why I ran out when he was showing me the house and left the poor man hanging…"
"Oh no…"
"I probably broke his heart." Her hand pressed to her mouth, the lines around it twisted in a grimace, as she breathed through the lump in her throat. "Like I did now."
Sakura curled into herself, hand rubbing against her sternum, trying to contain the pain that she didn't deserve feeling. She had poisoned him with the very thing that had terrified her during this entire marriage. As she tried to run away from the anguish, the worthlessness, Sakura had shoved it all, uncaringly and selfishly, into Kakashi.
Her mum's arms circled around her, face pressed down into her hair as she whispered words of comfort, words that dismissed the sharp cutting edges of her own fingers around Kakashi's heart.
"There was this little vase on a table with wild flowers… and it terrified me."
She imagined Kakashi, unfamiliar and too achingly sweet, as he plucked the flowers around the manor, gathering them into a little bouquet, something beautiful, caring, and most of all hopeful for a future shared with her. Then the sight of him slumped on the engawa, pain twisting his expression, the flowers he had caught with such care only a mock, a painful jab and reminder of her rejection.
It wasn't just there, throughout the past year there were so many of these small gestures, always shy and unassuming, so much like Kakashi. Only now could Sakura see the full meaning of them.
His acts of love from the simplest things, as the lunches in her office – an excuse to keep her from overworking –, and his diligence in his chores, a meticulousness that he had never bothered with before, because he knew that Sakura needed everything in the apartment to be in its rightful place for it to feel like home. And the shallowest things, as when he brought her the earrings Sakura had been flirting with at the market, a token of how he noticed to her, how Kakashi saw her.
To the biggest of them, as when he cared for her when a patient died, and when he helped with the project for the children's clinic, from the practical tasks to the emotional burdens. "Even if you fail, I'll cherish you all the same.", he had told her, and with those words he helped her see that failing wouldn't mean her ruin, that her worth was rooted on something more than her success.
Even when the physical dimension of their relationship was the great point of strain between them – only an expression of a deeper mismatch that only now Sakura fully knew –, Kakashi always held her, always kissed her like she was someone precious.
And where his gestures ended, there were his eyes, always tender when Kakashi looked at her, in the morning above a waking Konoha and in the evening when she arrived home, late at night on their bed, just before her heavy eyelids fluttered closed with sleep. A memory fluttered up in her mind, of their old missions and that same gaze through the crackling red of a fire.
She had been incapable of reading love in them. Her own trembling fear of being unwanted, being unlovable, had blinded her to him.
No, it was not fear. What scavenged in her heart was worse, like the chakra of a biju, burning the flesh of the body that gave it life to fight against death. A beast, slashing in its own protection, it was terror.
Sakura had entered their marriage with hardened eyes and a hardened heart.
It had started on the night of their wedding when Kakashi had mimicked the lyrics of that song, a veiled confession – all his confessions, through words, gestures, gazes, were veiled, always veiled, because through it Kakashi was giving her the freedom of not seeing their entire depth, the bottomless measure of their truth -, and Sakura had seen in it, in his shyness, in his frantic heartbeat under her fingertips, only a lie.
Kakashi had spent their relationship loving her, all while Sakura had been so curled into herself, arms hardening around her broken shards like a shell, and head tucked in, until all that she could see was the reducing sight of her wound.
In her own petulant need to have Kakashi choose her, she hadn't realised that the core of his pain, the core of his own distance, was that same terror.
"Have you thought that maybe I also want you to have chosen me? That it's the thing I wish for the most? And it's the one thing I know I'll never have?"
It was why his first act of love in the beginning had been to give her freedom back to her, written on that note, still saved between the pages of her notebook.
Your choice.
And it truly had been. Kakashi had given her control of everything in their relationship but had kept one piece of it to himself. A too important piece. Sakura understood now why, the veiled signs and the veiled confessions revealing themselves to her.
All his doubt, all his guilt, all his fear had concentrated into one thing: the consummation of their marriage. "Not until we're both free, we're both even.", he had said.
Sakura could never have convinced him that he had played no part in the Council's order, because, in his mind, his unrequited love had finally found its answer in an enforced relationship, like those stories of spirits that granted wishes in the shape of a twisted curse.
"Deep down I was glad the Council chose you."
It was why he believed that every reciprocating feeling and every touch that Sakura could give could only be something stolen from her. And it was why Kakashi had always felt like her curse.
"Can there even be love if there isn't freedom, Sakura?" She had seen in his question a doubt over his heart, but not her own. "Am I waiting for something that can never be?"
Kakashi had been waiting for her to love him, even as he battled with his fear of it being impossible. And what had Sakura given him as a sign? On their first night together, while she had seen an attempt to show him how good they could be in bed, Kakashi's eyes had been searching for a fuller unfolding part of it.
They had been uneven, mismatched.
"Slow down, Sakura", he had asked her, when all she could bear to do was take, take, take. His tender touch had been pain to her, the softened colour of his eyes like the sharp edge of a blade, his lips on the scar at her stomach burning her to ash.
So she had demanded of them something faster, harsher, so that the pleasure couldn't sink lower than her skin, into the trembling, terrified flesh of her heart.
Lust wasn't vulnerable. Lust was easy to give and it was easy to take. It was a mask and Sakura had draped it over her, over them, a reducing branch of her own profound want for Kakashi. And when it had ended she had been left with that sinking feeling that something was missing, that her fingers had brushed over that one lost piece between them
"Is that all you want from this marriage, Sakura? Is that all you want from me?" How pained, how desperate all of his questions sounded to her now.
It was a shared fault.
Kakashi should have told her of the love he hid in the secretiveness of his heart sooner. They were also uneven because Sakura couldn't truly choose him, not when she didn't know the truth of what moved in his heart for her. He hadn't allowed her the possibility of that choice…
A part of her still simmered with anger because of it, the same part that fevered with something else: anguish. Anguish for him, for how he had contorted himself in the guilt he carried, for how all was rooted in his own feeling of inadequacy.
Anguish for the little boy that first knew death from the sight of his father's dead body and would continue to know it so many times more, to shape it with his own hands. His own love had been made through it: "I won't let my teammates die.", his love had been at home in the battlefield, made for it and out of it.
That abandoned and scared little boy, thrown out into the worst filth of the shinobi world, and for whom Sakura had built the Children's Mental Health Clinic.
They had played it off as jokes among friends – Hatake Kakashi was doomed to be a bachelor, their enemies couldn't know that the one thing to make him tremble was the word 'love' – and Kakashi had laughed with them.
The flash of a memory surged in her mind, "What do you even know about love?" Sakura had asked him as a harmless tease, but Kakashi had looked at her, gravity in his eyes and under it, something that only now Sakura could see, was that tenderness for her, the love.
"What else could you expect from me?" He had asked after that first night together. "Is that all you want from me, Sakura? Because I can give that to you easily. It's all I've ever known how to give."
Maybe he had believed that Sakura didn't think he was capable of love, maybe he had feared that she could never consent and never choose to be loved by him.
Was the fear misplaced?
"I tried to make it mean something, remember, Sakura?" Kakashi had said, right in the beginning. "Slow down, Sakura." Why hadn't she slowed down? She knew why, it was the beast of terror in her heart.
The moment Raidou had said those three little words in their relationship, Sakura had closed herself into her thick shell. They had never recovered from that.
She realised then, cold biting fingers around her heart, piercing down until every breath seemed stuck inside her lungs, that she was terrified of the possibility that the same could have happened between her and Kakashi.
"Do you want me to love you?" He had asked, "I'm not asking for something that you can't give me, Kakashi." She had replied, seeing in it only a reflection of her own lacking. And still Kakashi had added, "But if I could give you love, would you want it from me?"
His words in her ears had been the ghostly echo of Sasuke's last words. And, like the reflex of lifting a kunai against the glint of metal at the corner of her eyes, she had withdrawn behind the beast of terror that guarded her heart.
Her answer, "I can't think about what-ifs."
It was the core of her being, her fault and her damning weakness. It was what her mum didn't understand, it was what Sakura never allowed anyone but herself to know.
That beast of terror hadn't started when she first heard from Tsunade's mouth that she was ordered to marry Kakashi. It had started before, it had started when Sasuke's heartbeat slipped away from her fingers to quiet itself forever.
They had won the war, they had mended the rotten corpse of the shinobi world. Everything had been made right and, even if the war raged still in her heart, Sakura could taste the peace that had settled over the world. It had been the good ending.
Sasuke's dead body on a grass field hadn't seemed real against that background.
Sakura was shaped by blood and guts soaking into the earth, by the colourless death of Sasuke's eyes and by those final whispered words, 'I could have loved you'. They enclosed and they completed the tragedy of his life: his past had stolen love from him.
Hers was a twofold failure: her hands hadn't carried enough love and they hadn't carried enough skill, to at least give him another chance to try. Sakura's failure had cleaved all possibilities of saving him, of redeeming him.
That day became the mid-point of her life, where she learned that love was stolen from her too.
Sasuke had shaped her, Sakura's own name became another vessel of his, her reflection a mirror of his own. He shaped her into broken shards.
"Kakashi's been so kind to me, so respectful, so loving… and what have I done for him?"
"I'm sure you've done amazing things too," Her mum said, hand brushing down her hair and back in soothing caresses. "you can't just see them under all your blaming."
"Shit," She grumbled out in a wet chuckle. "I'm becoming him."
"A common symptom of married life."
"If I could give you love, would you want it from me?"
That little vase of wild flowers didn't terrify her anymore. There was only regret in her heart as she thought of it, regret and longing for what it could have become hadn't she run away in fear.
Sakura wanted it now. She dreamed of it, old dreams made new, reanimated and built from the past. They hadn't disappeared into that patch of earth soaked with blood, they had remained in the shards of her heart, hidden and latent, waiting for the moment – not the moment, the person for whom to bloom again.
Her dream of building a home had been there as piercing shards when she watched Naruto and Hinata. It was there in how she had opened up her apartment for Kakashi and slotted her routine with his, in how for the past year she had stumbled through the cruelty and the absurdity of Konoha's mission, seeing at the end something bright, something that made it worth fighting for.
Sakura's mind had rushed through everything that made up their relationship and, slowly, what had always seemed only a tangle of red-braided cords unravelled itself with a clarity that she hadn't felt in years. Perhaps not since she healed her first patient and knew that the path of her life had been leading her there and from that point on would continue to lead her forward, a medic.
Their marriage was a dream of her own. Her most precious, most wanted dream – and it was the despair of that need, that crave that had terrified her away from it.
The path of her life had led her to Kakashi and, if he dreamed of it the same, it would continue to lead them forward. Together.
Sakura stayed because she was staying with Kakashi.
"I want to go home, Kaa-san."
Hello, lovely people, it's been some time...
My sole excuse is that my sweet-voiced Muse was dry. She's still not fully hydrated, but it's all I have to give