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He asked on a Tuesday.
Asking on a Tuesday was already a red flag (for many reasons, but the primary one being the fact that her twelve (which, if she was being really honest with herself, was more like fourteen) hour shift was on Monday, and Tuesday was her day of rest, which he would know if-), but really, the greater red flag was the fact that he didn't really ask, so much as assume. Like he couldn't think of a world where she would say no.
The worst part is that he almost wasn't wrong.
It's eerie knowing that Sasuke was back in the village. The very statement of it has blaring red-alarms going off in most Konaha shinobi’s heads, even after all these years of peace. It's one thing to deal with the vague notion that he is out there somewhere doing whatever he means by redeeming himself. That, at least, doesn't mean that when Sakura walks into Ichiraku Ramen (screw it, Naruto may have had a point about the quality in all of his ramen yammering nonsense) she runs the risk of being face to face with the boy… the shinobi who deserted his village, his friends, the people who could have been his family-
Sakura has tried to stop thinking about Sasuke, to shake him from her thoughts, but old habits die hard. She’s spent so much of her life trying to love him, and now that he's back - that she has a chance - Sasuke’s (and isn’t that funny? Sasuke-kun feels rotten in her mouth, like biting into an apple that has long gone bad. The affectionate honorific sticks in her throat, on her tongue, in her teeth. He was Sasuke-kun when they were children, when the meanest thing he’d do is call her annoying (it hurt, but the attention felt good, back then, back before his rot had spread into every orifice of his soul). He no longer felt like Sasuke-kun when there was a hand ripping through her chest (It doesn't matter the purpose, the reason, how real it actually was. It felt real enough, the physical manifestation of how he'd been ripping out her heart for years). He was no longer Sasuke-kun when he asked her to finish off a woman who bled for him, who loved him (Her and Karin had that in common. Karin deserved better. Maybe she does too.) and then attempted to Chidori her in the back for reasons Sakura honestly doesn’t care to discover.) presence is enough to send chills down her spine and spark phantom pain in her chest.
War fucks people over. Being a shinobi fucks people over. Sakura knows this. And yet, despite the pain they have all experienced… shinobi aren't cruel. They are efficient. They are doing their job. Kakashi-sensei, who has suffering written in every line of his body, who has more reason than most to have let himself be overwhelmed by despair and sink into cruelty, isn't cruel.
The situation is surely different for Sasuke; Sakura has tried to reason herself through it a hundred, a million times, trying to convince herself… but it has to be different. He saw his clan get murdered by his brother’s hands, discovered it was the deep set corruption within the very roots of Konoha that forced Uchiha Itachi’s hand - of course he would be angry.
(But he wasn’t just angry.)
Maybe Sasuke didn’t need a fangirl. (He definitely didn't.) Maybe he needed a friend. (Sasuke would have never allowed himself to have a true friend. Naruto was - is - the truest friend anyone could have, and he wasn't enough for Sasuke. Sakura would never have measured up.) Sakura has never found difficulty with naming her own flaws, she can count ten of them in the way she left her apartment this morning, remembers vividly how when checking into the hospital she tripped over the doorway in a very un-shinobi-like manner. People aren’t perfect, and children don’t know how to help a boy who’d lost everything. Children shouldn’t have to know how to help a boy who’d lost everything. That is the villages job, but the village has already proven time and time again how it fails every shinobi -
But Naruto isn’t cruel.
And Naruto had also lost everything: an orphan, hated by civilians, hated by shinobi, hated by children who should have been his friends because they mirrored what they saw in their world, and the world saw Uzumaki Naruto as a monster. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. And people’s responses to trauma shouldn’t be measured and compared - Sakura knows this, she’s been championing for better mental health support for shinobi and civilians alike, and yet she still can't help but debate whether Sasuke was Sasuke because of his situation, or if Sasuke would have always called her annoying and Naruto an idiot and felt superior to every person he met. (It's both. It's neither. But Sasuke-kun still feels like biting into an apple that's beautiful on the surface, and finding it rotten and soft and destroyed on the inside. It's death inside a pretty package.)
Sakura has made the lists in her mind - a paper ninja at heart, even now - listing the pros and cons of loving Sasuke. She has made the lists again and again, then rethought them, then screamed into her pillow about how she was being unfair, how she doesn’t know what Sasuke’s pain feels like, so how dare she judge it, and then reworked the lists once more.
In the end, it comes down to one simple fact: Sakura no longer loves Sasuke. She can't. She won't. (She wishes she could.)
Sasuke deserved better. It's a statement of fact, not an opinion. He was treated cruelly by the world, and so he in turn became cruel. It’s only logical. People have to make their own choices, and choosing revenge and cruelty was what Sasuke chose. It can be (and has been) a decision that's been judged by every person in the village.
He is a walking contradiction: pity and pain wrap around the emotions of nearly every person who interact with him (which, admittedly, is very few. The fear and betrayal tend to weigh the most in people’s minds). He is “The Last Uchiha” and he is also the terror who has turned his back on every good thing in his life.
But in the end, no matter who deserved what, Sakura can’t love him anymore. Not when “annoying” echos in her mind whenever she talks to people, not when her chest aches from the phantom pain of his arm bursting through her ribcage. Not when he no longer knows her. (Did he ever? Kakashi-sensei had them introduce themselves to one another on the first day, but Sakura knows her answer had been lackluster. Vague and full of frivolities that a shinobi can't afford. Sasuke had been shocked when she destroyed the ground with one fist. He probably doesn’t even know her favorite food, her favorite color, or her birthday.)
Sasuke has been in the village for over a month this time around. It's a new record, and the warning sirens in Sakura’s head have dimmed to a dull buzzing. She still can't look him in the eyes - eyes that used to look at her with what she once thought to be the beginnings of fondness, then later with anger and hate and, most recently, a terrifying, desolate blankness. It's the blankness that keeps her from looking him in the eyes.
Whenever they talk - which only happens when Naruto invites them both somewhere and fails to mention their third will be joining - it's stilted. Awkward. He doesn’t ask about her. Doesn’t talk to her directly. She doesn't look at him directly. He doesn't know her at all and she knows him too well.
It all came to a head on a Tuesday.
Sakura’s “twelve” hour shift had her stumbling through her door twenty minutes to midnight on Monday, post however-many surgeries and too drained of chakra and energy to even run across the rooftops (hence her long walk home). She had downed a cup of instant noodles, gave thanks to Naruto for his insistence of keeping her pantry well-stocked with them, then collapsed on her bed, too exhausted to even change clothes. Then, a mere seven hours into her normal ten hour recovery rest, there is a knock on her door. And when Sakura wakes up briefly (even an exhausted shinobi is a light sleeper) she decides to not even designate it with an answer.
And then there is another knock. More insistent. Everyone who matters knows that Tuesday is Sakura’s day of rest. It’s the only day of the week she has entirely off and it's an unspoken rule to Not Bother Sakura unless it is past noon.
There is another knock on the door. The door knob rattles. Sakura heaves herself out of bed with a newfound sense of urgency, because if a person is that insistent then there must be something wrong.
(If the world isn’t being attacked by another god, then that person urgently needs to be smacked into Wednesday, when Sakura can be bothered to be awake.)
Barely managing to temper her strength in time, Sakura flings open the door, mentally preparing herself to heal any wound that was so important it needed to interrupt her Tuesday. Instead, she's met with Sasuke’s (horrifyingly blank eyes) judgemental eyebrow raise, looking very much not critically injured.
“What did the door do to you?” It is said with an air of superiority, as if he could never imagine being reduced to flinging open a door in such a manner, when Sakura knows that Sasuke’s version of letting out anger is to commit attempted-murder and honestly one of those is much worse-
“Nothing. Something wrong?”
Sakura is not prepared for any interaction with Sasuke at this moment. She’s still spiteful and angry, going on tirades in her mind that she'd never dare to say out loud.
“Nothing is wrong.” He stands there. If he wasn't ruined from expressing emotion as a child he’d be rocking on the ball of his feet, waiting for something to happen. He used to do that when they first entered the Academy. Then his family was murdered, and the rocking stopped.
“Are you going to invite me in?”
Ah, that’s it. Sakura wasn’t planning on inviting him in, but something about Sasuke makes it hard to say no to him. That’s always been her problem with him. She can’t refuse him, and he is always refusing her.
“Sure, I guess.”
Sakura’s apartment is spotless - it always is - yet she can’t help her eyes from sweeping over the area, mentally trying to figure out if her home will make a good first impression on Sasuke-k-
“So, what are you here for?” Sakura interrupts that train of thought, the annoyance at her own thinking and inability to move on from him bleeding into her voice. If Sasuke was surprised by her tone, he didn’t show it, but Sakura wanted to be able to convince herself that the way he wet his lips before speaking had something to do with it.
“I don't have a ring for you, but I want you to wear something more meaningful and important, something that is a big part of me and I want to share it with you. I want you to wear the Uchiha clan crest on the back of your clothes for the rest of your life. Sakura, will you marry me?”
…
…
…
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Now Sasuke showed surprise - true surprise - his feathers ruffling up and his need to feel superior (Sakura pauses. Rethinks. She’s doing it again, trying to justify her not loving him by making him out to be the bad guy. In the end, he probably is and probably isn’t in equal amounts, but that doesn’t matter. Not right now. Not when-)
“You should marry me. You love me. I’m an Uchiha, you’d be an Uchiha. You’d live comfortably, raise my kids.”
In the end, if he was the bad guy or not didn’t matter. Whether or not he was cruel by choice or force didn't matter. How far his rot had spread didn't matter. Her lists and self justifications, and their combined cruelty didn't end up influencing anything. What matters is that he asked her on a Tuesday.
“You don’t know me, Sasuke! How can you ask me to marry you when you don’t know me, when you’ve never tried to know me before in your entire life?”
“Things are different now!” he sounds desperate, near panicked, “We - you - you love me. You said it - you’ve always said it! You’ve loved me since we were kids, you’ve loved me, that’s a constant, that’s never going to change, it’s-” Sasuke is hyperventilating, Sakura notes. Her emotions are detached from the situation, like they always have been - always will be - when Sasuke is hurting. Her emotions don't matter right now, not when he is gasping for air and rambling on like he can't even hear himself. She hates herself for this, how he always takes precedence above her own well-being. But just like Sasuke’s capacity for cruelty is part of him, this is part of her.
“Sasuke.”
Clarity. His eyes are wild; she can see the whites of his original eye, how both are now locked onto her, out of her periphery. Her own eyes are remain steady, staring at his remaining hand as she slowly moves into his space, letting her’s hands remain in plain sight. He lets her get close. Perhaps, one day, he could love her too. Right now, though, Sasuke doesn’t need someone to marry. “I’m going to take your hand, alright? That okay?”
His chest is heaving: he's spiraling.
He nods.
Gently, so gently (he has forgotten that the world can be gentle), Sakura takes his hand in hers, and loudly breathes in through her nose, holds it, then exhales. She repeats this, taking his hand and laying it on her collarbone, letting him feel the rise and fall of her chest, of the beats of her heart.
“Breathe with me,” she instructs, and after a while, he does. They breathe together and the minutes run into one another. It's five minutes. It's an hour. It was every day of their lives, and a single second. His eyes grow less wild, more shut off, more blank, and Sakura knows he is about to run. He has never been brave enough to dare to stay.
“I can’t marry you,” it's softer, this time. The world can’t walk on eggshells around him, but Sakura always has, and she can do it again now, “Because you are about to run away.” His hand freezes against her chest, growing stiff, and he’s no longer breathing. Sasuke is wary, like a caged animal, ready to lash out, “Maybe I love you, maybe I don’t. You trust me to not betray you - I’m safe, I’m a constant in your life. You need those. But you don’t trust me with your heart.” Sakura looks at Sasuke. Meets his eyes for the first time in years, not just looking around them. He’s taller than her. They used to look eye-to-eye as kids, back when they were on a team. Sakura doesn’t know when his growth spurt happened. In another world, she might have. He has his hand on her chest, just above the place where he once plunged it through her ribs, and not too far from where he ran Karin through. She doesn’t feel afraid that he will hurt her body. He might hurt her heart. She, too, doesn’t trust him with that.
“When I marry someone, I want to marry them because we trust each other with every piece of ourselves. You aren’t ready to give that up. And that’s okay.”
“When will I be ready?” Sasuke sounds achingly young, and Sakura’s heart reaches out to him. It wants to be his. It's always wanted to be his.
“You’ll be ready when you’re ready. No sooner and no later,” Sasuke wants to scoff. His body moves in the way it used to as a kid, when he was about to laugh in her face at one of her poor attempts at flirting or at Naruto’s foolishness. Maybe she does still know him.
“That’s a shitty answer.”
“It’s a shitty situation.”
“Will you ever marry me?”
Would she? Before Sakura can even ask the question inside her own mind, her heart has an answer:
“No.”
Sasuke deflates. It’s the opposite reaction as before; he isn’t bristling up trying to defend his stature as an Uchiha or list reasons why marrying him is advantageous. Lists had always been her thing, anyway.
“What do you mean when you say I don’t know you?”
She smiles, a real one. He never asks the actual questions he wants to ask. Perhaps afraid of being too eager. He was also ruined from feeling hope, but that was more recent, when it turned out his only aspiration of avenging his clan was enacted on the wrong person.
“It’s Tuesday,” it is a simple answer, so Sakura says it as such, “It's my only day entirely off all week, and on Monday I work an extra long shift. Everyone knows not to knock on my door before noon.”
“But I’ve been-”
“-Out of the village. I know. But you’ve been here for four Tuesdays in a row and you’ve never asked how my work is. Or talked to me. You talk around me when we are with Naruto, and you don’t search for me out outside of that.”
“You don’t either.”
Sakura’s crying. She’s not sure when it started, but her cheek is wet, and he reaches out to wipe it away but his arm isn’t there, not anymore, and so he fumbles, and she wipes it away herself.
His other hand is safely blanketed in between her chest and her hand. He doesn't move it. She doesn't move hers.
“I’m tired,” is her only explanation, and when Sasuke only continues to look at her, heartbroken and lost and scared, she continues, even though she has so little left to give, “I loved you when I met you, and I stopped loving you sometime after everything.” Everything encompasses a lot and simultaneously nothing at all, but Sasuke seems to understand, and so he nods.
Sakura doesn’t know how he feels about her answer. She’s tired of trying to assign meaning to his actions. Sasuke can simply act. He can, and he will - like any normal person - and she’s going to react to whatever ends up occuring. Maybe, had she been doing that since the beginning, this mess wouldn't have happened. (It's unfair to herself to think that, but when has Sakura ever been fair? She loved the boy who hated her and hated the boy who loved her, and hated her best friend when all Sakura has ever wanted to do is hold her.)
“Sasuke.”
“Sakura.”
“You don’t always have to know someone inside and out to marry them. But you should at least love them.”
And he doesn’t love her. Not like that. Maybe one day he could, but right now he is too broken to know what his heart wants. Sasuke doesn’t understand her words, but thankfully he doesn’t ask.
“So, before noon on Tuesdays are off limits?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Can-”
“I think we should try to be friends again.” She knows what he is going to ask. Sakura knows him, after all, even with his blank looks. She doesn't have to try to interpret him. Sakura wrote the dictionary on Sasuke, after all. It’s nothing (it's entirely) different from when they were kids, there is just more (just less) to decode now than before.
Sasuke seems pleased with the answer, then confused about why he is pleased, and so Sakura laughs at him. Before he can get defensive, she drops his hand.
He never wanted to marry her. He wanted to do what he felt he had to do, which is revive his clan.
“Kakashi-sensei never said our goals had to be lifelong.”
Maybe he will get it, maybe he won’t. Sakura looks away from his face before she can decide if he does or not. “I’m up now, so want to watch a shitty movie with me? I’ll probably fall asleep.”
He refuses.
(She knew he would.)
But now he knows the metaphorical door is open, so next Tuesday, exactly one minute past noon, Sakura opens the door and finds Sasuke there. It's not surprising.
He has a plate with him, but Sakura just directs him toward the couch, and grabs her own pre-prepared plate from the kitchen. They sit on opposite ends of the couch, and silently exchange plates as Sakura puts on a movie she knows he’ll hate watching but enjoy making fun of.
Together, they laugh at the resemblance between one of the characters and Naruto, then Sakura cries when that character gets everything they want in life and Sasuke pretends like he doesn't want to. Together, they eat the dishes they brought for one another: he has onigiri, Sakura has syrup-coated anko dumplings.
(They are her favorite.)