Chapter Text
Everything suddenly fell into its place.
It was like the sudden warmth of the sun against her skin after weeks of dense clouds, the cold of rain stuck to the walls of her home, the tips of her fingers, the throbbing scar on her stomach, so incessant that she forgot there was something that lay in wait behind that dark cover.
Sakura had grown used to the constant anguish of an old wound, grown used to the hardened shell of her skin, so used to it she had believed it intrinsic to her. She had believed it to sustain everything that she was and everything that she did and felt, everything that she deserved.
Now she felt it thaw and let herself soften under the lingering heat of a summer’s end, let it fade away with the gentle cool breeze as it rustled her pink strands and the needles of the pine tree, painting dots of light and shadow over their skins.
How had she endured years of it? How had she found normality, a sad touch of comfort in that absence?
Everything tasted better, fuller, everything seemed to reach deeper and for once settle in the softened nooks of her heart.
There was the murmur of Naruto’s voice, its strident tone soothing simply because it was there, had been there most of her life. Hinata’s doting eyes as she drank in his story, her adoration never waning even after all these years, and Naruto’s gentle smiles as his eyes met hers.
Her love for these moments of their own would have been tainted with pain – envy, she could finally recognise it now – hot-irons against the bleeding shards in her chest, leaving them achingly felt, achingly there. There wasn’t a sliver of that old pain now, only gratitude, free from the faults of her own heart, now there was only the serenity of warm September air, smelling of dry grass and sunlight.
And above everything, Sakura turned to the side, a strand of hair catching against her eyelashes, there was him.
Kakashi’s eyes crinkled in a smile, it was not meant for her but for the baby giggling in his arms. It felt like a gift with her name all the same. Naruto had invited them over for a picnic on his garden to celebrate Kakashi’s birthday, knowing he wouldn’t accept anything larger or more elaborate than that. Since their genin years, Sakura had known that he had never enjoyed his birthdays, but only now could she see how deeply it weighed on him.
That morning she had caught a glimpse of him tracing the faint wrinkles at the corner of his eyes and mouth, watching his reflection in the mirror as if it had betrayed him. Sakura loved to see his crows-feet deepen as he smiled, she found only beauty in the signs of the years of his life – precious, miraculous –, in how they were saved in his skin, as natural as the hidden rings on the trunk of a tree.
But aging set him apart from too many people that would forever remain unchanged in his heart and maybe that was what hurt him.
The soft thud of their bedroom window closing had woken her that morning, the light still that faint blue just before the sun rose above the horizon. Sakura had found him on the edge of the bed as he watched her with warmth and a quiet edge of sadness.
The same solemn shade of when he returned from the memorial stone had hung around him. Sakura had learned to recognise it in the past year, had learned to read the ghosts that haunted behind the grey of his eyes and that she still didn’t fully know.
She had drawn Kakashi to her and tried to mark into his body her overwhelming gratitude at the fast hammer of his heart against her naked chest, the warm flutter of his panting breaths on her skin, the pulsating glow of his eyes on her face. Alive under her fingertips, alive under her lips.
But that sorrow of those first moments before dawn had faded away and now there was no trace of it.
Kakashi wiggled his eyebrows in contorted ways, finger swaying in a lazy cadence to guide the tiny hand wrapped around it. He looked down at a grinning Hikari, toothless and joy made into a little chubby person as he let out squealing giggles.
Who would have thought that only a month before this man had refused to hold him, terrified that a single touch of his hands would break him? This man that now melted every time his eyes caught a glimpse of wispy blond hair and grey-blue eyes, who carried Hikari as if his arms had been shaped for it.
There was a groan stuck at the back of her throat from the cuteness of it, so devastating it was almost painful, closer to an ache, an absence, than a full feeling.
Kakashi chose that exact moment, for the sole purpose of furthering her despair, to lower his mask and brush his lips over Hikari’s head in a gentle kiss.
Another image overlapped this one, something violent that seemed to have been ripped out from Sakura’s own insides and bared into the open air of Naruto’s garden.
Kakashi’s grey eyes filled with the most earthshattering tender love and directed to a baby with white tuffs of hair, tucked safely into his chest.
It flashed with a clarity that had been barred from Sakura’s eyes for a long time. It was an instant of incarnated beauty and good, like green chakra mending the broken shards of her, old forgotten ones, wedged into a hidden crevasse of her heart.
The gentle-handed image brought those shards forth, brought them and placed them at the centre of Sakura.
It was where they had always belonged, ever since she was a little girl, each hand clasped inside her parents’ own, their safe presence all-encompassing, making up everything of significance to her, and Sakura had known that she wanted to remain there forever. Later, as she read of confessions under rain and happily-ever-afters, hidden under her blankets and away from the loneliness of the world. As she watched a boy’s cool eyes and saw in them a vision of perfection and home. As she burned with the need for a heart of her own that could shape eternal unconditional love. And finally, its last whole glimpse on a desolated battlefield, in her hands Sasuke’s blood and the shards of her broken heart.
An old dream made new, made different and its own, mended and built from the pieces of something worn and ragged, something that had once held only shame to her.
Kakashi opened her heart to her lifetime dream of being a mother, of building a home with a man.
Everything in Sakura stilled except for her throbbing heart, hammering against her ribs, wanting to leap out and stumble into Kakashi’s hands where it belonged, where it was its true and rightful place.
A fated quietness settled over the garden and for a moment Sakura was certain that they all could see this new clarity in her path, a dream of the future that burned through their eyes as much as her own, could see Sakura and Kakashi’s eventual child.
A choke burst through Naruto’s throat followed by a series of coughs, the man holding on to for dear-life. Hinata patted his back absent-mindedly, even a slight touch of pink on her cheeks as her attention remained on Kakashi.
“Your… your face!” Naruto erupted and sprang up with the emotion of it, finger pointing at Kakashi as if that would seal the reality of the unmasked face before him.
“Ah.” Both Sakura and Kakashi said at the same time.
She had completely forgotten it wasn’t usual for him to bare his face to other’s and he seemed to have forgotten it too, his unguardedness with Hikari unfolding for his parents as well.
His self-conscious blush betrayed him, eve as Kakashi tried to hide behind the casualness of his voice, “I thought I’d shown this old thing to you years ago.”
“Years ago…? Old thing…?” Naruto stammered between gapes. “You’re absolutely gorgeous, sensei!” His eyes widened at the words that had stumbled from his lips. “In a completely straight and friendly way, of course.”
“Oh good, because although flattering, Naruto, I am married.”
“And so am I! To a woman! My own child is in your arms!”
“You do seem to be protesting too much, Naruto.” Sakura added and her eyes flickered to share an amused smirk with Kakashi.
Their teammate erupted in another series of justifications, blended in with insults, until his wife managed to reassure him of his sexuality and their awareness of it. It still took him a few minutes of grumbling and sulking to finally pull himself out of his self-made embarrassment and turn instead into scrutinising Kakashi’s face.
Hinata swatted his arm and leaned into him to whisper, “Naruto-kun, don’t gawk at people.”
“I don’t care, ten years of my life, an entire decade begging and waiting to see that man’s face and it’s finally here. And not even because of me! If I’d known it’d be my kid to charm you out of that thing, I’d have gotten one a long time ago.”
“You’re not the first to think along those lines…” Kakashi drawled out, his eyes lifting from Hikari’s face to glance at Sakura. “Who would have thought my face had the power to make you brats settle down.”
Naruto continued to entertain himself with watching Kakashi’s newly revealed face and reminiscing on all their attempts to see beneath the mask, his voice ringing with a wistful tone at the memory of Sasuke. Only in those moments had he allowed himself to become any other teenage boy, silly and eager for one small petty goal in life.
“Sakura-chan, I can see why you’ve been so much happier since you’ve married.” Now was her time to sputter out her lemonade – sneaky cunning Naruto all too glad from it. From the corner of her eyes, she caught Kakashi’s hand as it stilled where he played with Hikari. “You always had a thing for pretty boys.”
The last thing she wanted was for Kakashi to be tainted with the ghost of Uchiha Sasuke, especially now, especially after her moment of epiphany.
“Kakashi’s not pretty, he’s handsome.”
“Handsome?” The man himself let out with an indignant high pitch. “I thought I was beautiful.”
Using only the piercing edge of her glare, Sakura said, ‘I will kill you.’´
“Hey! Stop having married eye-talk, you’re keeping us out of the conversation!”
Sakura rolled her eyes. “Shut up, Naruto, you do it all the time with Hinata.”
“Well, but with Hinata I know what’s being said!” He halted to think for a second. “Most times at least.”
She leaned back on her hands, head tilted to the side. “How hasn’t parenthood made you any less of an idiot?”
His eyes narrowed at her, before he turned to Kakashi. “Say Kakashi, if you can have any wife out there, why this one?”
He lifted his head, finally something that completely shifted his attention away from the baby in his arms, and he looked up to the sky as if truly pondering the situation. “Hmm, I’d say I got pretty lucky.”
“Coward.” Naruto’s head lulled back with a groan. “You always flatter Sakura-chan just so you won’t get punched to death.”
But something in Kakashi’s eyes as they looked back at her, intent and warm, didn’t spell out simple flattery. Their grey shone with honesty, vulnerability, and under all that – always under all that – there was guilt.
Kakashi still felt himself a curse to her, this marriage between them like a cage, like doom.
It wasn’t. In that instant where she had seen a possibility of their future, a dream for it, all Sakura had felt was freedom.
With a hum of delight as Himori-baa-chan’s ice-cream melted in her tongue, Sakura tracked through the crowds. Something caught her attention and she stopped in front of a jewellery stand.
Her finger glided down a silver pendant, a square made of nine smaller ones, surprisingly close to the crest of the Hatake clan. Sakura turned to the side, lips parted and ready to call after Kakashi, only to snap them shut again. It was the first time in months that she was coming to the market alone. Their shared habit already so entrenched into her that she completely forgot that he had been held shadowing Tsunade. A pout on her lips, Sakura turned back to the stand.
“Hello.” A pleasant voice called beside her.
“It’s a lovely morning, isn’t it?” Sakura answered with a smile, even if the woman was unfamiliar to her, used to meeting old patients and pretending she remembered them.
“Don’t worry, we never actually met before,” The woman said, transparent and straightforward, seeing right through her generic pleasantries. “but I know you. Hatake Sakura, right?”
“Haruno. And you?”
“Matsuyama Hanako.” The name was also not familiar, not even from Ino’s endless well of gossip, with names that spilled from her mouth in webs of stories or scandals and endured uninvited in Sakura’s mind.
“Do you need my help with anything?” It wouldn’t be the first time that random people approached her with maladies, in search for a ready cure or impromptu consultation.
“Not at all. I just had to meet you. Kakashi never introduced us and from his team you were the one he talked about the most.”
The sweetness of her voice as she shaped his name, let it roll softly from her tongue with a timid smile, was a sore beacon.
She was the woman Kakashi had been with before marrying Sakura, the woman she had teased him about. The woman he had been with for six months and had never thought it was his place to introduce her to them, even when Naruto and Sakura had begged him to, not quite believing such a creature could exist, wishing to see with their own eyes which mad delusional girl had let herself be snatched by the forever and intrinsically single Hatake Kakashi.
Now Sakura was seeing her, tall and beautiful, older, around the same generation as Kakashi. A woman that would slot herself into his side with a naturalness that Sakura, too young, too short, too pink-haired and too much of a former student, too much of an order to fulfil, never could.
What could she possibly want with her? There didn’t seem to be any jealousy or resentment in her expression, only pleasantness and an uncanny warmth when speaking to the wife of a somewhat recent ex.
“You were also the reason we were ever together.”
“What?”
“When we started dating, Kakashi told me he needed to find a wife for the clan restoration program. It was when I realised you were the one the Council chose that I finally understood everything.”
Sakura swayed with a step back, stomach quivering. “I don’t…”
“He was dating all sorts of women so he didn’t have to marry you.” She finished, her lips turning up in a gentle smile as if her words were a compliment and not the ravaging stab to Sakura’s heart.
“Not like that, Sakura-san.” She emended with a softness that didn’t seem to have any malice behind it. “You know Kakashi, he did it so you wouldn’t be forced. It’s so typical of him, only he would try everything not to marry a woman he loves.”
Her expression shone with fondness, the edges of it trembling with a hint of sadness. Most of all there was unmistakable admiration, the same Sakura herself felt for Kakashi. This wasn’t an envious ex-girlfriend needing to spite the current one, it was a woman that loved and loved selflessly, freely, unconditionally.
The kind of love that seemed to have bled out from Sakura’s own heart and into the desolate earth of a battlefield years before.
It pierced through her, left her stilled under the sharpness of it, unexpected and violent, ripping the ground from under Sakura.
“I’m sorry, I… maybe I shouldn’t have approached you, Sakura-san. It’s just that I always see you here on Sundays, with him, and he’d never want to come w— anyway, and I thought… well, I suppose I didn’t really think. I’m sorry once again.” She lowered her head in a stiff bow. “Have a lovely day.”
The woman disappeared as she had appeared, a mirage, a ghost of Kakashi’s past brought back to haunt her.
There was a vicious surge brewing inside of her. With each moment that passed in the shape of her heartbeat, with each step she took through the unsteady ground beneath, it slithered, fevered up into the surface of her. Sakura pressed a hand to her chest, harsh fingers rubbing against over the hard bone of her sternum as if it would scrape away the growing chaos of emotions, as if it would make them disappear like they had never been there before.
But they were there and they crashed like waves, baring broken pieces on the seafloor, the broken pieces of what she had thought her relationship with Kakashi was, what she had thought their marriage had become.
Their marriage.
They were married.
The reality of it pierced through her as it hadn’t in a long time.
Behind her lids were the excruciating images of a softness in dark eyes as he had watched this woman, of his touch on her, with careful fingers and other times rough possessive ones. How Kakashi had made love to her, not pulling himself back from it, making her body his and his body hers.
His choice of pursuing her, his choice of being with her, his choice of not having her for his future.
Envy curled like poison around her heart, vines desperate to erase a past that made him others’ and make him Sakura’s and Sakura’s alone.
Kakashi had never chosen her.
“Hey Forehead! Over here!”
Sakura looked up to find Ino already at their table. Her body moved, tugged by the routine of it. This was her moment of peace and quiet with steaming tea poured on pretty and fancy china, a piece of kasutera cake on her plate, at the terrace of her favourite teahouse overlooking one of the old, more traditional streets of Konoha.
How could Sakura find peace when Kakashi was stuck to her for the rest of their lives? He was stuck to the imperfect home they could make, stuck to an eventual child that deserved better than to be the fruit of obedience to an order, not born in freedom and love, but in a birdcage of obligation.
Kakashi had said he and the women had chosen to break up because they wanted different things. Wasn’t it also their own fault? Wasn’t that the core of their marriage’s problems, a point of origin that spread as spider webs and weakened their entire relationship with cracks, that their vision of the future didn’t align together?
His was founded in something that Sakura couldn’t quite understand and hers was founded in a melting chaos of things and she couldn’t discern the core of it.
Whatever clarity she had caught in her hands just a few weeks ago was only smoke rolling away between the gaps of her fingers, dissolved into doubt and nothingness.
How strong, how certain and real, had been Sakura’s place in this when a few words from an ex-girlfriend could bring its entirety crumbling?
A staccato sound hammered against her head and Sakura lifted her eyes to see fingers snapping in front of her. Sakura slapped them away. “Take those things away from me before I rip them off, Pig.”
“Gods, Forehead, what bit you in the ass? I’m just trying to have a conversation with you.”
Sakura glared at Ino on the other side of the table, daring her to bring the subject of her irritability up again.
“Come on, this is not new and I’ve been fairly patient.”
“I don’t know what’s patient about annoying me with it every time we’re together.”
Her blue eyes rolled. “You’re so dramatic, just tell me what bit you in the ass and I’ll shut up forever.”
Sakura doubted that very much, muteness would be Ino’s death.
“I just met Kakashi’s ex.”
Ino’s lips curled up in a devious smirk. “Oh?”
“Don’t ‘oh’ me.”
“You’re soooo jealous.” The smirk stretched in a delighted grin. “Is she pretty? A bitch?”
“Annoyingly pretty. And kind.” Sakura crossed her arms, watching the steam as it twirled up from her tea. “I don’t think it’s just jealousy. I…”
Her head turned to the side, gaze tailing the sound of children across the street, a cat stretching its body over the roof of a weapon’s shop, under him an old woman, sweeping her doorstep back and forth.
“He chose her.”
The instant of silence that followed her words allowed them to mirror the weight that they had in her heart.
“I don’t think he chose her, considering the fact that they broke up. You do realise you are the one Kakashi is married to, Sakura.”
“And without a choice.”
“Is it?”
Sakura snapped back towards Ino, fury and hurt flaring through the green of her eyes at the mocking question her friend at thrown at her. “What do you mean is it? If you don’t remember we were ordered by the fucking Council.”
“Yes, but there are a tone of other choices you have to make inside the actual marriage and he seems to be making them.”
A bitter chuckle rasped in her throat and the corner of Sakura’s lip twisted up as she looked away towards the street again.
“For fuck’s sake, Sakura, just tell me what really bit you in the ass.”
“No one bit me in the ass and that’s the problem.”
“Oh? I see what the issue really is…” Ino leaned into her elbows, nearing Sakura, a smirk curling the corner of her mouth. “Tell me everything about it. Is it some sordid kink even Konoha’s number one pervert is scared about trying out?”
A rebellious shade of red spread from the tip of Sakura’s forehead down to her chest, face turning even farther to the side where she couldn’t see those Yamanaka eyes trying to scavenge her expression for every little secret.
When they weren’t enough, Ino’s hand landed on her arm, hold tight as she shook her in time with her words, an attempt to jiggle Sakura’s mouth loose. “Come on, Sakura, spit it out! I always knew you had a wild side to you! I mean, it wasn’t even a turn off for you to have a dude try to kill you.”
“Ino, you don’t get it…”
“Then tell me!”
Sakura glanced around, the people that surrounded them were entirely oblivious to the conversation and the ones scattered along the street were too worried over their own lives to care about what was being shared on their table.
Her teeth clenched together, the words stuck to her throat, as Sakura remained attentive to the movement her fingers traced on the edge of the table and not the avid blue eyes of the woman in front of her.
“Kakashi and I… we…”
“Yes.” Ino emphasised with an eager shake of her head.
“We…” Sakura buried her face in her hands as she willed the words to spill forth into the open air. “We haven’t even had sex…”
The other side of the table was suddenly extremely quiet. Through the gaps of her fingers, Sakura chanced a peek at Ino and found her the perfect image of a gaping fish, slack jaw and widened eyes.
“Excuse me?” She let out in a loud yelp.
The china clattered with the force of Sakura’s fist as it crashed down on the table. “You heard me, Pig! And for fuck’s sake lower your voice.”
“You’ve been married for a year!” Ino countered with a hissed whisper.
“In an arranged marriage neither of us wanted.”
“With the sole purpose of making babies!” Again her voice rose into that shrill indignant tone of hers that could be heard all the way in Suna. A few heads on the tables beside theirs finally turned to glance at them. “And I can’t believe it took you this long to come to me with this!”
Sakura groaned and let her forehead fall on the table with a dry thud.
“Who would have thought? You two are always all lovey-dovey, it’s honestly pretty sickening.” Her answer was another groan but at least, Ino was back to whispering. “I’m guessing he’s the one that doesn’t want to.”
Sakura lifted her head. “He wants to,” One sceptical blonde eyebrow rose back at her. “trust me, Ino, I know he wants to. But… but he won’t.”
“Then what’s his deal?”
Behind the blue of her eyes, Sakura could see the rush of her thoughts as she tried to piece together the scattered pieces of Hatake Kakashi’s intentions into the coherent and understandable whole of a puzzle, an exercise Sakura had been toiling with for months.
“He has issues—“
“Clearly.”
Anger prickled through her at Ino’s mocking. “Don’t be cruel. Kakashi’s suffered so much all of his life, I can’t even begin to image how much, and that leaves wounds. He thinks he’s a curse to me, when it’s so completely the opposite, and so he feels like he’d be taking something that shouldn’t be his.”
Sakura felt powerless in the face of it, her green chakra worthless, incapable of reaching farther than the skin into the living and bleeding core of him.
“He keeps saying that we’re not even.”
“Is it true? Because if it is, I can somewhat understand why he would be hesitant, considering the reason why you’re married.”
Sakura shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t see how it can be true.”
“Have you told him you love him?”
Sakura only stared back, the words not fitting together into an intelligible sentence in her mind. One blonde and pointed eyebrow arched at her, willing something other than silence.
“Gods, Forehead, what happened to you? For all your silliness as a teenager, at least you had guts.” Ino flicked her forehead with a finger. “Anyway. You know about me and Sai, how difficult it was in the beginning.”
It would be impossible to forget those nights when Ino had cried her heart out about the fear of being incompatible with Sai, in a time when he seemed to hold no interest in the sexual dimension of their relationship, while Ino had always been a very sexually active person.
“I took a leap of faith then, because I trusted that there was a future for our relationship. A part of me was even willing to forgo sex altogether if it meant being with Sai. It was a complete delusion, of course, but that I of all people believed it was enough of a sign. Sai just needed more time to discover that part of himself and I needed to respect and accompany that.”
Ino offered her a cocky smirk. “And now if we could, we’d fuck every day.”
“Ino, please, I’ve told you so many times that I don’t want to know anything about it.”
Her hand swatted the air to dismiss her protest. “My point is, that you also need to figure out if they’re worth working through. You said it yourself, you know how hard this is for him.”
It wasn’t very different from Sakura’s own conclusion on the matter, but each day it seemed to tear away another piece of her heart.
“And isn’t it hard for me too, Ino? It’s not just sexual frustration, it’s…” Her gaze skirted away to the side. “It’s like Sasuke all over again.”
Sakura couldn’t bear to fall wholeheartedly into him and being left cold, abandoned once again.
A napkin slapped against her face.
“Don’t be idiotic, Forehead! And don’t do poor Kakashi the disservice of being compared to Uchiha Sasuke. It’s nothing like Sasuke.” Ino pointed a sharp finger at her. “That man not only cares about you, he cares for you. More, me and Sai have no doubt that he’s completely and utterly in love with you, and that’s probably the reason why he feels so guilty. If it was anyone else, he wouldn’t be this careful.”
A grumble slipped through her lips as Sakura crossed her arms, a scolded child, while ignoring how her heart hammered against her ribs at one of the words Ino had thrown at her. Her mind couldn’t fall into maybes and what-ifs, into delusional projections, not again and not with him.
“Okay, Kakashi’s completely different, but it’s still painful in much of the same ways.”
“Do you know what I think, Sakura?”
She only dared to throw a glance at her to show that she was listening.
“I think that you can’t trust that he loves you and can’t accept that you love him. For so long you’ve been living your life as if love has been banned from it.”
Ino’s hand reached for her own, fingers squeezing to mark her words into Sakura, blues eyes firm even if there was still an edge of softness in them.
“You can have a happy ending, Sakura. You deserve it.”
The wood on their front door was slightly chipped, with the pad of her finger Sakura smoothed it down until it became unnoticeable even under the close scrutiny of her eyes. But the movement of her finger didn’t stop, rubbing back and forth over that one spot.
It made her no less pacified, no less certain of the ground where she stepped. Her forehead leaned against the cool wood, his lightning chakra tingling through her skin. She hadn’t even had time to rearrange her pieces or tuck away the shards of them under a crevasse of her chest.
“I’m home.” Sakura called out as she opened the door, as any other day, the routine imbibed into her body.
“Welcome home, Sakura.” Kakashi answered back from the living room.
A practiced smile was already on her lips as she passed through the dining area for the kitchen, craning her neck to show it to him and facing forward again once she was certain he had seen it.
The groceries were barely down on the counter when Kakashi’s voice sounded from behind her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
His silence was a demand and she glanced over her shoulder to see his raised eyebrow, shoulder leaning on the frame of the door. The first thing she noticed, against the safety of her own heart, was that Kakashi hadn’t miraculously stopped being painfully handsome. Without the express order of her mind, Sakura’s eyes traced a path down his chest, stretching out the fitted fabric of his undershirt, and along his naked arms, crossed over his stomach, their corded muscles perfectly carved from pale, scarred skin.
“Just some issues with the clinic’s construction, another delay.” It wasn’t necessarily a lie. Sakura turned back to store the groceries on the pantry. “Your day?”
“A bore.” Kakashi whined as he pulled himself from the threshold to help her. “I almost died from it.”
Sakura snorted at his answer, always the same melodramatic complaints about the disgrace of being the first shinobi whose death certificate would read ‘Boredom’ as its cause.
“Don’t make that sound in face of my suffering, wife.”
Wife.
The word was a wrench in her heart. Kakashi never let it leave his mouth without a teasing edge to it, and always the word alone, a twofold movement of veiling and unveiling the true weight of it. She liked the sound – the weight – of it, Sakura realised now, it was meant only for her, like two soft and strong hands moulding her into something dear, resting her in a place to belong.
Her head tilted back to meet his gaze with a cheeky glint in her eyes. “Sorry. You know I always have unconditional support for all of your whining.” Before Kakashi could pinch her hip in retaliation for her mock, Sakura added, “Husband.”
His hand stopped halfway, the word with the same blunt power as when it was shaped by her lips. Sakura had never fallen into the habit of calling him that, not even as a tease. His eyes watched her with unnerving intent, as if searching for any deception, as if making certain what he had heard was real, was genuine, while her expectant heart waited for a reaction.
His expression eased into a small smile, timid, and instead he pushed his hip against hers. “Flatterer.”
Kakashi liked that she called him that.
Husband, Wife, it wasn’t tainted by the surface that tied them together as they said them, that thin thread that made them married as an order from a council. She searched in his gaze if Kakashi could hear in them the depths of who she was to him, only Sakura, only someone that he had come to know and care as he knew her.
Every time her eyes lingered on him – these unfathomable dark eyes that showed always and only her own reflection looking back and not what moved in what he saw – it was a full movement of her heart, an ache to be forever unfulfilled, forever yearning.
His arm curled around her waist and Kakashi drew her to him, lips pressing to her temple. “Sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
‘Tell me you would have chosen me.’ Sakura wanted to say. ‘Lie to me.’
She raised herself onto the tips of her toes. Her fingers grabbed him by the jaw, denting the fuller skin of his cheeks and forced him to turn sideways where she could lay a rough kiss on his cheek.
“You’re just too hot.”
Another non-lie.
“Oh?” He asked, at the same time smug and bashful.
“Himori-baa-san made me promise I’d deliver this and I’m nothing if not diligent in fulfilling my promises.”
“You do love your promises of kissing me.” Kakashi whispered as he leaned down towards her.
His lips pressed lightly under her ear, Sakura’s eyes fluttered closed at the pliant touch over her sensitive skin, hand holding on tighter to his side, neck falling back, open to him. But instead of kissing the desired path down her throat, Kakashi’s mouth brushed along her cheek, in the shape of his murmured words.
“I’m glad to see that this time it didn’t take you a couple of years to fulfil it.”
His teasing was weightless against the gentle curl of his fingers on her nape and the touch of his warm lips just at the corner of her own, turned up in a delighted smile. Kakashi dragged Sakura’s body flush against his as he finally kissed her.
Their movements were languid, their easiness soothed all but one persistent prickle at the back of her mind, a long forgotten one that Sakura had never allowed to rise up fully, where it could only rip open possibilities that shouldn’t be free.
Her fingertips slithered between their lips. “Why did you ask me to kiss you then?”
Kakashi’s warm breath puffed against her mouth with his words. “Because I was dying and it sounded like a good idea.”
He tried to skirt around the barrier of her fingers to kiss her again, but this time Sakura needed more than a weightless non-answer. So she demanded and he gave in.
“I’d noticed you, Sakura.”
His words were simple and still the weight they carried thundered through the room around them. Her heart startled at their sound, it seemed unreal, impossible, a misguided fantasy of her wishful mind.
Sakura pulled back to see the certainty of their meaning in his eyes. Kakashi watched her with the mirroring heaviness, silver lashes cast down over the deep colour of his eyes. There wasn’t the sliver of a lie in them, and still it didn’t settle in her with the reassurance that she demanded of them.
Perhaps because there was something that lurked under the grey surface of his gaze. Was it sadness? Was it the same anachronistic regret that rippled now in her heart, for a different past that would have led them to a different present, a different future?
Sakura leaned against him, cheek on the curve of his collarbone. “You never showed it.”
Kakashi’s hand twitched over the small of her back and his forehead came to rest against her hairline, the creases of his frown marked against her own skin.
“You were with Raidou.”
The shadowy outline of impossible what-ifs – their mismatched slits of time and pieces – haunted around their backs. The ones that Sakura’s heart wished for in the secretive burrows of its thousand folds and the ones it dreaded, knowing that it could all have slipped away from her oblivious and careless fingers.
Choice was a violent thing, destructive.
Perhaps it was a good thing that it had been taken from her.
Her head tilted back. Sakura relished in the sharp raise of his cupid’s-bow and the soft curve of his lower lip, because there had once been a possibility where she would never have watched Kakashi this close, her eyes would never have been free to linger over his face and he would never have rested against her, surrendered.
She rose to the tips of her toes and kissed him again. Kakashi’s grasp on her was surer in that uncertainty, needier, and the fold of her arm around his neck tighter.
They slotted themselves back into their Sunday routine, if they didn’t the possibility of it never existing would drown them. Sakura sat on the counter, crossed legs swinging against the wooden drawers with the nonchalance of being home, Kakashi watched the food on the stove, leaning into her, sure hand on the naked skin of her knee. They talked and they complained about their weeks and Sakura wiped away the droplet of sauce at the corner of his mouth from tasting the food.
Everything was done with the naturalness of leaves on a tree, until, like a gust of wind announcing winter, Sakura was yanked from it by a single first note murmuring from the radio. Her heart jerked at the long-forgotten that sound, the very song Sakura and Kakashi had danced to on their wedding.
Today the kami-sama had decided to remember Sakura’s existence, pointing with rough loud fingers at the tangles of hers and Kakashi’s relationship, first desecrating her Sunday mornings through his ex-girlfriend and now refusing to leave their cherished afternoon flow in its easiness – easy because it made them thoughtless.
Their guiding hands poked at her blisters and laid her cowardice bare.
“Ugh,” Her groan softened into a chuckle. “Remember this one?”
Kakashi pulled himself away from the stove and she followed his steps with an arched eyebrow until he stopped in front of her.
“How could I forget?”
His hands settled on her waist, each strong finger burning through the thin fabric of her dress, and lifted her without effort from the counter. The corner of his mouth lifted in a smug smirk, both times infuriating and irresistible, as Kakashi settled her soundlessly on the ground, dark eyes never leaving hers.
“Wife.”
He took her hand in his and guided her in a twirl at the slow rhythm of the music. Sakura rolled her eyes at the repeated gesture, but against her ribs her heart thundered in delight, almost too painful to endure.
It could have been the same song that they were dancing to, but the relaxed harmony of their bodies was entirely different. Kakashi was no longer terrified of snaking his arm around her middle to snuggle her to his front, the warmth of his body familiar, and their steps moved across the floor of their kitchen, unashamed and unconcerned.
Sometimes Sakura could believe that they would have found each other either way. Others…
It wasn’t that simple. The easiness now against the first uncertainty of before wasn’t deep enough for hiding. There were misplaced pieces, dirt and hidden things between the fissures of their apartment, and today it prickled with a ruthlessness that Sakura knew wouldn’t let her find her rest.
It simmered in her fingers, the urge to pull at their interwoven thread and yank it with her enhanced strength, forcing the knots to disentangle out of sheer desperation, ripping the entire thing apart in the process.
First her eyes tried to find it on his profile, but there was only his familiar, everyday relaxed expression, lids heavy over his eyes, lashes white, and a hint of a smile in his lips.
Then on the hand that had settled around her own, warm and ragged against her soft skin, certain of itself in its obliviousness, natural and habitual, as if it belonged there. And it did, Kakashi’s hand around her own belonged there as they danced, as she dragged him faster than his lazy steps through the streets of Konoha, as he reassured her after a hard day, as she found it slacked over his thigh or the arm of the sofa and held it, simply to relish in how it intertwined with her own.
What did this moment now tell her of the future brewing behind his eyes?
Nothing. A hand on a hand was nothing.
Had he danced with his ex too? Had he watched the soap-opera with her? Gone to the market? Had he coaxed her into it as he did with Sakura? Had they cuddled, kissed, fucked?
It didn’t matter what they had done, they weren’t doing it now. Kakashi was here with her, married to her, his body touching hers.
With her and without a choice.
“We’ve been married for a year and I still don’t know what you want with this.” The words flowed through her mouth without thought, already rehearsed too many times, ready to spill out for too long.
Kakashi simply turned his head to watch her, as if he had already expected it. “Do you know what you want?”
He had her there. Sakura had no idea. There were new dreams simmering in her of a child, but they were covered in a veil of unreality and distance. They held the shape of something that would always belong only in the future, something that would never overcome its nature as a dream and materialise into reality.
Sakura let out a small exasperated chuckle. “It’s so annoying…”
The uncertainty of it terrified her. A single year ago her future was a clear line forward and now all she could see were tangled knots and, at their centre, them.
“I don’t mind it.” Kakashi said with a shrug. “I like the process of finding out.”
Her head fell back with a groan. “You’re even more annoying.”
Her hand slipped from his to hit him in the shoulder. His fingers, unlike the soft weightless hold of before, clamped around her wrist, sending lightning down her arm, branding the mark of each finger into her skin.
“And a liar.” Because Sakura had been the one that wanted to embody that philosophy in their relationship.
If he wasn’t the one erecting walls between the natural flow of them, Kakashi would have followed the look in her eyes and acknowledge the sound of her gasp at his sudden grip. He would have coaxed her arm above her head, pin it to the cabinets with a squeeze of her wrist, before crashing his lips to hers.
Instead, he chuckled and continued with their swaying back and forth, thumb brushing lazy tingling circles on her knuckles.
Always back and forth. Tonight more back than forth.
The low rumbles of his voice fell into a murmur as he mimicked the song, just as he had done on the night of their wedding.
“I’m not free but who wants to be? You’re everything that’s right for me.” His breath teased the fine hairs at her hairline and brushed against her skin, the lyrics more whispered out than sang. “I belong to you.”
There was no dip back this time, no sliver of playfulness in his gesture.
“I mean it, Sakura.”
Kakashi’s lips continued to brush against her forehead as he breathed in once and locked the air inside his lungs, before letting it out in a long sigh.
“And I meant it then.”
A gasp wanted to stagger out of her throat, but it was stuck there. The only thing that Sakura had to show for the meaning of his words were her parted lips.
How could Kakashi whisper these things, brand them into her skin, and fall short in his way of acting on them? Without it, they couldn’t linger in her body, couldn’t settle in her heart.
“You’re not free, that is true, Kakashi,” The world had simply thrown him into it and shaped them into fitting like ragged pieces in a wheel. Sakura traced the edge of his cheek with the back of his fingers. “but do you belong to me?”
His eyes fluttered closed at her touch, he leaned into her palm, “If you’ll have me.”
“Then will you not give in to me, my dear?” Her voice trembled with a plea. “Freely and wholeheartedly.”
Sakura’s thumb pressed down on the soft raise of his lower lip and her eyes lifted to his, sharing all the burning desire that fevered in her for him.
“Fully.”
Kakashi’s movements faltered with what he saw written there.
“Sakura.”
Everything in her crashed with the sound of her name in his voice, her name as a warning, as a reprimand, as rejection.
Where was the love that Ino saw?
It had been an illusion to think things between them were fine, their relationship solid and certain, when there was this constant looming point of war between them, tugging each one in a different direction, Sakura always felt as if she was being torn apart.
Her hand ripped away from his and her body squirmed away as his arm tightened its hold on her.
“It shouldn’t surprise me.”
“Sakura…” Her name was gentler now, a trace of condescension in it, as if trying to stop the first tears of a hurt child.
“It really shouldn’t…” She repeated through the burning ache in her throat, branding them into herself and trying to break the glass of her delusion with them. “Not even my own husband will have me.”
“No, Sakura, you know it’s not that—“
His excuses, his complete and utter incoherence, only made anger simmer in veins.
“Save it, Kakashi.” She barked out as turned her back to him.
Sakura stomped out of the kitchen, into their living room only to sway on her feet, hesitating. She spun around to find him right at her back.
“Do you know who I met today?” Her words left bitterly. He didn’t even try to see who it might have been in her expression. “Hanako.”
His eyebrows met in a frown, as if he didn’t remember the name. It took only an instant for them rush up, in surprise, recognition, and for trepidation to tremble in his eyes.
“I think she still loves you.”
“She never loved me to begin with.” Kakashi stated.
“I think she did.” Her look of adoration had been sharp in its openness, blinding. “You just didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it. I think that if we annulled this thing, she would marry you in a heartbeat.”
Kakashi only watched her, the lines of his face soothed into a porcelain mask, gaze flashing with his thoughts as he tried to piece together his options, as he measured his words in the same way he measured his movements on a battlefield. “Do you want that?”
Sakura rolled her eyes. “Fuck, Kakashi, no wonder you didn’t see it!”
He took a slow step towards her. “What’s going on, Sakura? What else did she say?”
“That you did everything you could not to marry me.” Sakura wanted her voice to leave her mouth firm, accusing, all it did was waver with the hurt smouldering under the surface.
“Of course I did, Sakura, I didn’t want to ruin your future, I didn’t want to cage you.”
“I’m starting to think you’re the one that wants to annul this thing and that’s why you don’t want to consummate it.”
Kakashi stilled at her words and Sakura’s tongue was heavy like lead, knowing what it needed to shape now, knowing that she could no longer run from it.
“Do you, Kakashi?”
“Only if you want to.”
Her lip lifted in a sardonic gesture at the uncompromising answer, so like Kakashi, before she turned into a glare.
“For fuck’s sake! It doesn’t matter what I want now! For once just tell me what you want!”
“I don’t.” Kakashi answered, voice low and firm, inflexible, the tone of a team leader. “I’ve told you before, I don’t. Haven’t I showed enough how much I’m committed to our marriage?”
“Committed, Kakashi?” Sakura hissed. “You won’t even fuck me!”
“Is that all you want from this marriage, Sakura? Is that all you want from me? Because I can give that to you easily. It’s all I’ve ever given women. It’s all I’ve ever known how to give.”
“Then why won’t you give it to me, the woman you’re married to? I’m sorry I’m not like the genius Copy-ninja and don’t understand these complicated mind-games. Is this like Kiba said, are we just a sensei and his student, playing house? Is that why it’s different?”
His eyebrows furrowed down in anger, the rush of his words wavering with it. “You think this is a game to me?”
“Then what is it, Kakashi!” Sakura yelled, her voice rough against her throat and echoing through the walls of the room.
Finally Sakura gave name and voice to her fear, finally her fingers reached to yank away the veil where he hid, the one she had let remain there because she was terrified of the possible truth that loomed beneath it.
But Kakashi had spent all of his life hiding, had moulded all of himself into it, masks and illusions and hideouts. He was the paradigm of a shinobi and with the first wave of her yell he became a marble statue, not a piece of him moving. It was just as on that night he had returned home soaked in blood, a porcelain mask stuck to the skin of his face.
Nothing passed behind his eyes even as they remained pinned to her own.
“Would you ever have chosen me?”
At the weakened whisper of her voice, something shattered in him. The lines of his face distorted, heart-broken. “Sakura…”
“Tell me.” A tremble, a plea.
All that met her was silence.
Sakura clenched her teeth closed against the burning lump tearing her throat apart, but she wouldn’t let it rise to her eyes. Never again would she let it rise because of a man, would she let one tear her apart and breach through the core of her weakness, the core of her pain.
“Would you have wanted that from me, then, Sakura? Would you have wanted for me to choose you out of my own will and with that taken away your own?”
Kakashi stumbled back and sank into the cushions of the sofa as a tired shinobi after a battle.
The silence that settled between them was heavy with the certainty that this time, this conversation, wherever it would lead them, it would be to a point of no return.
“Have you thought that maybe I also want you to have chosen me?” His voice broke at the last words, barely leaving through the tightness in his throat. “That it’s the thing I wish for the most? And it’s the one thing I know I’ll never have?”
She hadn’t. His guilt was a constant spectre in their relationship but Sakura had only ever seen in it an unfolding repetition of all the guilt that reigned in his life, in his relationships, a habit, a scar, a familiar shape for something that was new. She had never seen in it a reflection of her own terror in face of rejection, her own terror in face of being unlovable.
“But you have it already. I am choosing you, Kakashi.”
His eyes lowered, hiding away from her probing ones. Even unmasked, his face bared to her, Kakashi was unreadable, so far away from her that the mere inches of space between them felt like oceans, impossible to breach, and he irretrievable.
“Why can’t you see it? Why do you keep slipping away from my fingers?”
Sakura’s hands reached for his face, fingers resting on his cheeks, his skin cold, like the surface of a mask. With her hold, she guided his head up and in line with hers, guided his eyes to meet her own.
“Choose us, Kakashi. We already do everything married people do. All except this. So tell me,”
She didn’t stop moving into him, one knee pressing down beside the left side of him and the other the right. Kakashi didn’t stop her as Sakura hovered above him, his hands slack over the cushions where they didn’t touch her, unmoving.
“why draw the line here?”
She lowered herself until she was straddling him, a small hint of a gasp the only sign that Kakashi felt the weight of her body on him. Her hands held his face still, demanding that he didn’t hide from her, fingers twirling the fine hairs at the back of his neck, thumbs gentle over his jaw.
Her body slid against him, he stirred at that first contact and she ached, a swirl blazed low in her belly.
It would be easier to understand it if Kakashi was lying about wanting her and making a pathetic attempt at sparing her feelings.
With all that pent up frustration in him, it didn’t take much to feel him harden against her, the fabric of her dress bunched up over his lap. Sometimes he tried to hide it from her, Sakura noticed and she pretended that she didn’t, being patient, being understanding when she didn’t understand any of it.
But today she was angry, today she was hurt and today she was breaking.
Her hips undulated into him and his fingers sank into her hips, a grunt of strain hidden against his throat, a slight tremble covering his frame. Sakura’s forehead came to rest on his, a small breath slipping through her lips and into the sliver of air between them, as she grinded against him again.
“How are we not even when we both want this the same?”
Sakura let the sign of their shared desires meet, only the thin fabric of her underwear and of his pants between them.
His eyes closed, expression clenched as if it pained him.
“Sakura…”
Her movements stopped, she didn’t want this. Their night together after the celebration of the Council’s approval of her project only marked that into her. Sakura didn’t want to rip it out from him, didn’t want it to be about him reaching the breaking point of his restraint and letting go because his body demanded it when all of him wasn’t there.
Sakura wanted it to be because Kakashi wanted her and he wanted to give himself to her, freely, wholeheartedly.
Kakashi looked down and her hands glided away from his face, to his chest. He watched the movement of his calloused fingers as they glided in gentle ups and downs over the skin of her thighs. Almost in disbelief, as if it was the first time he was doing it, the first time he was noticing that he was doing it.
“I asked you to kiss me then and… everything.”
His fingers twitched against her at the same time that her heart stilled at his words, as if they had both realised simultaneously what he was saying.
“I meant everything then, because…”
His expression creased into a grimace, brow furrowed in pain and the corners of his lips dragged down. Kakashi lifted his head up to meet her eyes and their colour shuddered with what felt like fear.
“I loved you then, Sakura.”
It left him as a shuddering breath. His lids closed, when his eyes opened once again, nothing moved behind them.
“I’ve been in love with you since before we married.”
His voice was even, inconsequential, only Kakashi would confess something this earthshattering with the same tone he did when relaying her the weather report.
“What?”
“You heard me, Sakura.”
She sprung away from his lap, her lip quivered as it curled over her teeth, between fury and hurt. “Don’t lie to me.” Sakura growled.
His face sharped, the hardness of his eyes offended, Kakashi stood too. “I’m not lying.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Of course it’s not impossible, Sakura.” He softened. “If anything it was inevitable.”
She could only watch him with wide eyes, trying to piece together the entire significance of it, her mind not quite understanding what any of it meant.
“I’m sorry.”
It didn’t seem plausible, it didn’t seem possible, and with how much she tried to push the pieces together, the idea that Kakashi loved her, had loved her, didn’t fit together. They continued to hammer inside her mind, a constant litany of sound, but any possible meaning had been rejected, made insignificant, and all that remained was an indistinct, overwhelming murmur of his voice.
“And…” Kakashi began, voice trailing off with a tremble.
His hands curled into tight fists, head slumping down and away from her. His bangs fell to cover his eyes, but Kakashi couldn’t hide the depth of his anguish from how it pressed creases around the corners of his mouth.
“And even with how much I hated the decision, even with how much I tried to fight it, stop it… Deep down…”
His fist, a minute shudder escaping from it, lifted to his lips.
“Fuck.” He grunted against his curled knuckles, like a shinobi that ripping an enemy kunai buried deep in his flesh.
“Deep down…” A grimace of pain, a burn of self-loathing. “I was glad the Council chose you…”
Sakura stepped back, an attempt to keep herself standing as her legs faltered under her. A jolt of shock sprang through her muscles when the dining table hit against their back.
“I’m sorry.” He whispered, still not looking up at her.
Her hands curled around the edge of the table, desperate for the felt and sharp shape of it to be a measure of stability.
“You should have told me this sooner.”
His fugitive eyes finally met hers, bared and vulnerable, resigned. “I know.”
Her tone lowered in a burning hiss. “How could you have let this thing drag on without telling me?”
“I didn’t want to pressure, to trap you even more. Don’t you think it would be a lot scarier if you knew I loved you then?”
The words in his voice again wrenched at her heart, the same shrill disconnected murmur that was only chaos when it broke past her ears. The pain felt physical and she pressed a fist against her chest, fingers twisting in the fabric of her dress.
“And you think me learning later comes with no pressure at all?”
“I was scared.”
The simplicity of it shook through her, the cowardice.
This was Hatake Kakashi. Her jonin sensei that had been miles away, unreachable to her, never turning his eyes away from the gore of the battlefield, never sheltering them from the death; her taichou in the Fourth Shinobi War, facing the burden of the lives of an entire division without once showing a hint of faltering, fighting gods and dead people brought back to life without a shudder in his muscles; her future Hokage.
Her future husband, who waited for her decision on the red bridge, drank sake with her in front of a shrine, gifted her his clan home as if it was a trivial, thoughtless present – only a vase with wild flowers on a low table betraying him –, all while inside his ribs hid the frantic beat of a scared heart, a loving heart.
He was entirely human and Sakura too aware of it, but in fear… in fear Kakashi had always seemed untouchable, otherworldly.
All of them looked at her and professed their fear.
“I was selfish.”
It was too much, it was all too much and all at the same time. Her head lifted and she looked at Kakashi with a plea, begging him to pull her away from it.
A sense of resignation, emptiness settled over him. He looked like a kneeling man, ready for the sharp edge of a blade. Sakura had seen those eyes too many times and they had always filled her with dread.
“Say the word and you’re free from me, Sakura.”