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gaasaku-fanfests · 5 years

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never sing your absolution

Title: of all the songs they’ll sing about you, they’ll never sing your absolution

Author: mouseymightymarvellous Rating: T Word Count: 11,437 words Summary: Sakura is born with a smear of dark, dark brown down her back: a strangely symmetrical blob of near-black. Naruto tells her later, much later, that he loves her, but she knows he loves Sasuke best: the two of them broken boys finding themselves in each other. Sakura considers the ragged edges of her half-formed soul, and wonders if it was ignorance or self-preservation that saved him from the way she would have swallowed the whole burning sun of his love without it having ever been enough. Sakura considers the ragged edges of her half-formed soul, and wonders how much more of herself will wash away under the weight of the world before she finds the matching piece. Warnings: Brushes up against violence, self-esteem and mental health issues, suicidal impulses, and co-dependent relationships. Nothing super explicit, but take care of yourselves. Author's Note(s): My general approach to canon is to cherry pick the parts I like and to leave out the parts that I can’t reconcile in any given AU or just simply can’t be bothered to recognize (e.g. aliens). As such, expect a fair amount of wiggle within the bounds of canon events and worldbuilding. Also, in case it’s not absolutely clear, soulmates are extremely rare in this AU.

Trope: Soulmate AU

She’s born with a smear of dark, dark brown down her back: a strangely symmetrical blob of near-black.

The midwife’s hands tremble as she wipes the viscera from the babe and whispers a prayer over the wrinkled, hairless head. She stills the apology on her tongue as she holds the child out for her parents to take, then turns away, leaving them to their grief.

In the bed behind her, Mebuki begins to weep.

***

Truths about the soul marked:

***

The thing Sakura will remember most vividly, later, years and years afterwards, is leaving Tetsu no Kuni, not actually living there. She wept for days, weeks, on the road, at times screaming loud enough in protest over leaving her cousins and aunties and uncles behind that, once, Tōchan knelt next to her where she was pounding the floor of the wagon with her fists and told her in a firm voice that she will never forget that if she did not stop screaming, he would let their shinobi guards gag her until she learned to be quiet.

It was like a hole in her heart opened up, then. Where once there had been something small enough that she could walk around it without paying all that much attention, suddenly there was something terrible yawning at her centre. Four years old, and Sakura knew better than to look right at it. Looking it in the face might mean something she could never take back, never come back from.

Sakura’s teeth had bit down sharply on her tears, on her screaming, on her grief, on the abyss inside of her that she did not understand, and it would be a long, long time before she learned to loosen her hold on it all without falling into it.

Tetsu no Kuni was running on bare feet through the wide paths of the family compound, giggling as she twirled out of reach of her cousin’s outstretched hand. Tetsu no Kuni was sitting crosslegged in front of Obasan, learning to breath evenly until she is standing in the empty of her mind or running careful fingers along Obasan’s paired swords. Tetsu no Kuni was Sobo’s fingers in her hair and a fairy tale in the air.

When they finally reach the walls of Konohagakure, Sakura thinks that nothing else in the world could be built as tall.

So she fixes the image of those towering walls in her mind and builds a copy of them in her mind and forgets there was ever an abyss at the heart of her, waiting to devour her whole.

Konoha is too big and too loud and Sakura doesn’t know how to make friends who don’t share her pink hair or her green eyes or the slope of her nose. She’s never had to make friends before, not when there were dozens of cousins to run with, bound by blood and peaches stolen from the family orchards and late nights tucked into bed together after a harvest celebration.

Kāchan and Tōchan are busy getting established, expanding the Haruno textile trade in the village and into the surrounding country, and they don’t have much time for Sakura.

Their new home doesn’t smell right. The walls are the wrong texture. Sakura misses her bed and her wardrobe with the bunnies carved into the door and the little nook under the stairs that was perfect for hiding in to surprise her parents when they walked into the house at the end of the day.

Sakura has never known loneliness before. Not like this.

There are no cousins or aunts or uncles coming in and out, or just around the corner. No familiar retainers sneaking Sakura her favourite sweets. No regular family dinners or stopping by the Main House in the compound to see if Sofu has receive a new ingenious mechanical toy for his ever expanding collection of spinning, whirring gadgets.

There is just Sakura and a set of busy, dusty streets where she doesn’t know the fastest way to run to reach the creek in order to dip her feet or to take a side in the ongoing, shifting, multi-alliance water fight where the only certainty in war is that you will walk away soaking wet at the end of it.

Loneliness, Sakura learns in that long year before the Academy, tastes like dead leaves scattered across the narrow paths through the forest Sakura explores on her own or food once the spices Kāchan brought with them run out and the trade caravan from Tetsu no Kuni is delayed by bandit activity or the salt of her tears stinging the back of her throat and carving canyons down her cheeks and into her soul.

The neighbourhood children look and her and quickly turn away.

Sakura builds the walls in her mind higher and convinced herself she does not understand what they see in her that is so imminently loathsome.

Sakura spends the year learning the geography of this new place, how it feels underneath her bare feet. She sits cross-legged in their new, blooming kitchen garden and breathes with the earthworms, opening her eyes to stare out at the impossible expanse of her mindscape, cool walls pressed to her back. She lets her hair grow long and doesn’t bother to tie it back out of her face; people seem to find it easier to meet her green eyes when they are shuttered by a fringe of pink.

In Konoha, Sakura learns to tuck herself away. Until she is all but buried under leaves, almost impossible to see through the debris.

It will only be much, much later, that she realizes the only thing she’s ever wanted is for someone to be willing to look hard enough to find her.

***

1. Somewhere out in the wide world is the other half of your soul. It resides in a body that breathes and bleeds and is not yours. (And oh, how bodies are fragile. And oh, how they break.)

***

“This is a new start,” Kāchan tells Sakura as she kneels in front of her.

Sakura wants to sink into the hand running through her hair in benediction, but that is what Kāchan said when they left home, too, and Sakura isn’t quite so certain she likes new starts.

“Don’t worry, Sakura-chan, you will make friends and learn. You’re going to find people who love you, at school. How could they not?”

Sakura is five years old and runs, still, with the kind of unconscious grace that only children can. Fearless and free.

She’s never thought to look over her shoulder in the mirror, because why would she?

Little girls shouldn’t be born with blades etched into their spines.

Sakura doesn’t know, yet, that with every inch she grows and every year she lives, there is a dark brown smudge on her back sharpening into stark relief.

“Who couldn’t help but love you,” Kāchan declares.

It almost sounds like a question, and Sakura doesn’t understand yet why she looks so sad.

“No one is ever going to love you with that big forehead,” Ami tells Sakura.

Sakura grits her teeth and hunches her shoulders.

Ignore them and they’ll go away. Kāchan promised.

“Hey! Are you listening to me?”

“You’re so weird! All quiet, with your dumb hair.”

Somebody pushes her: hard hands to her chest that steal the air from her lungs.

Sakura’s head swings up to look at the girl who shoved her, eyes wide, as she falls.

Oof.

It doesn’t hurt. Sakura knows how to fall without hurting herself by now. If nothing else, months at the Academy have taught her that. But just because it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

She swallows and tries to blink back the welling tears.

Why do they do this? Why do they hate her?

“Go ahead and cry, you crybaby!”

“You’ll never be a real shinobi.”

“Go back where you came from, we don’t want you here.”

“Wimp.”

“Baby.”

“Pa-the-tic.”

Every word is a blade, and still Sakura swallows down the hurt.

She’s not allowed to scream. She’s not allowed to yell at them to stop, to go away, to leave her alone.

Months at the Academy have taught her this, too.

So she sits and takes it, blood welling in her throat as she takes the insults in, makes the hurt a part of herself, turns it into one more stone in the wall around the abyss she pretends doesn’t exist at her centre.

If she screams, the void will echo in her voice.

Sakura dares not scream.

Kāchan promised.

She pulls her knees up and buries her face in them, pressing her open mouth to the skin of her thigh and setting her teeth there, all the better to muffle any sounds that manage to force their way past the blades in her throat.

She can no longer hear the words for the blood rushing in her ears, for the howling void in her heart that shakes at her walls, threatening to bring it all down.

Sakura wants them to hurt the way she hurts, but she must not.

Ignore them.

If they go away, maybe the hurt will stop and the void will fold in on itself, leaving her whole.

Sakura shivers, her tears too warm where they stain her skin, but she does not scream.

Eventually, Ami and her friends get bored, just like Kāchan promised, and they leave Sakura with a last parting gift of rocks and dust kicked in her direction.

One particularly sharp rock slices a thin line along her shin, and Sakura lets out a soundless cry.

The dirt makes her cough.

She watches them walk away laughing, tears on her face as she shakes under the force of her lungs protesting.

Sakura looks at the teeth marks set into her thigh and the blood running down her leg. Sakura looks at the girls walking away, so sure in themselves and their place in the world and their right to make Sakura feel small and weak and useless.

The void yawns in her heart and, for one endless moment, Sakura’s hands curl and her muscles tense.

For one endless moment, the illusion of her walls shiver, and across the plain of her mindscape races a triumphant, howling wind.

Sakura wants to rip their eyes out.

She wants to rip them to shreds.

But then a pack of boys runs in front of her—a loud, colourful confusion—and she loses sight of them.

As sudden as it started, Sakura is only just herself.

She shudders.

Around her, the ground settles, small dust spinners tumbling down to nothing.

Sakura heaves herself up and goes to the bathroom to wash out her cut, and does her best to forget the taste of iron at the back of her throat and the impossible feeling of the void engulfing her completely and leaving in her place nothing but wrath and the endless need to consume.

She is Sakura only.

Nothing lives under her skin but herself.

(And why does that hurt?)

Ino-chan’s hands are small but sure on Sakura’s face, framing her cheeks and her smile.

“There,” Ino-chan says, “no more hiding.”

Ino-chan’s love makes for much better building material than Ami’s taunts.

As for the guilt, Sakura swallows down that blade and pretends that there is no blood staining her smile.

Sakura loves Ino the way a monsoon loves the earth.

She sits in the dark of her bed some nights, and wonders when she will wash everything Ino is away under the force of it, how much Sakura loves her.

***

2. The only way you’ll know the body—a thing of blood and bone—that carries the other half of your soul is the mark that you both carry, carved into your skin. (It’s the only shred of pity from the universe you’ll ever see.)

***

“Sakura-chan,” Ino gasps, Sakura’s hair falling out of her grasp as Ino pulls at the back of Sakura’s shirt, “you have a tattoo?”

“Ow!” Sakura scowls. “I do not!”

That’s absurd, Sakura would remember getting a tattoo. They’re supposed to hurt. Even if she’d thought about wanting a tattoo, Kāchan would never let her, and they aren’t genin yet, not nearly, they don’t get to act as they please.

“You do too! I can see it!”

For a terrible moment, Sakura’s stomach plummets to her feet.

Has this been a lie? Two years of friendship, all so Ino can play a joke on her?

Sakura breathes through the impulse for tears.

“Come on!” Ino tugs her to her feet and across the hall to the bathroom.

Sakura squirms as Ino pulls the hem of her shirt up, but Ino just flicks her painfully on the ear.

“Stay still, and look,” she orders.

Sakura twists awkwardly, trying to get a good look in the mirror, blinking back tears, and. Oh. There’s what looks like ink at the small of her back, something sharp and pointed and terrible.

Sakura shivers.

She doesn’t know what that is.

“See?” Ino demands. And then her eyes go wide, her mouth dropping open in surprise.

“What?” Sakura’s heart drums in her ears.

Ino drops the hem of Sakura’s shirt, letting it fall back down and block out the sight of that dark, dark blade etched along Sakura’s spine.

Ino turns Sakura around gently, her hands fluttering nervously at Sakura’s shoulders. “Sakura,” she says, “why didn’t you tell me you have a soul mark?”

And Sakura wants to laugh. That is absurd. She can’t have a soul mark.

Soul marks are fairy tales, are legends.

Soul marks are things for people much more grand than Haruno Sakura.

“I don’t,” she whispers, shaking her head.

“Sakura,” Ino tries.

“No. I don’t. I would know.”

Except. Well.

Sakura’s never bothered looking at her back. Why would she?

And Kāchan has always been firm about saying no to certain pieces of clothing Sakura has begged her to buy.

And Kāchan has always insisted Sakura wear a shirt over her bathing suit. “To stop her from getting sunburnt.”

And Kāchan’s eyes have always gone cold and sad the few times the subject of soulmates has come up while Tōchan has looked away, and some days Sakura is so aware of the secrets that live in her house that she can barely breathe under the weight of them.

“I don’t,” Sakura pleads, trembling, hoping that Ino will laugh; tell her that of course not, that she was just joking.

Except, if Ino were joking, if she were to do that to Sakura, Sakura thinks her heart might just break irreparably.

“Ino,” she whispers.

Ino pulls her into a tight, desperate hug that leaves Sakura aching for more.

“I won’t tell anyone,” Ino swears, steel threaded through her voice. “Not ever.”

There’s something about Ino’s hands clutching at Sakura’s shoulders and the weight of her vow that is impossible to doubt.

Sakura stands in Ino’s hold, and shivers.

When Sakura trudges into the kitchen the next afternoon, her shoulders pulled up to her ears, her Kāchan runs the back of her hand down one cheek and crouches to look Sakura in the eye.

“Did you not have a good time at Yamanaka-kun’s last night?” she asks softly.

Sakura looks away, down at the floor, anywhere but Kāchan’s face.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispers.

She whispers so that she doesn’t yell, because is Sakura starts yelling, she doesn’t think she’ll stop until there’s nothing left of her.

“Tell you what?” Kāchan asks, but her fingers are trembling on Sakura’s cheek.

Sakura squares her shoulders, the muscles in her jaw tensing as she raises her chin, mulishness pasted over rage.

“Why didn’t you tell me about my soul mark?” she demands.

Wild emotions are not done in the Haruno family, but that afternoon Sakura slams her bedroom door behind her and flops down on her bed to scream into her pillow.

Her heart aches, gaping wide and much too open for the hurts of the world.

Later that night—long after Tōchan has knocked gently on her door asking her to come out, only to eventually give up with a sigh, and both her parents have settled down into bed—she creeps into the bathroom, strips off her shirt and perches on the cold, cold counter to stare over her shoulder at the image of her back.

A sword is inked down her spine: a beautiful, terrible thing. For all that it is flesh and pigment, she’s half tempted to believe that if you were to run your finger along the edge, trace goosebumps across her skin, you’d come away bloody.

She turns off the lights behind her when she finally pulls herself away from the mirror.

That sharp edge and the memory of the tears in her mother’s eyes chase her through dreams.

Sakura slams her stack of books on the counter.

The librarian manning the desk raises an eyebrow at her vehemence.

Sakura glares at him.

"Alright, alright kiddo. Put those peepers away. I'm not judging." He picks them up and opens their covers one by one, inking in the due date on the cards affixed to the inside before entering each title into his big official book. He whistles. "This is some pretty heavy reading. How old are you, four?"

Sakura's eyes narrow further. "I'm seven."

The librarian laughs. "Alright, sorry about that, seven then. Still, these are some pretty intense books. You sure you don't want something a little bit lighter? We've got fairy tale books and shit that are probably more your speed."

"I don't need fairy tales," she growls. "I need facts."

The eyebrows somehow go up even further.

Sakura wants to shave them off his face.

They're stupid eyebrows anyways.

The librarian considers the titles once again, and the bemusement turns to understanding and then something sadder still.

If he says anything pitying, Sakura is going to leap across the counter and take his face off, eyebrows and all. Even if he is a chūnin.

Sakura doesn't need or want his pity.

She’s gotten enough of that from her Kāchan and Tōchan as it is.

At least Ino doesn't look at her differently.

Too differently.

"Can I go now?" Sakura asks, tension in between her shoulders as she tries to keep them down from around her ears. "I've got research to do."

The librarian piles the books up again and pushes them to the edge of the counter. "Yeah, kid. You can go. Good luck."

It sounds like benediction.

It sounds like a curse.

It sounds like anything other than a librarian wishing a girl happy reading.

As she scurries out of the library, Sakura swears that she's never going to let anybody else know about the mark cutting its way down her spine.

She doesn't want more pity.

She wants to scrape the ink out from under her skin.

(She hasn't read the books, but she already knows that even if she could, even if she could rip the mark from her back, make her skin all smooth, unblemished silk, it would not matter.

What she carries, what she is—it’s deeper than skin.

There is no escaping what she is, and all that she is not.)

The books are a hard slog.

Sakura reads with her dictionaries spread out across her bedspread next to her.

Kāchan appears briefly in her doorway, but when Sakura looks up, she's already gone.

The grief of her presence lingers.

Sakura puts her head down and does her best to ignore it.

She's getting very good at ignoring her mother's emotions, those dark twisty things she doesn't yet understand. Not really.

The books help her understanding though.

Too much.

She wants to go back to before. Before Ino spun her around in front of a mirror and showed Sakura her truth, the explanation for her mother’s silences and the void that perches on Sakura’s chest, the one she’s always tried to pretend she didn’t know was there.

The books are a hard slog, but Sakura is clever, she understands what they do not say.

Her fairy tales spoke of love stories large enough to shift the world, of great triumphs and impossible tragedies.

And maybe they do happen sometimes, those grand tales.

But too often the books warn, all too often, all there is is a mundane disaster of two halves of a soul that never quite manage to meet.

Sakura stands breathing in her mindscape with her back to the plains.

Her walls stretch high enough to reach the not-sky.

She knows, now, that one day, they will not be enough.

***

3. There is no song that will sing out, no clouds that will part, no sign. The only way you will know is if you see it, the mark of your shattered soul on their foreign body. (It will be temptation to forgo clothing.)

***

Years and years and years later, she doesn’t remember why she convinces herself that she loves Uchiha Sasuke, not really. The reason will be tangled up with self-loathing and fear and that desperate, aching need to be normal, to not have her broken soul inked onto her skin for anyone to see if they were to look close enough.

It’s a foolish thing, of course, and not just for the ways that Sakura is broken. They are, the two of them, but children with knives in their hands, only ever taught how to cut each other to pieces.

Sakura’s parents only ever wanted peace for her, but peace was never an option for Sakura, and even before she understood that to her bones, she decided to be a shinobi instead.

Sasuke never really had a choice in what he was to become; his family made those decisions for him, carved him a path and laid it at his feet. The only decision he could have made was to not walk it, and by the time he might have realized that was ever a choice, it was much too late for that.

(Tsunade-shishō is the first person to teach Sakura how to hold something with firm hands and not break it with her touch. It takes her much too long to learn that softness is not a weakness in her bones but rather the greatest act of defiance she can make in the face of a world that gives children knives and feeds them to the gaping maw of War.)

Before all of that, though, there is just Sakura and Ino with an ocean of words that can never be taken back strewn between them.

Sakura would like to believe she did it for Ino. Split the two of them apart in a way that couldn’t be taken back so that the sticky tendrils of Sakura’s endless want didn’t strangle her into nothingness.

But Sakura will not have survived by lying to herself.

Sakura knows exactly what she is, and Ino alone could have never been enough.

Sakura knows well the taste of loneliness.

She drinks it down and pretends that it doesn’t burn her throat.

There are many things Sakura will never forget.

The crack of bone as she breaks Kiba’s leg is one of them.

The entire class freezes and Mizuki-sensei is suddenly next to them.

Sakura swallows down the hunger rising in her throat, the gorge.

She backs away from Kiba and tries to blink the tears from her eyes.

Akamaru is whimpering.

He’s just a puppy. Sakura didn’t mean to scare him.

Her fingers clench on nothing, on the phantom memory of Kiba’s leg snapping under her.

Her mouth tastes like iron.

Sakura is more careful, after that.

Better to be silly than to be a monster.

Better to stand back and look meek than to tempt her walls to ruin.

Three months until the end of the year exams.

Sakura is equal parts bravado and anxiety, she is equally certain in turns that she will fail out of the Academy and that she will graduate top of her class.

And then, of course, looming like storm clouds on that horizon, are genin team assignments.

Anyone who is paying attention knows that much of this year, with its various exercises and skill testing, has been about determining team composition.

Konoha has been at peace for longer than her class has been alive, and genin teams are built to last, not just the product of whatever resources are available at any given time.

Sakura keeps paperless lists in her head of her classmates and considers who she might be matched with.

Genin teams matter; they mean something. About what Konoha sees in you and what the village hopes you will become.

Sakura is from an immigrant family of merchants and samurai. She wants so badly to be useful to her village, wants so badly for her village to find worth in her.

So Sakura does what any self-respecting shinobi would do, and breaks into the Academy after hours to take a look at her academic file.

(It isn’t particularly hard: just avoid the regular street patrols and open a few locked doors. It’s like they’re just daring you to break in. Sakura wonders if they’re keeping track and giving out extra credit.)

The lock on the filing cabinet housing the files for her year-group is easy to shimmy open with the set of pins Sakura has carried in her pockets since she was six and they were first taught to pick locks. They were Ino’s second set. Sakura has never gotten around to replacing them.

It’s easy to find her file. Harder to not take another, to comb through the whole year, to consider who she might be paired with or to stow away knowledge for a rainy day.

Sakura resists, and flips only her own file open, reading it in the moonlight streaming through the small window lining the top of the outer wall of the storage room.

Sakura was born in Tetsu no Kuni, into the hands of a midwife in the Haruno family compound. Her birth certificate, such as it was, went missing at some point on the journey across the continent. Her worst injuries have been scrapes and a broken arm.

Konoha is at peace and has no reason to suspect anything of a civilian born girl-child whose family has been carefully monitored for the requisite five years after immigration.

If Konoha knows that Sakura has a soulmark, it isn’t in her publicly accessible academic file.

Sakura’s mouth tastes like ashes.

She carefully returns her file to its proper place, and pretends that she never went looking.

(If they do give extra credit, she never does hear about it.)

***

4. You will ache though. You will ache for them, ache to be complete. (All you’ve ever been is a trembling, broken thing.)

***

In the hours they spend waiting in the classroom for their new sensei to show up, after Sakura has passed the highs of Sasuke-kun’s presence and the lows of that-idiot-Naruto’s, Sakura wonders what their being matched to her says about Sakura and what the village expects from her.

It only occurs to Sakura in the years that follow that maybe, it never said anything about her at all. Maybe, she was just there to round out the numbers.

There are many lessons Sakura learns from Kakashi-sensei, and many others she wishes he would teach her.

She never does manage to learn his detachment.

Maybe it would have only tipped her closer to the abyss, but she envies all the ways he apparently just doesn’t care.

Sakura cares too much about everything.

She wishes it didn’t have to hurt so much.

When it’s all over, what will hurt the most is all the ways it was good. All the ways they were good for each other. All the ways they worked. All they ways they might have been enough.

As Sakura tumbles into a river screeching, Naruto and Sasuke-kun fleeing to the opposite bank in an attempt to avoid what will be her swift and sudden retribution for involving her in their water fight, she is filled with so much joy and laughter that it is almost enough to blot out the emptiness.

They might have been enough to keep her.

Until the stars burn out, Sakura will love them for the boys they were and the men they could have been.

It is hard, after all, to devour that which never becomes.

***

5. You will be filled with so much wanting you could swallow the world and it still wouldn’t be enough. (Try food. Try alcohol. Try sex. It won’t work. Nothing will.)

***

It’s not common to see shinobi wearing another village’s symbol in Konoha. Especially not unaccompanied shinobi.

Especially not unaccompanied shinobi who pick up the Hokage’s grandson and shake him like he’s a misbehaving puppy who is their’s to discipline.

There’s so much menace in the air, Sakura wonders if anyone else has realized she has a genjutsu poised to throw out over the group, enough to quell the violence for a moment and call the attention of a passing patrol.

They should be here, regardless. They shouldn’t need summoning.

Not when suddenly there’s another shinobi where there wasn’t one before, equally foreign and much more dangerous, so dangerous that Sakura’s teeth ache with the malice he’s radiating, ache with the way she’s biting down on the void rising to poke its curious head over her walls.

There is something empty in him.

Sakura wonders what it says about her that she considers this foreign boy with love carved onto her forehead, in opposition to the sword carved down her back, and finds something familiar in him.

His green eyes burn with consumption, feverish, and they pass over her without recognition.

The dismissal stings like acid.

For a single, impossible, unreasonable moment, Sakura considers stabbing a kunai into her own thigh, just to hold his attention.

For a single, impossible, unreasonable moment, Sakura considers going at him with her kunai, just to see if she could put a scratch on him. Just to see if he could manage to put a scratch on her.

His eyes pass right over her, to Sasuke.

Sakura pretends this is not one more scar on her heart.

Naruto wants so badly to be Hokage, and Sakura is helpless to resist his wanting.

It’s almost enough, sometimes, when it is dark and the campfire is low and they are trading in secrets, to believe that he and Sasuke-kun want with almost the same consuming absoluteness as she.

Maybe if she helps them achieve their dreams, they’ll love her enough to keep her.

Sakura knows they’re not ready. Not yet. They’ve been genin for not even a year.

But being a team means carrying your weight, means not leaving anyone behind, and Sakura knows there is no reasoning with the fire that has been stoked in Naruto and Sasuke-kun’s eyes.

Sakura thinks of the emptiness in the eyes of the boy from Suna, and tries not to shiver in the warm sunshine.

Afterwards, Sakura remembers the whole thing in flashes.

Violence in her mouth as she goes to raise her hand, wondering if any sacrifice will ever be enough to make Naruto love her the way he loves Sasuke-kun. The sudden knowledge that whoever has walked out of the brush wearing Naruto’s face is not her teammate. Sasuke-kun’s howl as Orochimaru’s teeth punctured his skin. The strain in her muscles as she carried her unconscious teammates, not daring to cry because it was only her now, with no one left to watch her back. Blood in her mouth and a knife in her hand, in her hair, like she has ever been anything other than a creature of desperation. Clutching herself to Sasuke’s feverish back, wondering if this is what it is to watch someone else be consumed by the void. Seeing Kakashi-sensei’s face and the relief enough to make her knees weak. Ino’s mind pressed so close to her own that it was enough to make Sakura weep, almost enough to satisfy her and not nearly sufficient, not unless she pulled Ino completely from her tether to be subsumed…

The Forest of Death is failure.

The Forest of Death is the beginning of the end.

Sakura remembers it in flashes, because it hurts to much to remember it any clearer—lest she see all the places she might have changed what became, what fell apart.

It won’t occur to her until much later that she should have been afraid of Gaara no Sabaku.

Of all the things to be afraid of during the Chūnin Exams, he is somehow to familiar for Sakura to consider.

She’s lived with an abyss at her heart for her whole life, it never occurs to her to be afraid of a boy who is the same.

Even as they race after the Ichibi, together as a team for the first time in weeks, Sakura can’t help but feel that they’re racing towards some other cliff edge.

They left her.

They didn’t even think to send her a note.

Sakura has known loneliness all her life.

It smarts, to learn that not even Team 7 is proof enough against loneliness.

Sakura tries to let the hurt dissipate.

She knows better, than to think anything could ever be enough.

She knows what she is.

She knows better, than to think she could ever be enough.

It’s easy to throw herself in front of the Ichibi’s rushing sand.

There’s nothing he could do to hurt her that could hurt more than the way something went wrong in her making. Her soul is incomplete. It got ripped in to pieces and shoved into two different bodies. At the edges of herself, she is frayed, fraying.

What is death in the face of possibly failing to ever knit herself back together?

Naruto and Sasuke-kun will survive her death.

Sakura isn’t so certain they’ll survive her.

***

6. The only thing that could fill you would be to press so close that your ragged, splintered soul could almost weave itself back together. Only then could you be something like complete. (Only at their touch will you know what it is to be at peace.)

***

Maybe, in their heart of hearts, Naruto and Sasuke-kun and Kakashi-sensei knew she was dangerous.

Maybe that would hurt less than thinking they just didn’t care enough to stick around.

(Maybe that isn’t fair, but when has anything ever been? Sakura waits at the red bridge where they would meet for two weeks, waiting to see if Naruto or Kakashi-sensei will show up for training.

They never do.)

The first time Sakura meets Senju Tsunade is the first time she ever truly believes that anyone could be enough to outlast the void in her heart.

Sakura would like to pretend that she begs the Hokage to teach her because Sakura wants to do good in the world, wants to put something into the world instead of just consuming it, wants to be kind and compassionate. In truth, Sasuke-kun has chosen Orochimaru and Naruto has gone with Jiraiya, and there is only one Sannin left.

Sakura is a scavenger. She takes what she can get.

Sakura refuses to be left behind.

It’s more than she’ll ever deserve that Tsunade-shishō is larger than life and so willing to love.

Sakura is fourteen and she has killed more men than she has digits and saved fewer than she would have wished when Tsunade-shishō finds out about her soulmark.

Shishō is drunk to forgetting, nursing a pain so sharp and old that when she occasionally pulls it out from the drawers where she keeps it, Sakura can’t breathe for how much it must hurt.

It’s an anniversary. Sakura isn’t sure which one. But it’s one of the bad enough anniversaries that Shizune doesn’t try to hide the alcohol, but rather shares a glass before leaving to sit with her own grief.

Sakura is present to stand witness and to make sure that the Hokage doesn’t die of alcohol poisoning.

And instead what she does is, into the silence left after Senju Tsunade has poured invectives onto a dead man, say, “I have a soulmate.”

Tsunade-shishō should be much too drunk to manage the sharp-eyed demand that she levels on Sakura.

“I think one day there’s going to be so little left of me that isn’t my worn away edges that I won’t be recognizable anymore,” Sakura continues.

Tsunade-shishō laughs at that, an ugly bark. She pours another glass and shoves it in Sakura’s direction. “That’s life, kiddo. You’re no different than the rest of us. You think the girl I was would recognize me now? No. No, she’d be disgusted. She wouldn’t understand, she couldn’t. You’ll survive it. You’ll become someone new. You’ll have to, because you’re too godsdamned strong to break. You hear me? Don’t you dare give into it. Don’t you dare betray yourself like that. You’ll live. You’re too much like me not to.”

It sounds like a blessing.

It sounds like a curse.

One day, two years into their reconciliation, Ino asks as she places flowers in an arrangement and Sakura reads through a splattered research journal with an intriguing thesis on poisons from Iwa, the air sticky and golden in the back greenhouse of the Yamanaka flower shop, “Do you think you’ll ever find them?”

She’s never asked, before.

She’s never even alluded to the fact that Ino knows about the sword etched along Sakura’s spine, or what it means.

Sakura breaths in the golden air, lets it settle in her lungs.

“No,” she says, finally, the word leaking out of her alongside her breath. “No, I don’t.”

She smiles at Ino then, and hopes that it isn’t as sad as it feels.

***

7. But it is a wide, wide world. What is the chance that you’ll get close enough? (Not good.)

***

It is bittersweet to see Naruto again.

He’s taller than her now.

He smiles at her like nothing has changed, like they are still the two kids who swore promises to each other, like he didn’t leave and leave her alone.

Sakura loves him and hates him in equal measure, and she swallows it all down. It isn’t hard, she’s all too used to swallowing down blades and poison.

And then there is Kakashi-sensei appearing like a ghost, resurrecting Team 7 too, and Sakura smiles and smiles and smiles, and tries not to bare her teeth.

There’s a certain crystalline concentration that is necessary to perform the kind of delicate and precise procedure that is pulling the poison out of Kankurō’s tissues.

When Sakura finally emerges, blinking, like a diver coming up for air, she stumbles for balance.

Kakashi puts a hand on her elbow to steady her, but even then, it is a struggle to stay standing.

Sakura swallows once, twice, and blinks rapidly.

She’s never been this shaken after a procedure, not for over a year now, since her chakra control and reserves both improved.

The world is swimming in and out of focus around her, and there’s a ringing in her ears, like someone in a distant room is screaming, and she can’t quite seem to catch her breath.

“He’ll live,” Sakura promises. “But he’ll need careful monitoring and some intensive physio to recover. I repaired as much damage as I could, but I can’t completely restore muscle tone, at least not without a better baseline to work from.”

She has a half hour to give the medical staff rushed instructions and to devour some food before they’re rushing, rushing, rushing, towards an end that Sakura has a terrible, screeching feeling they don’t want to meet.

Sakura has seen dead bodies before, more than she cares to think about some nights, but never has she been filled with this cold, dread rage.

The part of her mind that has been trained past exhaustion and fear is comparing the faces of the Akatsuki members against the list of known members, taking note of Naruto losing himself to his demon, making plans for how best to survive the upcoming fight—there is no way they are getting out of here without a fight.

Her vision keeps skittering away from where the Kazekage’s body is strewn.

Rage tastes like iron tastes like the void in her head and her heart screaming.

What’s a sword to the stomach compared to the one etched up her spine?

“Oh, child,” Chiyo-sama says softly once her grandchild is dead. Her hand is even softer on Sakura’s cheek. “Oh, child, what we’ve done to you.”

Sakura doesn’t understand.

Not until much later.

Chiyo sacrifices her life for Gaara, and suddenly Sakura can breathe again.

“You saved my brother’s life and fought for my own,” the Kazekage tells her later.

His green gaze is steady and catches firmly on her own.

“It was my duty,” Sakura answers, as if his recognition is not heady in her veins.

She wonders if he remembers almost killing her.

“I owe you a debt,” Gaara no Sabaku counters.

Sakura sucks a sudden breath between her teeth.

That is no small thing, for him to swear. Not when he is Kazekage and she is of Konoha.

“You will always be welcome in Suna, Haruno Sakura,” he presses.

Sakura dreams of the desert that night, and of an endless plain without walls and the moon shining steady overhead.

***

8. The hunger will be enough to drive you mad. (But, oh, you already know the taste of madness, don’t you? It’s chased you all your life.)

***

The promise of war beats like a drum under Sakura’s skin.

They can all smell it on the air.

Sakura prods her emotions, seeking out the fear.

She wonders what it means she is becoming, that she can’t find it.

The void is howling.

Her mouth aches for iron.

She wonders what she might lose, when all is said and done.

She wonders who she might become.

And then there is no time for wondering, because as much as she loves and hates him in equal measure most days, Sakura will not let Naruto face this alone.

***

9. It’s a race then. (Between you and the madness.)

***

Sai is covered in mud and ink and blood and he’s the best thing Sakura has seen all day.

“You’re still alive,” she breathes.

“You’re still ugly,” he manages between coughing up blood. There’s a blade through his lung.

“If you die on me,” Sakura warns, “I will bring you back to life so that I can kill you myself.”

Sai passes out part way through arguing with her about why that’s illogical.

Tenten, Lee, and a very embarrassed Neji are leading what seems like the entire camp in a rousing song about butterflies.

Sakura feels wild as she sings along, fire running through her veins as they shout in defiance in the face of the night.

He’s so young, to be leading armies, Sakura thinks as she watches the Kazekage and Kakashi-sensei talking quietly over maps in the battle room slash command tent.

Sakura considers how she is currently so covered in gore that she is likely unrecognizable, and almost laughs.

They’re all too young for this. They’ll have to be old enough.

Gaara no Sabaku looks up for a moment, and everything stills in the moment that his gaze catches on her own.

A runner calls for his attention, but he nods in acknowledgement before turning away.

It is an effort to move her suddenly leaden feet.

Ino speaking mind to mind with her is almost like coming home.

She averts her eyes from the towering wall beside them, and Sakura loves her enough to move mountains for it.

It’s almost enough to drown out the howling wind.

Kakashi-sensei looks too old as he sits next to her, the fire painting shadows onto his face, leaving him too gaunt.

Sakura thinks that his is the face Death must wear.

There are no stars tonight, the sky too thick with cloud cover.

Sakura enjoys the quiet.

“Are they still alive?” Kakashi-sensei finally asks.

Sakura’s mouth goes dry, and then she almost laughs.

If anyone could understand—

No. Not even Naruto with the demon who sleeps pushed next to his soul could understand.

Instead, for repayment for everything he has never said, Sakura answers. “I don’t know.”

There’s been so much death, it seems unlikely that if they were on this continent, that they would have been spared.

But then, Sakura held a man’s hand earlier today and wept with him as he died, and she was not swept away completely on the tides of her grief.

“Yet,” she corrects herself.

Maybe Kakashi-sensei doesn’t deserve the truth, but Sakura needed to say it out loud.

She hopes that is enough to make it true.

***

10. A race to get close enough before you consume yourself for wanting. (There might be nothing left of you by the end.)

***

When it’s done, Sakura can go back and count the days and calculate how long she spent with her hands buried in bones and guts or wrapped around hearts or just holding other hands, trying to keep people together or put them back together, trying to find someway through it all, to the very bitter end.

There are soldiers and civilians from across the continent who she will never meet again whose lives she has cradled under her breastbone, waiting to breathe back into their bodies. It is, maybe, the only birthing she’ll ever know.

That’s the easy part, the healing.

Tsunade-shishō had sworn to her, so drunk she didn’t remember the next day, that Sakura would survive, that Sakura would live.

That’s harder: the living.

***

11. You will find no happy endings here. (The universe gave you a chance and nothing more. The rest you’ll have to fight and bleed and die for.)

***

She hates him. She loves him. She’s starting to lose the line between the two.

Naruto has forgiven Sasuke, has welcomed him back home with open arms and an open heart.

Sakura is still swallowing down the urge to take all the hurt he’s brought them out on his skin.

She wants to carve it into him: a reminder he can’t ignore.

It isn’t fair, she thinks, that Sasuke can come home and pretend that that’s enough. That he hasn’t cost her and Naruto and Kakashi-sensei years full of heartbreak and regret and recriminations, that he hasn’t cost Konoha time and blood and lives. (That might be worse. They swore oaths and then Sasuke broke every single one. And then Sasuke dragged Naruto and Sakura behind him until they, too, broke their oaths. Not all of them, but enough. Too many.)

She hates him. She wants to pull apart his ribcage and crawl inside, be held next to his heart. She wants to occupy him the way he has occupied her: invading her heart and her mind.

The worst part of it is the imbalance. If Sakura were to fade out of Sasuke’s life, she doubts even a ghost of her would remain. He would not ache for her absence. She doubts he’d even remember her beyond a blurred figure in the recesses of his memory if he ever bothered revisiting their short, short stint as Team 7.

But Sasuke lives in her bloodstream, in her spine.

If she were to lose him, Sakura thinks, she’d collapse in on herself, under the weight of the emptiness at the heart of her.

She hates him, that she became—in part—what she is for him, for the dream of him.

She hates him, that she chose him of anybody to build herself around, to become something more than her body and the hungriest, weakest parts of her.

He doesn’t deserve them: her hands. Doesn’t deserve their strength or gentleness, their ability to rend and repair.

Sakura is proud of what she’s done with her own two hands, just skin stretched over so many tendons and bones. She just wishes that she’d done it all for herself, or for Konoha, at least. To make Tsunade-shishō proud or to beat Ino-pig.

She wants to be able to shatter the ground and not have the memory of Sasuke curled around her throat like a ghost.

The worst part of it is…

The worst part is that it isn’t his fault, not really. It isn't his fault the way she thinks about him and the way he’s eaten through her bloodstream like acid.

Oh, Sasuke’s hands are dripping with sins, but some of the least of those are what he’s done to Sakura. He never asked for, never wanted the power she gave him over her. He tried his best to shove it back into her hands. She just didn’t let him, kept watching her heart fall to the ground in her refusal to take it back, kept watching it shatter over and over and yet every time she cried out in surprise as it kissed the cold ground.

It was Sakura who constructed the facade she projected onto that shell of a boy. It’s her own fault that she ever expected anything back other than echoes.

She hates him. She loves him. She wants to press a kiss to his brow and watch him walk away without aching with it. She wants for them to be free of each other.

(Here a thing she knows: Sasuke’s back is bare of anything other than scars.

Here a thing she knows: Sasuke has never loved her.

Here a thing she knows: She’s never really loved him either, only loved the ghost she needed so badly for him to be.)

Maybe, maybe if she could have loved Naruto the way he wanted her to love him, maybe then they wouldn’t have ended in tragedy, the three of them.

Maybe if she could have loved Naruto the way he wanted her to, she would have something to hold in her hands that wasn’t just sharp edges.

(Sakura is full of selfishness. The only decent thing she’s ever done is refused to fall in love with Naruto.

She would have consumed him: all his impossible brightness, all his goodness, all his love. She would have taken from him until he had nothing left to give, and he would have let her, willingly or not.

For all his strength, Sakura knows that, in the end, he could not have withstood her emptiness.

She wavered on the edge of it, love for Naruto so burning in her breast—this impossible boy with too blue eyes who laughs wider than anyone else she’s ever known and who carries the weight of wisdom etched across his brow, this impossible boy who swallowed all the world’s cruelty and only ever learned how to reach back out with kindness—and she could have fallen, tripped, plummeted right into love.

Sakura wavered on the edge of it, the abyss, and, like always, she pulled herself back.)

But she didn’t.

And now here she is, standing on the fraying edges of all that remains of Team 7.

As she looks on at it, Sakura realizes that, even if they’d managed to keep it together, not even Team 7 would have been enough.

At the heart of her, the void is calling, and Sakura does not belong here.

She never has.

And staring at Sasuke, Sakura hates him for the fact that, for all the hurt he’s brought them, he belongs where she does not.

“Mah, mah, Sasuke-kun. Let this poor old man rest.” Kakash-sensei waves Sasuke off, sinking his nose down into his book as he sprawls against a tree at the edge of the training field.

Sasuke scowls, and turns back to where Naruto’s clones are playing what looks like a complicated game of tag with a pack of Sai’s ink lions and the odd gazelle, instead of actually sparring.

Naruto had promised him a decent fight, but it doesn’t look like they’ll be done soon.

Sakura wavers, measuring her own mood. She’s got lightening skittering in her veins, and she’s been jittering for a decent fight for days, but Lee and Tenten are still out on a mission as is Yamato-senpai, Sai only just returned, and Ino, Shikamaru, and Chōji have been caught up in clan business for most of the past month.

“I’ll spar with you,” she offers with a careless shrug.

Like it’s nothing. Like it’s normal. Like Sasuke and Sakura have fought each other so many times the edges of it are worn off and it’s more the steps of a dance than anything real.

But it’s not nothing. It’s not normal.

Sakura has never fought Sasuke.

Sakura has never fought Naruto.

Not really.

Not ever.

Even as genin, they were both so careful not to hurt her. Naruto used to try to let her win, and Sasuke was always so precise that he’d put her on the ground with barely a bruise to show for it.

So she’s never fought either of them.

Not in a way that was real: chakra bleeding into the air, so thick you can taste it on your tongue, with both combatants carrying wounds that one centimeter more to the right and they’d be dead, smoke and sweat and dust and grins wide enough to cut as chakra and their breathing echo in the space between them.

“Just until Naruto and Sai are done,” Sakura presses on. “Think of it as a warm up.”

She smiles then, at that, a nothing smile hiding too many teeth, like it’s a joke, like they both know all Sakura will ever be in the shadows of her teammates is a nuisance.

Sasuke stares at her for a long moment.

She wonders what he sees.

Finally, he grunts out a sound of agreement and walks away.

Sakura follows him and does not bare her teeth at his assumption that all he ever has to do is walk away and she will follow him anywhere.

Sakura is laughing when she has him pinned to the ground, his limbs disabled with her chakra bit by bit, his eyes spinning uselessly because when he tries to force her into a dream, Sakura nails him to her mindscape instead and fights him along that barren plain, too.

It’s only because he underestimates her, that it’s so easy.

Sakura has never had any compunctions about using her opponents tendency to underestimate her against them.

Sakura pins Sasuke to the ground, a glowing finger caressing his neck in a mockery of a kiss.

It’s enough to sate her, at least for a little while.

As she stares him in the face, his pretty, valuable eyes spinning and capturing her in this moment forever, Sakura wonders if Sasuke understands that, sometimes, hers is just the face that Death wears.

On the other side of the training grounds, Naruto and Sai haven’t noticed them.

Sakura stands up, brushes her knees off, and doesn’t turn around to catch Kakashi-sensie watching her.

She is tired of hiding.

They’ve never loved the lie of her enough to warrant the effort, anymore.

***

12. This is not a fairy tale. (The storybooks lied.)

***

She leaves because she can feel herself slipping away, slipping closer to the edge. Her walls are crumbling. The void yawns before her feet. Madness beckons.

She knows that there are people here in Konoha who could, who would put her down if it ever came to that, if she ever lost herself completely to the worn away edges of her soul brushing so sharply against the world. Tsunade-shishō and Kakashi-sensei and Sai and Yamato-taichō and Ino and Shikamaru and Shino and Kiba. Even Hinata if it were needed. But it would break them to do it.

Sasuke could do it, but that would break Naruto.

And Naruto, oh Naruto, yes he could put Sakura to sleep beneath the cold hard ground if it were needed, but he would never. It would break him to do it, and it would break him to not do it. He loves Sakura dearly, but he loves Konoha more.

So she leaves, takes herself to Suna and the man she knows could and would put her down if there ever comes the need.

To save Naruto’s soul, she thinks Gaara would even thank her for it.

Sakura thinks she might just be comfortable sleeping softly beneath the desert sun.

The wide stretch of it all is almost as empty as she is.

***

13. This is a collision. (You might find the other half of yourself.)

***

“Sakura,” Temari says to her one day when they have finished several piles of paperwork and are stretching out the kinks, preparing to leave their offices for the day, “would you please take pity on my brother and spend some time with him?”

Sakura pushes her palms a little closer to the roof, bouncing on her toes. “I literally have had lunch with Kankurō for three out of the last five days.”

Temari rolls her eyes with all the concentrated power of an eldest sister. It’s impressive.

“My other brother. Gaara thinks you hate him.”

“I don’t hate the Kazekage,” Sakura grumbles.

Temari snorts. “See, that’s the problem. You could start by calling him by his first name, like he insists upon every time the two of you are in the same room together, and maybe you’d be a bit more convincing.”

Sakura doesn’t exactly know how to tell Temari that she’s been doing her best to keep a certain amount of distance between herself and the Kazekage because Sakura doesn’t want him to feel too badly when the day comes that she forces him to kill her.

“I’ll do better,” Sakura promises, instead.

It’s a hard promise to resist.

She likes the Kazekage and his serious gaze and the smile that plays at the corners of his mouth when he sees her laughing with his siblings all too much.

Sakura should know far better by now than to want what she should not touch and cannot ever have.

“Spar with me,” Sakura demands.

Gaara looks up from the scroll he is reading, brow furrowed.

“Excuse me?”

“You need to take a break anyways, and I’m getting tired of thinking up new ways not to hurt Kankurō’s pride too badly. Come spar with me.”

Ino would despair over her.

Sakura can practically see the math Gaara is running.

She wonders how much of the equation is weighted on his trust that she can keep up.

He fought next to her during the war, at some points quite literally, the two of them side by side as they tore through enemy ranks. He knows her capacity.

Knowing has never stopped anyone form underestimating or dismissing her before, however.

“Meet me at the main gate in an hour?” he finally says, instead of dismissing her. “I have a quick meeting with the trade caravan arriving from Kusa, but I would enjoy sparring with you once I have finished and can change out of the ceremonial garb.”

Sakura smiles, wide and delighted and bright, and flatters herself to think that Gaara might blush a little bit at the sight.

“Wonderful! Thank you!”

It’s a foolish kind of impulse that has her dart forward to drop a kiss on his cheek, like he’s Ino or Sai or Naruto.

He’s warm and he smells like moonlight.

It takes all of Sakura’s self-discipline and diplomatic training not to leave the office at a dead run.

Sakura has been in Suna for more than half a year, on what truthfully amounts to a fairly bullshit diplomatic position, which only through the Kazekage and his siblings’ support means any real work or welcome.

Sakura has occupied her time consulting on some tricky long-term cases in the small hospital, experimenting with Kankurō and a team form the Puppetry Corps on prosthesis blueprints and the potential for neural integration, synthesizing increasingly more cruel poisons and their antidotes, futilely trying to learn how to wield a gunbai from Temari, eating spicy foods, assisting on construction projects, and occasionally doing some actual diplomatic work on behalf of Konoha.

She’s familiar with the various training yards in Sunagakura, after friendly and sometimes not so friendly spars with her friends here and generally anyone in the shinobi force willing to fight her (and, sometimes, attempting to teach her a lesson, much to their later regret).

Sakura has never fought outside of the village walls.

And she’s certainly never fought Gaara.

Not since the Chūnin Exams, impossible lifetimes ago.

He looks softer, out of the formal robes of office.

The scar on his forehead isn’t as angry as it was a decade ago, nor his eyes.

But there’s a violence in him that calls to Sakura.

She wants to bloody him. She wants to find his seams and take him apart.

Gaara tends to lovely, verdant blooms in his private greenhouse, the one to which he gave Sakura a key, tucked into an envelop with permission to use as she would. He is gentle with the children of his village, and spins them delicate animals out of sand to play with. He never looks away when, still, on occasion, Temari flinches when he moves too quickly or Kankurō quails at the tightly held rage in his voice in response to a particularly despicable comment by a council member.

He could be so, very easy to love.

Sakura knows better, so she’ll just have to settle for making him bleed instead.

It’s the only way she knows how to get under his skin without ruining him.

***

14. This is a catastrophe. (You might not.)

***

Gaara fights like a sandstorm and Sakura fights like a mountain toppling.

She laughs herself breathless as they fight.

No one has ever so lovingly tried to kill her. No one has ever dared.

Sakura once saw a foreign boy full of rage and recognized something in him.

She is only now starting to wonder what he recognized in her.

The earth shatters under her and Gaara steals it just as quickly from her, tools and weapons and geography passing between them, chakra filling the air like lightening.

She knows now why he insisted they take their spar outside the walls of the village: they couldn’t contain them.

This is how, she thinks, it must have felt to have carved the Valley of the End.

It’s like creation.

It’s like endings profound enough to reshape the world.

They fight for hours, as the sun begins to bleed the sky to black.

Sakura is laughing as, after a half hour of maneuvering, she finally gets close enough to kiss him with her fist.

She’s laughing, still, when the sand she’s displaced suddenly surrounds her.

Gaara is pale-faced and near trembling when Sakura stumbles out of his sand.

He catches her, his hands too tight around her wrists, something vulnerable about his mouth.

Her clothes are shredded, but her skin is made of tougher stuff.

Or, rather, there’s little her iryōjutsu cannot heal of herself, even with her seal untapped.

She is scoured and clean, remade under the setting sun.

“I thought I killed you,” Gaara finally manages.

Sakura shifts her wrists in his grip so that she can wrap her fingers around his own, their pulses pressed close.

“You’ll have to try harder than that,” she promises.

She wants to go up on her toes and press a kiss to his mouth, vicious and soft, to steal the breath from his lungs, to steal the vulnerability from the set of his chin.

“See,” she says, and tugs out of his grip so that she can spin in a circle, uncaring of her nudity, “no harm done.”

Sakura freezes.

The last person to see her soulmark was Ino, seven years old and terrified of the unknown, catching but a glimpse of the tip at the small of Sakura’s back, the blade still crowded and not-quite-formed.

She forgot.

How could she forget?

(The void in her head is howling, howling, howling. And her walls are nothing but dust.)

“Oh,” Gaara gasps, like the sound has been carved out of him. “Oh,” he says, “oh, it’s you.”

Sakura lives a lifetime in the time it takes her to spin around to face him.

Nothing will ever be sweeter agony that seeing Gaara looking at her, knowing her for what she is.

Sakura holds up a hand, and when Gaara reaches out to take it, all Sakura can hear is the clashes of swords and the sudden silence of a loud wind dropping down to nothing.

Gaara has freckles along the tops of his shoulders and dimples above his hips and a gorgeous, bloody sword etched down his spine.

The grip is carved with evening primrose, and Sakura has never found her blade so beautiful as now, sheathed into Gaara’s skin.

“Oh, oh. Oh, it’s you.”

Sakura dreamt rose petals and sweet nothings.

Even knowing what she was, she thought it would be soft. Even knowing that there’s little but violence left under her skin, she thought it would be sweet.

They’re tectonic plates abutting.

They’re a spontaneous chemical reaction.

They’re gravity colliding.

They are not a soft romance.

They’re a godsdamned tragedy.

How can they be a tragedy, when they end up together?

Against all odds, they find each other under the setting sun amidst a sea of sand aflame.

Kisses are breathing.

They fit like a blade to the heart.

***

15. Oh darling, you were made to be consumed. (You’re a funeral pyre, baby, and oh how you’ll burn.)

***

They’ll be in history books and myth and song, at the end and long after they’re dead and gone. Bodies less than dust and their soul moved on.

As they lay twined together, arms holding torso closer where sprawled between legs, nose buried in neck and ribs pressed close, fingers clutching shoulder, waist—as close as two bodies can get to losing all sense of boundary between them, skin close and sweat slick and suffocating.

There’s a content hum in the back of Sakura’s throat, and across the plains of her mindscape, a sandstorm is swirling.

She is full up.

They’ll be history books and myth and song one day, but for now, they are dual swords reunited, hiding from the world and responsibilities in Gaara’s bed.

Sunagakure cannot function long without its Kazekage, but there isn’t a Kazekage at the moment, just as there isn’t a Konoha diplomat at the moment. They are much less and much more at that. Two as one and one as two.

They will never be parted again.

They will ruin whoever or whatever tries to part them.

They will remake mountains and scour forests and drain lakes and dry rivers, if that is what it takes to remain whole.

And there will not be history books about this. The songs and myths might get close, but they’ll never be enough to encompass it, what it is to be whole.

Twenty-three years of distance and a death.

Sakura would take Sasori apart piece by piece if given the chance again. Take Deidara’s hands and feet and tongues and leave him in a completely empty room to rot.

She does not say “I love you,” because words will never be enough.

She’ll never have to say it, because Gaara is pressed against her, chest to chest and mind to mind, and the same relief is his, the same ecstasy.

Sakura came to Suna, knowing that if it came to it, Gaara would kill her.

Is this not a death? Is this not a birth?

Far above and outside, the sun is glaring down on the afternoon market crowds. They are not blades in the night.

Sakura places her mouth at Gaara’s temple, tastes the salt there, feels their hearts beating.

The only hunger in her is rooted under her skin. The void, for once, is absolutely silent.

Sakura weeps, and it is all joy.

“I love you,” Gaara mumbles, or maybe just thinks.

It is enough.

It is the only thing in the world that is true.

#GaaSaku #gaasaku-fanfests #GaaSaku Fic & Art Challenge #fanfic #mouseymightymarvellous

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tumblunni · 7 years

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I had some sudden more ideas for npcs in the monster petshop game, and a bit of worldbuilding and stuff!

I was just consideringwhether maybe this should be a fantasy setting with different non-human races, or one that’s just all humans. I dunno, games with catchable monsters seem to ALWAYS be just humans, that’s weird now I think about it! I guess its so the line between sentient magical beings and the pet ones isn’t blurred, but in my petshop idea the monster pets can all talk anyway so that’s not an issue. Tho I dunno if it’ll be to the same degree as in the Monster Rancher anime where monsters are all so similar to humans that they can live their own entirely separate lives without a human partner, and like.. start shops and hold property and stuff. Seriously that worldbuilding is so surreal and cool, you get to see stuff like a giant golem running a little metalwork jewelry store in the background of a crowd scene. I wanna see the story of that guy! Tho it gets a bit confusing cos some monsters can’t talk, and some monsters seem to have more petlike intelligence, and those two things don’t often coincide. I still cry forever about that episode with the guy who abused his giant worm monster, and how with its design and how it doesnt talk you’d probably assume its a mindless evil monster but its actually just a quiet sad good guy and like.. how its full sentience level is revealed by it choosing to refuse an offer from the bad guys to join them, and dying trying to save the life of its abusive trainer. And how it actually does succeed in making him realise how wrong he was to treat it like an animal, and to treat animals like mindless toys! And how he breaks down crying and then how he cradles the lil baby worm and promises to do better this time, and then how his original worm comes back to life way WAY at the end of the series and I CRY FOREVERRRR ... Anyway, sorry, where was I before I got distracted?

OH YEAH! Fantasy races! Which really should be called species, but I guess it stuck cos they’re often used as metaphors/replacements for actual racial diversity, especially in traditional fantasy. IM GETTING DISTRACTED AGAIN!!! So yeah that thought led me to an idea for a particular fantasy “race” I could add. But then it somehow developed into... I dislike designing overly humanlike fantasy races, like seriously what is the point of even bothering if they look identical to humans except short or with weird ears? So I thought.. what if this “race” is actually a disease instead?

MORE LONG THOUGHTS BELOW THE CUT!

So, I was thinking they could look like just normal humans but with a greyish skin colour, odd coloured eyes, and some sort of flower growing on their head. They’d be like ‘flower spirits’ but in kind of a negative way? They look like humans because this is a sort of magical genetic condition that turns humans into this. Though they still get predjudice because people are afraid of ‘catching’ a disease that isn’t actually contagious through touch or anything, but people are happy being ignorant fucks and excluding them from society ‘just in case’ their paranoia comes true.

But anyway! The details! At any moment an inherited carrier could manifest symptoms, and rather literally manifest a glowing flower from their forehead. It grants you enhanced magical powers, but at the cost of your life being tied to that magic. The flower is like if your soul has been forcibly pulled outside your body in a very fragile form! You have to tend to it like a normal flower, and you also have to sorta feed it by doing enough magic or absorbing the energy from magical objects. (So these guys’s magical power is to negate other magics.) If left untreated it will eventually be fatal, and if the flower wilts it’ll also kill you even faster. If you fail to take care of it, it drains energy from your soul instead, which leads to the grey skintone and general weak health. But even if you keep the flower alive it’ll eventually grow too big and you’ll be unable to drain enough magic to keep up with its energy consumption. By the time the story begins, medical technology has actually advanced enough to find life extending treatments for this, even if we don’t have a complete cure. You can’t get rid of the flower but you can take medicines to slow it’s growth. I mean, really the problem is just that this thing outpaces its host, its a really impractical parasite! It ends up killing itself by getting too greedy! (Which makes me think probably the predjudiced slurs around these people would be like... ‘you got that disease cos of your greed/sin/etc’. Even though its just genetic.) And then I think the final breakthrough to save people from this disease wouldnt really be a perfect cure, just to regress it to a budlike inactive state. You’ll always be physically marked as a victim of this disease, and you’ll always have the ‘demonic’ magic-draining powers. And it’ll probably be a long time before people stop treating the sufferers like shit, even after this...

So umm.. yeah. Its kinda gonna be like an analogy for the horrible HORRIBLE way the AIDS outbreak was handled by the government, and how it happened because the victims were ‘undesireables’. And how in this post-outbreak world the whole thing’s practically been covered up, lessened, forgotten. And people still deny it, and still treat gay people like shit, and its taken so damn long to make all this progress and just... gahhhh... How pretty much every LGBTQ person who’s that old lost a dozen friends, how people got so desperate they used to hold ‘die-ins’- protesting by literally saying ‘leave me here on the doorstep’ when they were about to die. Make the politicians see exactly what they’ve done! And similarly the massive MASSIVE quilt full of patches commemorating everyone who died. God... And seriously just HOW LITTLE EDUCATION there is on this subject! Even amoungst modern LGBTQ communities! How eager we are to sweep things under the rug, even if its LITERALLY a rug made of dead queer folk! *sigh* umm.. sorry for the heavy subject matter there.

So yeah, this would be a ‘race’ in this setting, or rather a minority group, but in fantasy terms its a ‘race’ but.. whatever. Dumb language rules! Very small community of flower disease folks, treated like demi-humans. And this leads to a bunch of new ideas for npcs that could deliver this plotline! Of course, the main one would be an actual member of the flower disease folks.

I’m imagining her as just an absolute sweetheart shy gentle giant sort of lady. She’s introduced being this terrifying presence walking into the town, your protagonist being the only one who doesnt understand why everyone else is being all hushed whispers and closing all their shops. Since you come from a sheltered rich kid background, you’re very out of touch with common issues and had no clue this disease even exists. (Even though rich folks are the ones who had the power to help them, are the ones who refused, are the ones who spread the propeganda and then tried to cover up all their own failures...) So you’re the only one who treats this seemingly terrifying vagrant as a normal person, even though it’s (initially) just because you didn’t know the situation. Because of this, she ends up seeing you as a friend and coming back again. And then its up to the player whether you fall for all the predjudice and decide to cut all ties with her from here on, or whether you continue to stand up for her rights and try and change the way society treats her.

ANYWAY, her personality once she opens up to you would be the total opposite of her imposing appearance. She’s a chronic sufferer of self-hate issues, who’s been living completely alone in the forest for a long time, after being kicked out by her family and having no-one to turn to. I’m thinking she constantly speaks like... shy equivelant of Fuujin from FF8? One word sentences, but whispered instead of yelled. And like.. “.......ah..............s-....sorry........?” *questioning inflection of silence* “......uhhm........?” *unfurls hand hesitantly from under cloak and points at loaf of bread* *counts out coins meticulously, making sure to spread her hands and show she’s wearing gloves, she’s keeping them in a pouch, she hasn’t touched them* *places them on the very edge of the counter and backs away slowly, assuming you’re thinking the worst of her* *won’t take the bread directly from your hands, just in case* *struggling to speak again* “... th-.... ah-...... t-thank....... you.....” *mumbles her way out of the store quickly and awkwardly* This is kinda how she’s had to deal with buying supplies from EVERYONE EVERYWHERE. This tends to happen with like the one store in town that’ll take pity and throw her some food, at a greatly inflated price. She’s just had to like.. keep trying. Wear them down. If she keeps coming to a town repeatedly they’ll eventually get frustrated enough to give her what she wants.... or they’ll call the sheriff to chase her off. Either way she finally gets a yes or no answer on that place, and can tick it off on her cross country map of spots to find actual supplies. So she like.. CAN NOT function in a regular shop environment anymore. Probably the first hint that she isn’t really scary is how she’d totally freak out at you treating her normally! She’d be TERRIFIED!! There’s no way she’d actually agree to talking normally, she’d adamantly refuse to taking anything for free, seriously WHAT IS YOUR DEAL, ARE YOU A DEMON??? *sobs into the complimentary bread* It’d be a few visits before she actually opens up to you, and even then she’s very monosyllabic. She literally hasnt talked to anyone for years, she’s become so hardened to loneliness and cruel treatment that she can’t remember how to react to kind people anymore. And her voice is so hoarse both from this and from.. well.. the disease. She hasn’t even had the minimal treatment that’s available nowadays... for the rich, at least. So along with her sidequest being to help everyone understand her, you’re also searching for a doctor who’d treat her, and trying to save up the ridiculous amounts of money it would take. Its far easier if you succeed at destroying enough of the town’s ignorance, and make at least a few friendship links between her and your other sidequest pals. You can start having a town-wide fundraiser to get her the lifesaving medicine! Tho probably that leads to its own sidequest of having to track her down after she runs away, worried that she doesn’t deserve it and she’s just gonna cause more problems for her new friends. NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Anyway, the general structure of her as a customer is that she kinda accepts ANYTHING, and doesn’t have much money to do it with. She’s very lonely, and only built up the courage to come to this town on that first day because she heard about your petshop that sells to lower class citizens, and the idea of getting her own monster friend was like a ray of hope in her life! If you decide not to chase her away from the town, she settles in the nearby forest where all the stray monsters live, and becomes like the scary local cryptid. “I totally saw an eight foot tall woman feeding the crows!!! What the fuck!!!” She has a problem with sacrificing herself to protect all these wild animals, they’re just SO BEAUTIFUL and MAKE LIFE WORTH LIVING!! She’s always going hungry cos she gives all her food to them, and then they start to love her in return and she gets a veritable army of feral pals that’ll defend her from anyone who tries to burn her tent down again. So she starts off desperately trying to buy a monster from you, any monster, and then after she gets her first one she starts befriending the forest monsters with its help, and becomes your biggest customer of monster supplies instead. She wants to give all these wild babies the closest life to a normal pet as possible! But she also still will buy literally any monster from you, ever, anytime. Doesn’t matter that she already has fifty, she can always take care of more! Though you do get better results if you give her ones high in defense stats and etc, cos its tough to live out there in the forest, even if your trainer is going hungry to ensure you get the best snacks. Oh, and she’d probably be ABSOLUTELY OVER THE MOON if you could sell her a monster that also has flowers or flower patterns. (Tho i think protagonist would be worried it would be insensitive, but she actually does like them cos they make her feel less lonely) She’s also an incentive to help out with your cookery crafting skills! Cos initially she’s having trouble being able to access any of the other shops in the town, she’ll just buy whatever spare food you have lying around. Even your absolute worst failed dishes are like heaven to her! So you can get more exp from cooking and also make a profit from it, thus helping you get better at crafting fancy dishes for your sweet monster pals. (And your strange tall pal!) Oh, and it’d probably also be an element that people in the town try and ‘politely’ advise you that you shouldn’t sell to her ‘for your own safety’. Because of the flower people’s magic draining powers, there’s the very real worry that one of them could be buying monsters from your store just to drain them dry and slow down their own death. But it sucks to assume the worst of her before you even know her, and honestly even if someone was doing that it’s dishonest to frame them as evil and predatory when seriously they are only committing a crime TO SLOW DOWN THEIR OWN DEATH! I bet that would be the most terrifying depressing situation for them, having to kill a small animal cos you’re having an attack of your symptoms and you just desperately don’t want to die...

And now on to the other supporting npcs I thought could be useful to this plot!

I thought of maybe there being bakers cos... well, the first scene I thought of while planning her personality was her trying to buy a loaf of bread. SIMPLE BRAIN PATHS! WOO! But somehow these bakers ended up gaining a way bigger plot role than I intended O_O I’m imagining them as some sort of Super Duo, just cos this plot idea requires one who starts off sympathetic to flower lady and a boss that provides an obstacle in this. I’m thinking maybe the good guy baker sneaks bread out to flower lady, and their greedy boss is all like ‘no! There are laws in place! Food waste must be destroyed! No giving to the homeless!’ (THIS IS AN ACTUAL THING THAT EXISTS. Almost every major fast food company does it! You can get arrested for stealing food from the bins, or for being an employee who tries to give the food to someone, even if it’s excess food that would just be binned anyway.) But then I ended up humanizing the grumpy boss instead of having them JUST be an enemy. I started imagining this as a family business, and the grumpy boss is their grandma? And then i thought maybe that would be a good vehicle to deliver the backstory worldbuilding about this disease, and now I am REALLY SAD about this grumpy grandma! I was thinking maybe she’s actually someone who lost a lot of friends in the initial outbreak of flower syndrome, and used to protest against it, and became all bitter and depressed after what happened, which is why she’s such a cynical mess nowadays. I think maybe the plot would work better if its like.. the grandkid baker just THINKS that grandma would object to serving a flower disease customer, and then when grandma actually sees who’s been ‘stealing’ her profits, she breaks down crying. Nobody in her family even knew she was so close to the tragedy, she’s been keeping it secret cos even though she isn’t infected she could still be ostracized for being part of that community and all. I’m thinking its gonna just be a very direct analogue, I’m gonna say that LGBTQ people were demonized as the ‘cause’ of this disease back when it was poorly understood. ‘Its caused by greed and sin’ = people pick whichever subjective ‘sin’ they wanna blame... So grandma shows you all her quilt that she’s been keeping secret, full of patches commemorating everyone she knew who died, and tells you about how the tragedy went down and how she got her start as such a cold and untrusting person out of the fear of ever loving anyone again in case she lost them. And everyone gets to have ALL OF THE HUGS, even though hugs can’t erase what happened :( But finding a family that can support her can help flower lady right now, grandma is determined to find a way to save this one person and make up for everyone she couldn’t save! They help you on your quest to track down a doctor, and they give flower lady a place to stay as part of their family, no matter what anyone thinks! And then i think maybe after flower lady manages to get her medicine, grandma actually leaves on a journey with the doctor, to learn how to become a doctor too. She was in medical training when she was younger, before she had to drop out of education due to all that happened. And she just ended up inheriting the family bakery, even though she personally sucks at baking and hates it. (Which is why employee/grandson does all the work and stuff) So now she sees this as a chance to redeem herself, you help convince her that its not too late! She’s gonna use however many years she has left to help people! if she has to be cursed with outliving everyone, she’ll use this long life to make a difference! So its sad cos grandma has to leave on her journey, but grandson takes over the shop and flower lady is employed as an assistant. And they keep in touch with grandma in the mail. (You can sell them a good carrier pigeon monster to help!)

Another npc there could be is... another greedy guy!! I started thinking him up cos i was just wondering about who could be a friend to the grandma. I mean, the npcs have to have relationships and rivalries between each other, its not like the protagonist is the only one who matters, lol This idea i have is (for some reason) someone who looks like a younger AZ from pokemon, wearing a cowboy hat. Kinda? He’s a travelling merchant and ssssssort of the same greedy archetype as grumpy grandpa, but sort of not? He’s an even more huge penny pincher than her, but he doesn’t seem to have his heart in it. He’s constantly desperately wringing any potential money out of anything, overcharging as much as he possibly can, getting himself hurt doing silly get rich schemes. But then he’s not really a jerk about it. He’s very friendly and cares about his customers, unable to actually scam them even as he announces his intentions to do it. He’s constantly betrayed by his own kindness, and ends up giving away free stuff to anyone who has a sob story! He also never seems to actually really spend his money on himself, its not like he actually has any of the luxury he’s always rambling about. I mean, he does indeed seem to have a genuine greed and a few lofty dreams, but then he just puts all his profits in his savings no matter how much it hurts him to do it. *crying over a fancy hat as he dumps his purse in the Swear Jar*

So anyway, his connection to this plot about the flower disease is that his Secret Reason For The Greedy is only revealed if you befriend both him and the flower lady. After you progress the story enough to get her first Happy Ending of getting adopted by the baker family, her second Happy Ending of finally getting the medicine, and her third Happy Ending of becoming the new assistant baker after grandma moves away, the plot still stubbornly continues because really no ending is an ending, yknow? I’m thinking this sort of formula could work really well with a game that has no real overall plot, and is more of just a slice of life theoretically endless thing. When you’re playing Monster Rancher there’s never really any huge changes in the town you still always have the same shopkeepers and nobody even ages. And even though Animal Crossing has villagers moving in and out, its also kinda the same, there’s never any real character development or shifting of the status quo. So I’m thinking having changing generations of the town and continuity between them could be a good way to keep stuff engaging even as you keep playing the same sort of gameplay forever. Maybe some people move away, maybe some people move in, maybe some people get married or have kids, who knows!

So yeah, after the status quo change of the baker grandma moving away and flower lady leaving her homelessness tent to become a full time resident, thats’s when this new sidequest starts. Stuff still isnt instantly perfect for her, she’s still facing predjudice from some people, especially now she’s in a rather public position as an employee. All the controversy over having her work with food, even though SERIOUSLY, DUDE, you can’t catch it from just touching someone who has it! I think she’d feel absolutely terrible, she’d be worried that she’s causing her benefactors to lose business because she’s here. And she’d also have just normal social anxiety adjusting to doing her first job ever, and having to do so much talking. She was homeless since she was very young, she even has trouble with complex mathematics cos she never finished school. Another reason merchant guy could be a good friend of the family, he could help tutor her on this stuff! And general shopkeeping techniques, cos both her and grandson are both super good guy pushovers and all. (”Don’t worry, I’m a wimp too, and even I can manage to be greedy with these five simple steps! ....that’ll be 50 dollars.”) But the main plot for him and flower lady is how he finally reveals his secret reason for being so greedy. One day he just comes along leading a little girl by his hand, and lifts her up so she can see the lady at the bakery counter. “Daddy, she’s got flowers like me!!” He’s been sending all of his profits home to pay for his kid’s medical bills, and he finally decided to let you know once he met someone else with the same condition. He’s been keeping it a secret because people hate flower sufferers so much, and he desperately needs to keep up the trade route with this town otherwise he can’t afford to look after her. he’s so damn relieved to be able to stop lying to you, and to finally introduce his lil bundle of joy! And to let her see someone else with the same condition, for the first time in her life! And then the lil girl could become friends with tall flower lady, and be all like ‘you look so pretty!’ which is something nobody’s ever said to her since she got sick, and just... HEARTWARMING TIME And it could help flower lady keep hope even though predjudice hasnt completely stopped in the world. At least now she’s found some good people, and she can see that her bravery in working at this job is inspiring young sufferers to feel that their life isnt completely over. So they all send off another letter to grandma together, and have a nice family dinner with this other family, and with yours too. :3 (...also, merchant guy apologizes for lying to his close friend grandma for so long, and they laugh at how they both had so much in common and never found out until now! And she is HELLA EXCITED to meet his daughter when she comes back ^_^)

#monster shop game #thats gonna be the new tag #i need to go re-tag all of the earlier posts

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