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“I think I made you up.” She rolls right into the crook of his neck where she can smell the remnants of her scent. A privilege in itself, for how many in a million does one get to have skin pressed onto skin and leave a trail fresh for but a few hours?
Does he smell himself in her hair too?
“Good morning.” Sasuke’s smiles are only hers alone, a secret she holds dear but a secret she wishes to let out to the awaiting crowds. What a blessing to be under the curve of his lips, exuding happiness with each syllable, his fingers spinning into her rose spun strands. “You’re gonna be late.”
Sakura grumbles, nestling closer into his nook, her sanctuary. “Ten minutes.”
He smells her hair again, inhaling her own remnants into the pores of his soul, and maybe they all mix up to form some sort of a whole - his and hers, forever mingling inside their organs until they dissipate into the miniscule hairs of their skin, forever smelling like each other, unable to tell whose scent ends where.
“I don’t wanna leave you,” she says to the silence in the room.
“I’m good at being alone.” His honesty is straightforward yet subtle. She doesn’t know if it’s meant to be a jab or simply self-awareness, but amidst the chaos in her mind, she chooses to believe the latter.
“I’ll always come home to you.” It’s a promise she will never break.
Sasuke smiles. What a blessing.
“You need a pet.” He always eats dinner first. It couldn’t be helped, not with her graveyard shift at the hospital.
“But I already have you?” He doesn’t laugh. Uchiha Sasuke never laughs out loud, but his eyes crinkle and that’s more than enough. She’s glad that he finds this amusing, but deep down she knows she couldn’t take care of another human being besides herself.
“Get a cat. A black one. They’re lucky.”
He likes cats, but he never takes in one. She saw him feed strays behind their apartment before. She wonders how they’re doing now. Maybe she can do the feeding sometime. The kibble jar is just under the sink.
She nods and proceeds to tell him about the mundane life of a doctor. In a peaceful era, the oddities now come in forms of freak accidents - nothing too extreme to handle. They both have seen too much. Maybe this is their punishment for having tainted their hands in the war, a boring, mundane life.
But isn’t that what she wants? To live out a boring, mundane life.
With Sasuke, of course. “Why don’t I marry you?” The curve ball doesn’t catch him off guard.
He places a finger on her scroll and quietly demands that she look at him. Her tool of detachment leaves her sight, and she is now looking at him completely. Has he always been this hazy?
“Don’t be silly,” he replies.
She rushes into the rain despite Kakashi’s insistent scream. No, she doesn’t want to wait out the storm. She can handle lightning. She survived a chidori to the chest after all. Even when the thunder drowns the loud voices, she picks out Shizune’s. No, she doesn’t want to stay at the hospital. A 19-hour surgery was enough. No, she doesn’t want to sleep in her quarters. She has a home.
And that home is him.
He’s supposed to be here.
She opens all the lights, curses when she realizes the power’s down, and runs amock through the complex’ halls to find him, even a bit of his shadow. His scent, oh his scent. It’s drifting away, she feels it, wisps of his smell escaping her body.
She punches herself. In the gut. Forgets to gauge her strength and she pukes everything she ate two days ago onto the wet puddle gathering around her. She curses.
One hour has passed. She’s afraid to open the door of her own apartment. Afraid to see his clothes strewn around, his things scattered along with her scrolls, but worthless in his absence. She tumbles on the carpet of his shirts, the same blue shades alternating with gray or deep muted shades of violet, and she tries, oh she tries to sniff whatever he has left for her to take.
She cries in muffled gasps. She knows the science; it has always been proven that one can die of a broken heart. How many minutes then will it ask for her life force to give up?
His hand reels her back from the vortex of inescapable grief. She ends her journey short in the cradle of his arms.
“I thought you left.” It’s more of an admonition than regret. You could never leave me, that’s what she’s trying to say.
“I just ran into a problem. The window was open.” Her hand travels along his good arm, his only arm, and her fingers traverse each crack like water to its tributaries.
Her chakra is warm against his skin. He glows in the dark, her sunshine in the night, and she is warm, dappled by his light.
“You can’t heal that.” He states the obvious.
“I know.” But she continues anyway.
“I think I made you up.” Days melt into nights. She doesn’t know - doesn’t care - when the sun sets. She drifts in time under his eyes, against his comfortable weight beside her, and stays in the same safe space, on the crook of his neck, her sanctuary, her nook, with his fingers spinning roses with her hair.
“I have to go.” His whisper fades into her strands.
“You can’t.”
She begged in the past. Begged for his attention, for his love. When she stopped, it came to her, overflowing. She didn’t know how to contain it, where to put these foreign affections, how to compartmentalize these with the Sasuke she once knew. But she didn’t need to. There is never enough space for a love that’s more than enough.
He once said she filled his lonely existence up. Maybe hers was like a shower of cherry blossoms, littering the ground until there was no inch left to cover. He refuted, told her it was spring, continuously in bloom where it was perpetual in winter. So she stopped begging and started accepting.
“Please. You can’t.” She holds him close. Maybe she can melt into him.
“You have to.” Again, his whisper fades into her strands.
Sakura wakes up alone. She doesn’t want to remember the exact moment he left her embrace, this bed, his clothes, this world. She cries. In muffled gasps. Maybe heartbreak will come sooner this way.
It doesn’t. His hand doesn’t even reappear.
On the fifth day, she finds the kibble jar on top of the counter. Half full, half empty. She struggles to open her door, struggles to walk the stairs, struggles against the twilight. Pretty, perfect shades of blue and purple and gray, blending into this image of Sasuke in her head and she slips on the curb, gasping in pain, the kibble jar open for feast for the hungry stray cats.
She runs upstairs. He should be back. He should be.
But he doesn’t.
She lives in contradictions and expectations, fading away at each instance. This isn’t so bad after all - to be stuck in this limbo.
When morning comes yet again, proof that the world continues on turning, and the peeking sunlight hits her on the face, she cries. It’s visceral, the chasm he left. It’s true how they say grief is inescapable. But it isn’t as harsh as she thought it would be. She imagines the kind of grief that sucks you right in when it comes, a vortex, a blackhole of emotions.
But what does she truly know about grief? She wouldn't have been able to name it if it stared at her right in the face. She let it marinate for weeks. It lived with her, took on a face, conversed, said words she wanted heard, and sometimes, it had warmth. She conjured it and gave it skin. Should she be grateful for the numbness in the pretense?
The grief at this point, however, is gentle in its torture.
The sunshine creeps on her whole body, but she never feels the warmth. It ends up falling on the cracked urn, the ashes spilling out and traveling with the gentle breeze.
It's like anesthesia wearing off and limbs starting to feel and neurons firing off every sensor of pain. A chaos contained within a body.
On the tenth day, Sakura takes a bath. She combs her hair and puts on his blue shirt.
“Just this one time.”
His voice doesn’t respond. He’d tell her she’s beautiful in his clothes but better without.
“Okay, just one shirt.” Instead it’s Ino who rouses her from slipping in.
She is flanked by her blonde best friends, one on each side, hands supporting the cracked urn. They ask her his favorite place, and before she could answer, it rains. It soaks them, even the ashes. He becomes mud.
Through her muffled hearing and blurred sight, she makes out Ino and Naruto yelling at her to take cover. But she doesn’t move. She’s stuck.
But maybe it’s all right. Grief is gentle. She stands under the downpour, still flanked by her best friends, wanting to move but unable to leave her unsteady. She opens the lid of the urn, and Sasuke spills out onto the ground as mud, seeping into the cracks on the soil, becoming one with the earth.
With that, he transforms into spring.
Sakura smiled on that day, under the rain, where the water from the skies washed away her pain, but never his scent.
Maybe there will be sudden strokes of loneliness, of yearning, of reaching for something that isn’t there anymore. Sakura knows this. These moments will come unguarded, and she will be at their mercy. But she promises to come home to him. To see every spring, to smell his scent with every node of a leaf, with every bloom of a flower, and every breeze that trails through her hair.