Work Text:
Shisui. The name of her soulmate, forever tattooed over her heart in a lazy scrawl with large letters. No surname is given because that would make the game the cosmos is playing with humanity too easy to crack.
Sakura is five when she hears what soulmates are, how everyone has one. “Yes, Sakura-chan, even the bad guys and those you think don’t deserve love.”
When Sakura is six and her bullies are too vicious and Ino is not around, Sakura daydreams about a future in which she is loved, where she is vindicated. She wants a love that feels like revenge.
When she is seven, she despises the name on her ribs since it’s not Sasuke’s. She and Ino fight and Sakura daydreams of becoming friends with Sasuke and learning that his real name is actually Shisui and he has to hide it for some reason. Then she would tell him that this was actually the name on her ribs, and he would gasp and show her the ‘Sakura’ on his heart. Or she imagines finding a love bigger than those soulmates and defying the very laws of the universe.
Ino probably does the same, ignoring the name tattooed on her spine that only Sakura and her parents know bout.
A little before she hits eight, she is hiding after school and crying the most pathetic cry in her eight-year-old life. She misses Ino, Sasuke has ignored her at school again, a teacher told her that her chakra coils would likely never amount to much and advised her to quit the Academy, and her parents are leaving Konoha for work again.
She feels someone approach her and forces herself to look up. It's a teenager with curly dark hair and an easy, comforting smile. “What’s wrong, petal?” he asks her.
“Do you want a chronological or an alphabetical order?” she asks bitterly. “Cause it feels like everything is wrong, shinobi-san.”
He laughs at her sass. She isn’t usually sassy but it feels right at this moment. Then he kneels in front of her and pats her shoulder. “I’ll tell you a secret, petal.” Sakura’s eyes widen and she leans in slightly. The teenager gives her a conspirational smile. “It’ll get better.”
She pulls away from him, her nose scrunching as she frowns. “No it doesn’t!” she argues, frustrated that she got so excited about something that is obviously a lie.
“It’s just one life,” he says then.
“So what?”
“It’s bound to get better one day. Then it will get worse. Then it will get good again, maybe not as good as before. Then it might get worse, but not as bad as the first time. And so it goes, until it ends.”
“I’m not sure I was prepared for this level of existentialism when I set out to hide from Ino-pig and Sasuke-kun and my bullies.”
The teen’s smile turns sharper for a second. Then he says: “Oh, you know such complex words at your age, petal?”
Sakura sits more comfortably and pats away the dirt from her knees in a slightly smug way. “I do. I’m quite smart actually. Pity that it’s not enough.”
“Whyever not?” he challenges.
“Sensei told me book smarts aren’t enough. I’m just a civilian and should just give up on ever becoming a kunoichi since my chakra is so low and I don’t know any good techniques.”
The teen shinobi looks absolutely appalled on her behalf. “Why that bas— If he were so good himself, he wouldn’t have been stuck teaching in the Academy, you know that right? He’s just projecting his own bitterness onto you, petal. You can be an awesome kunoichi one day.”
“Why do you think that?”
“You seem smart and you’re very stubborn,” he says without a pause.
“How am I stubborn?”
“Cause you’re only crying because of your shitty sensei, you aren’t quitting the Academy.” He stands up. “I gotta go cause I told Itachi I’d collect his little brother for him today. But I meant everything I said: you will be great one day, petal.”
“It’s Sakura,” she tells him. He looks at her strangely and then laughs.
“Of course you are,” he says slowly. “Matches your hair and everything.” He pats the top of her head. “It was really nice meeting you, Sakura-chan. I hope tomorrow’s better for you.”
He turns to leave. “Wait!” Sakura exclaims after almost allowing him to leave unbothered. “What’s your name?”
She can't really read his expression before it turns into his easy-going smile again. “Tell you what, I’ll tell you the next time I see you. When you’re a great kunoichi.”
She gives him a wobbly smile. “Bye shinobi-san,” she tells him, meeting his comforting gaze for one last time. “Keep safe until then.”
He waves at her and leaves.
The day after that is better for her but not really better in general. Ino and her bullies are ignoring her since they are fawning over Sasuke, whose cousin had apparently “died tragically”. Sakura tries to approach Sasuke and give him her condolences and he did not ignore her but thanked her quietly. She feels sad for him but since she has never lost anyone, she doesn't know what to say or how to act.
Sakura remembers the curly-haired boy’s comforting words. “You were right, shinobi-san,” she whispers to herself on her way home. “Things can get better.”
The next few years pass by without anything remarkable happening other than the Uchiha massacre. But while it is tragic and makes Sasuke more closed off, it doesn’t really affect Sakura’s reality in any major way.
She has good days and she has bad days and she has days that feel like a snoozed alarm clock but she keeps a positive inner attitude about how everything will be alright in the end and how she’ll become a great kunoichi.
She graduates from the Academy and is on the same team as Sasuke which is great. She doesn't really like her sensei since he never bothers teaching her but a few times he comforts her in a way that reminds her of shinobi-san so she grows to like him despite his terrible incompetency as a teacher. She doesn't like Naruto either but he slowly grows on her. She is in love with Sasuke, or at least she thinks she is, but now it feels more like she is biding her time until she meets Shisui.
She is thirteen and a half when she meets someone with that name for the first time. She’s on a mission with Team 7 and they are in a market in Suna when she hears a middle-aged woman yell: “Shisui Takahashi! Get back here right this instant!”
Sakura gasps and whips her head toward the direction of the voice. There’s a 12 or 13-year-old boy who seems to be running from his mother/aunt/a scary stranger and he’s laughing like the cat that got the cream. “I will not tolerate your pranks anymore!” the woman yells again.
“Sorry baa-chan, I’ve somewhere to be!” he yells back in a carefree way, looking over his shoulder and not seeing he is headed straight towards Sakura.
She is far too stunned that she is seeing a Shisui in front of her to move away and he collides with her.
“Whoa!” he exclaims as he falls on his butt. “Watch where you’re going!”
Sakura’s outrage gets her out of her stupor. “Watch where I’m going?! You collided with me !”
“Well, details details,” he says with a dismissive wave of his head and scratches his neck. There is a name there and Sakura tries to see what it was. He then looks behind him to see the aunt/mother/angry stranger approach. “Whoops, I gotta go!” he says and stands up.
“Shisui-kun wait!” Sakura grabs his sleeve and he looks at her in confusion. Sakura briefly looks at the tattoo on his neck. Then she lets go. “Be more polite the next time you collide with someone.” He gives her a sheepish smile and runs off. Minako, the tattoo read.
When she turns around, she sees Naruto and Sasuke looking at her suspiciously. “What?” she challenges.
“What was your deal with that guy?” Naruto asks. “Why did you grab his hand so dramatically?”
Since she’s been angry at Sasuke for ignoring her more than usual on this mission, Sakura feels kind of smug when she looks at the Uchiha as she says: “Shisui is the name of my soulmate. It’s not this one though.”
She feels vindicated when she sees pain in Sasuke’s eyes for a brief moment. “Is that so?” the boy says but he struggles to regain his composure and there’s a flicker of hope in her heart that perhaps he’s not so indifferent after all.
He doesn’t add anything else but her hope keeps building and building and–
He smashes it to smithereens months later when she begs him to take her with him. She tells him she can be his family.
“You could’ve been, you know,” he says softly.
“Could've been what?”
“You would’ve been part of my family if the world was a fair place.” He takes pity on her and finally explains: “I had a cousin called Shisui. He had a ‘Sakura’ over his heart.” Her heart leaps with hope for a stupid, illogical millisecond. “He killed himself before the massacre.”
Her heart drops to the ground.
She thinks she hears the faintest “I’m sorry” before he knocks her out.
Sakura bears the grief for the future she unknowingly lost as a child in secret. She romanticises her pain a little, leaving Shisui her unspoken scar.
She is wrecked by guilt for her one-time near-apathy when she heard about Sasuke's cousin, or her total misunderstanding of Sasuke’s strange expression when she told him the name of her soulmate. She even feels ashamed she ever hated having Shisui's name and not Sasuke's.
She trains to become stronger, still finding courage in the words shinobi-san told her so many years ago.
Sakura is taken as an apprentice to Tsunade Senju and she becomes a whole lot stronger and a lot less lonely. Both of them have lost their soulmates and are trying to figure out how life works without the promised true love.
One night, Tsunade tells Sakura she’ll teach her how to drink. Sakura is 16 and eager to experience a fragment of the world of civilian teenagers. They sit down with a bottle of sake and some side dishes between them and Tsunade has a rare moment of wistfulness as she tells Sakura about Dan.
“Tsunade-shishou…” Sakura says heavily when the conversation lulls to a natural pause, “Am I half a person for losing Shisui Uchiha before I ever even had him?”
Tsunade doesn’t react to Sakura name dropping her dead soulmate for the first time. She looks pensive for a moment, as if all the answers are at the bottom of the sake cup. “There’s so much more than a soulmate, Sakura.”
“How can you mean that? You practically fell apart after Dan died!” Sakura says, the alcohol making her rude.
Tsunade doesn’t seem particularly offended though. “Who said that my reaction to Dan’s death was a good one?” Her shishou looks at her then. “You’re so young Sakura. And you never even had a relationship with this Uchiha. There’s so much more this world can give you.
“Sure, we have soulmates but who’s to say we can’t love other people – perhaps even more deeply? Soulmates are just people who are supposed to have a major impact on your life one day.”
“I never even met him.”
“And that’s so much better for you. I can’t get over Dan not because he was my soulmate but because he was my best friend, my person, the man I lived with for years, the man I saw as the father of all my future children… He was my family. What you’re grieving right now is just an idea you had of the future. Find a new one."
Sakura sighs, feeling better but unwilling to fully let go of her grief. “I wish I could at least learn about him. The only ones who knew him are Sasuke-kun and Itachi, two missing-nin. There’s no one else alive who can tell me what he was like as a person.”
The morning after that, Sakura finds a manila folder on her desk with a handwritten note from Tsunade-shishou: “I hope this helps you find closure.”
Sakura knows exactly what the contents of the folder will be and she takes a deep breath — only to immediately gasp when she sees the photo on the front page.
She sees a tear fall on the photo and hastily brushes it away from the glossy paper, her fingers lingering on the not-so-unfamiliar face.
After what feels like an hour, she starts reading his brief bio.
SHISUI UCHIHA
Alias: Shunshin no Shisui
Status: Deceased
Rank: Anbu
Affiliation: Konohagakure
Soulmate name: Sakura
Birth date: October 19
Blood type: A
Height: 180cm
Weight: 69kg
BIO
Uchiha graduated from the Academy during the Third Shinobi War as a prodigy. He awakened his Mangekyo Sharingan during a mission that saw his teammate die. He developed a close relationship with Itachi Uchiha, and once he made jonin, he became the breadwinner for his parents.
Shisui was the first Uchiha since Madara to master the susanoo and the first Uchiha since his grandfather to develop to the dojutsu Kotoamatsukami.
Shisui Uchiha committed suicide shortly before the Uchiha massacre, crushing his eyes when jumping off a cliff into the Naka River to prevent conflict from arising over his eyes within the clan.
She takes out the photo and makes sure to always keep it on her person.
“I wonder why you were not enough for him to hold on and live,” an insane Sasuke tells her cooly. “He would’ve been killed by Itachi anyway but the fact that this was his choice says a lot.” Sakura digs her fingers into the meat of her palm, blood pumping in her ears. “Did he find you when he was still alive and get disappointed? Is this why you weren’t enough?”
Sakura roars and launches at him but he expects her punch. He is taunting her on purpose after all.
She does not give up until she lands a punch through his gut that nearly kills him and forces him to quickly retreat.
This does not make her feel better.
Sakura is sixteen and cries like a baby when the truth of what really happened to Shisui comes out, much much later after Danzo’s defeat.
“He was a hero, Sakura,” a redeemed Sasuke tells her but it’s a hollow victory: Shisui is dead, and he probably died alone and scared. He probably put on a brave face. She wishes she could have offered him some comfort, paid him back for the strength he gave her.
She wonders if she’ll see him during the Edo Tensei of the Fourth Shinobi War but she never does.
Sakura is twenty when she nearly dies on a mission. It's kind of ridiculous that a chunin-rank missing-nin from Kiri nearly gets the famous war hero Sakura Haruno. Luckily though, Tenzo-taichou is there with her so she knows she's in safe hands.
Sakura loses consciousness and her world goes white but then she sees Shisui who is so starkingly dark in contrast, from his unruly curls to his mischievous and warm eyes.
“Hey petal,” he says softly.
Sakura starts crying and she sounds a lot younger when she sobs out: “Shisui!” She waits until he is near, near enough to hug (she doesn't hug him). “I told you to keep safe! You were not safe.”
“No, I wasn’t,” the dead boy says. “But at least you were good – you listened to me and became great.”
“I used to think soulmates meant forever,” Sakura says through her tears.
“I think soulmates have limitless meanings,” he says as he slowly, gently cradles her head between his palms. Sakura’s heart hurts and she wonders if the universe paired her off with someone so optimistic because she is always, always so lonely and afraid, even when she is strong. If that's the case, the fact that she lost him before she could even comprehend his loss was even more cruel than she previously imagined.
She tries to fake some of his optimism. “I’ll keep being awesome, Shisui. I'll get even better.”
“You will be better than great Sakura-chan,” he says, seeing through her. "You will be okay."
He starts disappearing, or she starts waking up, and it’s like there’s a fist-sized lump in her throat. “I would have loved you so much, Shisui.”
“I would have adored you.” She reaches to touch his face but her fingers go right through him and the last thing she sees is his earnest dark eyes and his sad smile.
Sakura, unfulfilled and aching, opens her eyes and takes a moment to recover before she soldiers on.
There’s a tomorrow in her future where everything is alright and she is happy and loved and fulfilled, and the ‘Shisui’ on her heart is more like a guiding star than a scar.