Work Text:
The silence in his apartment had never weighed so heavily.
Sakura was sitting on the floor, his back against the cold wall, knees pressed to his chest, his black and white hair falling messily over his forehead. Outside, the city continued its indifferent course, but inside him there was only a hollow echo, the void left by something he wasn't even sure he had ever had.
Ever since he saw Nirei in the park, lying down and injured, Sakura's world had fractured. Not because of the violence Nirei had suffered, nor because of the blood. The crack appeared in the instant Nirei's words pierced his chest: "I couldn't stop Suo-san."
First came confusion. A mental short-circuit. Suo and Nirei fighting. No. Those two were... were they what? Friends? Sakura clenched his jaw. The three of them were friends. Right? They had built something together, brick by brick, with laughter, exhausting confrontations, and comfortable silences. Sakura had begun to believe in that word: friends. A word that had once tasted like poison and, with them, had begun to taste like home.
But the house was burning down.
Kiryu had to get his attention to pull Sakura out of his own labyrinth. "Sakura-chan." His voice was a gentle but firm tug. And Sakura obeyed, not because he wanted to, but because his body no longer knew what to do with the storm swirling inside him. He listened to Nirei recount the fight, each word a direct punch to the gut. Suo had turned his back on them. Suo... had he never considered them friends?
No. No, that couldn't be.
But then Umemiya dropped the bomb: Suo had requested his withdrawal from Furin. And Sakura felt the ground open beneath his feet. Suo had really made a decision. Suo planned to leave without truly saying goodbye. And in his plans... there was no room for Sakura.
"Why didn't he tell me?" he murmured in the solitude of his room, his voice hoarse, broken. Rage rose in his chest, hot and acidic. He felt betrayed. Deceived. Of all people, Suo was... what was Sakura to him?
And then, in the midst of the pain, a voice from the past whispered in his memory. Endo. His words, which at the time he had dismissed with fury, now echoed with sickening clarity.
"Staying in Furin will only wither you, Sakura."
Sakura squeezed his eyes shut. Endo was right. Why hadn't he gone with him when he had the chance? Endo had reached out to him on Furin's road, with that crooked, manipulative smile, full of tattoos and empty promises. But there was something in his words that Sakura hadn't wanted to see then: an uncomfortable truth. "You're going to get hurt. It always ends the same."
Sakura never knew how to choose correctly.
He always chose the wrong path. Choosing to trust others had brought him this sharp pain in his chest. Choosing to stay in Furin, instead of leaving with Endo, had given him hope only to have it ripped away more violently. If I had left with him, he thought, clenching his fists until his nails left crescent marks in his palms, I wouldn't have to be here now, feeling like my chest is being torn apart from the inside.
Endo said Furin would wither him. And damn it, he was right. Sakura felt like a flower crushed under the weight of his own naivety. He had believed he had finally found a place to belong. A place where his mismatched eyes were not a reason for mockery, but respectful curiosity. A place where his past was not a stain, but a scar others were willing to understand.
But Suo had left him behind. Without explanation. Without a single word.
Sakura remembered the day he told them about his past. It had been awkward, the words coming out in fits and starts at first but then flowing as he accepted them as something he had deserved, that he believed was okay because he was a killer. He told them about his mother, how she died bringing him into the world. How his father looked at him just once, with eyes full of something that wasn't pain or hatred, but something worse: indifference. "You should have died." His father didn't say that phrase with words, but with every day he ignored him, with every meal that wasn't there, with every night Sakura spent alone in the orphanage and then from house to house where he wasn't wanted.
And then, what cost him the most: the dagger of guilt. My mother sacrificed herself for me and I am not worth that sacrifice. Maybe if she had lived, if I hadn't been born...
When he looked up, trembling, expecting the contempt he was used to, he met Suo's gaze. And Suo... Suo was angry.
Not with him. For him.
"Never say that again," Suo had said, in a voice Sakura had never heard from him. Deep. Firm. Almost dangerous. His single visible eye, the one not hidden by the eyepatch, shone with an intensity that made Sakura hold his breath. "Your life is not a mistake. You are not a mistake."
Sakura felt something break inside him that day. Not from pain. From relief. For the first time, someone was angry for him. Someone defended his existence.
How was it possible that the same person had abandoned him without looking back?
If he really cared, why didn't he tell me anything? he thought, and the question was a dagger turning slowly. I told them everything. Everything. And he looked at me with those eyes, with that burgundy hair falling over his eyepatch, with those tassel earrings that swayed when he moved his head... and made me believe I belonged there. That I belonged by his side.
Sakura had trusted everyone. Nirei, his classmates, Umemiya. But trusting Suo had been different. It had been like taking off his armor for the first time and offering his bare chest, knowing that a single blow would be enough to kill him.
And Suo hadn't hit him. He had turned his back on him. Which was worse.
What tormented Sakura most wasn't the fight between Suo and Nirei. It wasn't the revelation that Suo was a commander of another organization. No.
It was the small moments.
The times Suo got too close, invading his personal space with a naturalness that left Sakura breathless. "You have a thread on your uniform, Sakura-kun," he would say, as his fingers brushed the fabric, and his warm breath grazed sakura's cheek.
The time Suo raised his hand and, with a delicacy that didn't match his teasing personality, brushed the black and white hair from Sakura's forehead to fix it. "I can see you better like this," he murmured, and Sakura felt his heart about to burst. He stood paralyzed, his mismatched eyes fixed on Suo's eyepatch, on his earrings that swayed with the movement, on the burgundy hair that framed his face like a dark flame.
Suo's words, always soft. Even when he teased, even when he made those "jokes" that made Sakura blush with rage and embarrassment, they never hurt. Never a cruel word. Never an insult disguised as humor. Only small jabs, silly things said with a smile that Sakura learned to look for.
"You're interesting, Sakura-kun."
"I like watching you react."
"You don't have to do everything alone."
And Sakura, stupid Sakura, had begun to believe that maybe... maybe Suo looked at him differently. That when Suo smiled at him, it wasn't the same smile he gave others. That when Suo offered to help him always, without fail, it was because he really cared.
Sakura had begun to dream that someday, Suo would look back at him.
Not as the leader of class 1-1. Not as the weird boy with two colors in his hair and two colors in his eyes. But as someone to choose. Someone to stay for.
What an idiot.
Suo never looked back at him because he never looked at him in the first place. Sakura was just a project, an entertainment, a distraction. Something to pass the time while he planned his real path. Far away. Without him.
And now, in the darkness of his apartment, Sakura allowed himself to feel everything he had been drowning. The betrayal. The deceit. The humiliation of having believed. The shame of having opened up. The horror of having told his past to someone who was just waiting for the right moment to disappear.
He cursed Suo. Oh, how he cursed him.
He cursed him for every soft smile. For every time he invaded his space. For that damn time he fixed his hair with such delicacy that Sakura had kept that memory like a stupid treasure. He cursed him for making him discover feelings he didn't know he could have. For forcing him to go to Kotoha, with his cheeks burning and his heart racing, to ask: "What's happening to me?"
"You like him, Sakura-kun."
Sakura had wanted to deny it. But he couldn't. Because it was true. He liked Suo. He liked his burgundy hair, his tassel earrings, his eyepatch that hid who knows what secrets. He liked his voice when it grew soft. He liked how he made him feel seen.
And Suo had left him behind as if nothing mattered.
As if Sakura hadn't cried for the first time in years when he told them about his past. As if he couldn't tremble slightly when confessing that he wanted Suo but it didn't matter because he had left. As if he hadn't looked at Suo with those mismatched eyes full of a fragile hope that Suo himself had cultivated so many times.
"You belong here," Suo told him.
Lie.
"We'll fight together."
Lie.
"You're not alone."
The biggest lie of all.
Because now Sakura was more alone than ever. Alone in his apartment, with the echo of his own thoughts devouring him alive. The pain in his chest was worse than any blow he had ever received. Worse than the beatings. Worse than the hunger. Worse than the cold of winter nights in the uninsulated shed.
It was the pain of having been returned to reality after having dreamed.
Sakura buried his face in his knees, and in the darkness of his room, for the first time in years, he allowed himself to keep shedding silent tears, letting them slide down a hot path on his cheek. Then another. And another.
Not for Suo, he told himself. Not for the betrayal.
But for himself. For the child who never learned to be enough. For the teenager who believed he finally deserved something good. And for the boy who, despite everything, still wanted to believe that Suo would come back.
But Suo wasn't going to come back.
And Sakura stayed there, hugging himself in an empty apartment, cursing Suo for not being able to hate him, cursing Endo for being right, and cursing himself above all.
For still wanting someone who had already left.