@sasusakublankperiodweek
Ao3 | FFN | ↓
“Cold,” he croaks, like unhinging an old metal joint. Instead of the weight of unused years, it’s the weight of unshed tears. The strain in his voice zigzags, lost, falls into its baritone groove. “You always are, when it rains.”
Upon awakening in the bleak dawn, the day’s significance settles on them — at once a burdening melancholy and poignant relic.
At first blush it could be any morning, but as shinobi experienced with the passage of years and the disorientation of traveling dimensions, both are loath to disregard the importance of date and time.
He’s standing at the window. You would assume he’s still lost in a daze of sleep.
Sakura gently presses her cold (they’re always cold, on days like this, days in which it pours and rain floods the countryside and small villages and cleans the dust from these everyday, hard lives) fingertips to his back, alerting him to her presence. Still they are in the phase of learning the lore of one another despite all the things already known, and it is the truest labor of love.
“We should stay one more day,” she says quietly. He hasn’t acknowledged, but hasn’t resisted.
Some days, that’s good enough.
But she overdoes it; that’s who she is. Love may be gentle but her manner of it isn’t always: Indeed, she is fierce with people that rub her the wrong way, especially those invoking his name out of turn; she eats too fast, as indulgence; she hugs children too tightly when she knows she’ll never see them again, knowing that they are ships flickering through towns, some benevolent symbol of an oppressor they’re too young to put a face to.
Today is the anniversary of death. Over time they’ve both come to know this as an old friend, but this is Sasuke’s most notable scar.
Sakura cannot reach him on days like this, and that’s okay.
“The rain, after all. Traveling in this would be a pain — we’ve tried that before.”
She slides her arm around his waist, pressing her cheek to his warm back.
Don’t cry. It’s not your day. Don’t be so emotional.
Tears escape, they always do. To his credit, he never resents it.
Even with him now, his equal, there are bouts of disbelief and self-loathing in which all she manages to do is convince herself nothing about her is helpful, that she’s still yearning for him to turn around.
Now the other arm, hanging on to him as if he’s unwieldy, as if he’ll sink into the chilled wood floor and out of her sight for good.
Sasuke’s hand and grip are warm, flash and fire. She knows this is in more ways than one — unspeakable ones, really.
Some grunt of assent, no fully-formed word at all, but she hears him swallow hard, once. It’s easy to, in a small corner of the world which hasn’t yet begun its day.
Hot fingers, frigid arms.
“Cold,” he croaks, like unhinging an old metal joint. Instead of the weight of unused years, it’s the weight of unshed tears. The strain in his voice zigzags, lost, falls into its baritone groove. “You always are, when it rains.”
Sakura resists the urge to click her tongue at his misdirection, the veneer to gloss over his emotional state.
“I’m all right, Sasuke-kun.”
“I am! It just settles into my hands, that’s all. It’s close to an equinox, you know. The seasons are turning.”
(He’d never admit he likes that about her — nervy, a little more quick to correct, less scared, and that it’s brought him some delight, some sparkle to her that continues to surprise him.)
She feels him scoff under his breath, probably at her ability to pinpoint their location in time, in space, in the universe no matter where they are. When you save lives on seconds of analysis, on minuscule doses, these things become instinctive.
So of course, she knows what today is.
Pressing her nose into his shoulderblade, she says, muffled, “Should I call for tea, then?”
It’s a long beat before he nods, knowing that she’ll have to let him go to complete this task, leaving him alone at the drafty window — the chill having a chance to seep into the cracks in his soul.
They’re always less protected on these days.
The sleeves of his shirt always drown her wrists and hands, and though she has to flick and adjust them as she moves about the inn room, it’s one of her favorite ways to trap heat against her body. It’s not as cold as the caves they’ve sometimes inhabited, but close. Though the teapot scalds, it’s welcoming.
“It’s steady,” she muses, eyes on the persistent rain. “The whole village will be quiet today, in weather like this.”
Sasuke nods in response with unfocused eyes, collecting himself to meet hers. Green, watching him in a searching way. The way he does to her on all other days, seeking signs of regret or distress or any emotion within his ability to repair or ease. At once, old lovers and new.
A memory sears, a sharp grazing against the mind: A low table, scattered small dishes like this with food remnants vivid, colorful; a sullen father, the corners of his mouth sagging; his mother beaming, hiding laughter behind her hand.
A brother, by then already burdened and saturated with the weight of his destiny, still finding the almost offensive wherewithal to poke him in the face.
“You haven’t touched anything,” she chides gently.
Tuning in again to them, this, arriving momentarily from his sojourn of the past, his eyes flicker to her own messy plate. Lately she’s only pushed food around in the mimicry of an indulged meal. Worries about her being sick. She just blusters, waving away concerns. (I’m a medic, for god’s sake, I’d know!)
“And you,” he responds, indicating her own dregs with his rude, handsome chin.
She shrugs, burying deeper into his shirt. “Perhaps it’s just the day.”
“You’re coddling, aren’t you? I don’t need that.”
It comes sharper than expected, and he regrets it the second it leaves his lips. He imagines what Itachi would say, knowing he possesses a great love which he’s taken for granted time over, time again. He’d reprimand him, as he should.
Often he settles for his ex-sensei’s silent admonitions instead.
Finishing a sip of tea, she sets the mug down and sighs. Getting to her feet, she collects a few scrolls she’s been poring over the last few nights and looks at him, a bit less readable this time.
“You’re allowed to feel this, you know, Sasuke-kun. You’re allowed to love, and you’re allowed to hurt.”
She half-turns, but stops and adds,
“And you can even feel it all at the same time.”
Sakura retreats to the corner where one of the few furnishings sits. A chair, large enough for her to fold herself into and unravel her resources. A plant discovered in this new region they had crossed into last week, similar and yet different enough to pique her interest and spur her to research. She’s been lost in common roots, and he’s been mired in the loss of his old ones.
The ability of the mind to experience multiple things at once is truly remarkable. To an observer he watches her study with intent as she furrows her brow, yawns often throughout. Sasuke can see her as well as his past all at once.
Anniversaries of his dead loved ones shouldn’t mean so much. After all, he’s been alive without them longer than with.
Sasuke wishes he could explain that her presence is enough. That her loving him has been enough.
“We could still go through the traditions, if you’d like. Collect what we need. I know,” and her breath hitches, and she glances away under his dark eyes, probably feeling she’s pressing, said too much, “there’s no grave to do it with, but—”
“It’s fine.” He tries, he does, to say it with less bite. Gods, he’s transparent, his pain and denial. He’s not ready yet. Will he ever be?
“This is your day to grieve,” she says softly. “You should do that however you choose. No one can tell you how to feel — not even me.
Even me. He knows she knows his weakness. Watches her yawn again and awkwardly adjust her body, as if her own skin is uncomfortable, blink and he’d miss.
“There’s nothing I want to do,” he confesses, sounding hoarse against his will. “Nothing at all.”
A pause, a long one, in which the rain sings against the roof.
“Then you don’t have to,” she says. “You just grieve.”
Lingers in the discomfort of his own skin.
Touches no food, lapses into a mausoleum silence so complete the lines of them blur against their own dimension.
He can feel his brother’s touch, and she can feel his agony.
She rises periodically, offering him tea, sliding her arms around him from behind again. He alternates between silence and quiet shakes that he’d never admit were sobs.
By dusk he’s in her lap, hair mussed and wild, feeling spent from everything and nothing at all, from wandering in the better memories of a brother he can’t bring back.
It slips from his lips in a moment of weakness, it hurts.
“I know,” she whispers, pulling her fingers gently through his untamed locks. “It always might. But don’t forget, every day has the same number of hours.”
It’s not until they lie down again, the day a simultaneous blur of grief and guilt, that she says in a soothing whisper, “And look, darling — you’ve made it through another. You always do.”
And while he can’t articulate that each year it’s a little more muted, the pain easing off him as they pass, if only marginally, he manages to thank her only in twilight when he’s spared from knowing if she can hear him at all.
On the second day of rain he awakens before her, an arm curled around her stomach in a way that aligns with some adagio ballad pouring from where, he doesn’t know, the universe, some sign, and as intelligent as he is the facts are slipping from him whether due to the haze of sleep or the turmoil of his ghosts, the way the dead and the living and the coming to life knot themselves with one another, soaking him with an instinct and some sense of surety so intoxicating that he buries his face in her long, wild hair where nothing can see his face, but she will know his heart.
If everything’s a cycle, then the old and new must cross paths in their rotations.
The darkness bleeds away and he realizes she’s waited to spill the joyous news, not wanting to acknowledge that alignment of the stars to spare his feelings, and for that he is endlessly grateful and guilty.
But he likes to think his brother, despite his faults, would have liked to know he continued forward, that he accepted the love he didn’t feel he deserved and tried, desperately, to welcome life anew.
Sasuke presses his lips to the back of her neck, and his warm hand against her stomach.
“It’s still raining,” she murmurs, still in the place between wakefulness and dreams.
He thinks he feels the flutter of his future against his palm. He only whispers,
“Let’s stay here for now.”
