Turn, turn, turn, Part Two
Not hell, Kakashi thinks when he opens his eyes the next morning. Hell is probably too good for him. A little too balmy.
It seems right that Sakura’s apartment have a lot of windows. Her skin is very pale in the morning sun, and she looks exhausted. It’s not a bad exhausted, though. She looks like someone kept her up all night, doing naughty things to her. Which, Kakashi thinks, is exactly what happened.
He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be feeling this smug. He should be feeling like the piece of shit that he is, and he convinces himself that as soon as Sakura wakes up the guilt will kick in. For now, though, he feels lighter than he can remember feeling for years. He’s been inside of her and he’s gone down on her and he’s answered a few of his own rather burning questions about her breasts, and he can’t bring himself to regret that.
He watches her sleep for a few minutes before he heads to the shower. There’s a fresh scar running from knee to hip from her leg surgery. He kissed his way up it last night. He licked every inch of her. He found every one of her scars, tasted every place she’d ever been hurt, touched every mark this life had left on her. He remembers his tongue tracing the swirled tattoo on her bicep, and the sound she made when he did it.
When he emerges from the bathroom, Sakura is awake, sitting up wide-eyed and panicked in bed. Her face is chalky.
“Good morning,” he says.
She just blinks at him with the shell-shocked look he sees on trauma victims sometimes.
“Shower’s free?” he hazards.
She’s starting to look a little green around the edges, so he attempts to pull some gravity into his expression. He starts to sit on the edge of the bed, then remembers he’s in a towel, and stands. She stares up at him.
“Last night,” he starts. “We - ”
“I’m gonna throw up,” she interrupts him, and runs for the bathroom.
*
“Eat,” he tells her.
“You’re not my father,” she says defiantly, and if he doesn’t know that by now, he’s even more fucked than he thought.
He pushes the plate of toast toward her, and she glares down at it. “I’ll throw it at you,” she warns.
“I’ve had a few hangovers,” he says gently. “Eat.”
She sighs, but she picks up the toast and begins to nibble. She gets a little color back in her cheeks after the first piece, and she manages to get half of the second piece down as well before she shoves the plate away again.
“Last night,” he starts again.
“Was a mistake,” she finishes tiredly.
He’s been thinking more slightly more violent variations of the same thing ever since she kissed him, but it still dislikes hearing her say it. He takes a bite of his own breakfast, chews. “Mmm,” he says.
“And it’s my fault,” she hurries on.
“Almost entirely,” he agrees. She looks at him sharply, but she keeps talking.
“And don’t think I don’t know that,” she continues, eyeing him suspiciously. “I was still upset about Yuugao, and I drank too much, and you were there, and…”
Kakashi stops listening after that, although he continues to nod. She’s clearly taken some time to plan the speech, and Sakura’s never been particularly fond of interruptions. It’s too early to get maimed.
“…and Tsunade would kill us both,” she finishes. “So…”
He must keep nodding for too long, because she narrows her eyes. “Are you listening to me?” she demands.
“Of course,” he says soothingly. “It was ill-planned. That’s a given.”
“And we obviously can't do it again," she says.
He likes hearing that even less.
“I’m to blame, too,” Kakashi says helpfully. “I seduced you.”
“What?” Sakura says, confused. “No, wait. I did the seducing.”
“That’s impossible,” he tells her gravely.
“What?” she says angrily.
“I would never allow myself to be seduced by my student,” he explains. “That would be humiliating.”
“You moron,” she yells. “Were you even there?”
“Are you suggesting you could…uh, persuade me to sleep with you if I didn’t want to?”
“Damn straight,” she says.
He gives her a patronizing smile. “I highly doubt - ”
She straddles him and slams her lips against his, thighs sliding across his lap like silk. She kisses him until they’re both breathing hard, fingers grasping at handfuls of clothing in frustration.
Kakashi breaks away first. “You have potential,” he says, winded. “Now, can you get me upstairs?”
*
Nothing stays secret for long in Konoha. Half the village knows what happened by noon, and Tsunade calls them both to a private meeting before twenty-four hours are up. Sakura is red-faced and cringing. Kakashi manages to stay expressionless, but only through years of practice. He’s pretty sure the look in Tsunade’s eyes would send the most powerful shinobi running for cover.
“Are you insane?” is what she opens with.
Kakashi opens his mouth to speak, but Tsunade silences him by tightening her jaw. “Not you,” she says. She turns her wrath on Sakura. “You. You’re his subordinate, and you’re my assistant. I expect it from Kakashi, but you should know better. How do you think it makes me look when you go and do something like this? In public!”
“We weren’t on the main street,” Sakura mutters defensively, and Tsunade kicks her glare up a notch.
“Not to mention,” she plows on. “He’s a jounin and a he’s a man, which means he’s already emotionally deficient. And that’s not even taking into account that he’s Kakashi. He reads Jiraiya’s books for god’s sake. Honestly, Sakura, what were you thinking?”
Kakashi clears his throat in case Tsunade had actually forgotten he was in the room. She barely spares him a glance, though. Sakura looks miserable.
“I taught you better,” Tsunade says sternly. “You’ve never been so indiscreet before.”
Kakashi’s on the verge of inquiring who, exactly, she was so discreet with before, but he wisely decides to keep his mouth shut.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“Then be more careful in the future,” Tsunade says. “You’re dismissed.” Sakura leaves, her shoulders drooping.
Kakashi stands in uncomfortable silence under Tsunade’s stare. She looks at him for a long, long time, and Kakashi is pretty sure she’s deciding whether his value to the village is greater than her desire to pop his head like a water balloon. At least he’s been removed from the short list of Hokage candidates, he thinks.
“If you ruin that girl,” she says finally, “I’ll pull your dick out through your throat and floss your teeth with it. Dismissed.”
*
Kakashi breaks up with her five times in the first month.
The first time she’s hurt, the second she’s baffled. The third time she’s angry, and the fourth time she just punches him. The fifth time he disappears immediately after he finishes talking, and she realizes he sent a kage bunshin to give the speech for him.
Somewhere between the third and fourth time, Ino gets it in her head that Sakura needs to find someone slightly more stable. Sakura’s just pissed enough to go along with it.
She puts on heels and red lipstick and a top that really doesn’t belong anywhere except in an Icha Icha novel. She dances with exactly three boys before Kakashi corners her against the wall outside the girl’s restroom. He fucks her in the alley behind the bar, and she thinks she likes it even better than the first time.
Because the thing is, it’s not like she’s in love with Kakashi. She’ll admit that he has a nice mouth under the mask and fantastic hands and he probably looks prettier naked than she does. And his voice has a way of turning her on, even when he’s saying things that infuriate her, and she’ll be the first to point out that the way he fights is really more like art than battle, elegant and efficient as it is.
All those things are nice, but that’s not really it. The heart of it is that he complimented her on her genjutsu when she was a genin, and smiled at her and told her everything was going to be all right when she needed to hear it, and sometimes she remembers how badly she wanted his approval when she was younger, so badly it made her teeth hurt at times. He was the first one to teach her about teamwork, with his voice throbbing low and steadfast. Kakashi was her first sensei, and something in her never feels quite right, never quite confident, if he’s not the one leading her team.
Kakashi lost Sasuke, she thinks, just like she and Naruto did. And it shouldn’t still matter so much, but it does. She and Naruto and Kakashi share that failure - they’ll always share it - and she feels better fighting alongside them because of it. She trusts them; like her, they’re determined not to lose even one more person.
Unfortunately, all of that doesn’t make him a good boyfriend in the least. The sixth time he breaks up with her, she just raises and eyebrow and goes back to making dinner.
*
Kakashi gets a lot of quality time in with Obito during the first month he starts fucking his former student. He refuses to call it anything else. Doing so would mean he’s made some sort of commitment to her, and Kakashi is selfish, but he’s not that selfish. He’s not going to tie her future to his. She has a long life ahead of her, filled with people she loves and battles she actually has a chance of winning - sex and happiness and friendship and all the things he’s not stupid enough to try and take for himself.
He starts making bargains, instead. A few more weeks, he tells Obito. A few more weeks of Sakura, and he’ll start coming to the monument three times a day instead of two. Just a couple more nights, and Rin will get fresh flowers on her grave every day for a month.
It’s a stupid game. Obito never answers, and it’s not like he has any control over it, anyway. He bargains with his time like it’s his to trade, like he can predict which mission is the one where he’ll come home in a body bag instead of on his two feet. He’s not looking for a happy ending, he promises Obito. Just a little more time.
Sometimes he thinks it would be better if his death came sooner, rather than later. Maybe it would be kinder to cut the whole thing off before either of them gets too deeply in.
Except he suspects he’s been deeply in for a long, long time without even noticing.
He breaks up with her just to watch her green eyes snap. It’s a warning for her, although it’s one she obviously refuses to heed, since she keeps taking him back. The truth is that he’s unable to walk away on his own power. He’s hers as long as she wants him, and his heart sinks while his dick does a little dance of joy every time she pulls him through her bedroom window and kisses him.
*
Sakura jolts awake to the sound of commotion on her balcony. She automatically reaches for the kunai under her pillow, but it only takes her a second to deduce that the visitor is no threat. It’s either a civilian or Naruto, she figures; no normal shinobi could make that much noise. It’s neither, however.
Genma jumps when she slams open the shutters. ‘It’s two in the morning,” she says dangerously. “What?”
The older shinobi blinks at her in surprise. Kakashi is leaning heavily against him, and Genma glances over. “You said you lived here,” he accuses.
“No, I said my bed is here,” Kakashi slurs with dignity. “I live across town.”
Genma detangles his arm from Kakashi’s, and Kakashi sways on his feet. He seems to notice Sakura for the first time, and he lifts his hand in greeting. “Yo,” he says with a drunken smile.
‘Um…” she says.
Kakashi rights himself, pats Genma on the back. “You can leave now,” he says.
Genma ignores him. He’s looking between Kakashi and Sakura, disgusted. “You broke him,” he says.
“What?”
“Ruined,” Genma clarifies. “He’s officially the most boring drinking partner in the history of Konoha.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks, baffled.
“…and Sakura’s hair,” Genma mimics, “and Sakura’s eyes, and Sakura’s skin, and Sakura’s bre - ”
Oh.
“All right,” Sakura cuts him off hastily. “I get it. Here, just - dump him inside. He can sleep it off on the couch.”
Genma mutters something that sounds a lot like, “yeah right,” but he shuts up when Sakura shoots him a look.
Kakashi reeks of alcohol - he must have been drinking for hours straight to get so wasted.
“You’re a mess,” she says. She sits him on the couch and he looks dolefully up at her.
“I had a dream,” he says.
“Did it involve my breasts?” she asks sternly.
“No,” he sighs. “Obito.”
“Obito’s breasts?”
“No,” he says, and he sounds annoyed, so she stops teasing him.
“What?” she asks patiently.
“He was alive,” Kakashi says, “and he yelled, and he told me to stop screwing around. He called me names first."
“Sounds unpleasant,” Sakura remarks.
“He always was an ass,” Kakashi confesses.
“So…how are you screwing around?” Sakura asks, not sure she really wants to know.
Kakashi reaches out a hand and cups one of her breasts through the thin fabric of her t-shirt. His thumb drifts over her nipple. “My…breasts?” she says.
He pulls her toward him, burying his face in her chest. He mumbles something, but she can’t really hear, given how tightly his mouth his smashed against her.
“Fuck,” he says, pulling away slightly, and she’s not sure if he’s cursing someone or just stating his intentions.
She thinks of all the information she could drag out of him when he’s like this, all the questions she has that he’s never answered. A hundred mysteries solved in one night.
She gets off the couch. He makes an inebriated swipe for her, which she avoids. “Water,” she says. “Or you’ll be sorry in the morning.”
She notices her hand trembling slightly as she fills a glass at the tap.
When she comes back to her living room, he’s stretched himself out on the couch. He’s too long for it, and he looks cramped. One hand is hanging limply off the side, and he’s snoring lightly.
She sets the water on the coffee table, takes off her slippers, and crawls onto the couch next to him.
There’s not much room, but she manages to fit herself between his body and the edge of the cushion, her head tucked underneath his chin. His arm comes up around her.
She falls asleep listening to his heartbeat.
*
The first thing Kakashi does when he opens his eyes is let out a long, painful groan.
“Morning,” Sakura chirps.
He shields his face with one hand, blocking out the light.
“What the fuck?” he says.
“You probably have a hangover,” she guesses in a sympathetic voice.
He moves his hand just enough to look at her out of a pained gray eye.
“Don’t worry, though,” she says. “I made toast.”
*
She should have known he couldn’t stay out of the hospital long.
A murmur drifts through the hospital mid-morning. A stretcher case coming in, she hears. They all know what that means.
Shinobi are proud creatures, Sakura has learned. Too proud, at times. They don’t like the hospital at all, if they can avoid it. When they can’t, they prefer to walk in on their own power.
And when someone can’t walk in on their own power, well…that means that it’s bad. Fifty percent of stretcher cases die before they get through surgery.
Another ripple runs through the hospital a few moments later, more hushed this time. It’s Hatake Kakashi, the copy ninja.
*
Tsunade’s eyes are very grim above her surgical mask as she wipes her hands. There’s blood everywhere. Sakura stares at her own face in the mirror above the sink. It’s chalky-white.
“He’s stubborn, at least,” Tsunade says. “If he makes it through the night, he’ll probably make it through the week. And if that happens, then he’ll probably survive.”
Sakura can’t speak. All she can see are the knives imbedded in his neck, his chest, his stomach, marking his vital spots, cutting his organs to ribbon. In her six years at the hospital, she’s never seen so much blood. His face had been very still and pale against the blue of the operating table.
Tsunade surveys her - her shaky hands, her shocked eyes. “You chose this,” she reminds Sakura.
“I know,” Sakura whispers.
“Go home,” Tsunade says. Sakura begins to shake her head, to refuse, to say she couldn’t possibly…
“Home,” Tsunade orders. “You can’t work anymore today, and you’ll be in the way here. I’ll call you when he’s in recovery.”
Sakura paces her apartment. She fidgets, she worries, and when she’s about to go insane, she heads to the training grounds to knock few trees down. Anxiety makes her unable to focus her chakra properly, and she smashes her own fist to a pulp in the process. She doesn’t stop until her gloves are soaked in blood and her cheeks are wet and cold from all the crying.
There are no messages on her machine when she gets back.
She tapes her hand, she cooks herself a meal that she doesn’t eat, and she curls up on her couch to wait.
*
Kakashi crawls his way out of unconsciousness very slowly. He hates this feeling; he’s had far too many chances to get acquainted with it. He hates the sudden snap of light and sound, the way everything’s sideways when he first comes around, the fact that he never know whether he’s dead or alive, or if all his limbs are going to be there.
The first thing he sees when he opens his eyes a crack is Sakura, sitting in a chair by his bedside. She’s in civilian clothes, and her hair is very bright.
Everything feels very heavy and slow in his body, but he manages a rusty, “Yo.”
“Yo,” she says.
“I guess I lost,” he says drowsily. He thinks it’s rather clever conversation, given his condition, but Sakura’s expression doesn’t change.
“Oh no, you won,” she says. “You gave Sai the distraction he needed to capture the target. The missing-nin is back in Konoha custody. Mission success.”
“Lovely,” Kakashi rasps.
She’s been reading a book - one of his Icha Icha novels, he sees - but she sets it down now.
“I’m going to ask you once,” she says, and her voice is steady, but her eyes look dead. “Did you step in front of those knives on purpose?”
At first, Kakashi thinks he mishears her. He’s still pretty groggy, after all. “Come again,” he says.
“Tsunade thinks you have some sort of death wish,” Sakura says, and this time her voice shakes a little. “I told her she was wrong, but I need to ask. Are you trying to die on me?”
And he’s been trying to show her for two months how utterly ridiculous it is to waste her time on him, but he never thought of doing it this way. He has an excuse now, a way to go about it, and he shies away from it like it’s made of hot metal.
“No,” he says truthfully. He hadn’t been trying to anything but finish the mission and get back to her. His last thought before he blacked out hadn’t been of Obito and Rin, but of Sakura, and how angry she was going to be if he died in such a stupid way.
He’s not sure which answer she was expecting, but the one he gives seems to lift all the weight from her shoulders. She picks up his hand. He’s too numb to really feel it, but he likes the way it looks - her strong fingers all wrapped around his bandaged ones.
“Move in with me,” he says, and then it’s out, it’s gone, and he can’t take it back. He does not say: marry me, have a baby with me, sleep in my bed, yell at me once a day. Those will come later.
He’s pretty sure he just threw the no-commitment thing out the window.
“Get rid of the porn,” she says. “Then we’ll see.”
*
“This is getting absurd,” Kakashi says, shoving a layer of soil and rock off of him.
“Then stop getting in the way,” Sakura says with infinite patience, pulling him out.
“No respect,” Kakashi clucks. He stands still while she checks him for injuries. She heals a cut across his thigh, and Kakashi watches with his Sharingan, mesmerized by the graceful swirl of her chakra.
“Where are Naruto and Sai?” he asks.
She squints up at the sun. “Uh, that way,” she says pointing off to the east.
“How far?”
She shrugs. “Two or three miles.”
“Meeting time?”
“We have an hour.”
“Perfect,” he says, and she looks up at him quizzically. “Leaves time for training,” he clarifies.
She shrieks when he pulls her back down to the ground with him, rolling on top of her. “You haven’t taken advantage of me in almost a week,” he tells her in an assessing voice. “I don’t want your skills to get rusty.”
“No chance of that,” she says breathlessly. “With such a difficult sensei.”
“Well,” he says cheerfully. “Let the session begin.”
ETA:
OMFG, I just found this on tsukiko7's deviantart:
YES.
It seems right that Sakura’s apartment have a lot of windows. Her skin is very pale in the morning sun, and she looks exhausted. It’s not a bad exhausted, though. She looks like someone kept her up all night, doing naughty things to her. Which, Kakashi thinks, is exactly what happened.
He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t be feeling this smug. He should be feeling like the piece of shit that he is, and he convinces himself that as soon as Sakura wakes up the guilt will kick in. For now, though, he feels lighter than he can remember feeling for years. He’s been inside of her and he’s gone down on her and he’s answered a few of his own rather burning questions about her breasts, and he can’t bring himself to regret that.
He watches her sleep for a few minutes before he heads to the shower. There’s a fresh scar running from knee to hip from her leg surgery. He kissed his way up it last night. He licked every inch of her. He found every one of her scars, tasted every place she’d ever been hurt, touched every mark this life had left on her. He remembers his tongue tracing the swirled tattoo on her bicep, and the sound she made when he did it.
When he emerges from the bathroom, Sakura is awake, sitting up wide-eyed and panicked in bed. Her face is chalky.
“Good morning,” he says.
She just blinks at him with the shell-shocked look he sees on trauma victims sometimes.
“Shower’s free?” he hazards.
She’s starting to look a little green around the edges, so he attempts to pull some gravity into his expression. He starts to sit on the edge of the bed, then remembers he’s in a towel, and stands. She stares up at him.
“Last night,” he starts. “We - ”
“I’m gonna throw up,” she interrupts him, and runs for the bathroom.
*
“Eat,” he tells her.
“You’re not my father,” she says defiantly, and if he doesn’t know that by now, he’s even more fucked than he thought.
He pushes the plate of toast toward her, and she glares down at it. “I’ll throw it at you,” she warns.
“I’ve had a few hangovers,” he says gently. “Eat.”
She sighs, but she picks up the toast and begins to nibble. She gets a little color back in her cheeks after the first piece, and she manages to get half of the second piece down as well before she shoves the plate away again.
“Last night,” he starts again.
“Was a mistake,” she finishes tiredly.
He’s been thinking more slightly more violent variations of the same thing ever since she kissed him, but it still dislikes hearing her say it. He takes a bite of his own breakfast, chews. “Mmm,” he says.
“And it’s my fault,” she hurries on.
“Almost entirely,” he agrees. She looks at him sharply, but she keeps talking.
“And don’t think I don’t know that,” she continues, eyeing him suspiciously. “I was still upset about Yuugao, and I drank too much, and you were there, and…”
Kakashi stops listening after that, although he continues to nod. She’s clearly taken some time to plan the speech, and Sakura’s never been particularly fond of interruptions. It’s too early to get maimed.
“…and Tsunade would kill us both,” she finishes. “So…”
He must keep nodding for too long, because she narrows her eyes. “Are you listening to me?” she demands.
“Of course,” he says soothingly. “It was ill-planned. That’s a given.”
“And we obviously can't do it again," she says.
He likes hearing that even less.
“I’m to blame, too,” Kakashi says helpfully. “I seduced you.”
“What?” Sakura says, confused. “No, wait. I did the seducing.”
“That’s impossible,” he tells her gravely.
“What?” she says angrily.
“I would never allow myself to be seduced by my student,” he explains. “That would be humiliating.”
“You moron,” she yells. “Were you even there?”
“Are you suggesting you could…uh, persuade me to sleep with you if I didn’t want to?”
“Damn straight,” she says.
He gives her a patronizing smile. “I highly doubt - ”
She straddles him and slams her lips against his, thighs sliding across his lap like silk. She kisses him until they’re both breathing hard, fingers grasping at handfuls of clothing in frustration.
Kakashi breaks away first. “You have potential,” he says, winded. “Now, can you get me upstairs?”
*
Nothing stays secret for long in Konoha. Half the village knows what happened by noon, and Tsunade calls them both to a private meeting before twenty-four hours are up. Sakura is red-faced and cringing. Kakashi manages to stay expressionless, but only through years of practice. He’s pretty sure the look in Tsunade’s eyes would send the most powerful shinobi running for cover.
“Are you insane?” is what she opens with.
Kakashi opens his mouth to speak, but Tsunade silences him by tightening her jaw. “Not you,” she says. She turns her wrath on Sakura. “You. You’re his subordinate, and you’re my assistant. I expect it from Kakashi, but you should know better. How do you think it makes me look when you go and do something like this? In public!”
“We weren’t on the main street,” Sakura mutters defensively, and Tsunade kicks her glare up a notch.
“Not to mention,” she plows on. “He’s a jounin and a he’s a man, which means he’s already emotionally deficient. And that’s not even taking into account that he’s Kakashi. He reads Jiraiya’s books for god’s sake. Honestly, Sakura, what were you thinking?”
Kakashi clears his throat in case Tsunade had actually forgotten he was in the room. She barely spares him a glance, though. Sakura looks miserable.
“I taught you better,” Tsunade says sternly. “You’ve never been so indiscreet before.”
Kakashi’s on the verge of inquiring who, exactly, she was so discreet with before, but he wisely decides to keep his mouth shut.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“Then be more careful in the future,” Tsunade says. “You’re dismissed.” Sakura leaves, her shoulders drooping.
Kakashi stands in uncomfortable silence under Tsunade’s stare. She looks at him for a long, long time, and Kakashi is pretty sure she’s deciding whether his value to the village is greater than her desire to pop his head like a water balloon. At least he’s been removed from the short list of Hokage candidates, he thinks.
“If you ruin that girl,” she says finally, “I’ll pull your dick out through your throat and floss your teeth with it. Dismissed.”
*
Kakashi breaks up with her five times in the first month.
The first time she’s hurt, the second she’s baffled. The third time she’s angry, and the fourth time she just punches him. The fifth time he disappears immediately after he finishes talking, and she realizes he sent a kage bunshin to give the speech for him.
Somewhere between the third and fourth time, Ino gets it in her head that Sakura needs to find someone slightly more stable. Sakura’s just pissed enough to go along with it.
She puts on heels and red lipstick and a top that really doesn’t belong anywhere except in an Icha Icha novel. She dances with exactly three boys before Kakashi corners her against the wall outside the girl’s restroom. He fucks her in the alley behind the bar, and she thinks she likes it even better than the first time.
Because the thing is, it’s not like she’s in love with Kakashi. She’ll admit that he has a nice mouth under the mask and fantastic hands and he probably looks prettier naked than she does. And his voice has a way of turning her on, even when he’s saying things that infuriate her, and she’ll be the first to point out that the way he fights is really more like art than battle, elegant and efficient as it is.
All those things are nice, but that’s not really it. The heart of it is that he complimented her on her genjutsu when she was a genin, and smiled at her and told her everything was going to be all right when she needed to hear it, and sometimes she remembers how badly she wanted his approval when she was younger, so badly it made her teeth hurt at times. He was the first one to teach her about teamwork, with his voice throbbing low and steadfast. Kakashi was her first sensei, and something in her never feels quite right, never quite confident, if he’s not the one leading her team.
Kakashi lost Sasuke, she thinks, just like she and Naruto did. And it shouldn’t still matter so much, but it does. She and Naruto and Kakashi share that failure - they’ll always share it - and she feels better fighting alongside them because of it. She trusts them; like her, they’re determined not to lose even one more person.
Unfortunately, all of that doesn’t make him a good boyfriend in the least. The sixth time he breaks up with her, she just raises and eyebrow and goes back to making dinner.
*
Kakashi gets a lot of quality time in with Obito during the first month he starts fucking his former student. He refuses to call it anything else. Doing so would mean he’s made some sort of commitment to her, and Kakashi is selfish, but he’s not that selfish. He’s not going to tie her future to his. She has a long life ahead of her, filled with people she loves and battles she actually has a chance of winning - sex and happiness and friendship and all the things he’s not stupid enough to try and take for himself.
He starts making bargains, instead. A few more weeks, he tells Obito. A few more weeks of Sakura, and he’ll start coming to the monument three times a day instead of two. Just a couple more nights, and Rin will get fresh flowers on her grave every day for a month.
It’s a stupid game. Obito never answers, and it’s not like he has any control over it, anyway. He bargains with his time like it’s his to trade, like he can predict which mission is the one where he’ll come home in a body bag instead of on his two feet. He’s not looking for a happy ending, he promises Obito. Just a little more time.
Sometimes he thinks it would be better if his death came sooner, rather than later. Maybe it would be kinder to cut the whole thing off before either of them gets too deeply in.
Except he suspects he’s been deeply in for a long, long time without even noticing.
He breaks up with her just to watch her green eyes snap. It’s a warning for her, although it’s one she obviously refuses to heed, since she keeps taking him back. The truth is that he’s unable to walk away on his own power. He’s hers as long as she wants him, and his heart sinks while his dick does a little dance of joy every time she pulls him through her bedroom window and kisses him.
*
Sakura jolts awake to the sound of commotion on her balcony. She automatically reaches for the kunai under her pillow, but it only takes her a second to deduce that the visitor is no threat. It’s either a civilian or Naruto, she figures; no normal shinobi could make that much noise. It’s neither, however.
Genma jumps when she slams open the shutters. ‘It’s two in the morning,” she says dangerously. “What?”
The older shinobi blinks at her in surprise. Kakashi is leaning heavily against him, and Genma glances over. “You said you lived here,” he accuses.
“No, I said my bed is here,” Kakashi slurs with dignity. “I live across town.”
Genma detangles his arm from Kakashi’s, and Kakashi sways on his feet. He seems to notice Sakura for the first time, and he lifts his hand in greeting. “Yo,” he says with a drunken smile.
‘Um…” she says.
Kakashi rights himself, pats Genma on the back. “You can leave now,” he says.
Genma ignores him. He’s looking between Kakashi and Sakura, disgusted. “You broke him,” he says.
“What?”
“Ruined,” Genma clarifies. “He’s officially the most boring drinking partner in the history of Konoha.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks, baffled.
“…and Sakura’s hair,” Genma mimics, “and Sakura’s eyes, and Sakura’s skin, and Sakura’s bre - ”
Oh.
“All right,” Sakura cuts him off hastily. “I get it. Here, just - dump him inside. He can sleep it off on the couch.”
Genma mutters something that sounds a lot like, “yeah right,” but he shuts up when Sakura shoots him a look.
Kakashi reeks of alcohol - he must have been drinking for hours straight to get so wasted.
“You’re a mess,” she says. She sits him on the couch and he looks dolefully up at her.
“I had a dream,” he says.
“Did it involve my breasts?” she asks sternly.
“No,” he sighs. “Obito.”
“Obito’s breasts?”
“No,” he says, and he sounds annoyed, so she stops teasing him.
“What?” she asks patiently.
“He was alive,” Kakashi says, “and he yelled, and he told me to stop screwing around. He called me names first."
“Sounds unpleasant,” Sakura remarks.
“He always was an ass,” Kakashi confesses.
“So…how are you screwing around?” Sakura asks, not sure she really wants to know.
Kakashi reaches out a hand and cups one of her breasts through the thin fabric of her t-shirt. His thumb drifts over her nipple. “My…breasts?” she says.
He pulls her toward him, burying his face in her chest. He mumbles something, but she can’t really hear, given how tightly his mouth his smashed against her.
“Fuck,” he says, pulling away slightly, and she’s not sure if he’s cursing someone or just stating his intentions.
She thinks of all the information she could drag out of him when he’s like this, all the questions she has that he’s never answered. A hundred mysteries solved in one night.
She gets off the couch. He makes an inebriated swipe for her, which she avoids. “Water,” she says. “Or you’ll be sorry in the morning.”
She notices her hand trembling slightly as she fills a glass at the tap.
When she comes back to her living room, he’s stretched himself out on the couch. He’s too long for it, and he looks cramped. One hand is hanging limply off the side, and he’s snoring lightly.
She sets the water on the coffee table, takes off her slippers, and crawls onto the couch next to him.
There’s not much room, but she manages to fit herself between his body and the edge of the cushion, her head tucked underneath his chin. His arm comes up around her.
She falls asleep listening to his heartbeat.
*
The first thing Kakashi does when he opens his eyes is let out a long, painful groan.
“Morning,” Sakura chirps.
He shields his face with one hand, blocking out the light.
“What the fuck?” he says.
“You probably have a hangover,” she guesses in a sympathetic voice.
He moves his hand just enough to look at her out of a pained gray eye.
“Don’t worry, though,” she says. “I made toast.”
*
She should have known he couldn’t stay out of the hospital long.
A murmur drifts through the hospital mid-morning. A stretcher case coming in, she hears. They all know what that means.
Shinobi are proud creatures, Sakura has learned. Too proud, at times. They don’t like the hospital at all, if they can avoid it. When they can’t, they prefer to walk in on their own power.
And when someone can’t walk in on their own power, well…that means that it’s bad. Fifty percent of stretcher cases die before they get through surgery.
Another ripple runs through the hospital a few moments later, more hushed this time. It’s Hatake Kakashi, the copy ninja.
*
Tsunade’s eyes are very grim above her surgical mask as she wipes her hands. There’s blood everywhere. Sakura stares at her own face in the mirror above the sink. It’s chalky-white.
“He’s stubborn, at least,” Tsunade says. “If he makes it through the night, he’ll probably make it through the week. And if that happens, then he’ll probably survive.”
Sakura can’t speak. All she can see are the knives imbedded in his neck, his chest, his stomach, marking his vital spots, cutting his organs to ribbon. In her six years at the hospital, she’s never seen so much blood. His face had been very still and pale against the blue of the operating table.
Tsunade surveys her - her shaky hands, her shocked eyes. “You chose this,” she reminds Sakura.
“I know,” Sakura whispers.
“Go home,” Tsunade says. Sakura begins to shake her head, to refuse, to say she couldn’t possibly…
“Home,” Tsunade orders. “You can’t work anymore today, and you’ll be in the way here. I’ll call you when he’s in recovery.”
Sakura paces her apartment. She fidgets, she worries, and when she’s about to go insane, she heads to the training grounds to knock few trees down. Anxiety makes her unable to focus her chakra properly, and she smashes her own fist to a pulp in the process. She doesn’t stop until her gloves are soaked in blood and her cheeks are wet and cold from all the crying.
There are no messages on her machine when she gets back.
She tapes her hand, she cooks herself a meal that she doesn’t eat, and she curls up on her couch to wait.
*
Kakashi crawls his way out of unconsciousness very slowly. He hates this feeling; he’s had far too many chances to get acquainted with it. He hates the sudden snap of light and sound, the way everything’s sideways when he first comes around, the fact that he never know whether he’s dead or alive, or if all his limbs are going to be there.
The first thing he sees when he opens his eyes a crack is Sakura, sitting in a chair by his bedside. She’s in civilian clothes, and her hair is very bright.
Everything feels very heavy and slow in his body, but he manages a rusty, “Yo.”
“Yo,” she says.
“I guess I lost,” he says drowsily. He thinks it’s rather clever conversation, given his condition, but Sakura’s expression doesn’t change.
“Oh no, you won,” she says. “You gave Sai the distraction he needed to capture the target. The missing-nin is back in Konoha custody. Mission success.”
“Lovely,” Kakashi rasps.
She’s been reading a book - one of his Icha Icha novels, he sees - but she sets it down now.
“I’m going to ask you once,” she says, and her voice is steady, but her eyes look dead. “Did you step in front of those knives on purpose?”
At first, Kakashi thinks he mishears her. He’s still pretty groggy, after all. “Come again,” he says.
“Tsunade thinks you have some sort of death wish,” Sakura says, and this time her voice shakes a little. “I told her she was wrong, but I need to ask. Are you trying to die on me?”
And he’s been trying to show her for two months how utterly ridiculous it is to waste her time on him, but he never thought of doing it this way. He has an excuse now, a way to go about it, and he shies away from it like it’s made of hot metal.
“No,” he says truthfully. He hadn’t been trying to anything but finish the mission and get back to her. His last thought before he blacked out hadn’t been of Obito and Rin, but of Sakura, and how angry she was going to be if he died in such a stupid way.
He’s not sure which answer she was expecting, but the one he gives seems to lift all the weight from her shoulders. She picks up his hand. He’s too numb to really feel it, but he likes the way it looks - her strong fingers all wrapped around his bandaged ones.
“Move in with me,” he says, and then it’s out, it’s gone, and he can’t take it back. He does not say: marry me, have a baby with me, sleep in my bed, yell at me once a day. Those will come later.
He’s pretty sure he just threw the no-commitment thing out the window.
“Get rid of the porn,” she says. “Then we’ll see.”
*
“This is getting absurd,” Kakashi says, shoving a layer of soil and rock off of him.
“Then stop getting in the way,” Sakura says with infinite patience, pulling him out.
“No respect,” Kakashi clucks. He stands still while she checks him for injuries. She heals a cut across his thigh, and Kakashi watches with his Sharingan, mesmerized by the graceful swirl of her chakra.
“Where are Naruto and Sai?” he asks.
She squints up at the sun. “Uh, that way,” she says pointing off to the east.
“How far?”
She shrugs. “Two or three miles.”
“Meeting time?”
“We have an hour.”
“Perfect,” he says, and she looks up at him quizzically. “Leaves time for training,” he clarifies.
She shrieks when he pulls her back down to the ground with him, rolling on top of her. “You haven’t taken advantage of me in almost a week,” he tells her in an assessing voice. “I don’t want your skills to get rusty.”
“No chance of that,” she says breathlessly. “With such a difficult sensei.”
“Well,” he says cheerfully. “Let the session begin.”
ETA:
OMFG, I just found this on tsukiko7's deviantart:
YES.