The Child Is Gone
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Sakura, Team Seven
Summary: People say that a woman's love is as deep as the sea and as soft as falling cherry blossoms. Before them, I thought these people were right.
A/N: This has been sitting on my hard drive, nearly completed, since February or March. Sakura fascinates me for many reasons, both as a character and as the most loathed figure in fandom. Hopefully, I did her complexity justice.
He’s so beautiful it hurts.
It’s a kind of beauty that’s simply unfair. He’s something that shouldn’t be visible to dumb humans like me, something that I shouldn’t ever get close enough to smell and taste and touch. It’s a kind of beauty that shouldn’t hurt, because why would it hurt to lose something no one is good enough to possess? At the very least, it should hurt the way beautiful music hurts-a kind of pain that makes the sufferer more beautiful by letting them touch the very edge of divine perfection.
But he doesn’t hurt that way, because he does bleed and sweat and cry when no one else can see. He smells bad at the end of a long mission and scratches himself in his sleep until his arms are raw and bloody. I thought he was cool, a god of frigid perfection who had the entire world under his command. But cool is the last thing he is, and the few times I felt the full force of his heat it nearly killed me. To feel that fire turned on me, to understand what it would feel like if I burned the way he burns, was a loss that still hurts.
Now he’s beautiful, too.
It shouldn’t hurt because he shouldn’t have become beautiful. He was never the one with the world in his palm; he was never the one with fire in his heart and hunger in his smile. He was never the one who made warmth burn between the legs of inexperienced girls. He was all things sloppy and stupid and useless, and none of the things that made fire grow inside me. He was nothing, and he was everything, and now he is so beautiful it hurts and I don’t know what any of it means.
They are not good and evil. They are night and day, and you have to know the universe to understand that the moon and the sun burn with the same light.
He was always supposed to be beautiful, and I needed his beauty the way that only an awakening girl can. I understood the way my body wanted him, the places I wanted to touch, the things I wanted to see. It took me years to understand that when I ached to feel him inside me, it had nothing to do with sex. I had always needed him inside me. I had always wanted him to fill the spaces that throbbed empty within me, to flood me with his strength and give my weak, wounded spirit a way to burn. I wanted to take his power and claim it for my own; I wanted to know what it felt like to be untouchable.
Slowly, his mask unraveled and I saw the raw, weeping mess he was inside. He was more beautiful broken than whole, and it scared me how badly I now wanted to fill the spaces inside him. I wanted to touch his wounds-I wanted my hands to cause that hiss of pain. I wanted to be the one who soothed as well as inflamed him, and it killed me to see him accomplish this instead.
It hurt because my only virtue was being better than dead last. It hurt because even if I wasn’t as beautiful as Ino, I couldn’t be uglier than him. It hurt because without his fire inside me I was nothing but an empty shell, a pretty face on a stupid girl who wasn’t strong or angry or hurt or loving or beautiful enough to save him.
It’s easy to say that I didn’t need softness-I just needed to know I was worthy of him. It’s easy to say that my body continued to crave him, needing his arms around me with a strength I still can’t explain, long after my heart let go. It’s easy to say that he was the product of childhood fantasy and adolescent curiosity, a being constructed entirely from the beauty and passion I wanted so badly in my life.
It’s hard to say that more than anything, more than strength or beauty or status, I needed to be visible. I needed someone to reach out to me the way I reached out to him, to accept everything that I am and hold it close like it was actually worth something. I needed to be held like I was pretty and smiled at like I was strong; I needed to make him bleed the way I bled.
The only boy who ever loved me that way was my family. I was more his sister than Ino’s, even after three years of girlish intimacy. I could no sooner have accepted him as my prince than I could have rejected my prince as a common rogue, and feeling his warm gaze on me inspired nothing but guilt and shame-I was only good enough for dead last, and my fragile, childish pride would not allow me to comprehend the full purity of his love.
The man my prince became carries hatred and loneliness as his standard, and I pity him as much as I fear him. The boy who loved me became beautiful, and it is the softness between us that keeps me from losing myself in him. I cannot lose the tenderness I felt for him, because that tenderness comforted the aching spaces inside me. I was never worthless in front of him, although he couldn’t give me the perfection I wanted.
(I always loved him as the brother I never had, but my body knew things that my mind didn’t. It saw the fire in his heart and the hunger in his smile, and it knew he would become a man who burns so brilliantly he robs the breath from my lungs. My young body shivered before a strength that hadn’t fully formed yet, and the way I melt under his strong hands is more familiar than I will ever admit to myself.)
Before them, when all I knew of love came from family and sisterhood and the fluttering warmth of seeing a cute boy, I thought I knew the difference between beauty and ugliness. I thought I knew that the pain of love was the best feeling in the world, and that it was better to lose love than to be safe and not love at all. I thought I knew that we’ll do it together and I like your forehead and you’re not dead weight would never, ever be enough.
There is nothing in this world more terrifying than love, but I do not fear it. I have loved with every cell of my being and been burned to ash in response, but I survived. I have lost the star around which my unformed psyche based its orbit, but I survived. What I fear is not love, but hope. To lose a love that burns this violently is all but inevitable. To see this love in the face of home and family and friendship, to face its brightness without flinching, to put myself in its hands without bracing for the fall-this takes more strength than I can claim.
People say that women see beauty in the soul and not in the body. They say that a woman’s love is softness and warmth, a healing power that is strong because it exists to serve others. These people think my choice is an easy one, and that the hot madness swirling in my head is an unfortunate effect of my age and gender. Poor girl, too young and stupid to put others first. Too trapped by the fancies of her heart to do the right thing. Too selfish to see the boy-either, neither, both-who needs her complete devotion.
These people do not understand us, and they do not understand me.
We burn, us three, because we love and need and hope more strongly than the rest of the world. We burn because the world is a cruel place, and this is the only thing keeping it together. We burn because there is no one else-not girlfriends, not parents, not teachers-who feels this hunger and understands what it means.
If they needed the love of a woman, they shouldn’t have asked for a warrior.
Characters/Pairings: Sakura, Team Seven
Summary: People say that a woman's love is as deep as the sea and as soft as falling cherry blossoms. Before them, I thought these people were right.
A/N: This has been sitting on my hard drive, nearly completed, since February or March. Sakura fascinates me for many reasons, both as a character and as the most loathed figure in fandom. Hopefully, I did her complexity justice.
He’s so beautiful it hurts.
It’s a kind of beauty that’s simply unfair. He’s something that shouldn’t be visible to dumb humans like me, something that I shouldn’t ever get close enough to smell and taste and touch. It’s a kind of beauty that shouldn’t hurt, because why would it hurt to lose something no one is good enough to possess? At the very least, it should hurt the way beautiful music hurts-a kind of pain that makes the sufferer more beautiful by letting them touch the very edge of divine perfection.
But he doesn’t hurt that way, because he does bleed and sweat and cry when no one else can see. He smells bad at the end of a long mission and scratches himself in his sleep until his arms are raw and bloody. I thought he was cool, a god of frigid perfection who had the entire world under his command. But cool is the last thing he is, and the few times I felt the full force of his heat it nearly killed me. To feel that fire turned on me, to understand what it would feel like if I burned the way he burns, was a loss that still hurts.
Now he’s beautiful, too.
It shouldn’t hurt because he shouldn’t have become beautiful. He was never the one with the world in his palm; he was never the one with fire in his heart and hunger in his smile. He was never the one who made warmth burn between the legs of inexperienced girls. He was all things sloppy and stupid and useless, and none of the things that made fire grow inside me. He was nothing, and he was everything, and now he is so beautiful it hurts and I don’t know what any of it means.
They are not good and evil. They are night and day, and you have to know the universe to understand that the moon and the sun burn with the same light.
He was always supposed to be beautiful, and I needed his beauty the way that only an awakening girl can. I understood the way my body wanted him, the places I wanted to touch, the things I wanted to see. It took me years to understand that when I ached to feel him inside me, it had nothing to do with sex. I had always needed him inside me. I had always wanted him to fill the spaces that throbbed empty within me, to flood me with his strength and give my weak, wounded spirit a way to burn. I wanted to take his power and claim it for my own; I wanted to know what it felt like to be untouchable.
Slowly, his mask unraveled and I saw the raw, weeping mess he was inside. He was more beautiful broken than whole, and it scared me how badly I now wanted to fill the spaces inside him. I wanted to touch his wounds-I wanted my hands to cause that hiss of pain. I wanted to be the one who soothed as well as inflamed him, and it killed me to see him accomplish this instead.
It hurt because my only virtue was being better than dead last. It hurt because even if I wasn’t as beautiful as Ino, I couldn’t be uglier than him. It hurt because without his fire inside me I was nothing but an empty shell, a pretty face on a stupid girl who wasn’t strong or angry or hurt or loving or beautiful enough to save him.
It’s easy to say that I didn’t need softness-I just needed to know I was worthy of him. It’s easy to say that my body continued to crave him, needing his arms around me with a strength I still can’t explain, long after my heart let go. It’s easy to say that he was the product of childhood fantasy and adolescent curiosity, a being constructed entirely from the beauty and passion I wanted so badly in my life.
It’s hard to say that more than anything, more than strength or beauty or status, I needed to be visible. I needed someone to reach out to me the way I reached out to him, to accept everything that I am and hold it close like it was actually worth something. I needed to be held like I was pretty and smiled at like I was strong; I needed to make him bleed the way I bled.
The only boy who ever loved me that way was my family. I was more his sister than Ino’s, even after three years of girlish intimacy. I could no sooner have accepted him as my prince than I could have rejected my prince as a common rogue, and feeling his warm gaze on me inspired nothing but guilt and shame-I was only good enough for dead last, and my fragile, childish pride would not allow me to comprehend the full purity of his love.
The man my prince became carries hatred and loneliness as his standard, and I pity him as much as I fear him. The boy who loved me became beautiful, and it is the softness between us that keeps me from losing myself in him. I cannot lose the tenderness I felt for him, because that tenderness comforted the aching spaces inside me. I was never worthless in front of him, although he couldn’t give me the perfection I wanted.
(I always loved him as the brother I never had, but my body knew things that my mind didn’t. It saw the fire in his heart and the hunger in his smile, and it knew he would become a man who burns so brilliantly he robs the breath from my lungs. My young body shivered before a strength that hadn’t fully formed yet, and the way I melt under his strong hands is more familiar than I will ever admit to myself.)
Before them, when all I knew of love came from family and sisterhood and the fluttering warmth of seeing a cute boy, I thought I knew the difference between beauty and ugliness. I thought I knew that the pain of love was the best feeling in the world, and that it was better to lose love than to be safe and not love at all. I thought I knew that we’ll do it together and I like your forehead and you’re not dead weight would never, ever be enough.
There is nothing in this world more terrifying than love, but I do not fear it. I have loved with every cell of my being and been burned to ash in response, but I survived. I have lost the star around which my unformed psyche based its orbit, but I survived. What I fear is not love, but hope. To lose a love that burns this violently is all but inevitable. To see this love in the face of home and family and friendship, to face its brightness without flinching, to put myself in its hands without bracing for the fall-this takes more strength than I can claim.
People say that women see beauty in the soul and not in the body. They say that a woman’s love is softness and warmth, a healing power that is strong because it exists to serve others. These people think my choice is an easy one, and that the hot madness swirling in my head is an unfortunate effect of my age and gender. Poor girl, too young and stupid to put others first. Too trapped by the fancies of her heart to do the right thing. Too selfish to see the boy-either, neither, both-who needs her complete devotion.
These people do not understand us, and they do not understand me.
We burn, us three, because we love and need and hope more strongly than the rest of the world. We burn because the world is a cruel place, and this is the only thing keeping it together. We burn because there is no one else-not girlfriends, not parents, not teachers-who feels this hunger and understands what it means.
If they needed the love of a woman, they shouldn’t have asked for a warrior.