There's a girl who offers him sweets.

"Sasuke-kun!"

With bubblegum hair, green gelatin eyes and sugar-white smiles, the girl comes before him.

She comes before him every day, without fail. And without fail, he stands impassive with his hands shoved deep inside his pockets. Every day.

"I love you, Sasuke-kun."

There's a girl who offers him sweets every day, and they(she) make him sick in the stomach.

She's giving him a tall tower of strawberry shortcake today. It's unskillfully stacked and threatens to collapse in on itself.

It eventually does. Layers and layer of cakes and fruits sliding of each other as the cheap cream between them comes undone. When the shortcake drops to the floor at their feet in thick sloppy chunks, staining them both, she flushes a deep red under his gaze and quickly rids his sight of herself.

He stares down at the mess for a while longer before turning away.

She's giving him a rainbow popsicle today, and she holds it up to his dispassionate scrutiny, the pointy tip like a sword and her stance like a challenge.

This last for a few moments. He doesn't rise to the bait, and soon the sharp tip recedes into a blunt head. She sighs and admits defeat.

She's giving him a vanilla ice cream cone today. Her favorite so far, he notices and is unsurprised. He says nothing and does nothing as he watches the syrupy liquid slide down the side of the cone and across the valleys between her fingers.

Somehow desperate, she pushes it up at him on tiptoe. The chill radiating from the cold treat wafts against his nose and mouth, and when he takes a breath, the crisp (faintly sweet) air isn't all that different from the glacier inside his chest.

The untouched ice cream melts into sludge and runs down the length of her arms, and drips off the tip of her elbow.

She finally lowers the barren cone away and gives him a small sort of smile that's very different (but he can't pinpoint how) from what he's seen before.

She used to give him an undefined pile of pudding. He wouldn't have known it was pudding if she hadn't called it such.

Cupped messily between her palms, the pure white goo leaks in heavy globules, through the cracks of clumsy fingers and onto the floor. Not unlike the melted ice cream of today.

It only took a single half-hearted glare to send her running, but she came back the next day.

She's giving him chocolate chip cookies today, wrapped up in a nice little bow. Her gelatin eyes shimmer as she proudly grins.

They smell freshly-baked and seems to be a home recipe. Low sugar, she promises, but he doesn't believe her one whit. Wouldn't touch those even if he did.

She tells him they won't melt this time, so she can stay there for a long, long time.

And he lets her.

She's giving him pancakes topped with salted butter today, and it's the first time he lashes out at her.

Because who is she? Who does she think she is? To pretend to be his family when he's buried them all years and years ago. To give him pity when he's never ever ever needed it. Least of all from a pathetic little thing like her.

He shoves her back. The plate of pancakes crashes into a million pieces between them. She looks at him for a moment, horrified (but at what he isn't sure), before fleeing in tears like she always does.

There's blood on the floor once she's gone, and he doesn't know whose it is.

He never finds out. She has a knack for healing up the cuts and bruises on them both when he's not looking, and by the time he cares enough to look, it's as if nothing has ever happened.

She's giving him caramel custard on a small white saucer today.

He can see his shadowy reflection in the smooth brown glaze, and if he pays attention, which he tells himself he doesn't, he can see the pale, yellow mound tremble with every quiver of her wrists.

He does nothing, and she stays.

She's giving him a large birthday cake today. Another year gone, smothered in sweets, bubblegum, gelatin and sugar.

His hands remain deep inside his pockets. She thanks him for being alive, and he just wants to pry the cake shovel from her hand and put himself out of misery. Or her. Or both of them.

But he doesn't. He does nothing again, and she stays where she is. Gelatin eyes are still so oblivious to the darker part in his heart, and he laughs at them at night sometimes because she claims to know him when she doesn't.

She's giving him a glass of bavarois today.

He has no idea what that even is, but it looks like the pudding from way back when, if only tidier and a little more garnished.

She tells him that's because it's made of the same things, they all are, and the muscle in his jaw jumps suddenly in response. He knows he won't win, but he'd be damned if he lets her.

So, he says nothing more.

She's giving him a crepe spilling with colorful fruits today. He shakes his head, and she leaves right away, dumping the dessert into the trash on her way out.

They don't talk for weeks after, but it's a given now that she'll be back again for more.

Or (a lot) less.

She gave him store-bought taiyaki sometime after they first met.

Her little fingers barely holding onto the much larger pastry, she held it out before her, to him, and he could taste the cloying sweetness of the azuki bean paste, from the permeating steam, on his tongue.

The carved fish eye that stared back at him was almost as dead as the coal-black ones he saw in the mirror.

She's back and she's screaming at him today. She's brought along a slice of some kind of cake.

He can't tell because it's crushed in the palm of her hand. Just that it's cake, white with some red pigmentation, and sweet and moist; weeping with rich cream, as he quickly learns when she proceeds to shove it against his face, his mouth.

He said not a single word that day. Not a single dollop of cream breached the firm line of his lips as she cried and clawed and begged him to accept even just the scraps and morsels.

Eventually, her tantrum died and she was reduced to a tight bundle of sobs and self-pity at his feet. His hands were tight fists inside his pockets because he did not know what he would do with them uncurled.

Eventually, she picked herself up and left. He stood there a while longer and made no move to scrape off the bits of cake half-peeled off his cheeks and chin. He stood there until she returned to wipe him clean and bring them both back to square one.

For the first time, her eyes weren't made of gelatin, even with the sheen of tears, and he realizes later on he doesn't like that either.

She's giving him dark chocolate today. A single modest bar. No sugar, she says and presses it to his lips.

He's beginning to think that's not really the problem just as she's beginning to embrace that it is.

But the bittersweet smell of chocolate is comfortable enough that he doesn't push her away. Doesn't accept it either. And they stay that way for a little longer.

She's giving him a nondescript hard candy today. She doesn't say anything and simply puts it against his mouth.

It smells of nothing, and feels of nothing more than the roughness perching against his dry lips. He wants to search her eyes for some kind of clue but she's not looking at him, only through.

Something nips at him somewhere deep and hidden, and his hands twitch inside their hideouts. Just because he does that to her doesn't mean she gets to do it as well.

Annoyed, he tells himself it's just curiosity when he discreetly unwinds his jaw.

Just as his tongue is mere millimeters from the candy, her hand suddenly drops away. The tiny colorless orb clatters to the floor and rolls quietly away.

She gives him a sad smile, the saddest he's ever seen from her. Bubblegum hair still frames her face perfectly, but there's no trace of gelatin or sugar anywhere. And when she turns to walk away, like she has done so many times before, he simply knows she won't be coming back this time.

.

.

.

.

Doesn't mean he accepts it.

"Sakura!"

There's a girl with bubblegum hair who no longer offers him sweets.

She no longer offers him sweets because she thinks they make him sick.

But while her eyes may not be gelatin, they still reflect his dark ones with perfect clarity. And she may not smile that silly sugary smile that much anymore, or at all, but he can smile for the both of them like she once did.

"I love you...Sakura."

He's giving her a thick syrup today. He can't say he knows the taste, but he really hopes she likes it as he meticulously feeds her spoonful by spoonful, never letting a drop escape her soft, pink lips.

They can take it at her pace. He doesn't have a lot of patience, but what little he has, he can spare for her.

He still wonders what that tiny colorless candy she's dropped would have tasted like-No, what it would taste like. Once he finds it.

Because he's still looking for it. It's not gone, just missing, out of sight—and although chains and shackles clutter the little dark room they are in, whenever she takes the hand he holds out to her, no matter how hesitantly, he can't help but be certain that he will find it.

He will.

Soon.

Author's Note: Metaphors, metaphors. Moral of the story is that Sasuke is a closet sweet-tooth? Gasp, major canon violation! I better bounce before the IC police comes.