Title: Diagrams
Summary: The library, summer, and the drawing sitting before them. If only. [Sasu/Saku
A/N: My first sasu/saku. : ( I blame some amazing fics I've run across recently. It's set in cannon. Somewhere in between Haku and the trials. Or wherever you think fits best.
Ps. I am currently looking for a beta.
The library is too quiet. She re-reads her line, before looking above the chapter, peeking to see that he was completely still, head rested behind his joined hands. Eyes flickering quickly across the page, hands moving independently from vision. Do-not-disturb tattooed in breath. Old as dust and moldly pages - ripped straight from her romance books.
She looks back down.
It shouldn't have started when he was eight. There was a time, when he was a shy but loudmouthed boy. Then one night, and the brooding orphan was the newest playground kid.
She taps her pen, unable to restrain herself.
"Sasuke, what did you think of chapter four?"
He furrows his brows, since he's really a fifty year old man, battered and done for. The missing years dribbled away, draining from his face. They should be tacked to a sign: find and return me please.
He picks up a sheet of paper, and draws out a thorough diagram, lightly tapping the important positions. She clicks her pen, and nods.
What if he had been allowed to grow, shoot up like a weed, nourished by the sun and sidewalk chalk. Even in the Uchiha sector, there are thin strands of sunbeams peaking through the cracked boards. Given walks along the park, ice cream, and homegrown tomatoes in the back, he could have been a boy who blushed, and squabbled with her over the last onigiri. Or maybe, they would have been caught in the dark, trying to break into the school, his face red from embarrassment and supporting her tumbling weight.
He would look up, guileless and maybe crack a grin that grew into his face.
And maybe he'd buy her sweet cakes, and then scowl – but not like this – when she laughs. Hopefully, he would have been less heart-achingly gorgeous, and more well-adjustedly handsome. A boy instead of a man.
"…Do you see?" He asks her, and crosses out an important point. He's good, but not perfect.
She taps her pen, and shows him the flaw in his drawing.
He watches as she traces the scenario and adds the details, fleshing out possibilities. He could argue that they don't matter, and they don't. Except when they do – and her hand, scars changing faces as she sketches loops and curves, looking soft in the electric light – but carelessness isn't his plan.
Putting down his book, he scoots in a little closer, very aware of the inches spanning his arm from hers. She's lost in their picture, but not really, since her voice has raised by a millimeter.
The problem is transparent as it always has.
He takes another look.
She increases it by adding alternate realities. The could,would,maybe,should. The diagram is now two pages long, and still she's clicking and tapping and scribbling and looping. He waits until she finishes, since he has been taught to be patient, especially with girls, and most particularly with this one.
One of her fingers taps her lip, a sign of mental turbulence. She is diligent, where nothing is difficult, especially in matters of simplification.
"The problem with hypotheticals is that they don't take into account reality." He moves the sheet, only after her hands have receded and the area is clear, and darkens the original lines. She shakes her head, and furrows her brows.
"The premise doesn't change. This-" he points to her last label, slightly askew – "could never happen. The original situation wouldn't permit it."
She chews it over, and he knows that an argument is percolating. He has set himself so firmly in this dried reality, that he can see the edges crumble, and know solid, hunkering metal down down below.
One time, she was tired and the words fell out of her mouth, before she could scoop them hastily back inside the heart on her sleeve. What if… you stayed for the summer?
He couldn't answer, and moreover, didn't want to. Nothing is gained from musings, wonderings, imaging silly notions of summers spent at home. He has been to her house, and seen the hose left out in the sun, watched as she and Ino drank from it and wet the cracked earth. Said something about planting cosmos.
He knows of the Uchiha garden, but he was forbidden to play there. Uchiha land had one garden, in the middle of the main house, and the lower ranks were charged with six specific kinds of geraniums, arranged in a spiraling center. Precision. Pragmatism – if flowers could ever be pragmatic.
The grounds were mostly dirt and ash, dumped from nearby hearths, before being swept away as though it had never settled. The smell stayed, like brimstone and fire, he remembered, and he couldn't imagine anything green surviving in such an acidic soil. He's read somewhere that plants need particular balance of Ph and water foroptimal growth conditions. They could grow well when pushed to their limits, but that was evolution. Subtle reality checks.
Anything else is juvenile imagination.
"Well, I don't see how that's different."
They've given up on paper and pens, and instead laid down their books. Voices that started out as whispers slowly increase as words begin to stack on top of each other, threatening to fall down.
"You aren't looking at the reality."
"The point of reality is being too complex to simplify – it's whymodels are inherently flawed."
Her head is cocked to the side. His hand clutches the edge.
"Possibilities don't clarity anything, without acknowledging the foundation."
"The foundation is –"
"The centerpoint."
"No, Sasuke-kun, the entry point."
She remembers playground walks, and gravel between her toes as she and Ino raced. Her hair was short, like the grass was short, like they were. Catch me if you can. She said. Then the schism, and now they are this, except when they need to be that.
"At least acknowledge that these are possible. They can't exist without belief."
He looks exasperated, and her eyes begin to crinkle.
Sometimes, he will squabble with Naruto over the last kunai. And he's never hoisted her anywhere, because he preferred to go in first and then let her know it's clear.
"They don't matter, and exhausting yourself this way is a waste of-"
But she's smiling and laughing, and he's scowling again.
Sometimes at night, he will walk her back, and even if it's in boiling silence and his hands are jammed in his pockets.
"What are you laughing at?"
"Nothing, you just… looked young for a moment." She says, before standing up and stretching. She's tired, and she can see the bags underneath his eyes – even if he can't. "Complications are life. Sasuke-kun."
"Sakura. Be realistic."
She shakes her head, as she packs up her things. He joins her, wondering if she's hiding resentment, gathering it up before tossing it at him. He waits until she has almost cleared the table, before scooping up his things.
Outside, it is dark already, and humid for mid-spring. Electricity is already building out in the east, and he can almost smell rain.
"It's going to storm." He tells her.
"I'll bring a few umbrellas. In case." She says, and waits for his offer to walk her home – the one with the painted shutters and fence and radishes growing in a box on the windowsill. He knows because he's done it before. Some nights.
He remembers solid oak pillars and exacting rituals, like carrying incense that wafted into his nose and clung onto his hair. Or narrow hallways darkened with statues of tengu, and being expected to walk through, head up, chin straight, hands at your side.
Some nights, he walks her back, and waits until the door is closed, before returning to his room with glass windows looking out across Konoha.
But she's strong and she's prepared and she's fine. So tonight, he doesn't move.
She stands beneath the awnings of the roof just as the first showers hit. She nods, understanding, before turning around and waving goodbye.
He watches her form as she sprints through the lamplight, smiling even with pink plastered to her forehead. The rain is thick, and it runs off the cement in little rivers, taking bits of soil and grass, converging into puddles here and there.
Bag in one hand. Shoes in the other. Her feet make pitter patter sounds in the mud.