A/N: I'M SORRY!

I have a good excuse, though: I didn't have internet D: And I got a job.

I have like 100 more followers since I last updated! Wow. I was really surprised when I checked. Thanks :D

Please excuse any proofreading errors.

(Oh, and because I have to say something about the music portion of the chapter… Mumford & Sons is pretty cool.)

Enjoy!

Ghosts That We Knew

"But I will hold on as long as you like

Just promise me we'll be alright"

- "Ghosts That We Knew"

Mumford & Sons

"I was cleaning," Sakura lied smoothly.

Sakuke snorted in disbelief. "With the door closed?"

"Hey, I don't ask you what you do on your spare time or how you do it," Sakura said, crossing her arms and turning her head to point her nose in the air.

"Why have you been avoiding us?" Naruto asked, cutting off her ramblings.

Sakura's heart thumped erratically.

This was it.

She climbed slowly to her feet, not liking the four of them towering over her, and kept her eyes on said body parts. "I've been really busy."

"That hasn't stopped you from making time for us before," Naruto said in a harder tone than Sakura was used to hearing. "We haven't seen you in almost a week. We even had to go to Tsunade-sama to figure out where you were."

Sakura almost flinched.

"I-uh…" she fell silent, knowing that any other excuse would be futile.

"What is it?" Sai asked calmly.

Everyone was staring at her and she felt like crawling out of her skin from the intensity.

Sakura stayed silent. She didn't want to do this right now.

"Why have you been avoiding us?" Naruto asked again and she noticed that even Sasuke looked at him in surprise at the cold tone he took with her; Naruto was always the one who was softest with her.

"I would think that that should be obvious," Sakura finally said in a hoarse tone. She had crossed her arms again and now had them clutching furiously at her shirt and into her skin.

"Do you hate us?" Kakashi asked.

Sakura lifted her head sharply in surprise. "Wha—no!" she denied frantically.

"Then tell us what is bothering you," Sai demanded.

"I—"

"Come on, Sakura," Naruto sighed.

"I don't want to do this right now," Sakura said, feeling tiny under their demanding gazes.

"Then when?" Sasuke asked, voice hinting at impatience.

"I—" Sakura started, only to be cut off again.

"We need to sort this out," Kakashi said.

"But—"

"Stop stalling," Naruto said.

Sakura was almost shaking.

Please stop.

"Sakura, please?" Sasuke asked, stunning Sakura with a tone that was soft in utterance.

Stop.

"That's—"

She was definitely shaking now. Her nails dug into her palms, but strangely, she didn't feel any pain. They had to stop interrupting her or she was going to explode.

"No more excuses," Kakashi interrupted for the last time as she finally burst out and yelled what she had been confining within herself for years.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT TO HEAR? THAT I STUPIDLY FELL IN LOVE WITH MY FOUR TEAMMATES AND NOW I DON'T HAVE A CLUE WHERE TO GO FROM HERE? ARE YOU HAPPY I FINALLY SAID IT?" Sakura's chest was heaving as if she'd just had an intense training session with Tsunade. She looked back down at the floor, not wanting to see their reactions to her outburst. Tears stung in the corners of her eyes, but she forced them back—crying would only make matters worse.

They said nothing and Sakura, not bearing the silence any longer, pushed past them, heading closer to the front door.

They misinterpreted her actions.

"We're not leaving—" Sasuke started.

"I wasn't going to ask you to leave," Sakura hissed, anger replacing her unshed tears. "You want to talk about this? Then let's talk!"

Her sudden mood swing apparently blindsided them. Naruto, Sasuke, Sai, and Kakashi stared at her with wide eyes.

Well, what did they expect!

Sakura pointed at the couch. "Sit."

"Sakura—" Naruto opened his mouth to say more, but Sakura didn't let him.

"Sit," she growled.

They sat themselves in quite a hurry.

The sight of them, squishing together on her small couch, would have made her giggle any other day, but not this day. Sakura started pacing furiously back and forth, probably wearing tracks into her living room floor in her agitation.

"Everyone's telling me stupid, crazy things, but then they don't seem so crazy once I think about them," she babbled, not even sure that they would understand her. Sakura ran a hand anxiously through her hair. "Stupid, yes, but not crazy." Izamani's, Ino's, Hinata's, and Tsunade's words popped up in her head. "But it just wouldn't work.

"And I was planning on telling you—" Sakura kept on, "—but I was thinking it would be a more individual thing—and certainly not how I just yelled at you right now! But all of you are so damn insisting!

"You probably already knew, even though I didn't even know myself yet. I was just repressing it for too long because I didn't want to think of what the consequences of this would be! But nooo, you guys had to up and confess all in one night and then I had to face my preposterous feelings! Who the fuck falls in love with four people in the same time frame?" Sakura couldn't stop her word vomit and she kept on saying what she'd been gathering into deep pools in her mind. "And then I agreed to your stupid plan and we should not have done that because it just made everything worse! I keep having these dreams and-and, ugh, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore!" Sakura did not want to think about the fact that she'd just unconsciously, more or less, admitted to having sex dreams about all of them. "I'm probably going crazy and maybe that's preferable."

Sakura paused in her pacing, but then resumed again. She spoke in a quieter tone now—almost a whisper, but not quite, "I mean, everyone else saw it before I even did. According to Ino, you guys stick so much to me that everyone else thinks we're already together," she clasped her hands absentmindedly as Ino had when she'd said it.

Sakura swallowed and rubbed her top and bottom lip against each other. She was getting to the hard part.

Another deep breath that rattled as it left her on account of her trembling and she spoke again, "Which was why I was trying to stay away. I don't see another way around this situation."

Sakura had come to agonizing conclusion that the advice she'd been offered and the longing wishes of maybe them finding an equilibrium in their relationship where they could all be together, was just not a possibility no matter how wonderfully fantastic it all sounded; all of them, including her, were too stubborn and too difficult and just too impossibly headstrong. She wouldn't be able to handle it if they tried what had been suggested, but then everything went downhill and all that would be left of their relationship would be the five of them occasionally running into each other in the streets as indifferent acquaintances.

Sasuke, Naruto, Sai, and Kakashi still had not uttered a word.

Sakura, legs numb under her, walked over and sat with a thump on her coffee table, back facing the four quiet shinobi across from her. All the fight and anger that had been keeping her going, left her body.

"I'm thinking," Sakura started again, fighting not to let her voice crack, "that this will be easier to say if I don't look at you. The only way around this situation that I see, is that maybe—maybe we should keep our distance from each other until—well, to see if these feelings disappear overtime." Now that was a bald-faced lie; she would never feel any differently. But maybe they could? And even though the thought of maybe running into them somewhere else with another woman made her want to bite her own tongue off, she had to say it.

Sakura went silent, having said her fill. Her hands were grasping on the edge of the wooden coffee table with enough force to make her knuckles stand out pure white. She still could not find the courage within herself to face the four men behind her.

"Wait, what?" Naruto asked in disbelief at her last statement.

"We're not going to do that," Sasuke said as if it was final.

"No, that is not a good plan," Sai said.

"Well, that was certainly an illustrated speech, but I should have expected that," Kakashi mused, mostly to himself. He completely avoided her proclamation.

This is what she meant about the stubborn thing!

Sakura exhaled another deep breath, not wanting to recognize the fact that she was more than a little relieved that they hadn't agreed to her plan right away.

"Well then, I suggest you think of a better way to handle this," Sakura said.

"We already have," Sai spoke up, "but we are not sure you will accept it."

Sakura's breath stilled.

Naruto's voice replaced Sai's, "We saw how you reacted the first time we asked you to pick, so we figured that that wouldn't be the way to go. And yes, we already guessed that you felt the same way as we do—your reaction when we asked you to pick before only confirmed it."

"If you already knew, then what was with letting me make an idiot out of myself just now?!" Sakura angrily retorted, still not turning. They probably let her freak out for kicks.

"We wanted to hear you say it out loud," Sasuke said.

"For what purpose?" Sakura asked hesitantly.

"Other than to see you freak out?" Kakashi said. "We thought that once we had preliminaries out of the way, we could find a solution from there."

"I didn't freak out!" Sakura denied, although everyone—including herself—knew that she had, maybe, just a little bit.

Sasuke cleared his throat and Sakura was pretty sure that if she could see his face, he would be rolling his eyes.

Naruto sighed, "Sakura, will you look at us?"

"No."

He sighed again.

Kakashi started once more, "We have a proposition for you—"

Yeah, because the first one went so well.

Sakura, guessing what was coming, shot off the table and quickly turned around to finally face them. "Don't say anything you're going to regret later," she said in a breathless voice.

Kakashi, Naruto, Sai, and Sasuke seemed startled by her popping off the table like a jack-in-the-box, but Kakashi kept talking, nonetheless.

"—what if you didn't have to choose?"

Sakura stared at him with wide eyes and said nothing.

Had he really suggested it? What she'd been hoping for, but at the same time fearing?

Her four boys watched her closely.

"Do you have any idea what you just suggested?" she asked, astonished.

"Of course we do," Naruto stated, "all four of us have already discussed it. We wouldn't have proposed it, otherwise."

"Don't you think that was a conversation I should have been included in?" she asked, slightly vexed.

"We wanted to ascertain if this situation would be possible between the four of us before involving you," Sai explained, "and we are including you now because we have reached a decision."

Sakura didn't have to ask what that final decision was because they had just offered it to her moments ago. She couldn't believe that they had been the first ones to say it out loud. To think of them, sitting down and actually talking this whole tangled mess out, was completely nonsensical to her. Sakura was flabbergasted because she had already convinced herself that the scenario they had proposed was entirely impossible for the four stubborn shinobi.

Did they really love her that much?

"All of you actually agreed to it?" she asked, even now more bewildered. "Even you." She turned her astonished eyes to Sasuke. Out of all her boys, Sasuke was always quickest to anger and toughest to get to comply, he was also the one who was the most annoyingly territorial about her.

"Don't look so surprised," Sasuke said, miffed, but then he continued in a calmer voice, "I thought that this has to be better than the alternative."

"That being?" she asked.

"What you suggested earlier."

Sakura swallowed and started pacing again, but less frantically.

If they had already talked this over, then did that mean they had gone over all the obvious details?

They were expecting a reply.

Sakura shook her head slowly. "No."

Dammit, did she just say that?!

Her boys didn't exactly look very surprised by her response. They knew her well.

"Why?" Sai asked.

"Because of various reasons," Sakura said, encompassing vagueness with her answer.

"Let's hear some of those reasons," Naruto pressed.

She was positively, pretty much certain that she didn't want to voice those reasons out loud.

The four of them looked at her, waiting for an answer.

"Umm," Sakura said in a tone that suggested that the reasons were obvious, and her stating them would only be redundant. She looked at them with such an expression, as well.

They waited some more.

Sakura decided to start with the least difficult reason to say out loud. "You guys fight, like, way too much."

"We have already discussed and agreed that we do feud consistently and we have reached a unanimous conclusion that we will try to keep our disagreements to a minimum if not nonexistent, or maybe somewhere where you are not able to witness them. Next," Sai said, barely pausing and moving to the next subject without transition.

Sakura stood stymied with her mouth hanging open. Had they rehearsed their answers?

"Uh," said Sakura smartly.

"If that's all…" Kakashi trailed off, leaving room for Sakura to elaborate further if she so desired.

"No! That's not all," Sakura quickly answered. Far from it

She was still eluding the more touchy subjects, so she searched for another.

"What will people think?" she finally said. Sakura had been trying not to let this issue bother her, but in some small way it still did; people could be very cruel, sometimes more so with words than with actions. Izanami had even told her as much.

The four looked at her with expressions suggesting that she'd just wasted their time with that particular question. Obviously they didn't give a rat's ass. Sakura thought that she should have expected this response. Each one of them had been subject to gossip behind their backs in some way or another and had learned to either deal with it or ignore it.

"Next," said Sasuke, sounding bored.

Sakura was becoming agitated again. She racked her mind for another, simpler problem, but finding none, she blurted out one of the big ones with desperation, "Children! What about that?" She turned to Sasuke and said in a strained voice, "I know you want children." Sakura knew that restoring his clan and having a family was an essential and primary part of his plans. She also knew that having this conversation now as a bit premature, but if she was even to consider this arrangement, she had to be certain where they all stood before entering into it.

Sakura continued, "I mean, I do want them, but—and don't take me the wrong way—but I haven't worked this hard and gotten his far only to end up as a housewife, caring for children for the rest of my life." Sakura took her job and skills very seriously, she wasn't about to abandon them. Sakura had decided long ago that she was a woman, but she was also a kunoichi, and she wouldn't merely defined by either one: Sakura was both and would always be. They had to realize that. She decided not to mention on how they would have the children, thinking that they would be smart enough to arrive at that problem themselves.

Another thing was that she wasn't sure if all of them even wanted children. Sasuke and Naruto, of course. But Kakashi and Sai?

And she wasn't a damn baby-machine!

Sakura went silent, waiting for an answer.

Sasuke spoke up first. His steady onyx eyes found her troubled green ones. "We understand that and would not ask you to forget your abilities and responsibilities to care for our children. And when that time comes we know that we will all work together to care for and raise them. Don't think we'll place that burden solely on your shoulders."

Sakura looked for confirmation in the other three's eyes and found it. She nodded slowly.

"I'm not even certain I will desire offspring in the future," Sai intoned.

Kakashi talked next, "Also, about the order in which we'll have them, well, I think that's a problem for another day." Trust Kakashi to acknowledge what she'd been worried about.

"Do you even want children, Kakashi?" Sakura asked, curious to know.

Kakashi eyed her contemplatively with his visible eye and said, "With you, I think I might."

Sakura was speechless for a moment. She noticed that not even one glare was thrown Kakashi's way, even though that comment would surely have earned him a jab to the side before.

They really were committed.

"Is that it?" Naruto asked.

Sakura suddenly reddened. No that was certainly not "it".

She was irked with herself for getting so flustered over this matter. Sakura found it preposterous that she'd talked about having children with less mortification, even though this act was required to actually produce them. How absurdly her mind worked! But she had to settle this matter, too.

Sakura clapped two hands over her overheated face and buried herself inside her palms. "I can't believe you're making me say this out loud," she whispered inside her makeshift cave.

They said nothing, probably already guessing where she was headed, but not helping her out.

Bastards!

Sakura didn't unbury her face, but she kept talking, forcing it out. "You are four, fully-grown men, with needs and insane amounts of stamina, and I am just one woman." There, she said it! Unlike them, she was still human after all. And she was pretty sure that if she had not been a novice at sex when she'd been with Kakashi, he would have taken her at least two or three more times that night. A lack of energy would never be an obstacle for these four men, as it would for Sakura. There was also a problem with jealousy with this matter: would they be able to remain neutral if they knew they were all sharing a bed with her?

Naruto chuckled and Sakura could just feel two other amused smiles being directed her way, and possibly one that was a little puzzled.

"Don't laugh at me!" Sakura said angrily. She had lowered her hands from her traitorously beet red face and glared at her toes, which were squishing into her springy carpet.

"Do you mean sex?" Sai asked.

Sakura sighed in exasperation and rolled her eyes up to look at the ceiling as if pleading for it to cave in. "Yes, Sai, I mean sex."

"I would be only too happy to initiate that piece of our arrangement today," Sai proposed eagerly.

This comment did earn him a sharp jab to the ribs from Naruto who was sitting beside him.

"That's not what I meant!" Sakura snapped.

Sasuke spoke, "Are you worried you won't be able to handle it?"

"We know that Kakashi is the only experience you've had, but—" Naruto said, but Sakura intervened.

"Says who?" she said

They all stared blankly at her.

"Well, okay, I don't know if you count a tongue down my throat and a hand shoved up my blouse an "experience", but I do," Sakura said with a bit of satisfaction in her voice. She'd mostly just said it to get a rise out of their smug asses.

Funny how the complacent smiles had quickly melted off of their faces.

She smirked internally.

Sakura could practically hear Sasuke grinding his teeth in anger.

"Who was it, Sakura?" asked Kakashi, trying to appear only slightly interested, but failing in his scheme due to a rapidly tapping foot on the floor.

Yeah right. Like she'd ever tell.

"I don't remember," Sakura lied. But of course she remembered—everyone remembers their first kiss, no matter how crappy it is.

"Was it that mousy-haired guy who's always staring at you down at the market?" Naruto asked, not acknowledging Sakura's previous remark, guessing it as a fib.

"Yes," Sai added, voice suggesting malignant intent, "he stares more often than most."

Sakura saw the mischievous glints in each of their eyes as they contemplated the demise of a completely innocent boy.

Sakura hissed in disgust. "See! This is what I mean! You can't even deal with the fact of some unimpressionable boy a couple of years back without conniving to ransack his life—like you even had any business or a say in the matter in the first place! How are you going to deal with each other once you know you are all sharing my bed?"

They quickly schooled their expressions into stoic masks. Guilt was evident just beneath the surface, though.

"That's different," Naruto said.

"Yeah? How so?"

Sai answered, "I am not certain about the others, but for myself, all five of us have always seemed as one cohesive unit. So as such, moving our relationship to something more does not seem as strange or out of place to me. I have always imagined and did not think to picture any other different scenario, than one in which we all cohabitate I one way or another."

Well, fuck.

Sakura was flummoxed. It seemed that Sai, being unlearned in matters of relationships, had created an image of one throughout his experiences with Team 7 that Sakura thought was a very good pronouncement of what she'd always thought the five of them were. To him, they were all a package deal.

"Do you really think that way, Sai?" Sakura asked.

He nodded.

"Oh," was all she could think of to say.

"And we're clearly not unimpressionable—well, at least I'm not," Kakashi added.

Sakura rolled her eyes and addressed Sai again, "If you think that way, then why do you get jealous, too?"

"I attribute it to a primal instinct of the human nature of not wanting to share one's mate," he stated with a tone of logicality. "But it is not too troublesome and easily manageable, so do not worry over it."

Okay then. "How about you three?" Sakura asked Kakashi, Naruto, and Sasuke.

Naruto puffed out air through his nose. "What Sai says is true in a lot of ways and I'll be able to manage it, too."

Kakashi looked at her, "I don't like it. But like we told you, we already discussed it and I am also agreeing to it if you do, too. You won't see us fight about it, we promise. And we know that you have limitations that have to be respected and recognized."

Sasuke picked at his nails and said tersely, "I'll deal with it."

"Wow," Sakura pronounced, "I'm impressed."

Naruto smiled at her. "So is that an agreement to this?"

Ugh, why can't I just say yes! Sakura screamed at herself and at her misgivings.

She wavered. "It seems really selfish to ask this of all of you."

Sakura wanted to slam herself into a brick wall. It sounded as if she was trying to convince them to change their minds!

"Selfish to whom?" Kakashi asked. "To you? As I recall, you gave us another option, which we flat-out refused, so if you think about it, we're really the ones who are selfish."

"Your juxtaposed logic is refreshing," Sakura spoke, speaking a bit of truth when it relived some of the tension behind her breastbone.

Kakashi smiled sweetly at her behind his mask.

"So…?" Naruto prompted.

Sakura hesitated.

"Haven't you run out of excuses yet?" Sasuke asked with impatience.

She repeated what she'd said to Ino with so much fear in her voice before, "I'm scared that you'll all wake up one day hating me."

"Don't be," is all Naruto said, "because that will never happen."

Sakura looked hard at each of them, each hopeful, each eager, and each loving her like she knew no other man would. Naruto, overenthusiastic, but kind like no other. Sasuke, impatient, but steady. Kakashi, lazy, but unrelenting in his resolve. And Sai, unconsciously closed-off, but always, always forgiving. Sakura realized that she was kidding herself if she ever thought her answer would have been anything other than one big, gargantuan, "Yes!".

Sakura sighed in defeat. "I'm tired of saying no—and I don't want to say no anymore." Those bothersome tears had made a reappearance and she sniffed as one escaped and traveled down her cheek.

"Why are you crying?" Sasuke asked, alarmed.

Sakura sniffed again, wiping the tear away. "Because I forgot to punch Ino in the face…and because you're all so dumb."

"Ah," he said.

"You have to promise me that this isn't going to end badly," Sakura almost pleaded.

"We promise," they said in unison.

Okay. "Okay," she said out loud.

A pause, then, "Can we get off this damn couch now?" Naruto asked, fidgeting. "My butt's numb. Shove over, Sasuke."

"I can't, idiot."

"You are crushing me with your thrashing," came Sai's unamused voice.

Laughing, Sakura went over and grabbed Naruto's hand and wedged him out with a tug of her arms.

Once she had him free, he gave her a fierce hug, which Sakura returned, and then let her go.

Naruto stretched his arms over his head and grinned happily at her, "So, everyone already knows, huh?"

"Yep," Sakura said, then added casually while picking at her nails, "Shishou says she's going to castrate all of you."

Naruto's grin slid off of his face. The three other men went still with evident states of fear surrounding their forms.

"Does she know?" asked Sasuke.

Sakura nodded.

"Does she know everything?" Kakashi asked, also inquiring of Sakura if Tsunade new that they had already slept together by the way he phrased his question.

"Mm-hmm," Sakura lied.

Kakashi's eye went wide with the biggest 'oh shit' expression she had ever seen on his face. "I'm dead."

"Probably."

Sasuke swallowed. "She said that she wanted to talk to us all tomorrow."

"Oh man," Naruto whispered.

They looked so much like scared little chicks that Sakura had to burst out laughing.

Kakashi looked at her. "I don't know what you find so funny. Today you had four prospective bachelors vying for your affections and tomorrow you will have zero."

"Oh, stop being so dramatic," Sakura said, "I'll be there to protect all of you, of course."

"You promise?" Sai asked.

Sakura smiled. "I promise."

A/N: I hope the contents of this chapter sorta made up for my long absence. Next chapter is going to be the last one for sure. I'm not sure when it'll be out 'cause I've been really busy, but I will try to get it out faster than this one took to publish (there will be more adult rated themes , too)!

Constructive and/or nice reviews are always appreciated ^_^