to cleanse the palate.

two: "i wish you hadn't come back."

—

—

"I wish you hadn't come back."

Sakura waits: a minute, then two, then five, but the only answer she receives is the wind rustling through the branches above her.

She never visits the cenotaph, or even the Uchiha family plot. This is the last place she'd seen him, eyes soft and unguarded, his heart a steady drumbeat underneath her palm. This is where he'd said goodbye.

In their secret place in the woods behind the small house Sasuke had built, away from the village and his abandoned family district, Sakura keeps a shrine for the man she'd loved more than almost anything in the world.

(—spider lilies in the spring to signify goodbye, white chrysanthemums that bloom in the fall with her grief, red camellias to flame in the winter for their heart and his fire.

He'd planted the camellias for her, and then Kabuto had surfaced with rogue nin in the south. When Naruto returned from the mission alone, his back bent with grief and guilt, Sakura hadn't been able to find it in herself to cry—to make even a single sound.

They'd barely had a year together.)

Sakura gazes past the bellflowers in front of her, her hands half-buried in loamy soil. He'd wanted to leave, and she'd asked him—he'd stayed because of her. He'd stayed for her.

If he'd never come back, if he'd left as he'd initially planned—

The tiny blue blossoms blur into soft spots of color, and half a year since receiving the news, Sakura finally cries.

Something soft brushes her cheek. Squinting against the glare of the late afternoon sun, Sakura rubs the sleep from her eyes, and gasps: plumeria blooms drift lazily from above, covering her legs and lap in a fragrant carpet of white.

There are no plumeria trees in her small, wild garden; there are no plumeria trees in the whole of Konoha. They need year-round, near tropical weather, the kind that only the southernmost regions of the continent can provide.

Sakura stares unblinkingly at the small flowers, feeling as if she has her heart in her throat, in her hands; as if the blooms are pieces of her heart that she'd systematically plucked.

(He's here, he's not. He's dead, he's alive.)

Swallowing, she gathers her courage and her fear and her wishes and looks up…

(Plumeria for a new beginning.)