Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Summary: He who tasted honey will want the hive. (And it's bitterness is more appropriate than her smile.)
AN: Oh my god, I felt like I was copying people on this one. -dies- But screw it. Because yeah. And I know that a lot of the concepts of the plot weren't very original-, most of my stories aren't, and I like it that way. My point is more to focus on the details and individual concepts of their lives, versus the marriage and the threesome and how important all of that is, no. This one took me a long time. :/ I would like a popular multi-chaptered fic. Then I could respond to the reviews. Unfortunately this is a one shot. Do you love me yet?P.S. I tried some new formatting on this, just in the dividers. I saw someone doing it like this, and her writing was good, and it makes me feel like I am too if I make it all neat and pretty like she did.
- - - -
One to mend the jerseys,
One to mend the socks,
And one to mend the holes
In the little girl's frocks. - Baa Baa Black Sheep
- - - -
She stares into walls in her past time, hoping that they will talk to her. Inanimate objects always make for better conversation, at least when all that comes from the men you thought you knew was superiority and things Sakura doesn't want to learn of.
She is able in her books and her studies and her small words, but her team mates, who express themselves with their clenched fists (which hold together tighter than her smile-, physically, they are her defeat, and she knows this more than the count of her teeth in two respective rows through the reflections in the water, or that the advantages and disadvantages of herself always outweigh each other, and she is left with nothing), she can not understand.
Kakashi has bent over the bodies and the decomposition of old, trained men, and been able to explain that each generation will become better than the ones before them. Kakashi is older than her, and yet she can't explain the power of who they are, because somehow Sakura still belongs buried beneath layers of ash and dust and blood, like a respective ninja, instead of the young and arrogantly obnoxious ones who win in the beginning and die in the end.
Sakura isn't sure of her place, but at the assurance of Naruto's smile, shiny and glossed like women's chapstick or a too-bright sun, she knows she does not belong there.
- - - -
Sasuke comes home before the sun is able to dawn on him like the realization that nobody wants him anymore-, even if, without willing admittance, they miss him-, his memories have been soiled and burned like old clothes filled with lice; Sasuke is an insect they can't get rid of, and he crawls beneath their skins marking little difference between a bug and a snake. None of them can truly look at him, despite looking at shame and misery and fear without flinching a million times before-, it is as if, with his sudden, but not unexpected (though there is a difference between a surprise and a shock, a hope and an unchangeable sureness), appearance, they have forgotten everything they have learned and have yet to regret that they know nothing.
What they do know, echoing in their mind like old sounds in a slurred and drunken brain, hearing things only after they have been said and decided, is that Sasuke is laughing at them, with every sickened, disgusted look, every sunken cheek turned towards their purposefully mis-aimed fists.
Sasuke comes home before he can understand that they have all been swallowed up by the stricken plague of themselves, like sitting within the stomach cavities of a whale who's skin is your own-, they can not get out of their melancholy, both because they are mindless, hopeless fools who dwell on things because they can't realize them for what they are when they first happen, and because, they can not take their arrogance and slash it through their skin like a million Uchihas have done before and died for. They are too afraid that soon, like Sasuke, they will be mocking themselves.
- - - -
His skin is soft like clouds should be, while she kindly ignores the faults and snake's tongues that occasionally bubble up from his shoulders. Everyone has mistakes, whether the old wounds on the insides of her cheek from keeping her words in too long or the skillful bruise on the side of his neck, or the swirl of a tattoo on Naruto's stomach that never ceases to amaze them with the fact that, despite the delicately human smiles and easy laughter, their team mate is not entirely human. But secretly, she thinks that none of them are-, ignoring the acceptance that comes with the definitions of monsters, perhaps they are more of one than Naruto ever has been.
She can imagine that the angry grimace of his lips is a resistance against smiling (too many times has she known that frowning is sometimes the only alternative if she did not want to laugh at the sake bottles lined up against Tsunade's desk or the faded, yellowing pages of Kakashi's dirty-books, because she knows that it is their only way to escape), or that the fingers gripping the sides of the tub is because Sasuke is as vulnerable as she wishes him to be, so that, perhaps once, she could heal something other than torn flesh and broken bones, instead of the agonizingly simple reason that she is just scrubbing too hard at his skin, hoping that one day he will be pure and angelic and clean enough so that when she touches him as she does now she will not walk away having sinned.
The whisper of her name is said with little passion, but among other things, she can promise herself that his hushed tones mean he loves her, that she means too much and letting his voice rise any amount would be because he is afraid that meaning will slip away into the cold air instead of the fact that he does not think she deserves to be spoken to in his real voice. He thinks he knows her, understands the tedious, long procedures that tear up the carefully woven brick walls, not as solid as she thinks they are (made of virgin blooded knitting yarn and bird feathers, suiting to her soul but not her eyes where as they have seen to much but have not been swallowed by the idea of taking sternness to her mind set, and at times she wishes each of her body parts did not have thoughts of their own-, maybe then she would be able to fully convince herself that Sasuke can be fixed in the ways bones can be shifted back into place; Sasuke is perfect but he would be even more so if only she could tweak him to her liking, just a small bit more, until they both understand flawlessness), understands the nightmares of making the mistakes instead of others soiling your perfection like he knows so well.
She wonders how much he hates the truth when her next words float out of her mouth as if bewitched by the ugliness of the whole situation-, that Sasuke is not perfect and does not love her and Naruto does not love her and none of them can ever love anyone, because they gave up more than their sanity or their innocence when they became shinobi, but simply did not realize it at the time. "You don't know me."
Sasuke sinks lower into the water, something she mistakes for embarrassment at his nudity at the time, but comes to realize much later that has something to do with the solid, roughened hands grasping his thighs and squeezing until he bleeds out her words before he has the chance to absorb them.
- - - -
Her expression doesn't falter as she pieces her team mate back together, not when it seems as though Sasuke only bleeds heavier as she concentrates harder, and when the flesh inches back into itself she is hit with the odd sensation that Sasuke is still ill. The smell of blood is on his breath, thick and taunting and she doesn't speak to him for the rest of the day because she isn't sure she wants to watch the process of him cleaning out the red from beneath his fingernails-, and Sakura knows that at times, the stains don't wash away.
Naruto is often seen bent over Sasuke's shoulder, speaking in low tones as if all the mistrust is buried into simple understanding-, Sasuke blocks the words out he does not wish to hear, and so when he comes home to them again with his team mates dead or thinks too slowly to bite his serpentine tongue back against a sentence, Naruto speaks in deep voices that strangle their attentions until Sasuke understands that he was wrong.
Sakura comes into the habit of letting Naruto do all the talking, and at times she feels as though they are all becoming each other so as to understand that they are equally in pain.
She thinks at times that there is no extraordinary distance between levels of pain, that each man who can be accounted as human has felt the same thing as his comrade, but perhaps for shorter or longer amounts of time. Naruto laughs when she tells him until she leaves the room and when she presses her ear against the door, she can't distinguish whether he is still chuckling or if he is simply as insane as they have all become before him.
- - - -
The annual celebration of the Kyuubi's defeat and the honorary mourning of their Hokage's death advances and with it, Naruto reverts back into indecision. Both Sasuke and Sakura ask whether or not it will be celebrated, but even without papers on his desk Naruto ushers them away with the quiet excuses of business (they understand that they are who he once was, that they have become distractions to him because that is all they can be when the empty spaces of lovers and friends and loyalty all closed up, and though it hurts to know that paperwork is now more important than them they, out of all of Team Seven, understand responsibility and obligation-, but in some things, they think that if it was how it used to be perhaps Naruto could love them).
It comes, and Naruto stays in his office with the lights out and listens to the laughter ringing through the glass.
- - - -
It's at the first whisper that is soft and gentle and everything she has wanted to hear, that Sakura stops regretting what she attempts at. Everything is an inevitable failure, and as Naruto murmurs "Make me human." into her ear she can not stop thinking that it is only as likely that they will not be monsters as it is that they will be in love-, and yet they try for both.
And afterwards she runs her fingers through the strands of his hair, sweaty and stringy and each isolated into small sections she folds beneath her hands until she is sure he is asleep and can roll to the side and cry until there is emptiness-, perhaps she will, like so many others, never get any type of relief from dripping out into an oozed pile of hurt faces, lying face down on the pillow because that way, if Naruto woke up, she could claim her sobs were laughs as long as he did not see the tear tracks on her cheeks. She doesn't think that laughing or crying makes differences between each other, not when it comes to the fresh-cut delirium buried under the deaths in the back corners of her thoughts, and she swears that Naruto's skin smells like peppermint, rubbed between small fingers until the scent drains away like the pain, or the remnants of insanity.
- - - -
The days in the hospital are spun together like close-knit lies, deceptions and truths running together as one until a disheartening gloominess and realism washes over the white-coated walls, and she molds into them, only green specks balancing humans from rooms and Sakura from everybody else.
When she speaks to Ino, she is left in the hallway with her hands outstretched in front of her-, she is some corpse reincarnated, and still all she had wanted to begin with was to know that Ino actually exists. Without touch, she crawls back into hollow coffins-, once an infant on fours and in death she is brought back to primal distinctions again, until children and the ancestors are combined and the dead make shadows in the living, and all of them live with ghosts trailing after them like a sticky fog.
"You don't bloom year round."
- - - -
Their first time is less awkward than their second, filled with clumsy hands and misplaced remarks, perhaps because all of the passion was drained away more easily than extracting poison from a wound, and she will bleed and cry out into the sheets until she is silenced, or until Naruto stops making her hurt.
They are almost sure that the first time Sasuke is mentioned at all is when both feel as if their actions are some kind of a beautiful betrayal-, and though the liquid grace holds a prettiness Sasuke's deception did not, his is regretted less. The second time, when they are held between the mattress pad and the floor and the ceiling that stretches farther above them than they can reach, even standing (as if their heights have shrunk into nothingness-, logic plays little or no part in games, just as the fact that cornering the Queen will not always win wars because some Kings simply carry no attachments to their brides, or that Sakura disappears deeper into her clothes than if she wasn't unimportant and not trapped between two men instead of two substances, such as she is now, feeling cheated out of her belief), occurs as they call out the name that is not each other's.
Sakura bends forwards into the muffled confusion of her melancholia, ancient delusions that have been passed from generation to generation and now to her, and as Naruto tosses in his sleep she can recognize that it is not always her who he wants in his bed. Surprisingly, the process of realization, despite the many times she'd pounded her fists against walls and flesh and unsuspecting faces, is not as painful as she expected it to be, perhaps because she too knows that her and Naruto's couplings differ in epic proportions. Sakura is not like Naruto where it truly matters-, she is loud and unafraid of many things, will protect who she loves and yet none of it makes a difference because not only are the traits worthless in a world that values rabidity, but because there is not a single person who she can say she gives her undying emotion towards.
Perhaps it does not hurt as much because she has become part of old traditions, and age is more important to her than anything else in that it is who she has become.
She is old with her eyes latched on to a boy who will never care for her, old in her habits and the playful fists that come down on Naruto's head when he is particularly idiotic, or the fake smiles or unmeaningful laughs or even deeper wounds that will never heal and remain visible and delicate and willing to open.
Gray hairs will stand out against the pink.
- - - -
In their silences, only Sasuke is uncomfortable. It's ironic that only a quiet man will find frustration in lack of noise, but neither Sakura nor Naruto can bring themselves to laugh. Sasuke's irritated shuffling breaks them from their reverie, and she is almost sure that he doesn't know which of them to kiss.
Sasuke isn't good with words unless he means them, and lies are a bold word in his vocabulary and as tender as his fingers inching over his clothes like earth worms towards their destination. Sasuke cuts through the quiet with his katana, and it stabs into Naruto's desk until there is a crack through the middle. Sakura watches it with small, thick bouts of pain somewhere between her heart and her throat, bile rising and twisting until it seems like she can hold them together.
- - - -
When Sakura can be sure that it is not simply desperation (whether sexual frustrations or heavy urges of the gift of emotion, whether saving a loved one that you do not really love or pushing a child away from a mountain edge, just because it seems like the right thing to do-, that is desperation, that is what pieces them together and it is selfish to pretend that they have more than that but she does it anyway because just that the sensation has been enough before it is not now), she places their heads on her lap and lays the backs of her hands against their faces.
It is like she has become blind, all in the short space of a time when she thought things would be most clear. Tracing the lines on their cheeks and the wrinkles at their mouths, nothing is less visible.
- - - -
Sasuke comes home from an assassination with Itachi's head in his hands.
Sakura thinks that somewhere in both their eyes, Sasuke's more dead than his brother's, she can find the solution. She wonders whether they can explain why he made so many late night outings, or why whenever they came home they were alone, or why he smelled of someone who wasn't them.
She wonders if they can explain why he was fucking his brother.
- - - -
Itachi doesn't have a burial, and is instead burned at a milky sunset that looks too close to her fingers to be real. Like his family, Itachi dies unsatisfied and hollow, and by the time they find the rest of his body Sakura knows that it was unnecessary for Sasuke to have carved out his chest, even for closure.
The fire burns with no vigor, no extreme symbolization of one of the most powerful shinobi of their time being ground into ashes that are forgotten about, left behind in the wind like too many before him, or the old feelings being flipped face-up inside of her and cultivated until she blossoms in front of the deranged smile on Sasuke's face. It is not fair that Itachi should burn literally, and as he is swallowed by the tendrils of flame, Sakura thinks that he almost looks alive.
More than Sasuke, besides the fact.
- - - -
She is married to Naruto two weeks afterwards, when the first frost of winter washes away any remnants of the warmth that could've substituted for what they had forgotten internally. Her father's arm curled around her elbow reminds her of humanity, and as he smiles it is bitter and unchanged in how much he doesn't care for her.
She thinks that, perhaps, he loves her-, but when she was too young to distinguish him as who he was he tucked a blade between her fingers and told her to practice murder. Justification doesn't play anything as he passes her sandwiched somewhere between Naruto's smile and Sasuke's absence.
She trips on her way up the stairs, and Naruto doesn't catch her.
- - - -
She sits still under the bed sheets, twisting her hands in her lap, until they are all a tangled mess of stringy, sweaty hair strands and confusion. He asked her if she wanted to make their marriage traditional, and despite her near worship of all things as such she sits, with the sweat beaded on their foreheads not from sex nor excitement, but the dull anxiety that Sakura would like to believe has nothing to do with her answer or the heavy silence clinging to the room like bubble gum on the upside of a school-table desk.
It is not as though they are inexperienced, and perhaps that is why it is filled with little trepidation and too much tediousness, the same schedule of dirty bed sheets as she moves about, honorably folding them into a plump white square in her arms and washing out the experience with dish soap.
It is not as though she doesn't know what she is doing as she walks away.
- - - -
Tsunade's office is blank and bleak and how she remembers it, and that, if anything, is comforting. More so than the twisting of the lips on Sasuke's face, something she can't tell is a smile or a grimace, more so than the wrinkles of Naruto's mouth from smiling too much or the indulgent nods that come as she says something particularly stupid (everyone wants to see her mess up). She prods the silence with absent fingers, features adorned with a flush creeping up her neck ever since she entered, as though they are as discomforted by her as she is.
Lately, Sasuke dances on his feet, and Tsunade's shuffles through sake bottle to desk drawer invite the cold chill of winter, pumping through the open window until Sakura is shivering under all the warmth Naruto has united with her. Even with the sun still bold in the sky, the clouds come to cover it in winter and any sense of ease is washed away more easily than her smile.
Naruto is heat pushing through dark corners when she thinks there is no hope, and Sasuke is a cold season with colder temperaments, and he blows the icy wind all over their resolutions.
- - - -
They speak idly of families, something they've never had fully and despite the fact do not mourn that having a completed one of their own is impossible, perhaps unwanted partially. Naruto, she is sure, does not want children because he too knows that he will be killed someday, but Sakura doesn't understand her own reasoning.
Perhaps it is that she doesn't think that she will be a good mother, not when she has not been a very good wife and stumbling through the days with the sureness she has never had that her husband will catch her, that is the easiest thing she has experienced, and if she cannot even get it right then she will have nothing else.
When Tsunade places her on maternity leave and Naruto's smiles change into something that is both cautionary excitement (as if she will keel over into herself and litter the grounds with her skin, Naruto learns that suspicion has nothing to do with paranoia, not when he has watched from the sidelines as too many people he knew before could collapse to their knees with hardly anything, nicks in the right places or too much of a good thing (he tells her stories, half joking, of Jiraiya stumbling through the doors at night and pressing sweaty fingers to his lips, all of him consumed by the smell of sex and an insanity that has become tangible), and saw himself what ignorance does when it lasts too long or lasts at all) and a grimace. Sakura has half hoped that she is unfertile, that her pregnancy will wash away as easily as she can wash away the remnants of their mistakes.
Instead she looks down at her stomach and cries because it isn't Sasuke's.
- - - -
Naruto pushes her back stuck between the lines of them both, and their child, who rests in her womb as forgotten as much as it is a part of her-, after all, any of the telltale signs can be bypassed easier than the fact that she has killed men before, none of whose faces she remembers, and the memories and blood on her hands are more obvious than the growth within her.
Somewhere between frivolous, futile attempts that remain few in number and pointless, Sasuke comes back to them, as if all the attempts at resistance and then forsaken faultiness, giving up the hope that he means nothing to them, have poisoned his mind as much as they have poisoned theirs. Sasuke knows how to deal with poisons though, long years in a hollow grave living next to men with shallow hearts and little understanding of him, and they believe momentarily that he will extract it from their veins in between the times when Sakura twists into herself, spindly and quivering with a forming life and her own inevitable death that looms in view within the choice of her career, as in theirs, or the faithful empathy of Naruto because he understands her more than anyone else can, pain of emotion and what makes her cry out to the gods in her sleep.
Frivolous attempts make no difference, and Sasuke swears he came back to them because there is no acceptance, no ounce of comfort or radiant belief, in anyone else. It feels disheartening to have their standards pushed away.
- - - -
Jiraiya stops by their house, drowsy and dazed and tipsy with sake on his breath and too many things on his mind, and the only difference between him and everyone else is that he doesn't hide the fact that he is so affected by it. He sits at her table and when she offers him water he asks for alcohol and is too far gone (into whatever realm he has so been taken in, and sometimes she prays that she could be as bold as to drink and drink until all of what mattered disappeared into blurs and she wasn't sure whether they were running near her or she was passing them by) to notice that she sets him with an empty glass.
He asks of her well-being, and is gracious enough to assume that a wife will radiate her husband and be the perfect reflection of souls, so dizzy with his confines of romance and his standoffish books is he, and therefore he takes one glance at her stomach as if Naruto is pregnant with something, too, life or heavy silences or dwelling thoughts or the noises that come but should not come from any man's mouth, not when it is not her making them from him.
He is too drunk to notice that her smile is fake and he leans over the tabletop with his head resting on his arms, and she sees a child in him that makes her decide against ushering him out the door-, after all, she knows little of parenthood and fussing over grown men is sometimes the same as fussing over babies. "Men can't stick to one woman, Naruto, Sakura-chan," he says and her name is lost on him between conflictions of bitter fury from a life that has passed him by, faces that look like faces and the faces before them have become as desolate as his convictions, so that when he continues she politely ignores the extra person she knows but doesn't know who he seems to think is there.
(Perhaps he is there, right there, listening to her fake advertising of a non-existent pride as his old teacher speaks to them both, but she can't see him and if she can it still doesn't make a difference because as Naruto has sex in her bed she is drawling on and on to old men who won't (can not) listen to her foolish reflections of a life she doesn't have.)
"And you have a pretty face but a flat chest and a flat life and an unwhole femininity, and you were always more of a man than a woman-, who is to say that the Hokage's baby is his? Listen hard, because when you are truthful there will always be misconceptions towards the truth and when you lie people won't doubt it a bit; when Sasuke left the village and Naruto left you, in your despair did you doubt yourself?" Neither of them register his words as they hit the air like silence, coming in waves of a language that, momentarily, seems familiar, because deviousness and skin-deep scratches have rained down on her (when it rains it pours-, you hear the taps of water shrouding the sky, but you do not hear an old man when he is most desperate for you because you are the only one close and indulgent enough to heal him) before.
"Have you read too many of your romance novels, Sakura-chan? Sneaky, foolish attempts at girlishness? What's more-, did you achieve it, bride of the Hokage? You're pretty but you're not pretty enough to cover up everything you lack and everything that shouldn't belong in you, not like Sasuke-, did you ever fully think through the reasons your husband is cheating on you?" It's not important what Jiraiya is saying, because he is talking to old ghosts he hasn't yet realized are alive, and so she mustn't count as real for the time being when she can ignore any remnants of the truth that bubble up from his lips like a lifeline, as if her hits are getting too hard and, like her teacher, she puts bruises and broken solutions on her best of friends as though nothing ever mattered as much.
"It's quite honorable of you to pretend I'm still drunk off my ass, Sakura-chan."
- - - -
Sakura thinks old bandages can be reused, and though Tsunade disagrees she has extended herself past her capacity of knowledge and now therefore knows nothing, and the bloodstains that seep through the fabric can go to hell, too, because the lies she's woven herself into (one day she will blossom under them, a beautiful butterfly and she will leave everything ugly and mistaken behind her like everybody has done to her before-, revenge is sold to the highest bidder, and Sasuke and Naruto have paid their dues for whatever they share amongst themselves and all that's left afterwards is to hoping old men and their sake cups will leave disdain, maybe just for a little while, and past lovers can regather their wits and listen to the sound of her walking away) are too thick to be ugly-, wind the gauze a little more and she will find an impressionable first layer that is white enough to make her look beautiful-, and she laughs because crying is for weak people and laughing is for the weakest.
- - - -
P.S.S. Sammy, it's still April but...it's the gift basket you can't escape from! I promised you the long Burn chapter, and I promised you a oneshot (enjoy the pairing, my lovely)(AND pictures, I won't forget those either, don't worry), AND your avatar inspired me as well as your presence (oh, it ALWAYS inspires me -loves on-), so yeah. Here's to five thousand words of pulp and soap opera (but I repeat myself)! Let's go have a party now, yeah, uh-huh. (P.S.S.S. Yeah. I was improper and used double/triple 's's instead of 'p's. But I was too sentimental, and couldn't stand changing old habits even though now I know they're wrong. XP)