your place in my heart (is the whole of my heart)

written originally for a comment-fic prompt over at sasusaku-month on lj, which asked for drunk!sasuke.

Sasuke makes a pie chart of his heart.

"A pie chart," echoes Sakura, starting at the 98% labelled Itachi. "How do you-how do you calculate this? How is this even quantifiable?"

He frowns at her: it is not where he wants this conversation to go. Sakura flips through the other tabs in the Excel spreadsheet: tax returns, stock trends, yearly expenditures, his heart.

"Your heart," she mutters.

"Yes," he says.

"Why are you showing this to-I mean, am I supposed to ask where I am?" she asks, not looking at him.

Sasuke doesn't answer. She doesn't really need him to. Staring at the 98% of Itachi, Sakura gets it.

Sakura gets it: it's almost an apology from him, an explanation he didn't owe and she hadn't expected, when she said, "I love you," and he said, "Thank you." She gets it: when he goes away.

Sakura doesn't get: years and years later, after he comes back, he is still making pie charts. "I am beginning to think," she tells him, "that this pie chart business isn't so much crazy-vengeance as crazy-in-general on your part." Sakura blinks a few times at the breakdown of his liquor collection (78% percent obscenely well-aged and prohibitively expensive sake, she is not surprised; 12% umeshu, a pleasant find; whatever% she doesn't care, after the umeshu.) Sakura concludes, "You're actually a nerd, aren't you?" and he-eyes mild and unshuttered with alcohol-tugs on her ponytail.

"I don't want to hear that from you," he says. Sakura decides to take that as a compliment, however he had meant it-she's better educated than pretty much everyone else in the village, these days, and that's not a bad thing.

"I don't understand why your cellar is so well-stocked when the rest of your house has gone to total shit," she says.

"I miss the days when you were too scared to talk to me," he replies, emptying the last of a sake bottle, and then reaching for a new one to pry open.

"I wasn't scared of you," says Sakura. "I was just-y'know. Shy."

"Give me back my alcohol if you're going to tell lies," says Sasuke.

Sakura clutches her umeshu closer, protectively. "No way. You owe me alcohol, after all that weeding, holy fuck, so much weeding, seriously how did your house go to such shit? Goddamn, we didn't even get to dusting yet, and the windows-" She gives a groan of despair, and slumps against the cellar walls, hard and cold along her back. It is not unpleasant, though, after the scorching heat outside.

"You can go, if you'd like," he replies; as cold and hard as the wall-and Sakura hadn't meant that, that wasn't what she'd meant at all.

"Oh, come off it, like I'm going to let you rattle around in this crypt all by yourself," she waves a hand to indicate the general ghost-ridden nature of his ancestral house. "Besides, with your luck, it'll turn out there's an infestation of black mold or something-"

"This house does not have a fungus problem-" says Sasuke, all ruffled aristocratic pride; but that's a little better, the Sound sibilance out of his words.

"You wouldn't know, would you? I'm just saying, you could have gotten a house-sitter when you left, bet you could have gotten one for free, even. I would have slept under a bridge when I was doing my residency-"

"I have seen your apartment," he says, passing her another bottle of umeshu. "You kind of do." There is something glimmering under his lashes, in his dark, dark eyes-something part alcohol but more humor.

Sakura kicks his ankle with her foot, their legs sprawled out on the cellar floor in parallel. Sasuke is beginning to list a little, balance impaired, the tilt of his head exposing a long smooth expanse of neck. She doesn't realize her own lean until his hand comes up, palm against her temple, and-oh, she's fallen almost sideways onto his shoulder.

Sakura turns her head until it is her forehead in his palm; there is a moment of stillness, and then very softly, the tips of his fingers in gentle strokes over her hair, feeling. She says, "You're drunk."

"You're the one who can't sit up straight," he replies.

"You're touching my hair," she answers. His fingers still. She makes a noise of protest, says, "I didn't tell you to stop." When he doesn't resume, she says, "Keep going; because then in the morning, I will cry so much about how you took advantage of my drunken vulnerability and bad-touched my hair with-"

"Remember when you used to be scared-oh, sorry, what? Shy?" but his fingers resume their tiny, soft petting.

"I had such a massive crush on you, you think I wouldn't have told you if I weren't shy?"

"You did tell me," he points out, but that is definitely a smile in his voice; and then he shifts, angling her head onto his shoulder. She waits, and then when he doesn't do anything more, pointedly relaxes into him-it is another long moment before, almost without her feeling it, so softly, his fingers come back, like a whisper on the nape of her neck. He says, "You practically told me the first day I met you."

"What? No, the bench-"

"On the rooftop, the first day of genin cells? You weren't exactly subtle, with your 'I want to marry-'"

"That was not the first day you met me," she protests. "We went to the same school for like, six years before that, you dickhead."

"Yeah but," he says, with a sort of dark chocolate sweetness in his voice, the way he sometimes calls Naruto dobe-sama, a sarcastic sincerity, contrary the way only Sasuke can be. "But you, with that class ranking of yours, what was your word for it, a nerd, was -?"

"Shut up," she punches him, aiming for his shoulder and getting his collarbone instead. Okay, maybe she is kind of tipsy. Her fist unfurls; fingers spread, palm open, she traces the fan emblem on his shirt sleeve. "Remind me again," she says, apropos of nothing, except to stop talking about how, yeah, she was a total nerd in the Academy. "Why's it a fan?"

"The clan symbol, after our name," he says-and Sakura wonders if that hurts, to say 'our' when really, there is only him now, only he who bears the name.

"What's it fanning?" she asks, more to move the conversation than out of real curiosity, tapping his shirt sleeve. "This one."

"The fire of my heart," he says with an ironic tilt to his words, just short of an eyeroll. "It's just symbolic. For the Katons."

(But, thinks Sakura, not really; she remembers, in a dark forest, in front of a snake man who had murmured, his Uchiha blood must be running hot in his veins now, and then, later, clutching his back to quench an inferno that had started as a spark of protective kindness. Sasuke's hatred was like a glacier, cold and implacable; but, thinks Sakura, maybe that had been learned, bred into him young. When he didn't think about it, when he was not careful about it, Sasuke burned, warm and ephemeral; his kindness always impulsive, hot-blooded, instinctive.)

"No," she tells him, "No, I think your heart really is on fire, Sasuke-kun."

"You have been spending too much time with that green kid," he replies, in distaste.

Sakura laughs. "Oh, everyone's heart is on fire, according to Lee-kun. No, that's not it; what I mean is-" she pats his chest. "That story. You know that story, about a man who swallowed a falling star and in return offered it his heart, which was then given into safekeeping to a-"

"I gave my heart up long before Orochimaru, if that's what you mean," he says, stiffly.

"No, no. Orochimaru's not a falling star, anyway; and that's not the point. The man got it back, eventually, his heart that was on fire-"

"You suck at storytelling," says Sasuke. "I thought he just offered his heart-when did it get set on fire?"

"If you would stop interrupting me," grumbles Sakura, and then huffs a sigh. "Oh, fine, never mind. It feels wrong to be telling stories like this when I'm getting drunk."

"You are definitely past the getting part," says Sasuke, but he reaches over and clinks his bottle against hers. They are quiet for several breaths. Sasuke taps a finger against the neck of his bottle, and then he says, "I would rather. I would rather my heart be kept in safekeeping, for a while longer. If you-" he pauses. Then very formally, "If you would allow its continued stay."

"Oh," says Sakura. "Wait. Are you. I mean, of course, of course I will. Yes. But-Sasuke-kun, say it again in the morning, I want to remember this. Say it again."

"You're not that drunk," he demurs.

"I am wasted," Sakura smiles in reply. "I am pickled. You are taking advantage of my drunken vulnerability, Sasuke-kun; you're going to have to make sure. Reconfirm." She edges closer to him, settles her head on his shoulder ducking under his chin. "So, tell me again in the morning, 'kay?"

Sasuke is probably very often more shy and more scared than Sakura, but that's never been important, and it's never paused him either. Promptly, in the morning, sitting on the edge of the bathtub while she clutches at the toilet, he tells her again, with the same formality that weighs the question a lot heavier than what it purports to be.

But-she thinks, between heaves-but, remembering her shoes in his doorway, the lawn that is half weeded, the way he eyes her apartment like she is the one with the black mold infestation, the many nitpicks he has with her rather sloppy laundry folding until he had been unable to bear it any longer and taken over the ironing entirely, the way he has taken to following her around the house on weekends, and as if settled between her presence and the warm pools of sunlight streaming in through the windows, napping while she reads her medical journals; his promptness in the reconfirmation, like it was something that couldn't be put off, like it was something that was too critical to wait for some perfect time and place, like there was to be no continuing with anything else at all until this was completed-

Well, of course, she thinks, because he doesn't really mean 'a while'; that's not what he means at all.

After he hands her a cup of water and she has rinsed her mouth, Sakura teases him, "Are you restructuring that pie chart of your heart?"

"Not right now," he replies. A moment of hesitation, and then, as if in the interest of full disclosure, "A while back. I did."

"Ah," Sakura says, and takes his hand. She tells him, "Me too." And then she tells him, "Yes. Yes, of course."

(hahaha, hello there, howl's moving castle au that i will not be writing! reviews would be love)