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Another dusky dawn befalls Konoha, the turning clock relentless and uncaring for all the lost souls that left gaping holes in the fabric of the universe. Sakura rises with it, breathes it in, but feels wholly detached as she goes on to live another day.
Her office is always cold. Her ANBU always stand poised at the entrance. These are the only constants in her new life as the Rokudaime of Konohagakure.
The weighty gaze of her predecessors staring at her from faded, sun-bleached photographs is a heavy burden she bears every day. All of them were legendary ninja, one of them had been the closest she had to a motherly figure; her mentor, the reason Sakura is the woman she is today.
Sakura spends the early hours of her morning caught in a whirlwind of grief as she studies Tsunade’s picture. A year today, she’s been gone, and the pain hasn't lessened, not even by a single iota. It’s a raw wound that hasn’t stopped bleeding.
Today a knock at her door is what pulls her back to the present. She takes a shuddering breath and seamlessly slips back into the facade of an unshakable leader. She has a village to run, people to protect.
Kakashi slips into her office, silent as a shadow. Exhaustion carves lines into his face where age failed to, making him look weary. His uniform is dirty, the ends of his hair bleached red. “Hokage-sama,” he says. “I’m here to report a mission accomplished.”
“Kakashi-senpai,” Sakura sighs, suddenly even more tired. “I’ll always be just Sakura to you.”
He cracks a faint smile. “Yes, Sakura-chan. And I’m just Kakashi. Always just Kakashi.”
She shakes her head long-sufferingly. “Yes, of course. Go to the hospital and then get some rest. Dismissed.”
When he doesn’t immediately vanish in a puff of smoke, she gazes at him curiously. “Did you need anything else?”
He shuffles his weight, and if Sakura didn’t know him so well she would’ve thought he was bored. But the subtle undertones of nervousness are there in the stiff tug of his shoulders, impossible to ignore.
“Can I see you today?” He says quietly, tone void of any inflexion. “After work?”
“See me for what?” Sakura asks, taken aback but intrigued.
“Maybe I just miss your company,” he offers airily, tempting Sakura to call him out on his bullshit. But a part of her feels stung and pained to remember how much she has neglected her team in the past year.
Tsunade hadn’t been exaggerating in her complaints about running this village. Sometimes Sakura barely has the time to get a full night’s sleep.
Maybe she owes Kakashi some of her time, if only for the many years he spent keeping her alive when on all accounts her meagre skills should have gotten her killed. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Here?” he ventures unsurely, further confirming her suspicions that he hadn’t really thought his request through. “We can get dinner somewhere. My treat.”
“Amazingly generous of you,” she says drily but can’t help the faint smile on her lips. There will always be a soft spot in her heart for this man and his ridiculous nuances. “Now get out of my office. You reek of blood.”
“Yes ma’am,” he nods dutifully and is gone in a displacement of wind.
Sakura shakes her head and pulls closer the first pile of paperwork for the day. Grief is still heavy in her gut, but a moment’s reprieve was all she needed to get back to work.
Kakashi shows up an hour late in his classic Kakashi-esque fashion, which gives Sakura a pause as she realises there’s a third constant in her life; this absurd, amazing, tardy man with his horrible taste in literature and perpetual lateness.
“You’re late,” she says by way of greeting.
His eye-crinkle, in its own way, is another kind of constant. “And you’re still working.”
“Hokage-dom is a full-time job I’m afraid.” She tosses her pen aside with a sigh. “One day I’m really going to snap.”
“If you don’t mind, I would really appreciate a forewarning. I’d like to be far, far away when that happens. Preferably out of the country.”
Cheeky bastard, she thinks with a swirl of affection. “Maybe I'll send you on a C-rank to the Mizukage, see how you enjoy being the audience to her tantrums.”
There it is: a full-body shudder works its way down his frame. “Sakura-chan, no,” he gasps, sounding genuinely alarmed. “You wouldn’t be that cruel.”
Sakura smiles, shaking her head in agreement. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right… Did you decide on a place to eat? Because I’m so done making decisions for the day.”
“Yes, we can get Yakiniku, they have a fifty percent off every Monday,” Kakashi tells her. “But we have to hurry because the offer only goes on until eight and it’s already seven-thirty.”
“Hai, hai,” she mutters and gets up to stretch.
They’re nearly intercepted by a messenger but one look from Kakashi sends him scurrying out of sight. “I should make you my bodyguard,” Sakura muses to herself. “Genma is not nearly half as effective as that was.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Kakashi cautions in good humour. “He quite enjoys his job.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, not many people can say they’re the Hokage’s personal bodyguard. He totally uses it as a pick-up tactic.” Now that Kakashi mentions it, Sakura recalls hearing about that somewhere—hadn’t Ino mentioned it just last week?
“I can always saddle him with a genin team,” Sakura decides vindictively.
Kakashi winces in sympathy. “You’re a vicious, vicious woman.”
“Thank you,” she responds primly, and they share a rare laugh. For a moment Sakura is reminded of why she used to appreciate Kakahsi’s company so much. No one is quite as casual or half as charming as Kakashi can be. “So when are you planning to tell me the real reason for this social call?”
“Maah, I told you,” he huffs. “I miss your company.”
“Kakashi, you’re allergic to social outings.” She raises a skeptical eyebrow.
“People change.”
“No, people are stubborn creatures of habit.”
“Must you be so stubborn?”
“Must you be an evasive asshole?”
They stare at each other for a moment. There isn’t any heat packed into their back-and-forth, but Sakura feels like maybe she has touched a nerve.
The autumn air raises sudden goosebumps on her skin as Kakashi goes awfully silent. She waits for him to talk again, to return her slight, but he's not forthcoming.
Until she opens her mouth to respond and he cuts her off.
Quietly, cautiously, and without looking at her, Kakashi confesses: “I didn’t want you to be alone today.”
Oh.
Sakura swallows, feeling choked all of a sudden. “I… I see.”
Silence, this one thick, descends on the corner of their street.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she finally says, once she’s sure that none of the emotions clogging her chest leak into her voice. “I’m fine.”
A blatant lie if she’s ever told one.
“No, you’re not,” Kakashi says simply.
Sakura doesn’t deny it again. But her silence must be telling enough.
“Nothing is ever okay again when you lose your mentor,” Kakashi carries on softly. “And nothing will ever make sense the way it used to. Not the sky, not the air, and certainly not this way of life.”
Vicious emotion wells up in her chest that she immediately and violently squashes down. The leader of Konoha can’t afford a moment of weakness, not ever, and definitely not in public. She must be a pillar of strength, a shining beacon of hope, not the broken caricature of a woman who nearly lost everything. No, she’s the woman who once punched a goddess in the face.
“I’m fine,” she insists with a halting breath. “I’m alive.”
“Sometimes being just alive is not enough, Sakura-chan,” he says gently. “While a miracle in itself… do you not think we deserve more out of this life?”
“What I know,” she says tersely. “Is that she deserved more days, and yet here I am while she’s gone. In which world will that ever be fair? And in which world could I possibly deserve more than a wretched existence, Kakashi?”
It was out. Sakura didn’t hold her tongue and all those sickly, grey feelings are out in the open, vulnerable and sharp-edged and festering in the cracked spaces between them.
His silence, for one heart-wrenching beat, is vindictively satisfying. Because Sakura is right. This is more than she deserves for letting her die where she managed to save everyone else. This agony is well-deserved, a punishment from the gods.
But Kakashi is only silent for a moment. “Do you know how many people I’ve outlived?” he finally asks, and there’s a hollowness in his voice she’s never heard before; a raw, unfamiliar thing that makes her ache in new ways. “Do you know how many slipped right from between my fingers?”
The self-loathing has no place in his voice, yet it saturates every atom and vibration in the air as it’s carried over to her. “Kakashi…”
“Is it my fault?” It’s a rhetorical question, but it’s all it takes for the stone facade of the unshakable leader to crack, and she’s stumbling over her words like she did in her youth, pained, and nervous, and stammering.
“No,” she declares with as much conviction as she can muster. “T-this … Kakashi … this is very different. I couldn’t … I had the power and I didn’t … I couldn’t save her. I could heal anyone and I couldn’t save her.”
He looks at her then, and she spies a familiar agony in his charcoal depths. He looks like a carcass of the solid, fearless man she knows, bared to her in his entirety for the first time. “Did you punch a hole in her chest? Did you let a boulder crush her to death? Did you watch her wither away before your eyes until one day you came back to a corpse?”
Her mouth dries. And she has no response to that, none.
There’s only her pain and his, and the cold air and the weight of so many monumental losses hanging over them, ready to crush them.
She looks away, feeling both broken and selfish. Feeling pain and anger in her chest so acutely, for a second she’s certain her mask will crumple irreparably.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers eventually, feeling somewhat chastised.
“I’m not looking for an apology, Sakura.” He sounds exasperated now, if only slightly. The pain she saw is momentarily tucked away but now she can read it in the creases around his eyes. “Or sympathy. I just want you to understand … no one expects you to be perfect. And it was not your fault.”
Everything within her is instantly tempted to reject that wholly and without compromise. But … what she’s seen, this broken, tattered facet of Kakashi he's only just acquainted her with … Sakura can’t bear the thought of rejecting his words, of making him believe that any of the tragedies that had befallen him were his fault.
Sakura rejects that idea so viscerally it makes her stomach roil with nausea at the prospect that he has ever lived his life with that misplaced guilt. Not even a small, inconsequential part of her ever thought Kakashi deserved any of his pain.
And wouldn’t she be a hypocrite to wish it upon herself, to believe herself deserving of it?
Miraculously, the poisonous feeling starts bleeding out of her, leaving behind a bruised and tender heart. “I’m sorry…” she says again. “You’re right.”
He sighs softly. “I’m sorry, too. That you ever had to experience this kind of loss.”
“Me too,” she says sadly, thinking of the Fourth Hokage’s picture in her office. In that regard, they were much the same, grieving the loss of amazing mentors, trying to live up to impossible legacies. The Yellow Flash and the Slug Princess. What hope do they truly have? “I hope whatever’s on the other side is better than this shit hole.”
His eyes crinkle slightly. “I hope so, too. And I hope we get to see them again.”
“That sounds nice.” Sakura finds herself smiling at the prospect. And yet before she can stop herself, another wave of melancholy passes through her. “...I hope I go before you.”
While Kakashi had never been her mentor, he is the second closest person she has to a teacher figure.
“You wouldn’t be so cruel as to really wish that, Sakura-chan,” Kakashi chides lightly, the back of his hand innocuously brushing hers.
“You have to admit this world would suck without you.” She forces a weak smile, suddenly swept with the fear of losing him too. How could she have been so naive, wasting away precious days? He's alive and Sakura, amidst all her duties, forgot to savour every last second while he's still around.
“If I die, only porn publishers will miss me. If you die, the entire nation will feel that loss,” he jokes somewhat lightly.
Sakura realises she stopped walking when he turns around to look at her strangely. “Sakura-chan?”
“Kakashi…” she parrots slowly. “You do know that losing you would kill me right?”
He pauses, his eyes a little wide. “Um…”
“I mean it,” she says, feeling the raw words scraping across her throat. “I know you’re allergic to feelings too, but … you know I love you very much, right?”
His shoulders slump a little, and a gentle tentativeness fills his gaze. “Don’t lead an old man on,” he attempts to tease, but the words come out too heavily.
He sighs and smiles, genuine and sombre, and extends one arm in open invitation. “Come on, let’s hug it out. Vicious woman conned me into a heart to heart.”
Sakura smiles widely this time and easily goes to him. She tucks herself against his chest and relishes every strong, healthy thud of his heart. “Silly man.”
He tightens his arm around her, his cheek coming down to rest on her head. “Sakura?”
“Mhmm?” she says, allowing herself a few more moments of enjoying his warmth. It’s a nice buffer against the evening chill, and he smells spicy and clean.
“You know I love you too, right?”
Her eyes sting, but she wills the tears away, and takes a shuddering breath. “I know.”
He squeezes her for another tentative moment before he draws back with a kind smile. “Now, let’s hurry before we miss the offer.”
“Race you there?”
“On the count of three.”
Sakura runs at two, and laughs when he calls indignantly after her: “Hey, that’s cheating!”
“Ninja!” she throws back, wiping at her misty eyes. “Hurry up old man!”
“Vicious, vicious woman,” Kakashi can be heard grumbling.
Sakura will savour the minutes, the seconds, the heartbeats, she vows. She will tuck them against her chest as close as she dares, for as long as she lives.
And secretly, she will always hope she goes first.