naruto ; x marks the spot
100moods writing challenge.
016. Cold
Fandom: Naruto
Genre: Angst
Pairing: Implied unrequited!KakaSaku, implied SasuSaku
Rating: T
Word Count: 394
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x marks the spot
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A simple glance as she arrives, but it catches something unexpected.
He stares at the scar tattooed over her chest, worn and faded smooth with time. Thin lines still jagged, torn with something dull—something not intended to cut, but rip; made by a clumsy hand used to precision, impulsive, but perhaps not without care. A criss-cross reminder over her beating heart. Not a promise, but a claim.
It is the only scar she wears.
Sakura pulls the cover of her open vest more cleanly over her chest, shielding it from his piercing eye. She does not look at him, but Kakashi knows. He knows enough.
She stares at the memorial stone in silence, and he waits for an answer. The grounds are empty, save for the morning autumn chill, and he wonders who it is that she's come to visit, the living or the dead or the someones somewhere in between.
“No,” she says, at length. Such a difference, this Sakura. This old, this young, tired Sakura. “It would only upset him. And even at its core, it doesn't mean what he'd hope it to mean.”
Which is? He doesn't ask, but she seems to hear him, anyway.
Her voice a gentle breath on the breeze when she sighs and says, “Sasuke isn't coming back.”
Kakashi stares at the spot where her heart should be, through the deep maroon of her vest in the early morning fog, to where the scar rests beneath the mesh shirt, to where it marks what's left of her beating heart. X marks the spot.
“Your scar says differently,” he says, as the morning chill seeps into his bones. And why should he bother now? Kakashi thinks, watching the dull light in the eyes of his once-shining student. After so many wasted years?
“What's left of him, maybe,” Sakura concedes, voice soft, eyes hard as stone. “To try to collect what's his.”
Kakashi stands before the memorial stone, but for once his gaze does not rest on the names inscribed there; instead they rest on a pair of eyes that have dulled and have faded, in all the shades of jade.
“Is it, still?” he asks. “His?”
And when the sun crests over the line of bright trees, the reds and oranges of a dying autumn in Fire Country, he is still waiting for an answer.
