#gorgeously written

[desdasiwrites]

–Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours

[dreadpudding]

I ONLY HAVE LIKE 2 MUTUALS INTO THE PITT BUT I NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED FIC RECS RIGHT NIWB

[fluteds]

slow, it’s earthquake weather by antistar_e

rating: M // word count: 2,422

His mother warns him, she says, don’t let that boy get too attached to you.

[bebenod]

"Her spirit was seized by speechless stupor. Eros darted back out of the high-roofed palace with a mocking laugh, but his arrow burned deep in the girl's heart like a flame. Full at Jason her glances shot, and the wearying pain scattered all prudent thoughts from her chest; she could think of nothing else, and her spirit was flooded with a sweet aching. As when a woman heaps up twigs around a burning brand - a poor woman who must live from working wool - so that she might have light in her dwelling at night as she sits very close to the fire, and a fierce flame spurts up from the small brand and consumes all the twigs, just so was the destructive love which crouched unobserved and burnt in Medea's heart. 

At one moment her soft cheeks were drained of colour, at another they blushed red, the control of her mind now gone." 

-Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Golden Fleece

[almostironic-blog]

Kabuto sees many sides to Sakura, in the hospital, and quickly categorises them. Like most medi-nin he's known, she has an amazing capacity for grace under pressure, but he likes her best - he wants her most - when she is stressed and sharp and ugly at the edges with the distorting weight of her own bitterness. Which is common; even the people closest to her seem unable to spot that to a very great extent she is holding herself together with her own talent and resilience. With anyone else he'd be tempted to say that it can't last, that they will shatter sooner or later, but not Sakura: the fissures are deep but her sutures are expertly strong, and though she shows no signs of healing she shows even less chance of letting herself break apart along her lines of weakness. Kabuto adds up her symptoms and what he knows of her situation, and then arranges it in his head because he has the odd luxury of time in which to do so, in which to organise the presentation of her case history such that the diagnosis flows, inexorably, from the facts. They are logical people, both of them. She'll appreciate the effort. He finds her alone with that coastline smile on her face and he is, like any good medic, direct and to the point. Or: like any good ninja, he strikes hard and fast in the place where it will count. "You don't know which of them you want and sometimes you think you don't want either of them, really, but you do know that you can't bear for them to have each other because it means that you have no one, and that no one wants you. And you hate yourself for this because it's your job to make people feel better but what you want more than anything is to destroy their happiness. Even though they are innocent of everything but finding love, even though their lives have been hard beyond imagining, you wish them harm, and you think this makes you a monster." She's just standing there. Flayed to the bone and shaking with her gorgeous, guilty anger. Kabuto doesn't touch her, even though he wants to; he smiles and he enjoys the tense balance of the silence between them. "Really," he adds eventually, "I'd have thought that someone in our profession would have a little more imagination than that." She doesn't pretend not to understand. Her eyes are slits of glass and she whispers, "There are different kinds of monsters. As you know." Now Kabuto reaches out and takes hold of her arm by the wrist, watching the slits widen into shuttered windows as she turns her hand to grasp his as well. It's automatic, this double grip - a training exercise, a way of demonstrating medical techniques. It can be as dangerous as the teacher requires. "As I know," he agrees, and gives her what she needs, which is someone to hurt. By silent consent nothing goes higher than the elbow, but that doesn't lessen the challenge because the anatomy of the forearm is tricky. Tricky, and full of individual variation; there's something deliciously private about the forks and meandering tributaries of the cubital vein, and Kabuto enjoys the way she sparkles pain down his, using the cells themselves, a precise method he's not come across before. It probably has a clinical application. She's probably never used it this way before. But she's fast, and bursting with her destructive want, and Kabuto laughs under his breath and reciprocates. It's exhilerating, allowing a little bit of the past to trickle down into the present, opening themselves up to the possibility of revenge, playing with synapses and guilt and other invisible things. They swap swift tainted secrets in the form of weaponised chakra, more of himself than Kabuto's ever given away before, but the way she gasps as his power gets past her defences - the way her heart stirs furious blood, the way her mouth tries to suck back the sounds - is enough, more than enough, for him to consider the game worthwhile and his own losses acceptable. She says, harsh, "You're enjoying this." He says, "Of course I am. Does it matter?" It's an important question. The desire to cause true suffering and the desire for violence are distinct. Unseen lightning forms a vice around Kabuto's tendons and Sakura says, as he thought she would: "No. It doesn't."