summary: six times itachi is surprised by sakura, and the one time he's surprised by his mother
EXCERPT:
The first time Itachi ever confesses his feelings for a woman, he gets punched in the face.
He has been avoiding her for precisely eleven days, ten hours, and fourteen minutes. And in that time, he has come to recognize the odd streak of hope in his situation.
Although their last encounter had left him embarrassed and ashamed, it had also all but confirmed that Sakura is now aware of at least a small fraction of his feelings. Which means that half of the work is already done for him.
Now, he only has to confirm her suspicions and officially present himself as a possible suitor. If all goes well, he may just have a shot at redeeming himself.
Summary: set during the five year gap // natasha-centric // “His jawline could cut her, could slice her six different ways with barely any effort.She doesn’t quite understand why that intrigues her.”
His jawline could cut her, could slice her six different ways with barely any effort.
She doesn’t quite understand why that intrigues her.
Because really, despite her appearance and reputation, she’s not the kind of woman who enjoys unnecessary displays of violence. On the contrary, she’s a sucker for a well-written rom-com, and she still sleeps with the stuffed lion that Clint won for her at an amusement park over a decade ago (although that may be for deeper reasons than just her sentimentality).
Maybe it’s the way he’s grown into himself, into the Captain who exists and thrives in this era, instead of the freshly thawed, punch-before-you-look kid he’d been. Maybe it’s the way he’s learned how to slip in a lie with the confidence of a politician, but none of their dirty underhandedness. It could even be the way he spars with her like she’s someone to be reckoned with, not a girl playing at guns and knives.
More likely, it’s that he’s the only one who still visits her regularly at headquarters and looks at her with all the understanding that she needs without any of the pity.
They haven’t slept together. Haven’t even kissed, really. At least, not since that one time in that one mall running from that one guy all those years ago (funny, how the world had seemed like it was ending at the time).
But there have been moments among the Moments—instances occurring between the events of complete lunacy that is now their lives.
He’ll find her, after particularly devastating news have been delivered by one of the remaining team members—after she’s tucked away the part of her that is shredded open and throbbing with hurt hurt hurt—and has implemented some semblance of a plan for damage control. In those moments, he’ll hold her hand, or run fingers through her brittle hair, or sometimes just sit, shoulder-to-shoulder, and let the despair overtake them both for a minute.
There are other times, when the world (the universe, she corrects, because it’s not just Earth that they have to avenge anymore) seems to be on an upward trend, and they can almost forget how epically they have failed as people laugh and live around them.
Those times, it’s usually her that approaches him. She’ll pull up to his rundown apartment in the city (because even still, he prefers the simplicity of a “lower-class” life) with her 1996 Harley-Davidson, and he’ll meet her at his front door already sporting a worn leather jacket and an even more worn out grin. And they’ll go to that tiny, under-crowded Mexican restaurant on the corner of 8th and Broadway and eat their weight in beef tacos with extra cilantro.
He always bets that he can out-eat her, and she always wins.
And if she gets tipsy off of one too many margaritas (he drinks too, but his super soldier blood is still a huge pain in the ass), he’ll take the keys to the bike and she’ll cling to his broad back all the way home. She doesn’t mind, even though she knows he only buys her countless rounds because he loves getting to drive her Harley. Sneaky bastard.
It’s all of these moments and hundreds more that’s led her to where she is now: sipping at her bitter coffee, standing in the shadows of the destitute auditorium, and watching Steve wrap things up with his support group.
When he’d first come to her with the tentative idea to lead a few people in an emotional support group, she’d been the one to find the location and give him a few not-so-subtle nudges. At the time, she’d been relieved. It had been months after the First Moment (aka the Moment it all ended, and the new Steve and Natasha and Avengers began), and he’d been slowly waning into a dark solemnity that surpassed his usual contemplation.
She was already heading the Avengers (what was left of it) and attempting to locate anyone who was lost, and he’d been desperately needing a purpose. It wasn’t that he was doing nothing—because he was shouldering whatever responsibilities she hadn’t been able to catch and doing a phenomenal job at it—but there was a certain heaviness to his whole countenance that made her hackles rise.
That heaviness began to lift incrementally once the group had kickstarted. She’d never asked about the specifics of why or how his old self had returned, but she’d been overwhelmed with relief all the same.
He’d nicknamed the group “The Fledglings” half out of an off-brand kind of humor, and half in respect for Sam Wilson, who’d inspired his idea.
Now, as she listens to the soft, vulnerable tones of the members as they methodically and intentionally face and reface their pain, she thinks the name couldn’t be more perfect.
Natasha studies the slope of Steve’s nose as he announces the next meeting date and time.
Years ago, she remembers doing the same thing during some boring SHIELD debriefing—back when she and him had been a favorite duo of the recon and special ops department—and she’d noted that his nose wasn’t actually as straight as she’d always thought it was. Halfway down the bridge, it juts just slightly to the left, belying a previous break.
It must’ve been from his pre-serum days, since she knows for a fact that he’s taken more than a few nasty hits to his nose in the past few years (one from herself during a particularly aggressive spar), but they’ve always healed perfectly in less than a week. Fucking super soldiers.
She fixates on that little divot for a moment, then follows it down to his lips (which she promptly skips over for reasons she would rather not examine), and finally settles back on his jaw.
It’s still sharp, and she still wants to try her hand at dulling it.
The members begin to disperse, some hanging back to thank Steve or ask him a question. Natasha watches the muscles of his neck shift as he speaks.
Finally, the door shuts behind the last stragglers, and it’s only them.
“There’s no one to hide from here, you know.” Steve doesn’t even look at her when he says it, forearms flexing as he stacks the blue plastic chairs.
She finally steps out from her dark nook, dumping her empty coffee cup in a waste bin on her way. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”
At her lack of playful sass that he’s so used to receiving, Steve pauses and eyes her.
“What happened?”
Natasha debates drawing this out, but she’s never been one to play coy—at least not when she doesn’t have to. She finds that she almost never has to around Steve, but mostly because he has the uncanny ability to sniff out her bullshit like a bloodhound on a rabbit.
“Rhodey found another trail.”
Her voice does not waver. Her body doesn’t even twitch. She’s very careful to remain relaxed. He purses his lips and sets down the chair all the same.
“Where?”
“Guatemala.”
“How bad?”
She stutters in a breath, hiding her shaking hands behind her back. He notices.
“Rhodey wasn’t even looking for him. Some teenager—a kid, really—ran right up to Rhodey, begging him to help his family. When Rhodey asked him what was wrong, the boy told him about a strange man who’d come and slaughtered his father. Along with eleven other men in the same night.”
Steve’s eyes are somehow achingly tender and sharply assessing all at once. “Who were they?”
“Dirty cops. All associated with arms dealing and drug trade in some form or another.”
He shifts his weight from one leg to the other, hands sliding into the pockets of his khakis. “And you?”
He’s using his I’m not Captain America, just your loving and concerned friend voice. She hates when he does that, because it always manages to wiggle underneath her emotional armor and she hasn’t figured out how to develop an immunity to it yet.
Instead of answering right away, Natasha pulls one of the stray chairs towards her, ignoring the awful screech it makes on the linoleum floor, and sits down. There’s a nervous kind of energy hovering just below her skin, something that itches and makes her want to run a few miles just to burn it out.
She ignores it—suppresses it—with a well-practiced numbing of her mind and a painfully steady breath.
“I wish I could meet you as Little Steve.” Her voice is distant even to her, and she’s not even sure where this half-accidental confession is coming from, but she dismisses his surprised look and plows right on. “Sometimes, I think I can almost see the shadow of him when I look at you. Like this vintage kid in baggy clothes and a too-big forehead is just blinking back at me. Just for a second.”
He doesn’t interrupt, recognizing that she has more to say, more to give.
“I think...I think I would have liked Little Steve.”
He quirks his mouth into a barely-there-smile, and sits on a chair directly across from her. If she stretches out her legs, she’d be able to poke him with her big toe. She doesn’t, even as she eyes the wrinkled fabric on his knees.
“I think he would’ve liked you too.”
Natasha glares at him then, though it lacks no bite. He’s bullshitting her, trying to make her laugh and realize that this hollowness she’s full of is just a passing sting, not a lifetime of biting down.
From all the reports and stories and files she’s read or heard, Little Steve was a thing of light. Coulson used to ramble on to her—before the Avengers were even a suggestion on Fury’s lips—about the incredible, straight-laced, honor-bound Steve Rogers who fought Hitler with a star slapped to his chest and an iron gavel of justice clutched in his bleached-clean hand.
For most of her life, she’d basically been raised by and with the kind of guys Little Steve used to sling his shield at on the battle lines.
She tells Big Steve this now with an arch of her brow and a tired sort of smirk.
True to form, Steve doesn’t back down. “I’m serious. Little Steve had a habit of getting drawn to people with bites worse than their bark.”
She does laugh then, a huff of hot air filling the space between them. “Is that what I am?”
He grins and nods, thick forearms crossing over his chest. “That’s what you are.”
His smile softens into something nostalgic that makes her heart pulse with I understand, I know I know I know you.
“Peggy was like that. So was Buck.”
“Peggy?”
It’s his turn to slant her a look that cuts her innocent facade down to the bone. She grins a little sheepishly and tilts her head for him to continue.
“I don’t know about what he was like in the Red Room, but the Buck I grew up with—he was the thing that grounded me, among everything. A lot of people think my life is divided by before-serum and after-serum. It’s not. It’s divided by before-Buck and after-Buck.” Steve’s eyes are unfocused, the echo of a deep appreciation, an unrepentant affection, resonating from inside out. Little Steve rises to the surface more vividly than ever. “And Peggy... I didn’t know a person could be like that. Could be so present, so built for the time and space that they occupied. She gave me something to work for—a purpose I could never reach, but I would gladly chase for the rest of my life.”
There’s a little bit of regret and a lot of longing in his voice as he says this, and Natasha finally gives in to her previous urge, the tip of her sneaker pushing against his leg with a comforting weight. He slides his foot out until the back of her ankle rests on the top of his.
“They were the ones who made me who I am now. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them.” Steve clenches his jaw once, twice, then relaxes. “I owe everything to them. I owed it to them. And now they’re gone.”
And it happens here. In the space between one second and the next, she knows. She understands—all too suddenly, all too intensely—why she wants to trace the hard edges of the man before her.
His edges are the same as hers.
In the oddest, most unexpected—most understated—way, they are the same.
The revelation washes through her with the force of a scorching bullet. She blinks hard against it, unable (and unwilling) to shake it.
In the absence of Steve’s voice, the silence has stretched out before them for minutes.
Finally—after allowing her spiking blood to settle, her heart to fit neatly into the Steve-shaped space (Big or Little, she isn’t sure) she’s only just realized that she’s been carving all this time—Natasha stands and eats up the floor between them with slow, steady strides.
Her knees are between his, and his hands are somehow already on her wide hips, but he looks up at her without any of the lust she’s come to expect from men. His face is relaxed, eyes leaking a patience she never knew could be directed at her.
And finally—with a shaky tenderness she cannot help—she lays the calloused palms of her hands on his marble-cut jaw.
“Clint,” her voice breaks here but Steve’s ice-blue eyes hold no judgment, “Clint used to tell me that it doesn’t matter what we tell someone; it only matters what we get someone to tell themselves.”
He doesn’t cut her, but it is a very near thing, because the feel of his stubble scratching at the pads of her fingers is enough to peel back the last layers of her self-preservation and leave her bare.
Her words are filled with a soft sort of confidence. “I don’t think anything that they had done or said could have made us who we are now unless it was already there from the start—unless we had already been planting those seeds from the very moment we existed.”
His broad chest fills with air under her hands and his thumbs dig into the meat just below her hipbones.
Only now does she allow herself to inspect his full lips. They are parted at the seam, parted with a silent promise she swears she can return, she can keep.
When it happens, it is not a passionate, messy thing that she has often seen in movies or read in cheesy romance novels. It is not burning with need or thrown to the wind like an afterthought. Neither is it wholly innocent or lighthearted.
First comes their foreheads pressed to one another’s, as if the mere proximity will be enough to meld them together. Then their noses bump, hot breath fanning over high cheekbones and soft dimples.
And even still, they remain, the demand of being heroes forgotten and abandoned for pressing on this still-fresh bruise that they have only just discovered to see if the pain is a healing one.
It is only when their heartbeats have properly synced that he tilts up, and she down, and they meet solidly somewhere in the middle.
It is not passionate or burning or needy. But it is whole. It is becoming one in a way that sex could only hint at.
It is enough.
Iron sharpens iron, Natasha thinks, and when she pulls away, she swears there’s a phantom trace of blood where her lips cut into his.
title: bite me and see, said the fly to the spider
fandom: naruto
chapters: 2/?
summary of chapter 2: making good first impressions is a difficult task. sakura, sasuke, and naruto are already pros.
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 2:
The grass hasn’t even grown back over Akemi and Yuji’s graves when Sakura gets reassigned to a new genin team.
Team 7’s token female quit after one week of training, and the males of the team have been looking for a fourth teammate for the last month. When the Hokage visited her hospital room and asked if she would like to continue her shinobi career or return to civilian life, Sakura had answered before she could fully process his question.
Now, she thinks she should have asked for more time.
